Free Republic

MADRID—When Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia—under the watchful gaze of Russian troops—some Spaniards viewed the drama through the lens of a conflict much closer to home. Spain's Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo said "the parallelism is absolute" between Crimea and Catalonia, the wealthy industrial region that has scheduled a nonbinding referendum on independence from Spain for November. Sunday's referendum in Crimea and the one planned in Catalonia each violates its nation's constitution, Mr. Garcia-Margallo said Monday, and thus "by definition violates international law." Catalan officials ridiculed his attempt to tar Catalonia with the Crimean brush. Catalans...

Former Rep. Ron Paul says that America’s reaction to Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine should be,“so what?” “Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?” the Texas Republican and libertarian icon wrote in a USA Today op-ed Monday. ...Over the weekend, Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia,which the Russian government has moved to approve. American politicians have called the vote a sham and the administration has said it does not recognize the results of the vote,placing sanctions on some Russian officials in response. Ron...

Let’s start with money matters. Who will pay the pensions of retirees who paid into the Ukrainian system? Voters are being told that Russia will assume the obligations for all pensions, with a big leap in benefits. For example, the average monthly pension in Russia is said to be about $270, almost double the $150 paid in the average Ukrainian’s monthly pension. And the retirement age will drop by five years, to 60 for men and 55 for women. And what about schools? Schoolchildren are expected to get new history books with a more outsize section on Russian history...

"I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them," the French novelist and Nobel laureateFrancois Mauriac commented acerbically during the Cold War. Investor Tim Draper loves California so much that he thinks there should be six of them. Draper is one of Silicon Valley'ssuperstar venture capitalists, an early funder of numerous high-tech enterprises, including, most famously, Skype and Hotmail. He is also the prime mover behind the "Six Californias" initiative, a proposal to partition the nation's most populous state into six smaller ones. From north to south, those new states would be: Jefferson, North California,...

GREELEY, Colo. -- If you mention the word "secession" most people think of the South during the Civil War. But today, a new movement is gaining steam because of frustration over a growing, out-of-control federal government. A number of conservative, rural Americans are taking about seceding and creating their own states, meaning a new map of the United States of America could include the following: A 51st state called Jefferson, made up of Northern California and Southern Oregon A new state called Western Maryland A new state called North Colorado These are real movements gaining traction with voters across the...

LOS ANGELES — California has reached the breaking point. Or so says Tim Draper, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is pushing a proposal to crack the nation's most populous state into pieces. Six of them, in this case. California has grown so big, so divided, it's essentially ungovernable, according to a ballot initiative that could reach voters in November. It has to go. "Vast parts of our state are poorly served by a representative government," according to Draper's plan, which cleared a key government hurdle this week to qualify for the ballot. California residents "would be better served by...

I sense that anger is building among the states as the federal government continues to encroach on states’ rights. Healthcare, traditional marriage, and other issues are irritating leaders in many states. Sooner or later a state is going to stand up and tell the federal government to go to hell. What might secession look like? I have a website that is dedicated to this proposition: http://freetexasconstitution.wordpress.com/ Here I offer some ideas to get people thinking about how we could go it alone here in Texas. I also address standard objections to secession. By the way, at least one poll has...

With the current movement of the Republican establishment to push for amnesty for the 11,000,000 or more illegal immigrants we have here in the U.S. it might be time to save as much of our country as we can before it is all taken away. If these illegals are allowed citizenship then the Democrats will have effectively eliminated the two party system and we will have full blown socialism headed towards a dictatorship which I believe has been the plan all along. Our freedoms will be taken away with the Bill of Rights being nullified by liberal judges who will...

You may have heard that Tim Draper hopes to convince Californians to separate their state into six pieces. The plan is the latest attempt by Silicon Valley to separate itself from the rest of California, where mentally ill people have the gall to clutter streets paved in alternative currencies and Series As and which lead to startup employees’ lavish home-away-from-homes (bought at obscene prices in an overheated hot real estate market). Draper’s proposal would see the formation of six new states: Jefferson, North California, Central California, Silicon Valley, West California, and South California. In his vision, counties would be able...

Longtime YouTube political poster, Christopher Greene, makes a strong case for why the state of Texas will secede from the union.

Could we soon have 52 states? The succession movements in Colorado and Maryland are at full speed. Citizens in Alleghany, Carroll, Frederick, Garrett and Washington counties don’t feel that their interests are being represented in Annapolis any longer. Now they are looking to split off from the rest of the state to form Western Maryland. This effort is being called: A New State initiative. Scott Strzelczyk, leader of the Western Maryland initiative puts it bluntly, “people are fed up with the liberal majority and want an “amicable divorce.” The five counties make up about 11% of the entire state and...

Scotland would face a 9p (15¢) increase in income tax to plug a financial black hole caused by independence, a damning report warns Alex Salmond today. Falling revenues from North Sea oil and increased costs of a faster-aging population mean an independent Scotland would need deeper spending cuts and steeper tax hikes than the rest of the UK, the Institute for Fiscal Studies claimed. But the Scottish National Party claimed the country would have been better off if it had broken away from the rest of the UK in the 1970s. … Under even the most optimistic scenario, the IFS...

On Tuesday, five Colorado counties voted to approve the 51st State Initiative, directing county officials to explore secession from the state, the Denver Post reported. Voters in Kit Carson, Washington, Phillips, Cheyenne, and Yuma counties approved the measure, while voters in Weld, Moffat, Elbert, Lincoln, Sedgwick and Logan counties said no. "Weld County voters said this is an option we shouldn't pursue and we won't pursue it," said Weld county Commissioner Sean Conway. "But we will continue to look at the problems of the urban and rural divide in this state." Fort Lupton Mayor Tommy Holton acknowledged Tuesday that secession...

Eleven of the state’s 64 counties placed a measure on their Election Day ballots for voters to decide whether to pursue secession. In six counties, the measure passed by mostly wide margins, the The Denver Post reported. The push is unlikely to succeed. In order for the new state to be created, the Colorado electorate or legislature would have to approve and so would the U.S. Congress. Read more: http://thehill.com//thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/other-races/189411-6-of-11-counties-in-colorado-vote-to-secede#ixzz2juqEI7Q8 Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

There's a big race right now to become the 51st state. Forget traditional contenders like Puerto Rico. In several existing states, residents of less populous areas are hoping to create new states of their own. Citizens in 11 northeastern Colorado counties are among them. They'll vote on Nov. 5 whether to break off and form their own state. Many are unhappy about liberal state legislation they believe reflects the values of the Denver-Boulder corridor, but not their part of the world. "We're rarely listened to when it comes to legislation," says Butch White, the mayor of Ault. "I'm sure the...

We don't want to live in Ted Cruz's America. He doesn't like ours. Maybe a split really is inevitable — and right Yes, I know Michele Bachmann is from Minnesota and Steve King is from Iowa, but all this proves is that in the 150 or so years since the Civil War, the vituperative Confederate agenda of anti-Americanism has managed to spread its irresistible redneck poison into benighted pockets across the country. Kind of like Waffle House. But to deny that the current attack on the federal government isn’t part of the hidebound Confederate agenda is to ignore the people...

Patrick J. Buchanan has raised the question asked here fifteen months ago: Is there a peaceful civil secession of Red States underway? Originally raised here in July 2012, we asked if there wasn’t a real possibility of what we described as a “constructive secession” which would accomplish what The Confederacy could not achieve. As we described the situation those states that have grown tired of the overbearing Barack Obama Administration and see it as no longer intolerable could engage in conduct that would amount to de facto if not a de jure secession from the United States. Red Staters have...

In the last decade of the 20th century, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated, so, too, did that prison house of nations, the USSR. Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia. Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo. The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia. Yet a Europe that plunged straight...

The intense political polarization of the United States is most clearly reflected by the dysfunctional nature of the federal government. At a more local scale, it is seen as well in the growing movement to create new states by splitting existing ones. Most of these cases involve the desire of people in rural, conservative counties to secede from the more liberal states in which they are currently located. A front-page story in the October 7 edition of the New York Times, for example, highlights a drive to devise a new state of “Northern Colorado.” Eleven Colorado counties will vote on...

Václav Klaus has long been a critic of the European Union, but never before has he openly called for his country to leave it. As prime minister he negotiated the terms of Czech EU membership, and was president when the country joined on May 1st, 2004. But he’s been a constant critic of the EU, accusing it of unacceptable meddling in its members’ sovereign affairs and comparing its economic policies to communism. His suggestion that the Czech Republic should now seek an exit from the EU was immediately welcomed by those on the euroskeptic right, including Petr Mach, head of...