Bloglander

Gettin' a little tired of East Coast-centric thinking here ...

There's no news hook here, just a guy who's a bit steamed that TV listings are always in Eastern Time, and how on Mad Men, it's always Connecticut this and New York that. Well, here are some cold hard facts, buddy:

Rhode Island is two-thirds the size of Spokane County. Of course, they have twice as many people. But they get senators and congresspeople and electoral votes and their own state flag and state bird and everything. And what do we get? We get Mielke-Richard-French and a logo with the Monroe Street bridge.  

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Delaware is smaller than Whitman County. Oh, sure, they have 20 times the population (900,000 compared to 44,000). But do people who flirted with and actually considered having Christine O'Donnell as one of their U.S. senators deserve two of them? In Spokane, we only get the attention of about one-fifth of one senator.

I could go on here. If you were to combine Spokane County and the three counties to its south and east — Lincoln, Adams and Whitman — you'd have a land area larger than New Jersey (and only slightly smaller than Massachusetts). 

Of course, into that same four-county area, Massachusetts crams the same population (6.6 million) as in all of Washington state.  

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Or take the Garden State, so-called. (Please, take it.) You drive from Deer Park to Ritzville to Pullman, it's like driving from Hackensack to Princeton to the Jersey shore. You'd probably see Snooki.

At 8.7 million, however, NJ has even more people than either WA or MA (in that same four-county area). And you think Sprague and I-90 get a lot of traffic?

I'm just sayin'. Dinky little "states." They get all the attention. It just ain't right.