Secede.

The New York Times:
With Stickers, a Petition and Even a Middle Name, Secession Fever Hits Texas
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: November 23, 2012

Some conservatives in Texas have been asking ... how to secede.

Secession fever has struck parts of Texas ...

A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response...

treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party: "the fundamental cultural differences between Texas and other parts of the United States may be best addressed by an amicable divorce, a peaceful separation.” ...


Residents in other states, including Alabama, Florida, Colorado, Louisiana and Oklahoma, have submitted similar petitions, though none have received as many signatures as the one from Texas...

But all the secession talk has intrigued liberals as well. Caleb M. of Austin started his own petition on the White House Web site. He asked the federal government to allow Austin to withdraw from Texas and remain part of the United States, “in the event that Texas is successful in the current bid to secede.” It had more than 8,000 signatures as of Friday..
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TEXAS SECEDE!  I think I signed the petition as did other non-Texans.  You never know.

I have long advocated secession.  Here are excerpts from several of my secession posts:

Wednesday, November 5, 2008
City States in America.

Once New York sets the precedent, all large U.S. cities should follow. They all have the same problem: lack of representation in the Senate proportionate to their large populations. Once cities started to secede the Congress would have no choice but to admit them as city states. If not, they could each become an independent country.  Cool.
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Friday, September 11, 2009
Rep. Joe Wilson should secede.

Rep. Joe Wilson is the jackass who two days ago cried out in the middle of an address by President Obama to a joint session of Congress: "You lie!"

... jackass Joe Wilson should secede. If his Congressional district does not like it, the district should secede. If his state of South Carolina does not like it, South Carolina should secede. It already knows how. Am I the only one to notice that the issue of secession was never resolved constitutionally? Just because the Union army won and forced the rebellious secessionist states back into the union does not mean that they do not have the right to secede. Let them. If Lincoln had been truly great there would have been no Civil War. Lincoln should have either resolved the matter or let them go. Does the United States of America really need South Carolina? Mississippi? Alabama? Louisiana? Even Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia? Let them take their peculiar institutions and go. GO!
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Saturday, February 20, 2010
Two Americas? At least.

Let states and other municipalities secede. No, the American Civil War did not settle this issue. Show me the constitutional amendment, which addresses this. If Lincoln had truly been great there would have been no civil war. When slave states seceded, he should have let them go. He could have corrected some of the original mistakes while leaving the original sin of slavery where it belonged: with the slave states of the Confederacy. The peculiar institution would have ended in about twenty years and the Confederacy would have failed by then. Those states could have been considered for re-admission but on terms that would have made far more sense than what evolved out of the civil war.
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Dumb States of America (DSA)

The old Confederate States of America (CSA) could join with some of the western states that are also dumb and form the Dumb States of America (DSA)...  Let states secede and form the DSA. Then they can produce as many guns as they want, leave their children uneducated and have a nice weak central government like the old CSA. It was that weak central government that ultimately doomed the CSA.
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Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Break up the United States of America.

It's obvious that we have two incompatible views of governance: central v. decentralized.  This is the cleaned up version of what we are.  Then each of the new components can create a government to their liking.

Geographically, the good old USA does not lend itself to this divide, so three, maybe, four new nations could spring from the grand old 50 states...

It makes a lot more sense than the mess we currently have.  On to the constitutional conventions!
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Romney: best Republican candidate since Eisenhower.

Thursday, November 6, 2008
We elected the smart guy
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I was first eligible to vote for president in 1972.  Since then Republican candidates for president have consistently been dumb for the office. It's harsh to say but it's true.  Romney seems to be the most intelligent Republican candidate since Nixon and the best Republican candidate since Eisenhower.

Clearly, Since 1972 the most intelligent candidates overall have been, chronologically: Carter, Clinton and Obama.

The basic requirements of the job are intelligence, executive experience and communications skills.  That's pretty fundamental stuff.  To continually nominate people who were less intelligent than the office requires is irresponsible.  The Republican party is a minority party by its nature being the party of the rich.  It has cynically cruised through a series of silly issues to get people to vote against their own best interests.

Intelligent Republicans do not want to debase themselves running for president so the party is limited to dummies or expedient cynics.

Mitt Romney is the first Republican candidate I could even consider.  The others have been completely unacceptable.  That combined with the disastrous dysfunction of President Obama and the absurdity of the Electoral College, which makes my vote in New York meaningless, I will probably vote for Romney first thing in the morning before I lose my nerve to do so.

Romney: Reagan with brains. A non-endorsement.

Mitt Romney may be the first Republican candidate for president since Nixon who is intelligent relative to the job.

I still don't understand why Romney is not more popular.  He's good looking and well spoken like Reagan and with a much better family.  And he has good hair.  Isn't that what it takes?

I wrote in September 2011 that Romney can win.  I still think so.  I might even vote for him.  I've finally accepted that the Electoral College makes individual votes in most states, including New York, irrelevant.  Romney and Obama are running for president of Ohio, which must have the stupidest voters in the country.  They allowed themselves to be duped into voting for Bush the Younger in both 2000 and 2004.  Ohio gave both victories to Bush.  The deciding issue in each election was one of those moronic social things that people get worked up about to rationalize why they are voting against their own best interests.  In 2004 I think it was homosexual marriage.  In 2000 ... who remembers.  Something stupid.  Ohio is stupid.

Liberals get themselves duped, too, which is why I'm dumping Obama.  I might vote for myself or if I'm feeling lazy in the voting booth I might vote for Romney.  The environment is always an issue on which I can depend on the Republican candidate to totally revolt me and Romney has done it this year.  Obama says much of the right stuff but he did not deliver.  Plus, he's such an expedient wimp that he tries to outdo Romney on junk like burning coal, exploiting public lands and drilling off shore. With a Democrat like Obama who needs a Republican.

So if I'm going to have a Republican president maybe I should get the real thing.  At least Romney has run businesses, which is more than Reagan ever did.  And maybe Romney will come through on the environment in a Nixon going to China sort of way.  Maybe Romney can bring the knuckleheads in his own party around to some substantial improvements, the kinds of things that Obama talks himself out of before he even gets started.

I'm pretty sick of Obama.  Too bad.  He's such a smart guy.  He knows what should be done but cannot get it done.  He's a congenital compromiser and the worst negotiator of all time.  Except for that mess Obama care, which he stuck us with instead of single payer universal health care, his policies are indistinguishable from what Bush would have done, especially bailing out GM and Chrysler, which was a golden opportunity to fundamentally change the auto and energy industries.  Obama never even considered that.  And he dealt with the financial industry like a Republican.

Obama promised change we can believe in and to change the way in which the federal government operated.  Obama failed miserably based on his own criteria.  Dealing with Congress is part of the job.  Blaming the opposition is not acceptable, especially when Obama's ineptitude prevented progress in the first half of his term when his party controlled Congress.  That is what enabled the opposition to take control of the House of Representatives.

In the immortal words of that great screw up, Al Gore, who lost the unloseable election: it's time for him to go.  Back to Chicago, Hawaii, wherever Obama wants to pretend that he belongs.

Barack, we hardly knew ye.

Obama sucks. Romney, too. So now what?

Thursday, September 8, 2011 Romney can beat Obama.
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I'd really like to consider Romney, if only he'd say something intelligent.  I know he's not that dumb but he's been pandering to nuts for so long he may have forgotten how to think.

Who is the bigger waste of talent: Bill Clinton or Barack Obama?  Both compromised so much that they forgot why they wanted to be president.  Both are really smart but dumb it down to appeal to dumb constituents.

We are to blame.  We, the American people.  None of the politicians will say it but we all know it.  Americans are divided into three groups:

1. those who want this
2. those who want that
3. those who don't know what they want.

The election is about the hearts and minds of #3.  That's where all the campaign money goes.  What, you thought the system was actually corrupt?  No.  One third of us are stupid and need to be influenced by television ads because we're too dumb and lazy to know what the heck is going on.

All that money is not being paid to voters.  It's being paid to television networks, the big three traditional over the air networks, not even cable channels and sure as heck not the Internet.

Campaigns need to sell their candidates like soap, just like in 1968.  See the book The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss.

So here we are, in the middle of the Internet age, with twitter, facebook, blah, blah, blah, and we are going to select the leader of the free world like we were buying soap.

And you wonder why the candidates behave as they do?  Because we need them to.  Because we're dumb and lazy.

You get the government you deserve.

Chief Justice Roberts: Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye.

Friday, March 30, 2012 Death to Obamacare!

This legislation is and always was a typical Obama mess, a weak hopelessly convoluted diversion from what anyone with any sense knows we need: Medicare for all U.S. citizens, the ultimate single payer system.  Instead of honestly increasing taxes to pay for it Obama and his fellow Democrats passed a constitutionally suspect mandate that uninsured individuals must pay a modest penalty or be forced to buy insurance from a private company.  This mandate has evolved into a huge distraction and undermined the entire bill.

Obama continues to be a huge disappointment to those who voted for him in 2008 because of his promise of fundamental change.  As written here many times in various ways, Obama's policies have not varied from those of his predecessor.

It's better for the country for the Supreme Court to completely overturn the legislation so that whoever is elected president this year can work with the new Congress in 2013 to enact universal Medicare.

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Enter the Chief Justice who inexplicably joined the four liberal justices by standing on his head to conclude that the penalty was a tax, which made the mess constitutional.

Wow.  Who the heck expected that?  Now Roberts has drawn the wrath of the lunatics.  Too bad.  My guess is that Roberts did not want his legacy to be that of precluding some people from having some health care.  But that's just a guess.

So now what?  Mitt Romney assures the lunatics that he will somehow stop the legislation from being implemented.  How?  If only Romney would say something even semi-intelligent.  On any topic.

Here are some questions for Eric Cantor, Congressional Representative from Virginia, and others who like making silly inane statements about all this:

1. How do you get health care?

2. Who pays?

3. How much do you pay?

4. What country's health care would you prefer to that in the USA?

5. How will the legislation impact you?

Death to Obamacare!

This week the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case challenging the national health care legislation passed recently by Congress. Initially I was rooting for it to be upheld but I realized that I was reacting to the right wing morons yapping spewing nonsense.  Moderate Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused President Obama of trying to cover everyone, as if that was a bad thing.

This legislation is and always was a typical Obama mess, a weak hopelessly convoluted diversion from what anyone with any sense knows we need: Medicare for all U.S. citizens, the ultimate single payer system.  Instead of honestly increasing taxes to pay for it Obama and his fellow Democrats passed a constitutionally suspect mandate that uninsured individuals must pay a modest penalty or be forced to buy insurance from a private company.  This mandate has evolved into a huge distraction and undermined the entire bill.

Obama continues to be a huge disappointment to those who voted for him in 2008 because of his promise of fundamental change.  As written here many times in various ways, Obama's policies have not varied from those of his predecessor.

It's better for the country for the Supreme Court to completely overturn the legislation so that whoever is elected president this year can work with the new Congress in 2013 to enact universal Medicare.

Al Sharpton: provocateur and shake down artist.

Al Sharpton is a provocateur and shake down artist.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  Always was.  Always will be.

MSNBC should be ashamed that this clown now appears in his own one hour TV talk program five days a week plus being included in panel discussions on other MSNBC talk programs as if he actually knew something and had credentials like some of the other panelists.  He sticks out like the clown he is.

Now Sharpton is appearing with the family of the teenager who was shot to death in Florida and who mysteriously has become the focus of national attention in the news media.  Sharpton has gone full circle from Tawana to Trayvon.  The only constant is Sharpton's shameless disregard of facts and the public good.

Sharpton never met a sensitive situation he would not exploit for personal aggrandizement and self promotion.  Maybe he should just get a regular job and earn an honest living.

Pandering run amok: cars, guns, gas, oil.

Romney was slobbering over NASCAR fans.

Santorum, whose father Aldo emigrated from Italy and lost a vowel at the end of his name, was contradicting John F. Kennedy on the separation of church and state and calling President Obama a snob for advocating education for all.

Gingrich was being his revolting self.

Not that Obama or Hillary Clinton were much less revolting during the 2008 election.  Here is what a candidate for president needs to not only believe but actually say and act upon.

1. Denounce NASCAR nation for its mindless glorification of oil consumption and reckless driving to say nothing of the its immensely boring form, driving in circles for hours.

2. Repeal the second amendment, the one that permits gun ownership.  If it didn't exist it would have no chance of being adopted.  Instead they pander to gun advocates and pretend to be one of them.

3. Advocate $10 tax per gallon on gasoline to force conservation, a word they are too afraid to utter.

4. Outlaw the use of oil for home heating to force conversion to less offensive fuel.