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November 14, 2012

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White House website

On the WhiteHouse.gov website, there is a section titled, ‘Petitions’. Once there, people are shown the 3-step process on how to participate (from the White House website):

Step 1 – Browse open petitions to find a petition related to your issue, and add your signature.

Step 2 – If your issue is not currently represented by an active petition, start a new petition.

Step 3 – If a petition meets the signature threshold, it will be reviewed by the Administration and we will issue a response.

The page ends with a quote from President Obama. “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government,” the President says below the 3-step process, “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”

The Petitions

Upon entering the petition area of the White House website, this author only had to go through 8 different petitions before reaching the Connecticut petition to secede from the United States. If listed in order of their creation, Connecticut is the most recent state to add a new secession petition. It was not the first as most states have multiple secession petitions now.

Like many of the rest, it reads, ‘Peacefully grant the state of Connecticut to withdraw from the United States of America & create its own NEW government.’ As of Wednesday afternoon, the petition had 616 signatures.

For what it’s worth, the first 7 petitions Whiteout Press went through to get to the first petition to secede weren’t that bad. Some of them were amusing while others were very good or very serious requests. Here is a list of the petitions we came across upon first entering the White House ‘Petition’ area:

• Assist in reinstating Scott “The Torg” Torgerson back on the air at 97.1 The FAN, an ESPN radio affiliate in Columbus.

• Legally recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group.

• Declare the 1984 killing of 30,000 Sikhs in India as Genocide and ask India to punish the guilty and deliver justice.

• Condition US aid to Israel on compliance with the law not to violate the rights of Palestinians.

The next petition asked the President to do the Hokey Pokey, so we thought we’d end the list of random examples right there. A quick glance down the list of petitions finds the following state secession requests with the following votes so far. According to the site, it takes 25,000 signatures to garner a response from President Obama. Most of these states already have additional petitions created with larger signature counts.

-Connecticut – 616

-Maryland – 786

-Washington – 735

-Alaska – 1,147

-Hawaii – 1,544

-Massachusetts – 1,460

-North Carolina – 820

-Washington – 2,209

-Iowa – 2,515

-Maine – 2,365

It’s obvious by the above list that the last to get into the action were northern states that supported President Obama in the election. According to various news sources, the petition frenzy began with a Texas request and finished with Vermont being the final state to submit one.

The first petitions were posted on Thursday, just two days after the election. Texas was immediately followed by Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana – all of which have easily passed 25,000 signatures so far. As of last check, the Texas petition for secession was over 100,000 signatures.

The requests for secession aren’t without their opposition. There are also a handful of petitions submitted in response. One such petition reads, ‘Keep the United States United’. It had 2,071 signatures.

Ron Paul and American history

Former Presidential candidate and Texas Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) was one of the first to respond to rumors of the secession petitions. Unlike other public figures, the Republican Congressman has always supported the right to secede.

“Secession is a good principle. Just think of the benefits that would have come over these last 230-some years if the principle of secession had existed. That means the federal government would always have been restrained, not to overburden the states with too much federalism, too many federal rules and regulations,” Paul wrote to supporters in an email today.

The Congressman went on to say, “But since that was all wiped out with the Civil War, the federal government has grown by leaps and bounds and we have suffered the consequences, and we need to reconsider this. It’s not un-American to think about the possibility of secession. This is something that’s voluntary. We came together voluntarily. A free society means you can dissolve it voluntarily. That’s what the whole issue was about.”

As Rep. Paul reminds us, and we at Whiteout Press have explained before, the rules of the United States are the same as a street gang – once you join, the only way out is to die. That’s right. The people of Puerto Rico may want to listen closely as they vote for possible US statehood. Once they join the USA, they can never, ever leave. America fought the bloodiest civil war in world history over the question and that was the outcome.

Is a second American civil war even possible? History says it is. And America seems to be drifting closer and closer to it everyday. Read last month’s Whiteout Press article ‘Threats of American Civil War get louder’.

To view, submit or sign some White House petitions, visit the White House Petitions Page.