Say this for the Confederates. They started seceding in 1860 before Lincoln even took office. None of this waiting to see if he got elected for a second term.
Any secessionist movement that takes four years to get up its nerve is half-hearted at best. If they did try to secede, I figure we could fire a shot across their border and they’d surrender. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee would call these guys wimps.
Cattle or people ?
You realize I could sign any of those petitions and I’m neither an American nor in the US, right?
A vanload of old hippies could sneak up behind them & say “boo!” The Secessionists would flee in disarray, pursued by a vehicle with smoke pouring out of the windows. The last thing seen: A bumper sticker saying “Keep Austin Weird.”
Speaking of smoke–I oppose the General Sherman approach. Mobile homes consist of a shitload of toxic materials. The refineries pollute the air down here enough…
Milbank chimes in from The Washington Post.
He makes the obvious point that, except for Texas which is at 94 cents per dollar, each of the red states that has a petition to secede are heavy users of federal dollars. That is, each takes more from the federal government than they send to Washington. So if they secede they’d be forced to come up with a way to provide those services AND make up an addition deficit.
If Texas were to secede it would be fun to watch President Perry perform on the world stage.
I cast my vote for this post to win today’s internet prize.
Oh Alabama. Please don’t go. No. Please. Come back.
Good Gad, if Mississippi leaves, Arkansas will be second worst everything instead of third! :eek:
Just asking here, have any of these mooks mentioned what specific issues they want to secede over? Is it the ni…er, newly elected president, thinking they’ll somehow get out of being responsible for the federal deficit, or something else?
BECAUSE OBAMA. Duh.
It’s that they’re the kind of people who’d refuse to [del]read[/del] watch The Three Musketeers ever again after seeing a picture of Dumas père and realizing he had a natural afro.
Which brings up the question of how many signers of the Texas petition are from other states, wanting to kick Texas out?
I imagine a lot of it is social programs like WIC and medicaid/medicare that mean they take so much out so the putative new government could balance their budget by simply axing all the social programs but I doubt that would make them popular. I am a little annoyed, and maybe this is unfair, that the conservative talking point for quite some time now is a balanced budget yet many of the red states, are as the article points out artificially afloat due to federal largesse. I feel that “take the beam out of your own eye before removing the speck from your neighbor’s” is appropriate here.
From the look of it, it’s about half and half. I counted 50 Texans out of the last 88 signatures.
Here’s a fun letter from my hometown newspaper outlining some complaints.
The reason, I think (without doing research), that red states tend to be ‘takers’ is because their military employment is so high. They can slash social programs, but it won’t balance their federal input/outtake unless they get rid of all the military bases, active soldiers, and stop honoring the veterans’ pensions.
Well secession should take care of that toot suite. Not sure I’d want to share a small country with a lot of pissed off ex-military, though.
At least this one does not say it was conceived by Woodrow Wilson. I’ve actually encountered assertions of that kind on the Intertubes before.
Does one lose a Federal pension if one moves out of the country?