I suppose this guy could have become president

In this Texas Tribune photo, Rick Perry is in a meeting today about drug-testing applicants for welfare -- a kind of typical slapdown you'd expect from the far right.  "Those people" need higher walls to jump if they're gonna ask me for a handout.

Our "handsome" governor might have become president.  Apart from anything (everything!) else, I'm glad this dark, mean face didn't make it to the White House.  He's the guy who deserves the slapdown.

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By the way, Texas is trying to secede again.  If I were the other 49 states, I'd leap at the opportunity to give Texas a little push.  Lessons would be learned, perhaps on both sides of our national borders with the upper 49...

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A number of pro-Romney states have sent petitions to the White House seeking permission to secede as part of a "redress of grievances."  Dana Milbank writes today in the Washington Post that they should be allowed to go.  The rest of us would benefit significantly from the move.

... A large number of patriotic Americans, mostly from states won by Mitt Romney last week, have petitioned the White House to let them secede. They should be careful about what they wish for. It would be excellent financial news for those of us left behind if Obama were to grant a number of the rebel states their wish “to withdraw from the United States and create [their] own NEW government” (the petitions emphasize “new” by capitalizing it).

Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. The balance is the opposite in blue states. The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union. ...Dana Milbank, WaPo

I don't see any problem with that:  leave the blue states with all the patriotism and our democracy.  And lower taxes.

What would be left is a Confederacy of Takers, including relatively poor states such as Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. One of the few would-be Confederacy members that pays more than it receives is Texas, which because of oil money is roughly break-even at 94 cents of benefits for its tax dollar. (The statistics, from an analysis of tax and revenue data by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, were published in 2006, but the broad pattern doesn’t vary much over time.) ... Milbank, WaPo

What do you think?  Start the proceedings immediately?  Start paying lower taxes here in America in 2013?  Enjoy a democracy no longer threatened by homegrown extremists?  Is there anything in this proposal that makes it a bad idea?  If, eventually, if the new confederate states want back in and can afford to pay their way, I'd be willing to take 'em back.  They'd just have to promise to change their ways and start behaving like Americans.

Comments

[joel hanes]

We'd have to maintain a corritor, or stage an Austin Wierdness Airlift.