Salt Lake Crawler

Fortune magazine offers a very rare glimpse inside  Cirque Lodge, Utah's posh sanctuary for celebrity drunks and pill poppers. The treatment center in Sundance Canyon has hosted Melanie Griffith, Kirsten Dunst, Eva Mendes, Mary-Kate Olsen and, of course, Lindsay Lohan. Its director of operations, Gary Fisher, won't name names, but explains, "we've probably had 30 or 40 clients that you'd know immediately."

Fortune captures the wonder that is Cirque Lodge:

Even before you set foot inside the Cirque Lodge, it's monumentally obvious why people would come here. The Lodge -- a stunning structure of fieldstone, glass, and wood -- sits just up the mountain from Utah's Sundance Resort, a stone's throw from Robert Redford's Rocky Mountains estate.

With rooms for just 16 residents, it commands views that could literally lift you up when you've hit bottom.  . . . From the Lodge, you can see the Cascade Cirque on 12,000-foot Mount Timpanagos, still sparkling with snow in mid-May.

All for $1,595 day, with a 30-day minimum

Like a fuzzy Polaroid, Gov. Gary Herbert's leadership style is quietly developing: Herbert and coal company execs meet. A month later, a strip mining permit is issued just south of Bryce Canyon National Park.

A hastily created coalition of environmentalists, including Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney Stephen Bloch, say the governor expedited the permit process.

"After the meeting with the governor, a faster, finite timeline [for the permit] was part of the response from the division."

The dark-humor lining in the situation is that pave-Utah-end-to-end advocate Rep. Mike Noel has been catching hell from his Kane County constituents, complaining that the coal trucks will crush local roads, increase noise and dust pollution and generally screw up their quality of life.

I wonder if Herbert, friend of rural Utah, gave Noel a heads up?

Gov. Gary Herbert might be A-OK with state bureaucrats' "audacious, despicable greed" in treating themselves to fat bonuses while state unemployment lines lengthen — but the Legislature still seethes at being treated like chumps.

Legislative leaders, faced with a billion-dollar shortfall, ordered SITLA (basically, the slumlord for state lands) to forgo its tasty bonuses. Instead, the wily agency paid the money out early (yes, they were that lame) — an obvious end-run around state budget cuts.

Herbert was so charmed by SITLA's sleight of hand that he dropped a pledge to do something about it. But lawmakers, who sometimes resent being treated like hayseeds, are looking at ways to even the score with SITLA—maybe by slashing the agency's budget to offset the bonuses.

Senate Majority Leader Sheldon Killpack vows the legislature will "deal" with SITLA.

"We feel our direction was clear. This was an outright, deliberate action to go against that direction and we don't feel it would be appropriate to not respond."

Full-auto killers — The killers of a retired BYU professor Kay Sherman Mortensen may have been after his machine gun arsenal. Says a neighbor: "Kay was fairly well armed. He figured the country was kind of going to hell in a hand basket and he was preparing for it."

“Much was accomplished”— Ambassador to China and former co-chair of the McCain campaign Jon Huntsman is in a new position of defending Barack Obama, at least the president's China trip. Huntsman spoke at Peking University, saying the U.S. will regain its economic leadership role, but must cut its long-term deficit and export more.

No more shapeshifting — Mike Huckabee, famous for his feud with Mitt Romney, says Mitt's chameleon ways are a voter turn off. "Mitt Romney just needed to be Mitt Romney. If he'd have been who he was, rather than trying to out-be who everybody else was, I think he could have possibly got the nomination."

Step up for torture — Jay Bybee, federal judge, BYU alum and torture memo author, has quietly set up a legal defense fund to pay for his defense if he is pursued by the Justice Department's internal ethics unit. A report trashing Bybee is expected out later this month.

Ethics farce heads for Lege — Political skeptics are underwhelmed, to say the least, by the ethics reform bill that will go before the Legislature. Says one blogger: It’s exactly what one would expect from arguably the most corrupt state legislature in the country:  window dressing.

Paperwork slam dunked — Karl Malone has been offered for consideration by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

New York magazine talks to Chris Weitz, director of New Moon.

NY: How do you go from directing a movie like American Pie, where the object is getting laid, to Twilight, which has been called a Mormon allegory, with the writer of the series, Stephanie Meyer, being a Mormon?

Weitz: It’s funny now to work with a writer who is a practicing Mormon. I don’t mind that at all. I’ve never had a problem with religious people. I rather love that it’s men being objectified and the attitude towards sex is "think about it, be careful, this is a really big deal." Considering the number of 17-year-old girls objectified in film, I think this is just one back for the ladies. It’s almost revolutionary for a character to be a virgin and for the male to want to wait.

A better question might be how well Weitz, who, judging from the photo, is obviously a closely shaved werewolf, works with vampires.