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from the you-can-go-your-own-way-♩♫♩♫ dept.
Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general's office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.
Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.
"We're doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention," Evans said.
The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S.
Could California go it alone?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:52PM
For years I have been regularly instructed by The Narrative that secession movements are always and forever dog whistles for neo-confederate racists. States Rights is also a code word for racists wanting to bring out the chains. What are we supposed to think about this? Somehow I doubt we will get an honest admission that it is only OK when Progressives do it.
Succession is "OK" if you believe in a weak federal government and strong states' rights, and not "OK" if you believe in a strong union and states' rights being reigned in by a federal constitution. It's not really a right vs left question, except that since the civil war racists have often hidden behind this argument when their real objective isn't states' rights, but succession from the federal government and a free hand to run amok against minorities, and in particular target the black and Jewish communities (and also the Catholics, which is amusing given the central role Catholicism has played in just about every western fascist regime from before Hitler to the present, but I digress).
I don't think this will go anywhere (I tend to believe in a strong union over states' rights, though if the white supremacists now in power run amok I could see my opinion changing, as a matter of self-preservation if nothing else), but it is amusing to see the racist Republicans who are now in power in a position to be forced to "eat their own dogfood."