City Governance for Dummies?

This post has no point.

Last week we had City Council elections in Kootenai County, Idaho. (This is the first time I didn't go to the polls in the last thirty years--EVERYONE running for office was a teabagger, so I said the hell with it.)

Speaking of language: In Coeur d'Alene, ID, calling yourself a "progressive" means you're in favor of building more tourist attractions rather than trying to get real jobs that pay real money in here. We had one guy running who claimed to have "progressive" ideas--which, like I said, means he wanted to spend $37 million to build a city park. (That was the only issue in this election, another reason I didn't vote.) The guy is a bona fide teabagger right down to the "independent" label all the local teabaggers have applied to themselves, but because he has "progressive" ideas, half the people in town thought he was a screaming leftist. I was starting to get seriously annoyed--I am the only screaming leftist in this whole town, and I take umbrage at teabaggers being labeled as such.

Anyway, one of the three teabaggers who won election to the City Council was a gentleman named Dan Gookin. I had no fucking idea who he is, but I looked at his signs and wondered, 'why do these look like the cover of a "Dummies" book?' They look that way because Dan Gookin wrote almost all the "Dummies" books. Expect to see "Drowning Government in the Bathtub for Dummies" coming soon to a newsstand near you!

(I worked in publishing for years. Didn't meet him personally, but heard him referred to numerous times as a "hack" writer.)