The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Only takes an hour to cross over the I-5 partisan boundary and another to leave the blue state altogether where Trump/Vance signs as large as small billboards still declare total allegiance. We’re in Winthrop, ersatz cowboy town where we ate our ice cream cones as fast as possible in 104 degree heat while sitting on saddles, not stools, overlooking the Methow River. A fellow tourist decided we were so cute on those saddles, me a Roy Rogers in a beat up hat and the mizzus a modern Dale Evans, that she asks to take our picture. America, land of anything goes. More or less.

We’re lodged in a cabin next to the city’s new library so I walked in to peruse the joint before heading to 3 Finger Jack’s Saloon to quash the heat and thirst of a day’s tire-melting drive up through the ‘dry side’. Nice enough library. Air conditioned. Friendly staff. The usual.

Drifting by the newspaper racks I looked for a Seattle Times maybe or a Spokane Spokesman Review, but the only one they had was the Okanogan Chronicle so I pulled my pony up to a hitching post and began to read the news of the day out here in the Great Outback. Their Grange getting a new HVAC was big news, top of the fold. Bigger was a million plus grant to build Okie a new library, maybe as nice as this one. By page 3 and 4 they’d covered some old local history and a few fluff pieces about flower arranging and other crafts. 5 and 6 had some generic state news and finally, near the back but before the comics and weather, two articles of national import, one, Sen. Cantwell hoping for more money to fund the Weather Bureau, this being the land of wildfires, and the other something of no significance whatsoever, near as I could tell.

I suspect Fox News rides the range all to itself out here and if PBS or NPR still exist, they won’t for long once the funding dries up. If even the library won’t carry subscriptions for the NY Times or WA Post or even a Seattle paper, it’s probably time to check our guns with the sheriff, stop kidding ourselves and skedaddle on home, we’ve lost the range war.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2025 at 4:47 am and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.