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By Dave Simpson, columnist

The good news this week is that our newspaper in Cheyenne gave the Wyoming Legislature a failing grade for the budget session that ended last month.

And not just a failing grade – a huge failing grade.

(Failing grades start to explode at 50 points or less out of 100. You can research it.)

According to an editorial in our newspaper, our lawmakers did not come close to a passing grade, scoring only 35.5 points out of a possible 100. Oh oh !”

When it came to judging the session, the newspaper told us how the cow ate the cabbage, as my wife from Oklahoma likes to say when someone really gives someone else a shit. .

Our state legislators have taken him in the seat of the pants for their stubborn and continued failure to raise taxes, for their stubborn and continued refusal to take advantage of free money from Medicaid expansion, for not spending as much American Rescue Plan Act money as humanly possible on all sorts of things that have little to do with Covid, and to waste time talking about silly issues like banning guys from competing in the girls’ sports teams, and parents meddling in what teachers are teaching.

They also got slapped on the knuckles for a general inability to play well with others, and didn’t even get credit for kicking my state senator – the allegedly unrepentant scoundrel Anthony Bouchard – from all his postings. to the committee.

“But wait, Dave,” you think, “why is it good news that the Cheyenne newspaper only gave the legislature 35.5 points out of 100?”

Because, Grasshopper (obscure Kung Fu reference), I’ve worked in newsrooms for almost four decades, and I can tell you that the last thing Wyoming needs is a legislature that passes whatever the people want. columnists.

No no no.

I can count the conservative journalists I’ve worked with for over 40 years on one hand, with a middle finger left out. Editors and journalists are almost always for higher taxes, more regulations, new powers for the government, for strict mask and vaccine mandates, for any candidate with a “D” behind their name and for suppression of evil private industry.

At one newspaper where I worked (not our Cheyenne newspaper – I never worked there), plans proposed by anyone in private industry were greeted in the newsroom with deep suspicion. Such plans were undoubtedly crackpot schemes “shelled” by greedy crooks. The jobs they provided were considered low-paying “nickel-95 jobs.”

A woman who went on to write editorials for a major newspaper once told me that I was naive for putting money in an individual retirement account. Because, she explained, any idiot could see that the inflation would far exceed any money you could accumulate in an IRA. (I’m glad I was naïve enough to put money in my IRA. And I wonder what her retirement looks like, if she followed her own advice.)

A weekly editor once explained to me that President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua was an inspired leader, a great man, far smarter than the amiable dunce (Tip O’Neill’s term) Ronald Reagan.

In a press room, they burst out laughing when I said that unions had a lot in common with political action committees. No, Dave. Good unions. CAP wrong. Case closed.

For years I wrote articles for a newspaper in Illinois. I wrote one about investing in Caterpillar stock and cited the impressive growth that anyone with a few dollars to invest could have achieved. It was such a ridiculous idea that the editor read it out loud in the newsroom, so everyone could have a belly laugh at the thought of a reporter investing in stocks. They thought, “He’s kidding, isn’t he?”

An editor in Nebraska liked to introduce me to friends because they considered a conservative journalist a rarity, a freak of nature, a two-headed calf.

So let’s not lose sleep over our legislature’s failing grade on the editorial page.

Far from there. I think our failing grade is a mark of courage and the editorial can be posted on our refrigerator doors.

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