Posted on 11/13/2012 11:37:37 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The more than 25,000 Sunshine Patriots who signed the petition to have Texas secede from the United States might get a response from the White House.
Yahoo News:
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Looks like the Obama administration may have to respond to a petition seeking the green light for Texas to secede from the United States-one of 20 such requests filed on the official White House website since Election Day. At the time of the writing of this post, the Texas secession petition had garnered 25,318 signatures-above the White House's self-imposed rules for requiring a reply.
(A "Recount the election!" petition filed Nov. 10 had 16,238 signatures. "Regulate Internet Pornography"? Not a big winner. It was filed Nov. 4 and had only 501 signatures.)
The White House may opt out of replying. Under its own rules, "To avoid the appearance of improper influence, the White House may decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies, federal courts, or state and local government in its response to a petition." Other secession petitions include requests for Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama and New York. (Spoiler alert: No, the White House won't approve secession.)
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No, the White House won't approve secession. And yes, the signers are indeed sunshine patriots. To cut and run when things look bleak perfectly fits the description of Tom Paine, who wrote of them, ..."the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country..." "Shrink" is what these so-called Americans are doing. Giving up. Surrendering. Is there any other way to describe their cowardice?
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
There are two sides, but our side is never represented. Whose fault is that? I submit the RNC works against us continually. Thinks that’s going to change, if we break away?
We’ll still deal with that dynamic. We need to end that dynamic.
We had folks that didn’t go out and vote. We didn’t even get as many votes as we did in 2008. I’m not convinced that’s going to hold up over time. We may in fact see the vote swell to around the same amount as last time. We’ll see.
We’re making a lot of assumptions about what the actual make-up of our nation is, based on the votes of the adults who bothered to show up.
Less than 180,000 flipped votes in three states, and Romney could have been our president. And Romney never was one of us. We predicted the outcome in the April/May time frame.
We hoped Romney could pull it out, but we were kidding ourselves.
I don’t see the benefit of splitting off so we can become a shadow of our former existence.
I say win it all back. We can do it.
Why do you assume that everything will be exactly the same? There are plenty of solid red states that have the voting power to destroy the left. Currently the GOP straddles the fence so they can remain competitive for local offices in blue states.
I’m not convinced that’s going to hold up over time. We may in fact see the vote swell to around the same amount as last time.
Smells like wishful thinking to me. So what if it comes true? As I pointed out before, it is extremely unlikely you are even going to be able to meaningfully reign in the debt and spending and slow the rate of decline. Forget changing direction. You are engaging in recreational drug use if you believe that.
We’re making a lot of assumptions about what the actual make-up of our nation is, based on the votes of the adults who bothered to show up.
Maybe you aren't remembering the Bush years when the vote did flip? Massive spending and increases in entitlements? Heck, we even wound up with a whole new entitlement program!
What magic dust are you going to sprinkle on the candidate and the electorate next time to change that?
I don’t see the benefit of splitting off so we can become a shadow of our former existence.
Which existence would that be? The one where half the nation is on the dole? Where half the nation pays no taxes? Where we send soldiers to be little more than unarmed targets for people that hate us? Where in nation where we have boots on the ground Christians are still being martyred and women oppressed? I say win it all back. We can do it.
Put down the bong. Join reality.
In 1964, Goldwater lost by a massively lopsided margin.
We could have said that because of Johnson’s great society programs, the nation would never right itself.
Fact of the matter is, it could have been just as reasonable to say it back then.
Within three years, Johnson declared he wouldn’t run again, and the Democrats lost in 1968. In 1972, just eight short years after 1964, the Republicans won an election that was just as lopsided in reverse.
Hang in there. Keep your powder dry.
Who knows what’s about to transpire. The Democrat party could be so discredited by 2016, they won’t be able to get any candidate elected.
You are forgetting that the north did everything it could to provoke the southerners into war. Lincoln was quite relieved when the South fired first, because that was always his goal.
Well, according to dictionary.com, I stand corrected!
“I was trying not to open the can of worms about whether or not the war was fought over slavery”
We can argue over whether secession was about slavery. I tend to think we much overrate Southerners’ word on the matter, given his naturally politicians demagogue and how much easier it is to whip people into a frenzy over the specter of John Brown and blacks stealing jobs and commingling in white society and an inequitable tax code. I’ll nevertheless concede the point.
The war is a different matter. The North fought it for the union, and therefore it was nit about slavery, at least not for a couple years.
“If I said the states were right, it would appear to many that I am condoning that ‘peculiar institution’”
Many ignoramuses, but why bother about them?
“so why give them any mire reason to buy into it”
Diminishing returns? Seriously, though, because you shouldn’t let them dictate your arguments. You can’t argue out of fear. And you’ll only encourage them.
Firing on Ft. Sumter, etc. was an act if war. But not just any war. The North was by no means empowered to conquer the Confederacy and reintegrate secessionist stated because they stole federal property. Taking back the forts and demanding retribution and reparations, that’s what Sumter justified, if that. Not total war, unconditional surrender, and occupation which in a sense persists to this day.
As for the notion that the South invaded the North, lol. Who are you kidding? Even if we take your point about Bull Run on its face, that was only after the blockade of Southern ports, which SCOTUS later pinpointed as the start of the war, and Lincoln’s (unconstitutional) call for volunteers, not to defend Washington but obviously to crush the “insurrection.”
act if war = act of war
Okay, well then let’s us just say it was the war to keep slavery in the South war. The South wanted to keep slaves and they attacked the North because of it. So the issue was the South wanted to keep slaves.
It goes back to Buchanan. The president before Lincoln. In any case it was the South wanting to keep slaves.
I don't want to be mean, but how dense can you be? What percentage of the population was on the dole then? What percentage is on the dole today? Not to mention that Johnson has more in common with Romney and Bush than Obama.
What did Nixon do with those wins? He permanently ensconced Johnson's welfare state, and he was willing to end the space program to do it.
What you fail to understand is that winning elections is only good for us in relative terms. You have to go back nearly a hundred years to even find a pause in our leftward tack. After every republican president the budget is larger, the number of people on the dole is greater and the culture is coarser.
George W. Bush oversaw a bigger expansion of the government than Bill Clinton.
Even when we win, we lose.
“the north did everything it could to provoke the southerners into war”
That may be true, and certainly they negotiated in bad taste. But the whole “I’ve been had!” defense of the South is misguided. Whether manipulated or not, they did fire. FDR backed Japan into a corner and goaded into war, if not held the Pacific fleet as bait and withheld advanced notice of attack from commanders at Pearl Harbir. Nevertheless, Japan is responsible, as is the South.
The better argument is the one that doesn’t sophistically entangle the “first shot” with the war that followed. Firing on Sumter was not grounds for total war and forcible repatriation. If the North was justified in conquering the South, it was not because of Sumter. Whatever a war based solely on Sumter would’ve looked like, it is not the war we got.
Think of it like WWI. Convention had it that it started with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian empire’s throne. Not so. That started an Austro-Serbian war. The bigger war came through a chain of events emanatining from the little war, but it was nit sufficient cause. Without Germany invading Belgium there is no bigger war. Or maybe a bigger war would’ve broken out anyway, but the war we got was started by Germany, not Gavrilo Principe.
Take WWII (please). Historians either date it to 1936 because that’s the beginning of Japanese expansionism or more commonly the Nazi invasion of Poland. However, that only covers the Sino-Japanese and Anglo-French-German wars. The bigger Pacific and European wars start only when Japan attacks the British and US empires and Germany declares war on Russia and the US. For simplicity’s sake we pretend they follow of course from the “first shots,” but no. Subsequent steps are not inevitable. They have to br chosen.
They did not attack the North to keep slavery. They stole federal property to keep the feds from doing fed things to them—for instance taxing—after secession. The theoretical war sparked by that incident, like I said, would have been different from the one we remember. The real war started because the feds decided to treat secession as an insurrection, and it was fought to force Southern states back into the union.
It was most emphatically NOT an invasion of North by the South to preserve slavery.
“You have to go back nearly a hundred years to even find a pause in our leftward tack.”
Coolidge, yes. Reagan represented mostly a symbolic victory. He barely managed to slow growth, let alone pause it, let utterly alone reverse it. The last time we actually reversed ourselves in any meaningful way was Harding’s (or Mellon’s) normalcy after Wilson’s War Socialism, and even that was hamstrung by the annus horibillis of 1913. The last principled stand for laissez-faire was Cleveland. But who am I kidding? It was only a matter of time after 1865.
Whoops, I meant bad faith, not bad taste.
“You can’t argue out of fear.”
Agreed. I’ll say more like discretion.
Leftists are so intellectually dishonest it is almost moot to even try to argue a point with them.
I have also read the threads arguing the Civil War causes here on FR, and freepers do not always play nice with each other.
I was just not in the mood to rile up my fellow freepers who happen to view that war as a single-issue conflict.
No. What is the gist of it??
Right now,I think the Atlas Shrugged scenario seems to be playing out. Notice all of the companies since the election last week that served notice that are not hiring or will be laying off?
But then again, the Civil War scenario could be playing out as well. Check out the headlines in today’s Drudge Report. The Secession movement is building steam.
I don't believe this will actually happen, nor do I want to see it happen. I want to correct the problems, not run away from them.
I will say that Texas has enough strengths to talk about this, even if it is not a "real" proposal to most people. I think it adds to the incentive to fix the problems, as this is a possible if not probable outcome otherwise.
The South still wanted to keep its institution of slavery. The South can name its war with the US anything they want but The War Of Northern Aggression. The South did attack first. The feds replied in kind and fought to preserve the Union.
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