Recent news events have left me wondering “what the hell is wrong with Smithfield?”

We all know about the former Logan fire chief case where Kyle Lindsay was arrested on multiple felony charges including burglary and drug counts. But although this is a high-profile case involving a (former) high-level public official, the Smithfield Police Department, namely police chief Johnny McCoy, has refused to release any information as to the basis for his agency’s allegations. That silence has been echoed by the Cache County Attorney’s Office, and the publicly available court documents are also scant with information.

This raises a red flag because, generally, police release information about people who are arrested, the who, what, where and when of the crime. In the Kyle Lindsay case, Johnny McCoy and friends are saying public records laws protect them from giving the information, but they lose that defense because they regularly release the information. McCoy et al also can’t hide behind the statement “we want to preserve the suspect’s right to a fair trial” because the courts have an extensive process to ensure that a defendant is given a fair trial. Johnny McCoy is not the person who is responsible for ensuring someone receives a fair trial, the courts will handle that. McCoy needs to focus on his own agency (you know, the agency that regularly has three-plus squad cars at the Smithfield 7-Eleven late at night) and not how the court process is going to proceed.

That’s the first red flag. The next comes in Sunday’s edition of The Herald Journal with this letter to the editor about Smithfield Justice Court Judge Terry Moore.

If these allegations from the letter writer are true (and I tend to believe they are based on several similar stories of disrespect from people I know, from the comments on that letter to the editor, and from the HJ’s own printed response from what they got when they called the judge himself,) then Terry Moore should not be retained as a judge by the residents of Smithfield (and Wellsville, for that matter, where I’ve heard stories of Moore wreaking havoc and arrogance as well.)

I’ve long had a problem with the fact that people without law degrees are allowed to serve as judges. I’d like to hear some of the arguments for and against allowing “lay” people to serve decades (Terry Moore has been Smithfield’s judge since 1992) as justice court judges.

At the end of the day, I’m frankly scared for the people of Smithfield. All indications are that even though it is 2010, there is a early-20th Century form of good ole’ boys justice taking place in Smithfield with people like Terry Moore having no respect for patrons of his court and Johnny McCoy incompetently running an agency, ignoring public records laws and having officers that seemingly are constantly “on break.”

Where’s the justice? Not Smithfield, it seems.

Many of us woke up to the headlines this morning about SCOTUS overruling the Chicago gun ban and heralded it as a victory for the Second Amendment.

But then, after seeing this video from The American Conservative that’s been circulating this morning, the opinions changed pretty quick.

At face value, yeah, you’re excited about the victory for the Second Amendment, but in supporting this ruling, we’re put smack dab in the middle of one part of the Constitution conflicting with another. Ultimately, as is argued in the short video, gun rights advocates might have to sacrifice gun rights in places like Chicago (or Washington D.C. or NYC or wherever else) in favor of holding the high ground on 10th Amendment issues (like keeping gay marriage or Obamacare out of Utah.)

These are the times.

This has been one of those weeks in talk radio.

One of those good weeks.

Whodathunk that at the end of this week, the biggest story in the “KVNUniverse” wouldn’t have something to do with the Primary Election on Tuesday.

Let me set the table for you.

On Tuesday, after our regular For the People show, we did the entertainment portion of the show from 6-6:30, and Paul Mero, president of the Sutherland Institute, remained in studio with myself, Jason and Jonathan.

Now, if you’ve listened to FTP Prime Time before, you know that what we generally do is read through entertainment news stories, and make comments on them, comments that are often sarcastic against the glimmering shine of Hollywood.

This particular Tuesday, there was news about the latest Miley Cyrus photo scandal from a Toronto concert. In this incident, the Reuters news agency posted a risque photo of Cyrus on its wire service, and the photo was linked to by celeb blogger Perez Hilton. Our discussion on Tuesday (which isn’t available online since I don’t podcast FTP Prime Time) ventured from a legal discussion about the posting of the photo (Reuters apparently consulted their attorneys and decided the photo would not pose a “child porn” issue if it were posted, as the intent wasn’t child pornography and the photo was taken at a concert in view of thousands.) As we were looking at the news story on Tuesday, I showed the photo in question to Paul Mero to get his reaction, and he said something along the lines of “That’s nothing worse than you’d see at halftime of sporting event,” referencing the dance troupes that often perform at halftimes. This led us into a discussion of teenage role models, and at one point, we received a phone call from someone identifying himself as Adam.

Adam told us that he had a sister who was a member of a local high school drill team, and because he felt either the costumes or the dances were inappropriate, he quit attending events to watch his sister dance.

That was that, we eventually moved on to other news.

On Wednesday, however, it turned out that we had lit the fire of controversy in Cache Valley, with comments that were made on Tuesday apparently offending several parents of drill team members in the valley. Myself and others at KVNU received phone calls and e-mails varying from demands of apologies to requests for a response from someone associated with drill teams. On Wednesday’s show, during the first part of the 4 p.m. hour, I brought up the issue briefly (you can listen to that here) and announced that on Thursday at 4:10, we’d hear from some parents and take calls on the issue.

We did that on Thursday, and ended up staying on the topic and taking calls non-stop for two hours. (Hear Hour 1 and Hour 2.)

I thought it was great radio. Whereas an early caller in the program told us that discussing the issue of whether drill teams (and other dance troupes) engage in inappropriate or suggestive dances and wear inappropriate clothing was not relevant and was something we shouldn’t be talking about on radio, the two full hours of calls we received indicated otherwise.

It is a very relevant discussion for us to have, and as the community listening post at KVNU, we have the perfect forum to have the conversation.

During the course of the evening we heard from a parent of a drill team member, a drill team coach, a current member of a drill team, a former member of a drill team who has a little sister involved in dance, a parent who wouldn’t want their child on a dance squad and several others. We received several different perspectives and it was fantastic. The discussion was great. Meanwhile, online in our chat room, the discussion remained vigorous and brought different points of view to the table.

So it surprised me to wake up Friday and find that not only were there still some people fuming about the issue, there are parents out for blood.

Friday’s ire apparently was focused on one comment that was made in our chat room from one of our listeners in response to a parent’s claims that the girls on drill team work long hours and work extremely hard. While I don’t have a transcript of the chat (perhaps the listeners who copied and pasted the transcript and are distributing it amongst their friends can provide me with one,) the comment was along the lines of “Prostitutes work hard too. And late nights.”

You can interpret the comment how you want, there are several ways it could be interpreted. That the comment was calling members of drill teams prostitutes, however, is an extreme stretch at best.

To me, that comment was simply a commentary that hard work and long hours does not excuse certain behaviors. To an individual who is concerned about the ever-more risque behavior seen amongst our youth and the desensitizing of our society to sexual exploitation, the comment is relevant. More so, however, it’s an opinion protected by the First Amendment.

I understand emotions are high in this issue. We’ve got what I think, by and large, are parents of drill team members who are emotionally, financially and physically invested in the endeavors of their children. It’s easy to get defensive, and it’s good that they’re standing up to defend the issue, because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

But the flip side of that reality is that there are people in our communities who believe that certain activities are pushing the boundaries of our community standards, and from time to time, we need to all pow wow and discuss our individual values and define what our community standards are, then, make sure we are abiding by them.

That’s what we did yesterday, at least in the form of two hours of radio time that can serve as the start of that discussion. Some have demanded that my colleagues and I apologize for what we’ve said, specifically, they say, for accusing local drill teams of dancing inappropriately.

To that, let me say, myself, Jonathan Choate, Jason Williams, Paul Mero and all of our callers Thursday, have said nothing of the such. No accusations have been levied at any of the Cache Valley drill team programs or any other local dance troupes. We recognize that these teams work extremely hard to have precision routines and over the years, the different squads have won numerous awards for their work. What we have said, however, is that the content of dances nationwide have changed over the years (yes, including here) and we must keep a prudent eye on not just what the children in our community are being involved with.

Because ultimately, at least with this drill team situation, what a drill team coach, a drill team member or a drill team parent thinks is appropriate is important, but of equal importance are the values and opinions of thousands who see these groups perform, from the father of the girl on the drill team to the mother of a member of the football team to the 15-year-old boy in the stands.

We must constantly monitor our community standards, because if we don’t, we let them slip.

Utah moves to the Pac-10! from Semper Ute on Vimeo.

As we wrapped up (what I thought was) a great night of election coverage on KVNU last night, we started to get into a discussion about the low voter turnout in the 2010 Primary Election, and past Primary Elections, in terms of what Salt Lake City radio host Ethan Millard and friends of the show like Tom Grover called “systemic disenfranchisement.”

I woke up this morning to find Millard was still beating that drum well into the 9 a.m. hour, almost to the point of being either comical, or purely to try and generate buzz about it so he’d have a topic on The Nightside Project (which I wouldn’t fault him for doing because lord knows I do it from time to time.)

It’s nothing new for people to complain about Utah’s closed Republican Primary Election. You have to be a member of the Republican Party to vote in it. Meanwhile, anyone can vote in the Democratic Primary Election. I get it.

Do you know why I get it?

Because I used to be among the ranks. I used to be one of the guys, as a registered Democrat, who decried the process of being locked out of politics in Utah, because we all know that in 80 percent of the races in the state, whoever the GOP nominee is on the General Election ballot is going to be the person who fills the office. That is especially true in Cache County where up until recently, Democrats sometimes didn’t even field a candidate in most races, even on the state level.

But I realized I could complain about this, or I could do something about it. If I wanted to have a say, there was a very easy, quick, free way to do it.

Register as a Republican. I did that earlier this year, I participated in the caucus process for the first time, and on Tuesday I voted. As a member of the Republican Party, even if the party didn’t know for sure that I agreed with its platform, its collective ideology or its values, I was allowed to have a say in Utah politics for the first time.

So to call this “systemic disenfranchisement” is a combination of pettiness, arrogance, ignorance and jealousy all in one. You can probably also pepper in a little enjoyment in using a five-dollar phrase like “systemic disenfranchisement.” It makes you seem smart and like you know what you’re talking about.

But know this: Whoever is saying anyone was disenfranchised in Utah yesterday doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Disenfranchisement would be if the Republican Party vetted voters before allowing them to join the party and, as a result, vote. Disenfranchisement would be if the Republican Party had in its bylaws that it doesn’t allow gays or blacks or women or non-landowners to vote. Disenfranchisement would be if there were any arbitrary factor that the party used to prevent people from having a say in picking their nominee.

The Republican Party doesn’t do that. All you have to do is go to your County Clerk’s office, fill out a new voter registration form, and check “Republican.” This is a move that has virtually no impact on anything except for the number’s the party is allowed to boast and it gives a voter access to the ballot.

You see, being on this side, I can absolutely see why the Republican Party keeps its primary closed to members. The Primary Election is not really an election. It’s the final step in the nominating process. The party is selecting its nominee. Using the logic that everyone should be allowed to participate in the nominating process, irrespective of party affiliation, then we should get rid of the nominating conventions on the national level and just let everyone vote on their nominees. We should adopt a system like California just did where everyone goes into the race and we take the top two vote-getting candidates and then let them campaign against each other for a few more months.

Maybe the “systemic disenfranchisement” crowd would like that. But for now, at least, we don’t know how California’s experiment is going to work, so before we cross that bridge, let us give California a chance to have that experiment grow in the petri dish for a while. We’re in Utah, we have a system that works.

The reality is, everyone who wanted to vote in the 2010 Primary Election had an opportunity to vote. We can’t dumb down the election process to make it easier for everyone to vote, because the fact that the Republican Primary is closed isn’t what is keeping voter turnout down. Collective apathy is what is killing turnout, and we can’t force people to care. All we can do is hope that people will come to the realization that it’s to their advantage to vote, they’ll realize that it’s a great privilege in this country and, for many of us, Election Day is a day to look forward to.

But the collective angst being directed toward the Republicans for keeping anyone but members in the party away from the ballot box is misguided at best and delirious at worst. Like I said, I was one who complained about “disenfranchisement.”

But then I grew up and did something to solve that problem. And when your problem is “not being able to vote” and you can remedy that by checking a box on a form, you’re not really being disenfranchised.