Keep Payson Clean

Keep Payson Clean is a great idea, and the volunteers deserve credit. But let’s be honest: it is impossible to keep a town clean when its leadership refuses to address the largest sources of blight.

Litter along roads and in public spaces is visible and annoying, but it is not the root problem. Payson could be completely free of roadside trash and still look neglected as long as large-scale junk properties are allowed to exist unchecked. These aren’t hidden problems—they are in plain sight.

Anyone who doubts this should drive down Arrow Street. What you see is not “clutter,” it’s a full-blown eyesore that looks more like a junkyard. Look toward American Gulch and you’ll find the same thing: junk, disarray, and neglect that reflect poorly on the entire town.

This is not a lack of ordinances. Payson already has the legal authority to address these properties. The real problem is enforcement, and enforcement is the direct responsibility of the Town Manager, the Mayor, and the Town Council. Choosing not to act is still a decision—and it’s one that harms property values, drives away tourists, and tells residents that the rules are optional.

If residents want real change, posting online isn’t enough. People need to show up at Town Council meetings and use the “Call to the Public” portion of the agenda. That is where citizens are guaranteed the right to speak, be heard on the record, and put elected officials on notice.

One person can be ignored. A room full of residents, all asking the same question—why aren’t the ordinances being enforced?—cannot be.

If Payson truly wants to be clean, attractive, and welcoming, then its leadership must move beyond words and take visible action. Volunteer cleanups help, but they cannot substitute for governance.

Show up. Speak up. Use Call to the Public. Demand enforcement, timelines, and accountability.
That’s how Payson gets clean—for real.

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The High School Bully works for ICE

Some people never reach a mature mental age. They grow older, but they do not grow up. They remain trapped in a world of macho fantasy, where dominance substitutes for intelligence and force replaces thought. To them, every problem looks like a nail, and the only tool worth respecting is a bigger hammer—or a gun.

Donald Trump is one of these people, and the culture he has empowered reflects his arrested development. His ICE agents are not an accident; they are a product. Who else would willingly harass, intimidate, and brutalize innocent people while claiming they are “just doing their job”? You already know the answer. You know the type.

We see them locally, too. At the recent Democratic protest in Payson, they announced themselves in predictable ways—rolling coal in their trucks, flipping the bird, sneering as they passed. No arguments. No ideas. Just reflexive hostility. This is not political disagreement; it is emotional immaturity on display.

Who are these mental midgets? You guessed it. They are the high-school failures who never learned to read critically and discovered early on that thinking is hard work. They are the bullies—and the bullies’ henchmen—who learned that intimidation feels easier than understanding. When confronted with complexity, history, or empathy, they respond with rage, mockery, or violence.

This is not merely a Trump problem. It is an American failure. It is the failure to educate for citizenship rather than obedience, for reasoning rather than reflex, for empathy rather than dominance. When a society stops valuing thought, it starts celebrating cruelty. When ignorance is rewarded with power, brutality soon follows.

We are now living with the consequences. A nation led by emotional adolescents will behave like one—lashing out, blaming others, and confusing aggression with strength. Until we confront this cultural and educational collapse, the bullies will keep marching, convinced that their immaturity is patriotism and their cruelty is courage.

The rest of us know better. And knowing better means refusing to normalize this behavior, refusing to excuse it, and refusing to surrender our democracy to people who never learned how to grow up.

Trump's Epstein Phone Call - The Recording That Ended Everything

Once Again

Once again the sun has come up in Payson. Yesterday 78 people stood on Highway 87 to protest Trump's thugs shooting people in the face. Yes, there are good people in Payson, but too many don't have the courage to stand up against the dictator.  

Of course the local Hoopleheads always attack with their smoke dog wagons. The smoke dogs like you see in the picture above take great pride in displaying their immaturity, and stupidity. The Payson Police have been pretty good about ticketing the smoke dogs. Trump has his thugs shoot a woman in the face and it just does not register with his cult. Trump lies about it so quickly it is astounding. Worse yet Vance chimes in calling the woman a terrorist. Of course Christie Nome lies about it also. All have the high school mentality of the smoke dog in the picture. 

WHAT does it take?

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What Does It Take?

What does it take to awaken basic morality?

History keeps asking the same question, and humanity keeps answering it too late. The Germans slept while millions of innocent people were marched to their deaths. Americans took years—far too many—to wake up to the lies and slaughter of Vietnam. Slavery did not end because conscience suddenly appeared; it ended only after oceans of suffering and blood. Progress, it seems, is always dragged forward kicking and screaming.

So what does it take?

Today, we are watching the same paralysis unfold. Donald Trump has built a modern dictatorship in plain sight, surrounded by lickspittles who mistake loyalty for virtue and cruelty for strength. Institutions bend. Truth dissolves. The rule of law becomes a suggestion rather than a foundation.

What does it take?

When Trump’s thugs shoot a woman in the face and excuses rush in faster than accountability, what does it take? When lies are documented, replayed, and then repeated without shame, what does it take? When power is used not to protect the public but to intimidate it, what does it take?

History tells us the answer is never “one outrage.” It is never the first crime, or the second, or the tenth. It is always after the damage is undeniable—after the bodies, after the ruin, after the moral collapse is complete.

The real question is not whether Americans will wake up.

The question is whether they will do so before history adds another chapter explaining how ordinary people watched, waited, and asked—again and again—what does it take?

What do Americans want?

What the Republicans Know (and Democrats Pretend Not to)

Years ago, while traveling with singer Pat Boone and former White House counsel John Dean, Earl Butz was asked why the Republican Party had such trouble attracting Black voters. His answer—later reported by John Dean in Rolling Stone and confirmed by New Times—was as crude as it was revealing:

“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

It’s an ugly quote. Racist. Dehumanizing. And yet, it has always intrigued  me —not because it’s true, but because it exposes how Republicans actually think about voters. Strip away the slur and the obscenity, and what remains is the Republican worldview: people are simple creatures, easily managed, easily distracted, and satisfied with comfort, stimulation, and a place to sit quietly while power does what it wants.

That formula didn’t stop with race. Republicans applied it to everyone.

Give Americans a big TV, a six-pack, a fishing boat, and a pickup truck to pull it. Keep gas cheap enough, beer cold enough, and football loud enough, and they won’t notice the house next door is on fire. They won’t care if democracy is collapsing, wages are flat, healthcare is unaffordable, or their kids can’t buy homes. As long as their porch is intact, reality can burn.

Republicans understand this at a molecular level. They know exactly how many Hoopleheads there are, and they know how to talk to them. You sell fear. You sell guns. You sell grievance and conspiracy. You tell a MAGA voter that if they’re busted flat, it’s someone else’s fault—immigrants, liberals, trans kids, city people, professors, journalists, Democrats, anyone but the billionaire picking their pocket.

You sell them a cartoon version of themselves: rugged, wronged, and secretly powerful. A he-man myth where complexity is weakness and thinking is suspect.

Democrats, on the other hand, keep acting shocked—shocked!—by how many people fall for this. They talk policy to people who’ve been trained to distrust thinking. They talk democracy as an abstraction while Republicans tie identity to lifestyle, resentment, and tribe.

Democrats need to figure out how to explain democracy in terms that land. Maybe democracy needs to be tied to fishing: clean water, public land, access that doesn’t get sold off to the highest bidder. Maybe it needs to be tied to the pickup truck itself—roads that aren’t crumbling, wages that actually pay for repairs, healthcare that keeps you on the job instead of bankrupt.

Because Republicans already know the game. They’ve been playing it for decades. They don’t respect voters—but they understand them.

And until Democrats accept that reality, they’ll keep losing to people who are very comfortable selling a six-pack while the country burns.

Trump and his bullies

Government by Bully

The high-school bully is now president, and he has surrounded himself with the same type of people who once lurked in hallways looking for someone weaker to push around. Not thinkers. Not leaders. Enforcers. Sycophants. Brainless bullies whose only qualification is loyalty to power.

Trump does not read. He does not reflect. But he lies effortlessly—and with no shame at all. When caught in a lie, he doesn’t correct it or explain it. He simply ignores reality and moves on to the next one. Truth, in this administration, is not a constraint; it is an inconvenience.

In the Oval Office, Trump watched video evidence contradicting his own claims—footage showing that one of his armed henchmen shot a woman in the face under circumstances Trump had publicly misrepresented. The facts were undeniable. The evidence was right there. Even reporters from The New York Times witnessed it. Yet rather than acknowledge the truth, Trump simply turned the page and lied again.

This is not incompetence. It is a philosophy.

“Might makes right” is no longer a slogan whispered by authoritarians—it is the operating principle of the federal government. Thugs occupy positions of authority. Intimidation replaces judgment. Loyalty replaces competence. The people empowered to act are not those with restraint or intelligence, but those most willing to carry out cruelty without hesitation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in agencies like ICE, which have become gathering points for the worst kind of small-minded tough guys—the same ones who had no brains in high school but desperately wanted to feel powerful. Given uniforms, weapons, and political cover, they are unleashed to do what bullies have always done: dominate, dehumanize, and harm—while insisting they are just “doing their job.”

This is what happens when a bully rises to the top. He does not govern; he recruits. And he chooses people who think like he does—people who confuse strength with brutality, authority with fear, and leadership with cruelty.

That is not law and order.
That is rule by intimidation.