U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
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(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
April 16, 2009 04:07 AM UTC
58 Comments
…if it would clear our mountains of Texan skiers…
Oh, the possible irony! Texas as “illegals” in the lower 47! Would lend a whole new meaning to the Ski Patrol!
(a) Perry is a hairdo, nothing more
(b) TX governors are the least powerful governors constitutionally
(c) Perry is trying to keep his job, and that’s what this is about, not Matt Drudge’s wet dreams. He needs all the wingnuts to turn out in the GOP primary to save his ass from Kay Bailey Hutchinson if he’s going to stay governor.
I think most of us would support it….
And take the San Antonio Spurs with them.
work out a trade….
Colorado Springs for Austin?
We’ll throw in some Rocky Mountain Oysters for Rick Perry since he’s “got balls”.
Hey Governor Hairdo, if your overrated state takes its toys and goes home, you’re only speaking for Texans, not Americans. And I bet you’ll be surprised at how many Texans won’t want to leave the union this time.
And a lot of the grassroots and libertarian-leaners have been pissed at him for supporting Texas’ version of the SuperSlab land grab. That’s why he’s in serious trouble in the GOP primary.
He’s still a corporate sell-out, but this stunt will probably go a long way to helping him paint Kay Bailey as a Washington insider.
what it’s like to have a governor with balls?
you won’t find your answer in Texas. There’s a difference between being bold and throwing red meat to the Texas nationalists.
the comment at a Teabagging party, that is even more funny…
You need to stop engaging in this public fantasy about donning knee pads for your boss in the Governors Mansion. It’s un-be-coming.
It’s absolutely incredible.
But there’s still the Austin Airlift problem.
I think there is an Austin secessionist movement too.
It’s that easy!
We had secession once and it killed 1 million Americans and tore this country apart. It required 4 years of a brutal bloody war to end it.
This is not funny, this is not a throw-away line, this is not hyperbole. What this truly is is treason and anyone who proposes this should be considered unacceptable as an elected official – for any position.
But if it takes a visa to get into the US from Texas, maybe we’ll get Lake City back.
Seems to me that there are still a lot of people still fighting the War of Northern Aggression. In words and deeds if not bullets and bayonets.
I wrote this diary as an indictment of republican ridiculous-ness, didn’t mean to actually give any sort of creedence to Perry’s secessionist fantasies.
And I think, from reading the comments here, that no one else credible gives this any sort of support.
If Texas really did try to secede, who would go to war to keep it in the union? I sure wouldn’t, and I hope my teenage son wouldn’t pack up his canteen and go off to fight the 21st-century Johnny Reb.
I have been thinking about this issue lately. Would we, as a nation, be willing to make the sacrifices that our nation made in the 1860s to keep our country whole? I don’t think so. Does anyone disagree? Do you think we should be willing to sacrifice 1 million young lives to keep a disaffected state bound to our union?
If they started “relocating” and seizing the assets of my friends and relatives there, or if they used violence against our volunteer armed forces, I would definitely support an armed response. Might even pick up my weapons and volunteer myself.
The Civil War really got started with a passion when the South started firing on Fort Sumter.
Or less.
All we don’t need is for every American with a temporary grudge against some federal action seceding. I have ancestors who fought in the last one (from MIchigan, Ohio and Massachusetts) and it made sense then- would make sense now.
But there’s no way Perry was serious. The federal spending in TX (DoD contracting, actual military presence, NASA, and other) is HUGE. Aside from the drunken-sprng-break-rowdy-DMWT crowd- the TX right is pretty conservative. They wouldn’t want it.
Now if South Dakota wanted to leave….
I don’t care who or why, if our country faces that internal threat I would do whatever I could to support my country.
you must be unacceptable as an elected official – for any position.
http://feralhouse.com/titles/k…
Secession: How Vermont and All the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire
Especially when that same elected official constantly harps against others for supposedly not being “patriotic” or “American” enough.
Barack HUSSEIN Obama has more patriotism in the tip of his little finger than this Rick Perry asshole has in his entire body. For Perry to make a statement like he did is SICK.
Who supposedly said they would move out of the country if Bush won?
I recall they were un-patriotic and just plain stoopid.
But now that some wacky right wing nut job says it- and adds that he wants to take his state with him-it’s just gutsty and admirable.
It’s illegal.
But it does play well with TX voters. So I’d guess Governor Perry isn’t trying to start a new Civil War, he’s telling other R governors not to mess with Texas in 2012 ’cause he’s running.
no girls and no so-called governors who can’t deny a Senate seat to a D and who won’t turn away federal money to rebuild New Orleans.
If some doofus says he wants to move out of the country if Bush wins, well, that’s his right. Move to France! Don’t let the door hit you…
It’s another thing entirely for the governor of one of our United States to suggest that the state should secede from our union. That’s out-and-out treason.
the families whose sons and daughters came home under the American flag. They fought and died for one country and that country included Californians as well as Texans. For a politician to imply that our sons and daughters died for a tyranny is beyond the pale. He should be called on his traitorous statements and apologize to every family that mourns to this day the loss of their loved one.
You said it! It’s out-and-out TRAITOROUS to suggest that Texas should secede just because the American people exercised their rights – the rights so many thousands of Texans and hundreds of thousands of other FELLOW AMERICANS – fought and died for.
These nimrod teabaggers are nothing more than the worst kind of sore losers, with their outrageous “WE’RE GONNA HAVE A REVOLUTION” nonsense.
They should all burn in hell. They are spitting on the graves of the TRUE patriots of this country who died in defense of liberty: the right to VOTE.
It is THESE people who all truly want a dictatorship!!!
Can Immigration Control and Enforcement then issue a border alert prohibiting entry into our country by George W. Bush?
giving Texas back to Mexico. Just think of how much fun it would be to watch them forced to remarry! Or, if Texas secedes, the U.S. would suddenly look good to the rest of the world by comparison, sort of like Canada does today.
That is, to all Mexicans south of the Rio Grand and the Gulf of Mexico.
Perry is certainly dumb for throwing succession out there glibly.
But your comment (tongue in cheek though it may be) is irksome too. I know it is popular to bash Texans (and Californians) who come to Colorado, but it is really annoying. Colorado would be a crappy state if we weren’t effective as a magnet for so many highly skilled people from other states (we certainly don’t educate our own residents well enough to merit our position economically). It is through those non-natives, including Texans, that make Colorado even better.
A second point though is on the legality of secession. I think it is a major oversight in the Constitution that there was no discussion about how to exit the union. Especially at the time it was created, the states had individual identities. I’m not sure they would have agreed to ratify the Constitution if they didn’t think they could leave at some point. I’m not sure the Union was right to fight the Civil War (even with the morality of the slavery concern), and I’m not sure we should dismiss the right to secede so lightly in the modern context.
had some snow-plow wedging, jean-sporting Texan careen into your line on a powder. I mean, I know the economy’s hurting but let’s get our priorities straight:
1. Powder
2. Everything else
And yes of course it’s tongue and cheek. The whole point of this is to ridicule people like Perry (and possibly yourself?) who take things like secession seriously, when no serious person would actually do so. I mean, if you support breaking down the nation-state structure through promoting secession that’s one thing, but I think people like Perry are looking at it from a very different and unreasonable perspective.
Since the Civil War the issue is settled.
Ask the good folks in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and other territories and possessions. They know if they apply and get statehood- they will be in.
Not in until they want out.
It was a clear change where all the people became the United States where before the 13 states joined together in confederation.
That is why the members of the House were directly elected by the people.
“Hey, don’t let the door hit y’all on the ass on the way out, heah? Yay-ass, I’m makin’ fun of your dic-shun, too.”
The price our nation has paid goes way beyond the dead and wounded in that war. It’s the creation of institutions that are almost as bad as slavery, it’s the Yankee/Dixie hatred of each other that was alive and well when I was a kid. It’s taken, in round numbers, 130 years to leave most of that behind.
Time would have unraveled the economic underpinnings of the South in not many more decades, although he could not have known that.
Why is it a Democratic candidate gets lambasted by Republicans if he so much as dares to show up at one event without his little obligatory American-flag lapel pin – but these Republicans like Perry and Palin can talk about SECEDING FROM THE UNITED STATES and they wrap this mantle of patriotism around themselves?
Anyone who talks about seceding from the Union, or who speaks to an openly secessionist group, is nothing more than a traitor to the United States of America in my view.
Can you imagine? 20 of Texas’ 32 US Reps are Republicans. Both Senators are Republicans. In addition subtract 34 Republican electoral votes for President. If Texas weren’t a state, George Bush would have never been President the first or second time. The rest of the right in the US would declare war on the right in Texas . . . . or defect.
I made a swing through the Panhandle (Amarillo, Lubbock, and Midland-Odessa), then over to DFW. I was surprised how many people brought it up — and these were mostly well-educated, well-off business owners and professionals. Many of my clients are seriously loading up on guns as well.
All I can say, it was weird.
There are media campaigns for tourism there that end with “Texas….A whole nuther country.” They don’t know how right they are.
Being a net tax money receiver, they would soon learn that they either could provide fewer benefits that most citizens expect, or they would have to…………..raise taxes.
view this issue, and the emotions that it invokes. After all, this is one of the very few contexts in which Americans, in general, do not hesitate to state with unyielding conviction that membership in a certain club is not voluntary, that member-states do not have the freedom to choose to terminate their membership at will, and that to attempt to do so is an assault on the integrity of the club itself, on the club’s ability to continue to function and survive (thus the cries of “treason”). To the extent that this is a subtly informed response, rather than a blind ideological one, it is informed by a recognition of the limits of liberty, and of the necessity of coercion, something Americans are loathe to recognize as a general rule. And it’s no coincidence that the cries of “secession!” come from (as, historically, they came from) those most loathe to recognize that “liberty” is not an absolute, and that any society based on each doing whatever the hell they please whenever the hell they please it can neither function nor survive.
Parsing suggested that Lincoln made a mistake by militarily forcing the southern states to remain in the union. First, I can’t help but pause again, and point out what few ever mention (though I wonder how often it quickly crosses minds, and is just as quickly discarded, for fear of the internal contradictions it raises): That the notion that Lincoln was a hero for militarily forcing a large and geographically contiguous part of the country to continue to belong to the country against the will of the vast majority of its people seems somewhat incongurent with our normal understanding of “liberty.”
And, in fact, the Confederacy was quite right in considering itself the continuation of the American Revolution (or, more accurately, the American war of secession from the British Empire). The parallels go beyond a mere war of secession. In fact, many of the colonial complaints against the British involved the Colonists being on what we would now consider the wrong side morally. Here are some examples: 1) The British wanted to respect Indian sovereignty in the recently conquered Ohio Valley, and the colonists considered this an affront to their right to expand at the expense of the Indians; 2) The British wanted to let the people of the newly obtained Catholic, French-speaking province of Quebec continue to practice their own religion and speak their own language, while the Colonists took umbrage at this permission given to the new colony to remain aloof from their emerging (still informal) confederation. 3) The British were increasingly moving toward abolition of the institution of slavery in all of their territories, which the Colonists considered a threat to their way of life. (This last one, ironically, was not only at the center of the secession that ignited the Civil War, but also was one of the major causes of the Texans decision to secede from Mexico in the 1839s, after obtaining their original land-grant from the Mexican government based on an agreement to adhere to Mexican law, which prohibited slavery).
And yet, both Washington and Lincoln are our national heroes, the two most exalted ones, though they were on completely opposite sides of parallel events.
What is the explanation, other than that the victors write the history books? It’s this: It is treasonous to secede from any political entity unless and until the secession is successfully accomplished and the new entity formed by the broken off part survives intact, at which point they rename the “traitors” national “heroes” and “founding fathers.” Of course, the rhetoric of just cause in opposition to tyranny is invoked to justify the secession, as it was invoked in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, but the fact is that the Colonists were all proud and loyal citizens of the British Empire 20 years before the Revolution, admiring and respecting its institutions, until that sovereign, having given the Colonists special support with little imposition for several generations, decided that the Colonies were now robust enough to be full participants, with full obligations, in British civilization. At that point, the Colonists correctly decided that they could serve their own collective interests better as a new nation detached from the British Empire, and found excuses for declaring the realization of that separation to be just and righteous, protesting such things as the lowering of the tax on tea (which threatened the vibrant smuggling business by making British tea cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea).
But back to Parsing’s comment: Lincoln was so adamant not to let the Union disintegrate, because had it done so, not only would the South have failed economically, but so would have the North. The United States would have more closely resembled much of the rest of the Americas, a bunch of fractious Banana Republics, unable to unite in large enough and well-designed enough configurations to defend themselves against foreign aggressors (though the US, and the Monroe Doctrine, kept the others intact against such aggressors). We would have been re-conquered by European powers, and reabsorbed into European empires, and the world would have veered down a quite different path (though possibly arriving at a similar place in the end).
I, for one, am not a big fan of intense nationalist ideology, and the cries of “traitors!” that accompany calls for secession. Despite my willingness to recognize that “liberty” is not an absolute good, and that coercion for mutual benefit is a vital component of a functioning society, I am still committed enough to the concept of liberty to say that if any portion of any nation feels that it is not benefitting from its membership, then it has a basic right to detach and go its own way. And yet, despite this “basic right,” I do indeed think Lincoln was a brilliant leader for having denied it to those who had done nothing more than invoke it. Such is the complexity of the practicalities of the real world, and the limitations of thinking strictly in terms of “rights.”
and 75% would vote to stay in the USA.
That got me thinking about how the process of secession would even occur. Since there’s no legal procedure for doing so, other than following the precedent set by the Confederation, there really could never be a situation wherein it would be justified legally. Would it be a vote on a referendum? Would the legislature approve something to send to the Governor to sign?
Regarding your last paragraph: Lincoln was right to forcibly keep the south in the union because of the moral context with which the south seceded. They wanted to secede so they could continue to have slaves, and Lincoln said no.
Where is the moral justification to secede now? “We don’t like paying taxes” doesn’t exactly ring the bell of liberty with anyone. Could you imagine the second American Civil War being fought over taxes being 10% lower than they were under Reagan? It boggles the mind.
in order to end slavery: He opposed it in order to preserve the Union. He said so explicitly. And, as I pointed out, much of the same moral justification could be invoked to justify the British opposition to the secession of its American colonies. After all, “we don’t like paying taxes” was exactly what did ring the bell of liberty 230-some years ago.
I said he was right to do it because of that fact.
And it wasn’t that they didn’t like paying taxes (even though that was probably the underlying notion.) They didn’t like the Crown telling them that they couldn’t have any representation in parliament. Had George III lamented and allowed them to have representation, it’s quite possible that the northern colonists wouldn’t have had enough support from the southern and middle colonies to actually declare independence.
Texas has Congressional representatives (even though one of them is Ron Paul) and therefore have no basis for seceding based on taxation.
And what really started the war were events like the Boston Massacre. When British troops started shedding colonial blood, any hope for peace between Great Britain and America started to disappear.
Actually, by the British definition of representation, the colonists did have representation in Parliament, because Parliament was conceived to represent all of the people of the British Empire. The American experience had begun to redefine what representation meant to the colonists, since it became more geographically defined, but that was a local modification of a shared set of beliefs that we accepted by the British people, the citizens of the most liberal state the world had yet produced.
No, there was very little authentic justification for the secession of the colonies: They suddenly were being asked to pay taxes similar to those paid by all other British citizens (not identical, because locale affected which ones were relevant), taxes from which they had been extraordinarily exempted in order to give them a chance to establish themselves in a foreign land, and they simply didn’t like it.
As for the Boston Massacre, an event when one or more British soldiers being stoned by an angy mob fired into the mob killing five people, it was so exaggerated by colonial propaganda that John Adams felt compelled to defend the soldiers in court out of a commitment to justice.
We distill reality into neat little packages that erase or blurr all of the subtleties and ambiguities and internal inconsistencies, and create a perfectly coherent narrative with which we are perfectly comfortable.
Don’t get me wrong: There are few people for whom I have less respect than these yahoos who I may seem to be defending. But, truth be known, I probably wouldn’t have had much respect for Sam Adams either, though we have very successfully whitewashed the fact that he was remarkably similar to them. The main difference was that, in retrospect, he had much better timing.
If Texas were to secede (as highly improbable as that may be), and were they to become a successful and enduring nation thereafter (even more improbably), then the descendents of the secessionists would speak of the good governor with the same veneration that we speak of our own heroic revolutionary heroes, with as little justification.
You can defend anyone. 🙂
I thought I was showing that I can condemn anyone! See how confusing it is?
….to outline a process for secession. It probably wouldn’t pass or be ratified, unless there was one particular state that so irritated the other 49 that all 49 agreed it should be permitted to leave (or tossed out).
it doesn’t prove much.
If Rass says it’s 75%, it’s probably more like 95%.