Media Is Very Quiet About Secession Vote In Colorado

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Getting a sampling of what you people are thinking and talking about today, many of you are pointing out that you’ve tried to Google search to get some news, view some news from the secession initiatives in Colorado yesterday and you can’t find it.  I had the same problem.  I had to change and alter my search a couple of times this morning before I was able to get anything. Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Getting a sampling of what you people are thinking and talking about today, many of you are pointing out that you’ve tried to Google search to get some news, view some news from the secession initiatives in Colorado yesterday and you can’t find it.  I had the same problem.  I had to change and alter my search a couple of times this morning before I was able to get anything.  I finally threw my hands up in defeat and said: Okay, give me a television in Denver.  That’s how I found the little bits of info that I have here on what happened in Colorado.  From the Fox station that is headquartered high atop Mount Doom — if you’re just joining us, Denver, Colorado is now known as Mount Doom.  Peyton Manning plays for the Mount Doom Broncos.  We’re just continuing our analogies with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the brilliance of J.R.R. Tolkien.

“N. Colorado secession results: 6 of 11 counties vote ‘no’,” notice how they write the headline, “6 of 11 counties vote ‘no’.”  You could have written a headline that five of the eleven said yes.  By the bye, one of those counties is still counting votes.  Until I see that that return has been certified as official, it’s a tie right now, five to five.  We’re going into overtime and Drew Brees has the ball.  This is the only news item I can find on this.  Listen to how this story is worded from the Fox affiliate of Mount Doom Colorado.

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Following the Democrats’ dominance during the 2013 legislative session, a group of Weld County Commissioners weighed an idea: what if their county, and possibly others, were to secede and form a 51st state?

[end reading]

Mike:  Can I just say to you that I just marvel at how intellectually vapid the discussion over this has been?  Every news report contains something to the effect of [mocking] “Secession, a new state out of another, has not occurred since West Virginia.”  By the way, West Virginia was illegal.  That was part of Lincoln’s tyranny.  If you’re going to cite one, pick one before West Virginia.  Why not cite Maine leaving Massachusetts?  In any event, how do you think these other states were formed?  They were formed, some of them, out of what was the Louisiana Territory, part of the Louisiana Purchase.  This is a very simple process here.  You didn’t have to secede from the Louisiana Territory.  You just formed your geographical boundaries and said: We want to be a state.  We’re a sovereign people and we’ve decided.  Here are our border lines.

Founders TV – Five Things To Remember On The Fifth Of November

Why do you think Missouri has a straight line across the top and bottom?  That’s not by accident.  That’s how they determined the border.  There’s a river to the east.  There’s a parallel line — remember from grade school how to tell the difference between latitude and longitude.  Lati-, think ladder, rungs on a ladder; longi-, think long up and down.  So longitudinally on the east you had the Mississippi River.  North and south there were parallels.  To the west there is a similar geographic boundary.  That’s how Missouri is formed.  It’s pretty simple.  People therein Missouri were sovereign.  They formed a government of that part of the territory, drew their boundaries, drafted a constitution, asked Congress to recognize they had drafted a constitution, and since they were a republican entity, asked to be admitted as the State of Missouri.

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There is nothing that is shocking or revolutionary about any of that.  That’s just the way it happened.  Why is it so shocking that it could happen, or that it should happen again?  What is the shock to the system here?  For a people that fancy themselves to be so self-important, as George Carlin said, so evolved, so enlightened, why is it such a shock that people would want to congregate together in smaller geographical entities for the purpose of governing themselves?  Maybe the people in northern California don’t have anything in common with the nutjobs in southern California.  Is that possible?  Of course it is.  Is it probable?  Yes.  Why is it [mocking] “This hasn’t happened since the 1800s.”  Wow, that is such a great coat hanger to rest your case on.

We should be very, I think, disappointed that it hasn’t happened since the 1850s.  We should be wondering: Why don’t we think that smaller political entities are better?  If you go to the Founders Tradin’ Post or to Amazon and pick a copy up of Don Livingston’s Rethinking the American Union, in one of the chapters there you will find a chapter written by the great writer of the name Kirkpatrick Sale.  Sale wrote a book in 1981 called Human Scale.  It still is, I think, one of the definitive works on the issue of human scale.  Professor Don Livingston, who edited Rethinking the American Union for the 21^st Century, uses it often in his talks when he talks about the subject.

Sale points out that if you study the world, the rest of that spinning blue ball that Carlin just talked about that’s out there in space, if you study the rest of the world, you’ll find out there are an awful lot of countries out there that aren’t very big, aren’t very geographically large.  Why do some people mock them?  [mocking] “They’re just a little, tiny country.”  What’s wrong with being tiny?  Does that mean there is something inherently wrong with the size of Rhode Island?  Should we just say: You’re too small, dude.  You don’t get two senators anymore.  Screw you.  What about Delaware?  Let’s look at the size of New Hampshire and Vermont and Connecticut compared to the size of Texas or California or Alaska.  Which one is closer to being in scale and which one is out of scale?

The idea that there is something inherently wrong with even talking about allowing or encouraging new political entities or new geographical sovereign entities that achieve sovereignty because the people therein decide they want to congregate because they have common cause and they feel: This is our community.  This is where our borders are.  You people over there, if you want to govern yourselves like that, you go right ahead, but you leave us to govern ourselves.  This is as old as ancient Greece, folks.

Why then with such scorn and derision is the result in the five Colorado counties that voted to secede, why is that news being greeted with such scorn and derision?  We should be sitting here going: Yeah, it’s about damn time somebody did it, about damn time.  Then you hear, [mocking] “The state legislature is never going to go along with this.”  I asked the question in the first hour and I’ll ask it again because I haven’t gotten an answer: Why wouldn’t they go along with it?  Under what guiding principle, under what ethos, under what dogma do the legislators or the people that gather in Mount Doom in Colorado deny those five northern counties the same right the very state they are situated in asserted back in the 19^th century, under what principle?  Why was it good for you to form Colorado but it’s not good for them to form northern Colorado?  Who are you to tell those people no?

Folks, all this worrying about whether Chris Christie is a conservative, whether or not he’s going to emerge as the national Republican candidate, and all this other handwringing and gnashing of teeth that’s going on out there, focus your attention on Colorado.  Those people in those five counties got it right.  Who knows?  Maybe we have misjudged them.  Maybe they form a state and it turns out to be blue.  I profess to care not.  I profess to care not.  What I care about is that they actually are trying to practice what all of us claim that we so desperately want: self-government, republican government.

If you’re looking for a model and you’re looking for good things that happened yesterday, look at those five counties in Colorado.  Maybe that’s why you can’t find any news of those results with the proverbial search warrant.  That probably explains it.  You just heard about it because I just told you.  As a matter of fact, I have an open invite.  I’ll say it publicly.  I would invite anyone that is of any of those counties that is now going to petition the legislature that sits on Mount Doom in Colorado, what’s your plan?  How do you plan to roll this out?  What is your argument going to be?  Are you going to get together in your five counties and draw your boundaries?  I don’t even know because the news is so scattered, are the five counties connected?  Is there a gap in between them?  There’s a lot that’s left to be discovered here, and it’s because there’s so little coverage of it.  I think that tells you an awful lot.  We hear [mocking] “That’s not important.  National politics and Chris Christie, that’s important.”  Really?  That’s part of the problem right there, methinks.

You can see the exact same thing by looking at the electoral results map in Virginia.  Go ahead and look at it.  Go to Politico.com.  It’s on the front page.  I’ve also linked to it in today’s Pile of Prep.  Click on the map.  Look at that ocean of red in Virginia and the little, tiny pockets of blue.  What are the people of Virginia to say about, now that they have a governor that’s going to govern all the counties in Virginia, yet you can see a very small minority of actual counties voted for Terry McAuliffe.  AG says: Well, Mike, if it goes the other way, if those big counties in the north vote for Cuccinelli, then he’s the governor.  I’d say then that the politics and the political alignment in Virginia is out of scale.

Mike Church Show Transcript – No, Not The ‘S’ Word, Don’t Say It . . . Secession In Northern Colorado

Is it fair to say the people that work and derive their existence from the toil and labor of the rest of the United States, including the southern part of Virginia, those that live in those counties nearby Mordor on the Potomac who are streaming in and out of that purported capital of this government, you know they’re working for the federal leviathan.  They’re working and existing on the toil and the labor of the rest of the states.  Is it fair?  Do they really have common cause with the people of southwestern or even northwestern Virginia?  Will they break bread together?  Is there anything they share a common concern in, other than maybe the very existence of life?  When it came to determining whether or not a soon-to-be-born child’s life is to be preserved, do the people in that part of Virginia share the concerns and the view of life that the people in the rest of Virginia — if you look at that map, should you then be compelled and forced by some archaic geographic alignment to have to live, and I would say many of you complain and suffer under it?  I think you shouldn’t.  Does that mean there’s going to be a realignment?  I doubt it.  Should you talk about it?  I think that’s healthy.  That’s part of self-government, isn’t it, to ask those questions and then to answer them?  That’s what our forefathers did.  That’s exactly what they did and they kept on doing it.  They didn’t have a problem with it.

It’s almost hysterical to know the history of the northeastern United States, especially when it comes to the states that wanted to secede and attended the Hartford Convention in 1815, how those men viewed how they should align or how they should draw boundaries for political government, how they should or could unite together in common cause.  When they did not think that their own principles were being protected or were shared by others, they didn’t hesitate.  Timothy Pickering and his buddies — listen to my docudrama What Lincoln Killed: Episode I.  Pickering and his buddies, who would have been led by Aaron Burr if he hadn’t killed Hamilton, Pickering and his buddies didn’t give a second thought to whether or not they should go to Hartford and have a convention.  As a matter of fact, Pickering was angry for almost 15 years until he finally got his convention.  Then cold feet reigned the day.  The delegates said: I don’t know, Tim, maybe we ought to just ask for amendments.  At least they had the convention.

What happened yesterday on election day is a story of a lack of federalism and a lack of republicanism, but in five rare instances, a triumph and an assertion of federalism and republicanism.  Put that in your North American continental blob and “that’s the way it’s got to be” pipe and smoke it.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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