“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”

Jonathan Swift
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"The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital." - Bill Maher
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"The city is crowded my friends are away and I'm on my own
It's too hot to handle so I gotta get up and go

It's a cruel ... cruel summer"

Saturday, June 07, 2008

sexual healing

The dramarillo1 in Senate District 31 came, disappointingly, to an end with an absence of theatrics. I say "disappointing" because I couldn't find the caucus reconvention at 1:30. I was told that the caucus would reconvene at 1:30 in "Room 5". The Austin Convention Center has a room 5A, a room 5B, and a room 5C on the mezzanine level. At 1:20, I checked all of these rooms to no avail. Then, chased by a minotaur, I ran through the labyrinthine expanses of the convention center to find "Meeting Room 5".

The one room I didn't check was "Exhibit Hall 5," because that's where all the moneychanging is going on, the sales of buttons, posters, t-shirts and other political gear. It seemed a particularly bad place to recaucus and there's no shortage of empty rooms at this point. I had just about decided that my notorious bad head for numbers had betrayed me again.

Unlike what you may have heard from Republicans, there are relatively few methamphetamine and crack sales in Exhibit Room 5. On the other hand, perhaps there were some calming intoxicants flowing, because moods had apparently calmed by 1:30. After some "impassioned" speeches, the challengers agreed that it was "appropriate for the Hillary delegate to be female."2 That's just as well because, had there been fisticuffs or vulgar language, I would have liked to have had my Irish self in the room.

So, in the end, here's who we ended up with:

Jane Alexander, Hillary Clinton delegate from Amarillo.


Chris Hightower, Barack Obama delegate,
a high school teacher from Midland.



Congratulations to these two delegates to the national convention in Denver.

spacedark

1Sorry to be Panhandle-centric. If you can think of cute pugilistic nouns to describe the other towns in Andrews, Bailey, Cochran, Crane, Dallam, Deaf Smith, Ector, Gaines, Glasscock, Hansford, Hartley, Hemphill, Howard, Hutchinson, Lipscomb, Martin, Midland, Moore, Ochiltree, Oldham, Parmer, Potter, Randall, Roberts, Sherman and Yoakum you're welcome to attach them in comments. Then again, if you want your town's name contorted into a cute nickname, you shouldn't have named it "Midland".

2I don't know what that means, I'm just repeating it.