Author’s note:
This piece was inspired by reading the main page, so I am going to reprint it in its entirety. Thanks for the great ideas, bart! I credited your site on all of the slides and linked to it in the sources.
Article:
Yes, you heard that right. There are people in every state in the U.S. that have submitted and signed petitions to ask permission for their state to secede from the United States of America. The petitions specifically mention injustices suffered under the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
As of today, there are 830,618 signatures on these petitions. Petitions in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas have surpassed the 25,000 signature threshold required in order to elicit an official response from the White House.
The U.S. population in 2012 is roughly 312.8 million people. So the signatories amount to roughly 0.27 percent of the U.S. population, yet these people want entire states to secede from the United States.
So, here’s an OpEd for anyone that wants their state to secede from the union:
I have a few questions for secessionists. If you .27 percenters don’t like the way the rest of your fellow Americans voted, then why not just leave? Most of the petitions ask for permission to “peacefully grant to withdraw.” Why are you begging for permission like little kids? Why not get up and leave and show the world how you feel? Stick to your principles. Move away and take FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the Palin family with you. If you do, America’s average IQ will probably go up 40 points.
I’m sure you can find another country where less than one percent of the population can dictate policy to the other 99.7+ percent. There are countries that mix religion and politics, persecute homosexuals, do not give women equal rights, do not tax the ultra-rich, and do not hold free elections. They may make a good fit for you. Try Iran or Saudi Arabia first and if that doesn’t work for you, I’m sure there are several other third world dictatorships that’d be happy to have you.
Don’t even think about Australia, though, because they have single payer universal health care, strict gun laws, compulsory voting, no death penalty, pro choice when it comes to contraception, openly gay politicians and judges, an unmarried atheist as a Prime Minister, and evolution is taught in all schools.
And I wouldn’t recommend Canada either, because you probably already know how horrible their “socialist” health care system is from listening to Fox news. In fact, most of “socialized” Europe wouldn’t be recommended, because citizens and businesses in many European countries pay higher taxes than Americans so they can have things like universal health care, a public transportation system that makes America’s look like a third world country’s, dams and levee systems that actually do protect them from flooding and businesses that are regulated and required to allow 30-35 hour work weeks and up to 6 weeks of paid vacation for all employees. You’d hate all the “socialists” there.
Listen crybabies, half of the voters in this nation had to put up with stolen elections in 2000 and 2004 and a President that they didn’t like. You didn’t see any petitions to secede then, did you? You didn’t see the other half of the electorate crying to secede and signing online petitions when Bush created the TSA and rammed the PATRIOT Act down our throats. Where were your petitions while the Bush administration created these agencies, passed legislation like that, started unnecessary wars, let Wall Street run amok, and bankrupted our country?
Real Americans support the United States of America and work within its political system to change leadership. They work within its judicial system to change laws. For example, some of the “liberal elite” that you seem to despise, such as Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf, Cornel West, and Daniel Ellsberg were the first to challenge the NDAA with a lawsuit.
Alaska’s petition asks for a “free election” to allow citizens of Alaska to decide if they “should be a free and independent nation.” That’s a stupid thing to write. Every state has a right to hold their own elections whenever they want to. The U.S. just had a free election and every American had a chance to vote in it, except for the Ron Paul delegates.
Texas has the most signatures? Fine, invade Mexico, move your border south 200 miles and rename your state Tejas – we’ll do OK without you. Just go away and don’t ask to come back when you lose the revenue from the 20 or so military bases there. Have fun patrolling your own borders when the border patrol is removed. And don’t cry for help when the next hurricane hits. Texas would be a third world country in no time without being part of the U.S. Besides, the blue states would get most of your electoral votes, thereby nearly ensuring that we’d never have to put up with one of your politicians running, excuse me, ruining the country again.
And as for you Floridians that signed this – fine, your state can go too. With all your retirees and welfare recipients off the rolls, it would help balance the Medicaid, Social Security and federal budgets. And same goes for you when the next hurricane hits. Good luck having your newly free and sovereign state pay for all of that!
I have seen dozens of posts in blogs from secessionists about taking “our” country back. Whose country is it if it isn’t ours? Yours? How is it logical or even sane to call it “our” country when you make up less than one half percent of the population? Take your country back from what? The black man in the white house?
So now, you sign petitions asking permission for your state and everyone else in it to secede because you don’t like the election results? Are you kidding me? Instead of asking permission for your state and the other 99.7+ percent of sane people who live there to secede, why not move to a better country? If I were President Obama I would be laughing at your petitions. I’d put all of you at the top of the waiting list for passports and personally stamp them.
Real Americans stick with their country no matter what happens and if they do not like something, they get involved to try to change things from within, not try to break up the country. Anyone with a functional brain, who understands politics knows that the chances of secession being granted to any state are about the same as you being abducted by aliens, dropped in a Bigfoot encampment, and being served gluten-free pizza there. So, your best bet is to pack it up and go if you hate America that much.
It’s funny that more than one petition was filed in several states – the people signing these probably can’t read and forgot someone else already filed it for them. It is also ironic that all of the states who garnered more than 25,000 signatures are states that are vulnerable to hurricanes and have recently received federal disaster aid. And if you secessionists are so worried about the NDAA and that “dictator” Obama, then it was real bright to sign your name for secession on a government web site. You probably saved the Department of Homeland Security a lot of time and the taxpayers some money by making it easier for them to add your names to their watch list.
A small percentage of the population are acting like petulant children that kick over the game board when they know they’ve lost. So, I put together a fun slideshow for you secessionists. It’s called “Deal with it or LEAVE!”
Have fun watching!
Get the other links, credits and slideshow here: Madison Independent Examiner – Petitions from 50 states to secede from the U.S.
You can view another version of this on OpEdNews: A few questions for secessionists.
Nude protesters seek coverage
Demonstrators at San Francisco City Hall
Columnists who imitate Herb Caen’s style of three dot journalism wouldn’t be fazed in the least by one week that produced an opportunity to include the particulars of the Profumo Scandal, a chance to stand in the batter’s box at AT&T Park, a curious fashion note for political protesters, and the possibility of informing readers in the USA that Australia now has a TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party before the New York Times runs that bit of information.
Getting a photo that shows the view down the third base lane from home plate in AT&T Park in San Francisco CA was not what the World’s Laziest Journalist expected to accomplish on Saturday November 9, 2012. We had learned that the Red Bull Flugtag glider competition was going to be held at McCovey Cove (AKA China Basin) and we thought a photo of a failed attempt to glide away from the launch point would be an eye-catching stock image to have available when it comes time to write about the struggle between the President and the Republican controlled Congress over the “fiscal cliff” showdown.
AT&T Park, which is the home for the Giants baseball team which currently holds the “World Champion” title, is adjacent to where the Flugtag competition was scheduled to be held and the management for the baseball team, in a show of civic pride and hospitality, had agreed to open up the baseball stadium to make a greater number of observation points available to the public. They also were showing the event on the giant (pun?) screen in the bleacher section beyond center field.
The World’s Laziest Journalist arrived at AT&T Park about 11 a.m. knowing that the event was not scheduled to begin until 1 p.m., so we wandered around taking feature shots. Since the Park was open free to the public, we went in and immediately noticed that the public was being permitted to stroll out onto the playing field. We thought that a photo take showing the viewpoint of a batter standing at home plate would be good for use on our photoblog, if nothing else.
We did not know that one of San Francisco’s famous cable cars was on display inside the stadium so when we saw it we took some feature shots of it immediately. Folks who have attended a baseball game at that venue would know about it, but people living outside the Bay Area, who are not baseball fans, might find it amusing to see one of the cable cars in an incongruous setting. So we snapped several frames of that visual oddity.
Baseball fans who were informed ahead of time about the opportunity, were taking a large number of snapshots of themselves on the playing field, and in the dugouts.
Images take from far away and which are then tightly cropped have a sever quality challenge that makes the photos take from the media vantage points seem all the better in comparison. One such image was on the front page of the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle’s, which just happened to be the Sunday edition, which has the largest circulation numbers for each week.
We figured that an attitude of reverse snobbism could be implemented for a column that describes the Flugtag photo expedition and with a bit of chutzpah we could pull it off and let it go at that because we “had other fish to fry.”
If Karl Rove (or whomever) fully intends for the Republican controlled Congress to drive the USA off the fiscal cliff, which would be a better choice: A Republican in the White House or a Democrat whom many conservatives already despise? Wouldn’t having a Democrat to blame it on be better than having a Republican in office struggling for reelection in 2016? Maybe another column questioning the validity of the results obtained from the electronic voting machines would be a good column topic choice.
If a foreign country had hacked into the CIA files and exposed the director’s indiscretions, Americans would be livid but if the FBI causes the ruckus does that make it OK? Something fishy is going on and American media is directing their audience’s attention to the hanky panky aspect of the story and ignoring the nagging questions about how and why this scandal came to light. Knowing that “ya gotta go along to get along,” we will also skip over those questions as being inappropriate for use as a column topics.
Were Mandy Rice Davis and Christine Keeler better looking than the women involved in the latest scandal?
Speaking of British scandals, didn’t one of their most famous media moguls use a crack hack team to get dirt on politicians and then use that knowledge to manipulate them?
Could there be a stealth manipulation angle to the Petraeus scandal that the American media is overlooking?
We came across the information that a <a href =http://austeaparty.com.au/web/> TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party</a> is in the formative stages in Australia. Will they form a welcoming committee to greet the disgruntled American conservatives who threatened to move to Australia if President Obama got reelected? We sincerely hope the assignment desk at the New York Times reads this column.
The conservative who are griping about being taxed too much can sympathize with some of the protesters seen at San Francisco City Hall at noon on Wednesday of this week. The folks who want tax breaks so that they can increase the country’s employment level would probably make a reference to Lady Godiva’s famous tax protest and make the assertion that times are so tough now that protesters apparently can’t afford clothes.
The protesters were objecting to a proposed law that would take away their right to walk around nude in the city of San Francisco. The contingent of journalists on hand to cover that protest outnumbered the protesters. The amount of exposure in the media that the event got was minimal.
Why would so many journalists turn out to cover the nudist protest and then produce such a limited amount of coverage in the media?
The next day one well known web site which provides aggregate news content used a deceptive headline (“Nude protest turns ugly”) to refer to the Wednesday event to draw readers to a slide show that seemed to use images taken elsewhere earlier in the year. The Castro Theater isn’t anywhere near the City Hall and we did not see any protesters on bikes, Wednesday.
For those who think this protest exemplifies values that could only originate in San Francisco, we would suggest that they do some fact finding on the clothing optional policy for the metropolitan area of “Ile du Levant.”
One young lady tested the journalists’ power of observation with an ensemble that consisted of: an old leather aviator’s helmet, a pair of shoes, a red neckerchief, dark glasses, a bracelet, two socks that didn’t match, and nothing else.
A duck vehicle transporting tourists around San Francisco passed by the noon event as City Hall and seemed to gain approval of the cause from the passengers.
It was a difficult assignment for the still photographers and video crews because most publishers and managing editors insist that no frontal nudity be shown. When you have a group of nude people milling about, it takes a concerted effort to get images that don’t violate the media prejudice against any frontal nudity.
Readers of this column who want to fact check the effort by Supervisor Scott Wiener to criminalize nudity should do a Google news search for “San Francisco Wiener measure.”
Could the idea of pictures that many journalists want to take and many in the audience want to see, but which get “killed” by prudish (conservative?) media owners be used as a metaphor for the clever management of news stories and political commentary in American Journalism?
If journalists and citizens think that the rich should pay a fair tax and the good ole boys don’t see it that way, which group will the media owners seek to please? The politicians might well use tax payers’ money to subsidize a trip to a strip club but the newspaper and TV station owners damn sure are not going to run images with frontal nudity in the media they own. Perhaps more media hypocrisy will be on display at the next San Francisco City Hall nude protest which is scheduled (weather permitting) for noon on Saturday November 17, 2012.
Poet William Blake wrote: “The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”
Now the disk jockey will play The Electric Prunes’ “I had too much to dream (last night),” the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints,” and Scot McKensie’s “San Francisco (Be sure to wear a flower in your hair).” (Yeah all those songs are from 1967 – so is “San Francisco Nights” by Eric Burden and the Animals. So what?) We have to go buy a new Mayan calendar because our old one is about to become obsolete. Have a “Live for today” type week.