I'm sure we all had those USA puzzles in our youth, Californuia, laid back and reclining like at the beach, Wyoming and Colorado, rectangles, our own Illinois straight on one side and squiggly on the other, Michigan, I believe they gave all of Lake Michigan so that they could include the yoopers and loopers in one piece (outrageous!), Pennsylvania with that odd snout and then there was one big solid piece in the northeast which stuck together everything from Maine to Maryland. New England, flinty types, rocky soil, lobsters, taciturn, give then a high wide Midwestern "Howdy doo Neighbor," and they'll just turn around and grunt. Who needs them? Well we certainly need Massachusetts, and probably Conneticut, but New Hampshire and Vermont, those two oddly nestled states, I don't think so. Maryland gives us Baltimore and that lovely song "The Streets of Baltimore," but what has Delaware ever done for us? And those shapes, they look like congressional districts even before gerrymandering became all the rage.
I guess my point is did we need them so badly that we gave them two senators each, what does "Two Scoops" call it, the worst deal I ever saw? And having made that mistake why did we extend it to the gas giants of the west? Why isn't there just one state from Kansas to Idaho? Well I think, and Beagles will know, that there were size restrictions. Texas was too big, but it all came in one lump, kind of dashing with that Lone Star crap and all. Could become five states tomorrow and have ten senators, but Texans, unlike Illinois, where there is animosity between the city and the burbs, and downstate, and that southern tip and Michigan between the north and south, Texas is one big happy family from Beaumont to El Paso, Lubbock to Brownsville all united singing the Eyes of Texas are upon you arm in arm until the Lone Star beer runs out.
Where was I? Oh yeah, senatorial representation, badly distributed. Bad compromise, but I suppose if it favored rather than rained on the dems I wouldn't be complaining so loudly.
That's an interesting thing Beagles says about our high school days being before homosexuality was invented. Looking back I don't know if I even knew it existed. Years later I was tending bar at the Wigwam when the gay bar up the street burned down and they all came into my bar and one day one of them called out, "Hey Ken Schadt, I remember you from Gage Park." Well shit, by then I certainly knew that there were plenty of gay people, but it had never occurred to me that any of them would have come from Gage Park.
I once heard a cable guy explaining the way it works. He said when there is a breaking news story (I know, all stories are breaking news stories anymore) like the hurricane, people drop in at all hours of the day to see what the hurricane is doing, and if it's not on your cable station they'll click to another, so they keep it on the hurricane. And they watch their competitors, and if their competitors are still showing the hurricane they stick with it. And that's why you see the same thing over and over.
And it's the same thing with the political stories I love. They change panels but they are all saying the same things about the same things. Well in this case you can go to Fox and listen to them saying different things about the same things. That is until recently when some cracks in their Trump worship appeared. I don't know what they are doing now that Trump has gone over to the dem side. Times like this they just cover some obscure story because they like to speak with some voice.
I've been watching Brietbart for about a month. Hard to believe that it has such a following with Trump's base, it's so stupid. Well I guess I have answered my own question. In the great book and movie Wise Blood Hazel Motes, disillusioned with regular religion, starts preaching from the street corners for the Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ (where the lame don't walk, and the blind don't see, and the dead stay that way). It's kind of like that on Brietbart now, they are the voice of Trumpism without Donald Trump. I think their theory is that he is being badly led by bad advisers.
If you're like a right winger or a libertarian or a commie when your hero breaks from what you think are the tenets of your ideology you can say the man has strayed, fuck him. But if you are a Trumpist, your ideology is Donald Trump, and what do you do when he strays? I guess we're waiting for the next poll of the deplorables to see if it drops below that steady 35 percent.
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