We don’t want to blame all Texans for the high jinks in Austin. It’s a state full of lovely people, three-fourths of whom, according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, have no desire whatsoever to secede from the United States
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Link to the full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/opinion/18collins.html?em
Published: April 18, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By GAIL COLLINS
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Let us pause to consider Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, and his feelings about seceding from the union.
This all started during the recent anti-tax protests. You undoubtedly saw the pictures of the demonstrations full of people wearing teabags or tricorner hats who kept comparing themselves to the founding fathers at the Boston Tea Party. True, when it comes to taxation without representation, they were slightly different from colonial New Englanders on the minor point of having representation. But let’s not be picky.
Have you ever noticed that the states where anti-tax sentiment is strongest are frequently the same states that get way more back from the federal government than they send in? Alaska gets $1.84 for every tax dollar it sends to Washington, which is a rate of return even Bernard Madoff never pretended to achieve. Yet there they were in Ketchikan waving “Taxed Enough Already!” signs and demanding an end to federal spending.
Also, have you noticed how places that pride themselves on being superpatriotic seem to have the most people who want to abandon the country entirely and set up shop on their own? “What a great crowd,” Perry twittered, referring to the protesters he addressed in Austin, some of whom were waving American flags and yelling “Secede!”
Afterward, he told reporters that Texas had come into the union with a unique right “to leave if we decided to do that.” This is a beloved piece of state folklore despite its unfortunate drawback of being totally untrue.
5 comments:
My Party is embarrasing me. It's ignorance personified. Leave it up to Rick Perry to patronizingly exploit the “tea party” movement (a good idea with misplaced sentiment). If Texas were to pull out of the Union, voters certainly wouldn't allow Perry to run the new "country". That would be a disaster. He should move up to Alaska and join Sarah Palin where they can be the poster children for our Party's sad and destructive extremism.
That said, why don't all you tea party supporters send back your social security checks instead of making Indian tea exporters rich? Better yet, why didn't you show some real courage and refuse to pay your federal income taxes? And why weren’t there any “tea party” demonstrations when our tax dollars were being foolishly sent to pay for the Iraq war which needlessly killed and maimed thousands of our soldiers and Iraqi children?
America's chronic tax dollar stealing has been going on forever. Most recently, it started under the Bush group with Paulson. What no one in either political party wants to acknowledge is there really is no difference between us and the Democrats when it comes to the tea party issue. They should just rename the US Department of Treasury the US Department of Goldman Sachs.
We all need to quite using destructive two party politics and start addressing the real problem in Washingon: The Wall Street bankers and their insider hold on the Federal Reserve Roard and the Department of Treasury -- and their chronic pilfering of our tax dollars. Until both political parties acknowledge the problem, this systemic institutional dysfunction will not be fixed, and American taxpayers will continue to be screwed.
Perry and his ilk who are playing the tea party movement are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
And we are parroting the NY Times for what reason? It would be great if we could trust Rick Perry to follow through on his words.
Hey man I'm a former war protester. Don't mess with the Times. How 'bout sharing some news from Rolling Stone! Perry's a washed out establishment figure.
This site is such a magpie! Quoting Yankee papers about what we can and cannot do as a sovereign state. What one and everyone forgets is that Texas freely associated to join the Union, we were not forced to. We were a sovereign nation who joined in the Union. Much as the original 13 colonies voted to join the Union, they kept the right to leave the Union should they so freely choose at a later time. It was a Union of equals, not of sub-units of a supreme federal government. That is the fallacy taught by establishment historians who have liberal socialist agenda that cannot be substantiated with anything other than their ability to control the socialistic mechanisms in place to appease the masses. Secede AGAIN! Tell Washington to cram it, and keep their blankin' Yankee scrip money!
SECEDE TODAY, SECEDE TOMORROW, SECESSION ALWAYS!
What, precisely, did Perry say and what was the full context? And why wouldn't the national media report this?
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