Actually, Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote. Hence the name.

It was the first state to give women the right to vote.

And they brought us Dick Cheney. What a fucked up little state.

That's probably the saddest engraving of the whole collection so far.

Whoever designed that quarter really phoned it in... like the only thing they had was a cowboy paper cutout.

(Don't mind me, I'm just bitter Washington's quarter can't have President Washington on both sides.)

Dumb comparison to make a stupid point, but okay.

I propose: "formerly knowns as... " the Equality state...

And when they catch up with Massachusets AT THE VERY LEAST maybe they can reclaim the title...

wow, how terribly ironic.

Also, Mr. Poe: Why is that a dumb comparison? Why is it a stupid point?

As the State with the smallest population, Wyoming is the most over-represented in the Senate and the Electoral College.

A voter in Wyoming has about 40x the voting power of a voter in California, (relative to the Senate, which must approve all laws) because of the population difference.

More accurate: the Most Unequal State.

That's the little logo that is on the Wyoming license plate. They're really into the cowboy thing there, aren't they? Hmmm.

How about, "the hypocrisy state." Because there is something very homoerotic about that cowboy.

Animal silhouettes should all have genitalia like the Osborne bull:

http://costablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/stier.jpg

Cleve @10:

That's the point of the Senate: to give all states equal representation regardless of population.

As for the House of Representatives, Wyoming (like Delaware, Alaska, Vermont, etc.) has the smallest number of representatives possible: 1. The good people of California get 53.

@9

Discrediting Wyoming's motto of 'equality' because of the death of Matthew Shepard is something only Dan Savage could pull off with a straight face.

Fortunately for Dan, who has zero interest in women's rights, he can go ahead and ignore all of the history behind Wyoming and women's suffrage and get away with it. All he has to do is copy and paste a picture of a dead 'mo and his point is made. Forgive me for calling it a stupid point. I now see its indescribable brilliance.

***

Some 'mo was dragged outside of a car down Broadway. So by Dan's logic, let's go ahead and remove the whole 'gay district' label from the Hill.

Tugged a heart-string, there.

James: Yes, we agree: the system we have is the system we have.

But what I said remains true, it is fundamentally unequal and undemocratic.

If your state has 450,000 people like Wyoming, each voter's vote counts way more than the vote of a voter in a State like California or New York (with 35 or 25 million people), because each State gets the same number (2) of US Senators regardless of population, and every law must be approved by the Seante.

Equality of States = massive inequality among people.
Wyoming: one person, 40x the voting power of a Californian.

In the Senate you can have a majority of Senators who represent only about 20% of the US population.

Minority rule, it's called.

Mr. Poe is officially the least entertaining troll on the internet.

By virtue of its small population, Wyoming has the largest (and most disproportionate) per capita representation in the electoral college. "Equality state". Har har.

a further quibble.
DC (not Wyoming) has the smallest number of representativews possible in the House: zero.
Half a million tax paying citizens without representation.

@15

Check your eyes!

There's a coin and a photo of Matt. NOTHING else!

Dan makes a point. And that point doesn't discredit women's suffrage because he DOESN"T talk about it! In fac t Dan only wrote one sentence down.

Also your logic would be more believable if you stop employing straw-man arguments and attacking Dan personally. Just a hint.

I thought maybe it meant that horses and people were equal. Or maybe that's eqqual.

It's a little known fact that nothing bad has *ever* happened to a gay person outside the State of Wyoming.

@18

That was made official ages ago. Where have you been?

@21

I cannot fathom how much of a fucking idiot you are.

@23

Exactly.

I cannot fathom how much of a fucking idiot you are.

Sure you can. Try harder.

Just got it.

I hear the one with two cowboys eating pudding only lost by a very slim margin.

For 22:

That's the best horse/wyoming joke I've heard all day! Come on people, lighten up, it's just the internet.

Is Wyoming the new Germany?

What's going on Poe? You're not yourself anymore

Cleve:

Since the Constitution was set up as a federation of states, I think the Connecticut (or Great) Compromise makes quite a bit of sense. Have a bicameral Congress, with one chamber allocating seats equally among the states, so the minority can still be heard; in the other chamber, where seats are allocated by population, the sole representatives of states like Montana or South Dakota or Wyoming or Vermont are theoretically lost in a sea of 435. The fundamental units of the United States are the states themselves - they all ratified the Constitution upon joining. So the Senate is where that federation meets as equals, and the House is where they meet proportionally, with mighty California and other large states holding a greater voice.

Why do we let the minority be heard in the context of the federal Senate? Because - theoretically - we're all about the little guy. Letting the minority voice be heard in some context, in some capacity. Forging compromise, urging cooperation. Does it always work? Obviously not. A hostile minority can hold up much-needed and much-wanted goverment action. But, I'd much rather give any member of any minority a microphone to state concerns, positions, and opinions... rather than plow through proportional majority rule and have the minority sit and stew in their bitterness, sewing small pockets of discontent.

As for D.C.'s voting rights, that's a slightly more complext matter. The easy answer is that D.C. isn't a state, and the Constitution says only states get full voting members of Congress. Some legal scholars therefore say D.C. can only get federal representation through either statehood or an amendment to the Constitution (just as a Constitutional amendment was passed to let D.C. residents elect electors in Presidential and Vice Presidential elections). Others say an act of Congress could easily give D.C. one voting member of the House for itself, and further permission to cast votes for Senators as Maryland citizens. I tend to agree with the latter camp. Is it fair that D.C. residents get no real voice in Congress aside from their committee-only-voting Delegate? Absolutely not. It's a Constitutional quirk we've been stuck with, and we frankly have been dragging our heels on. Want to do something about it? Then do what I've done: write your Congressional representatives (we all have at least 3, unless you live in D.C.) and urge them to take action. Talk to your friends and relatives about it (D.C. voting rights make great pub conversation). Get involved. They won't do anything about it unless we demand it.

To paraphrase Orwell: "some states are more equal than others".

poe is right

Sheesh, it's the only quarter I've seen in the series where adding in the outline of the state would improve the design.

Even though Wyoming is just a rectangle.

taxation without representation? D.C. shouldn't be a state, and shouldn't be entitled to senators. the people should vote as if citizens of maryland. or at least become a state -- an idea i'm not too fond of. it is certainly not taxation without representation, though. it was set up that way for a reason, and those living there are aware of this.

Yeah, I saw that. My partner and I were trying to figure out what it meant.

The vote for women, huh? Well, what's Wyoming done for equality lately?

Wyoming: "Where the women are lonely and the sheep are scared," was just too long to fit on a quarter.

Hey all. I'm a homo who grew up in WY. Yeah, we weren't treated well there. Yes, I totally had my Brokeback Mountain thing with the captain of the wrestling team when I was in HS.

As for it being the "equality state" - They gave women the right to vote so there would be enough voting citizens to meet the population requirement for statehood. There was every intention of taking away said right once statehood was attained.

As for its disproportional role in the Senate. Hoorah to #31. The system was designed that way. It makes states like CA and NY pay at least a tiny amount of attention to what concerns the people of WY. Seems like people are just bitter because Wyomingites are stupid and produce people like Cheney. I'm bitter too, but lets not screw with bicameralism, shall we?

The idea that states are proxies for "minority groups" is no longer remotely valid. What about other ethnic or cultural or socioeconomic minorities that were non-entities during the founding of the country. The relative importance of state to national government has changed greatly in the past 200+ years. The basic ratio of the size of the large to small states has vastly increased.

The senate is an anti-democratic anachronism. It's an American house of lords.

@30

Stuff.

They gave women the right to vote so there would be enough voting citizens to meet the population requirement for statehood.

Interesting. I was sitting here scratching my head wondering how WY of all places was the first (not exactly a great tradition of progressive-ism). Now it makes sense. Thanks for the history lesson...

#41 - Well, that and the dykes were starting to get ansy.

#39 - I suggest reading the Federalist Papers...or living in WY. Then you might understand why this system works and is still needed.

#41 - Well, that and the dykes were starting to get ansy.

#39 - I suggest reading the Federalist Papers...or living in WY. Then you might understand why this system works and is still needed.

Over the past several years, the Senate has been the only thing holding back the most radical Republican garbage concocted by Congress. Some Republican measures have died in the Senate, some have been modified to be slightly less damaging. It's true that the Senate can be a stick in the mud when Congress tries to push through liberal reforms, but I'll settle for a little moderation if it applies to conservatives as well.

Daniel at #39:

I don't quite see how the Senate is "anti-democratic." Since the 1914 federal election, Senators have been elected directly by the people from their respective states. Even Senators appointed to fill sudden vacancies must eventually stand for a mandate from the people of their particular states. The U.S. Senate in its present form isn't even CLOSE to the U.K.'s House of Lords. Members are elected, and must serve a fixed term before standing again for election. Their number is fixed (two per state). No politician anywhere can stuff the Senate with party cronies the way some U.K. Prime Ministers have stuffed the Lords. Senators are elected by the people, and accountable to the people. There are no hereditary seats (though most of those are gone from the House of Lords now too, I hear) or seats reserved for the clergy. And don't even get me started on the wigs. Today's Senate is nothing like the House of Lords.

So how is this elected body , put in place as an institution that gives all fifty members of this federal republic, "anti-democratic"? My Senators earned my vote. And I find it much more democratic and accountable than the pathetic gerrymandering that goes on with many Congressional districts. At least people in Wyoming, Montana, Vermont, Delaware, and the Dakotas don't have to put up with that.

True, especially since the Civil War, states by and large have chosen to pass more and more powers up to the federal government (or, in some cases, devolve power to local municipalities). But, the states are completely impotent - they still have power, they still have voices, and they're still the fundamental unit of this country. Hence why we call it "the United States of America" and not "the Republic of North America." It is a system of organizing a government fundamentally different from other democracies like the U.K., France, and Israel - and even more genuine than other federal republics like Germany and Brazil. Our states matter. Our states still hold considerable power. Thus, we still need this institution where the states come together as equals.

As a former Wyoming fella, I'll say this:
1. Whatever point Dan's trying to make with the state motto and the photo of Matthew Shepard is lame. Agree with Mr. Poe on that one.
2. The design on the quarter is pretty fucking unfortunate given Wyoming's many beautiful landscapes and natural monuments.

I think they should go back to running Wyoming the way it used to be.

Government by the Railroads, for the Railroads, and of the Railroads.

Slow news day.

That quarter has been out for a couple months.

does the release of this quarter coincide with the most recent drop in value of the US dollar?

@38

Tell us more about your wrestling Brokeback thing

Most representative quarter so far. Flat and boring.

#51

Wyoming may be a lot of things, but in isn't flat...

Oh and I can't believe I agree with Poe.

Dan you are a complete Prick AND a moron. How you got a job doing anything but being a medical experiment is beyond my comprehension. Whose dick did you have to suck to get a job at the stranger?

Stranger = all gay all the time, no matter if we are wrong and obnoxious.

#50. HAHA. What's to tell? We were hanging out, drinking a few beers. He was well-defined and looked good in a singlet. After the first time he never spoke to me in public. When I was in college he was a nice distraction whenever I had to visit WY. Now he's married and has a few kids and I haven't been back in years.

The kid had a nice, honest face. You can look at him and see yourself liking him.

It is miserable to think of what he had to suffer through, and it is miserable to see him used as shorthand for whatever shrill argument du jour some demagogue wants to make.

Ok people. I am a DC resident and tax-paying citizen of the United States. I'm pissed off:

1. We don't get a quarter. There are only 50 of them. They rejected a 51st for DC. You won't even give us a friggin' quarter???

2. We have 560,000 people. That is > the 450,000 I see posted here as the popul. of WY.

3. The City pays billions in federal taxes, but our federal payment -- the payment we get from Congress for being its colonial pet is only like $800 million. The rest goes to states like Wyoming with 450,000 people (and MS, and ND, and SD, and bridges to the sky in Alaska).

4. Here are proposed solutions: a. Make us a full State; or at least, b. Make us a 1/2 state with 1 Rep. and 1 Senator. If you won't do either, then make us a federal tax free zone. That way we'll stop whining.

5. And, by the way, we're extremely gay friendly. So, all you WY-OMOS can come here and teach us your Brokeback tricks.

And . . .

6. It's tragic what happend to Matt Shephard. And it's tragic that the hate crimes bill named in his honor is going nowhere.