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California has granted a pro-secession group 180 days to gather enough signatures to get their Calexit initiative on the ballot. From the Hill: The California secretary of stateÂ’s office announced that the group could begin collecting signatures on Thursday.The group needs 585,407 signatures from registered voters over the next 180 days to qualify for the ballot. The mechanism here is not very straightforward. If the Yes California Independence Campaign can gather the needed signatures in time, that would put an initiative on the ballot next year. That initiative, if passed, would change portions of the California constitution and set...

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced Thursday that a ballot initiative called “California Nation” has been approved by the state to begin collecting signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot. The effort is supported by the “Yes California” campaign, an organization that enjoys the support of the Russian government and whose founder, Louis Marinelli, now lives in Russia.

Reuters has a poll out which found a surprising number of Californians are ready to secede from the union now that Donald Trump is president: One in every three California residents supports the most populous U.S. state’s peaceful withdrawal from the union, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, many of them Democrats strongly opposed to Trump’s ascension to the country’s highest office.The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it around the time Scotland held its independence referendum and voted...

Friend -- The cause of Californian independence requires us to adopt multiple lines of attack. Yes California is busy working to qualify a ballot measure that will give us the chance to hold a vote on independence on March 5, 2019. Register to volunteer to collect signatures if you haven't already, or chip in a few bucks if you can't. Now there's another way you can help the cause of independence and it will take just a few minutes. Yes California is reorganizing its political party, the Californian National Party, to begin running pro-independence candidates to local, county, and state...

#CalExit just received a big boost from an unlikely source: Peter Thiel, billionaire tech buddy of President-elect Trump. In a “Confirm or Deny” interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, the 49 year-old Thiel confirmed that he believed California should secede. Maureen Dowd: California should secede. Peter Thiel: Confirm. I’d be fine with that. I think it would be good for California, good for the rest of the country. It would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. Apparently Thiel’s comment that “…it would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign” was made rather tongue-in-cheek. But it does raise an interesting question. With...

I am not Spanish, but I am following in the path of other Americans -- such as Washington Irving, Ernest Hemingway, and Orson Welles -- who find Spain absolutely fascinating. Recently, Spain has revved up its always impressive offerings of Hispanic chaos, and the cacophony has spilled over into France. Spain is fascinating because it is not a country, but at least five countries, possibly more: the Basque country, Catalonia, Galicia, Andalusia, and the interior where the hated Madrid bureaucrats live. The closest equivalent might be the United Kingdom. If so, the Basque history of armed insurrection finds its closet...

California gained an embassy in Russia last weekend, at least in the eyes of those who have promised to seek a statewide vote on secession, nicknamed "Calexit," in 2018. Louis Marinelli, a San Diego resident who is the leader of the group promoting an effort to turn the state into an independent country , organized the Moscow event that was publicized on social media. "We want to start laying the groundwork for a dialogue about an independent California joining the United Nations now," he said in an email Monday.

California gained an embassy in Russia last weekend, at least in the eyes of those who have promised to seek a statewide vote on secession, nicknamed "Calexit," in 2018. Louis Marinelli, a San Diego resident who is the leader of the group promoting an effort to turn the state into an independent country , organized the Moscow event that was publicized on social media. "We want to start laying the groundwork for a dialogue about an independent California joining the United Nations now," he said in an email Monday. (TWEET-AT-LINK) Marinelli is currently working as an English teacher in Russia,...

Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Louis Marinelli, leader of the movement, said the embassy will not deal with diplomatic issues, but will act as more of a cultural center that will educate Russians about California's history, boost trade ties and promote tourism. “We're not requesting military assistance from Russia,” Marinelli explained. “We're certainly going to request recognition of our independence and recognition of our [2019] independence referendum result, as we're going to request that the entire international community recognizes the results.”

Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 led South Carolina to try to secede from the Union. Donald Trump’s election last month has raised similar talk in California, known as the “California Independence Campaign.” Billionaire activist Tom Steyer said in that aftermath of the election that, “It’s impossible to look at the Trump campaign and not see a direct threat to the civil liberties and dignity of California citizens.” The leftist anti-constitutionalist Jeff Rosen is also touting “States’ Rights for the Left” in a recent opinion piece. California can’t secede. The Civil War settled that. But there are other potential avenues by...

Are Democrats returning to their Confederate roots? Driven to apoplexy by Donald Trump’s victory despite Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote, some Democrats want to split the United States up. At a forum yesterday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) bemoaned the existence of the accursed Electoral College, that brilliant constitutional device that prevents angry mobs in densely populated states from picking the president of the United States on their own. But the way things are set up, there is no way to get the Constitution amended to abolish the Electoral College, she sighed.

Earlier today the Kersten Institute for Governance and Public Policy highlighted an updated pension study, released by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, which revealed some fairly startling realities about California's public pension underfunding levels. After averaging $77,700 per household in 2014, the amount of public pension underfunding for the state of California jumped to a staggering $92,748 per household in 2015. But don't worry, we're sure pension managers can grow their way out of the problem...hedge fund returns have been stellar recently, right? Stanford University’s pension tracker database pegs the market value of California’s total pension debt at...

When people speak of Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote, they are really speaking about California. In that state, Hillary Clinton won 6,621,346 votes to Donald Trump's 3,549,576 as of this writing. This margin of over three million votes alone accounts for any claim that Clinton exceeded Trump in popular support. Consider some numbers. In New York, Trump won 37.5% of the vote; in New Jersey, Trump won over 40%; and in Illinois, Trump won 39.4%. Among sizably populated states that lean "overwhelmingly" Democrat, California is in a class by itself. Trump struggled to get even a third of Californian...

In 2018, the issue of whether California should secede from the union could come to a head. Yes California Independence Campaign, a fringe political group that calls for the state to become an independent nation, filed a proposed ballot measure with the Attorney General's Office on November 21, The Sacramento Bee reports. If it garners the half a million signatures required to appear on the 2018 gubernatorial ballot, the measure would strike language from the state constitution that would help clear a path to secession. Still, a state holds no right to secede under federal law. Californians would need to...

A group of left-wing Californians, frustrated with the recent election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, has filed an application to put a secession referendum — “Calexit” — on the 2018 ballot. The East Bay Times reports that the group, called Yes California, intends to circumvent the U.S. Congress: A “yes” vote would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if “California should become a free, sovereign and independent country.” Another “yes” vote would require the governor of the newly minted “Republic of California” to apply to the United...

Anti-Trump secessionists filed formal paperwork Monday launching their petition drive aimed at separating California from the union by first putting the issue before voters on the 2018 ballot. A petition submitted by the Yes California Independence Campaign calls for repealing language in the state constitution that describes California as an “inseparable part” of the nation and holding a vote on independence on March 13, 2019.

All: Thanks for responding. Paul, I agree with you, but there is a part of me that believes there might be something we can do. Dan, I agree with some of you your points, mainly the first, which is where I see my effort moving toward. Though, I am not sure how you measure the “corruptness” of the states verses the federal government. I consider the states nothing more than vassals of the federal government, some more than others. Lee, I am serious only to a point. In that I agree with Dan and I see this as first an...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Donald Trump’s election as president is giving a big social-media boost to an unlikely effort in the nation’s most populous state: a plan to vote on seceding from the union. The Yes California Independence Campaign hopes to put a question on the November 2018 ballot that would authorize a statewide independence vote for the spring of 2019. The effort drew little attention until Tuesday’s election, which also kept Trump’s fellow Republicans in charge of Congress and raised the possibility of a conservative shift on the U.S. Supreme Court. Any effort to get an issue on the ballot...

That massive blue block on the left – encompassing California, Oregon, Nevada and Washington state – stands out quite a bit against all of the red. So it may not be a huge surprise that people living in that Democrat-voting block are now looking at other options – specifically, secession. Since Donald Trump’s electoral victory was first announced, #Calexit has been trending on Twitter, with distraught Californians looking to form their own state.

An organization hoping to facilitate the secession of California from the Union is holding a meet and greet on the Capitol steps in Sacramento next Wednesday, November 9, 2016, or, the day after the presidential election. The Yes California Independence Campaign, which is based in San Diego, is aiming to qualify a citizen's initiative in 2018 to get a referendum for secession on the ballot in 2019. They'll be in Sacramento to garner support for their initiative.