Last week, I wrote an article about the SHOT Show in Las Vegas and how NBC Sports was pathetically tone-deaf by sponsoring the event. As I mentioned, the NRA had not one but three different booths, and Bushmaster, the manufacturer of the assault rifle used by the Sandy Hook shooter, had two different booths. So it comes as no surprise that aging rock star, secessionist and draft dodger Ted Nugent was there, too. It was the largest gun show in the world so, naturally, the rogues gallery of gun fetishists were on hand.

And the Secret Service should probably have another chat with Nugent after what he said from the floor of the SHOT Show.

Yes, Nugent not only threatened the president again, but he implied that he and his “buddies” would stage some sort of geriatric armed revolt if the president continues to push for new gun safety laws. I used the phrase “another chat” because this is the second time in less than a year that Nugent has popped off with some sort of not-so-subtle threat against the president. Rewind back to April, 2012 when Nugent said at the annual NRA Convention, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” The Secret Service responded to that one by paying a visit to Nugent’s compound. Oh, and you might recall how, at a concert back in 2007, Nugent said that Barack Obama can “suck on my machine gun.”

Yes, one of the gun culture’s A-list spokesmen — and a Republican campaign prop.

So here’s what he said at the SHOT Show last week via a Guns.com video attained by Media Matters yesterday:

I’m part of a very great experiment in self-government where we the people determine our own pursuit of happiness and our own individual freedom and liberty not to be confused with the Barack Obama gang who believes in we the sheeple and actually is attempting to re-implement the tyranny of King George that we escaped from in 1776. And if you want another Concord Bridge, I got some buddies.

Do we have to go over this again? Nugent and his buddies would be utterly wiped out. Full stop. Actually, they might as well be threatening to ride velociraptors into the White House, armed with magic wands and accompanied by Space Monkey Gleek. It’s just that ridiculous. The whole notion of an armed revolt and secession from the United States failed miserably in 1865, and the revolutionaries at that time were headed by skilled West Point commanders like JEB Stuart and Robert E. Lee who directed massive armies. These gun nutjobs today have — who? — octogenarian D-list electric guitar player Ted Nugent and a gaggle of his redneck disciples. Good luck, boys.

In fact, you know what? Bring it on. Seriously. I’d like to see Nugent try his hand at something like this — to actually follow through on one of his kneejerk treasonous threats. But considering how he chickened out of the Vietnam draft, we can safely assume that Nugent prefers to only shoot at things that don’t fire back.

And he didn’t stop there. Here’s his latest threat against the president:

But here is what is wrong with America today. We have a president, and everybody better write this down, and memorize this. The president of the United States goes to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and pretends to honor 58,000 American heroes who died fighting communism and then he hires, appoints and associates with communists. He pretends to pay honor to men who died fighting communism, and then he hangs out with, hires and appoints communists. He is an evil dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom. And we need to fix this as soon as possible.

The election’s over so the only fixing he could expect to achieve would have to come in some other form, and he doesn’t have the power to impeach the president. By the way, you know who else hates freedom? The owners of the venue where Nugent and his fellow over-compensators held their big gun show last week, that’s who. One of the regulations emphasized by the SHOT Show organizers was that attendees couldn’t bring their own firearms into the convention hall. No conceal carry at the world’s largest gun show.

But that’s incidental. Nugent has, for the third time (that I’m aware of), threatened to assassinate the president. Did he mean it?

Chances are he isn’t very serious, and he’s just popping off for attention, but who really knows? He’s a board member for the NRA, and the NRA insists that video games and the media can somehow incite a man to walk into a school and kill 20 children. Well then, by that same logic, influential pop icon Ted Nugent’s constant outbursts about violent insurrections and assassinating the president could just as easily influence a man to take a shot at Obama or drive a car bomb into an army base (another Concord Bridge would ostensibly involve Nugent and his buddies attacking American military forces somewhere).

So perhaps the authorities should take him a little more seriously since he clearly has no self-censor or self-control. And the gun lobby would do well to take Nugent a lot less seriously. But they won’t.

Adding… Looking over some of the words I used in this column, it occurred to me that this URL could easily be red-flagged by the hyper-sensitive national security infrastructure that Nugent supported throughout the Bush years. You know, because he’s all about freedom. Also, yes, I know. Nugent isn’t really an octogenarian.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

A group of Republicans in the Arizona House of Representatives are pushing a bill that would limit federal gun laws’ reach into the state.

The bill, known as HB 2291, would, among other things, make it a Class 6 felony for a federal government employee or official to enforce federal laws or regulations of firearms, accessories, and ammunition that are owned or manufactured within state lines and remain within state lines.

The bill would also make any new federal laws restricting semi-automatic firearms and magazines, or requiring any form of firearm registration, unenforceable in Arizona.

Among the bill’s sponsors is state Rep. Carl Seel (R), who previously made headlines as the author of a 2011 birther bill.

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By Bob Cesca:

In the wake of the election, there’s no doubt that the Republican Party leadership is capable of making some adjustments to re-brand itself. There are plenty of ways they can do it, but it’s obvious to anyone paying attention to what’s happening on the far-right that the base simply won’t allow the party to change. For example, in the wake of his support for a deal that would allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest incomes to expire, it appears as if Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) is vulnerable to a primary challenger from his right. We’ve only just begun to witness the far-right backlash against the party leadership.

The base of the Republican Party is deeply entrenched in the murky darkness the party has been building throughout the last three decades: a realm of anger, racial resentment, distrust of government, hatred of immigrants and violently anti-choice misogynists and demagogues. The party has incited these tendencies via its PR apparatus — the conservative entertainment complex — on AM radio and Fox News Channel, augmented by wealthy financiers who bankroll the bulk-purchasing of every book-length ghost-written screed by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck.

The problem this creates, of course, is that the Republican Party has been consumed by misinformed idiots with no substantial connection to the real world, and the first post-election PPP poll only serves to amplify this conclusion.

First, the good news. 56 percent of Republican voters aren’t really interested in seceding from the United States.

Wait. Isn’t that kind of low given the seriousness of topic?

The sloganeering party of “these colors don’t run” — the party that practically branded the notion of American patriotism during the previous decade is only around half-sure that it doesn’t want to totally abandon the nation it heretofore claimed to love so much. The other half is split between still making up its mind on secession and totally wanting to secede right away.

As I’ve written before, we can only regard this as fair-weather patriotism. More than that, it’s just dumb. Perhaps there’s a big steaming chunk of wishful thinking on the part of the secession supporters, but the process of secession presents a huge obstacle: it’s simply impossible.

For a significant chunk of the party, softening on issues like immigration and reproductive choice is more obscene than the impossible task of disconnecting from the Constitution and the nation.

But wait. There’s more.

The PPP study asked Republican voters why they thought President Obama was re-elected. Thanks to the ex-morning-zoo-deejays and television screechers in the conservative entertainment complex, half of all Republicans think the president stole the election. Actually — correction — the president didn’t directly steal the election. Half of all Republicans told PPP that ACORN stole it for him. 49 percent of Republicans believe ACORN, the evil nonprofit organization, rigged the election somehow for the president.

Good news and bad news on this one.

The good news first: the number of Republicans who think ACORN stole the election is down by three percent from 2009 when 52 percent thought ACORN prevented John McCain and Sarah Palin from winning the election.

Here’s the bad/hilarious news: ACORN ceased to exist years ago following a conspiracy of videotaped lies by Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe — a scam that was picked up by Republican leadership in Congress where the organization, which didn’t break any laws, was stripped of federal funding. After it was too late, the U.S. Government Accountability Office determined that the Breitbart/O’Keefe videos were heavily edited and that no federal funds were misused and no laws were broken. But ACORN was killed by a conspiracy of lies and slander anyway.

And now, years following its wrongful death sentence, ACORN is still being wrongfully accused of stealing elections, and it’s all because the base is entirely disconnected with facts and reality — a disconnection that’s reinforced in almost every sphere of right-wing influence.

Anyone who thinks the Republicans are capable changing is just as delusional as the secessionists and conspiracy theorists who compose the GOP’s base. The far-right media is so deeply and inextricably woven into the life-support system of the Republican Party, it’s nearly impossible to extract it without killing the host.

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By Chez Pazienza: Can you feel that? Isn’t it nice?

I may be a big fan of new experiences, but there’s nothing quite like returning to your comfort zone, where every minute of every day unfolds a like warm blanket of soothing predictability. Sure, it was entertaining and even, for the briefest of moments, somewhat encouraging to see the Republicans humbly soul-search following the trouncing they received at the polls last week. For a couple of days it seemed like all you heard was a steady stream of self-recrimination and conciliatory language coming from the right. Even as the usual apocalyptic raving and blustery doubling-down on the politics of division and eliminationism went on unabated, for the first time in a very long time these voices were uncharacteristically outnumbered by people at least trying to behave calmly and rationally. Just about everyone of every political stripe was apparently ready to acknowledge that the GOP had lost its way and its historic comeuppance was proof of its lack of viability in a changing America. November 6th was a date with demographic destiny the right shouldn’t have been able to forget.

But hey, that was last week. This week, everything’s back to normal.

Surely by now you’ve heard that rather than going away quietly and consequently aligning himself with the losers of elections past who’ve comported themselves with dignity and class, Mitt Romney is basically confirming for us all in grand fashion the fact that we dodged a serious bullet by not electing him president. In some ways I guess we can be thankful. Yesterday, on a conference call with several of the big money donors to his failed campaign, Romney once again expressed disbelief that he’s not right now at this very moment putting together a transition team to help usher him into the Oval Office come January. He still can’t understand why he didn’t win — although the best reason he can come up with might prove that he’ll never really understand. While talking to those donors, Romney blamed his loss on the “gifts” President Obama was willing to give out to minorities, women and students in an effort to win their vote.

“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

If this sounds contemptuously plutocratic, a 180-degree turn from the 180-degree turn he pulled toward the end of his campaign when he tried to disavow his infamous “47%” comments, believe me — it is. With nothing left to lose or gain, the real Romney once again reveals himself, and it’s not pretty. Still, it was to be expected because while Romney admittedly speaks from a rarefied position when it comes to the ability to sociopathically look down one’s nose at the teeming unwashed and their pathetic needs, he didn’t say anything yesterday that guys like the sulking, bitter Bill O’Reilly and the bloated, loudmouthed Rush Limbaugh weren’t saying last week. They were simply balanced, for a change, with introspection from those who realize that disenfranchising half the population — calling them lazy, irresponsible freeloaders — is no way to win a national election.

The voices of reason were probably never going to last but as with 2008 it’s almost shocking the speed with which so many Republicans have returned to a place of outrage and conspiracy, spouting the familiar shibboleths that got them into the mess they’re currently in.

First of all, Fox News, which many expected to at least temper its lunacy for a bit in the interest of trying to move the political party it shills for forward, has jumped fully back into fanciful fear-mongering mode. Not only has it latched onto Romney’s comments as a means of pushing its own version of the bullshit “makers-vs.-takers” meme, but it’s proving that it’s still willing to give a national forum to any idiot with a theory about President Obama sure to stoke the terrors and resentments of its aging white audience. Yesterday alone, a former CIA operative appeared on Fox to make the claim that Obama is “encouraging radicals to act against America’s allies,” and of course it practically goes without saying that it’s been willing to lend legitimacy to the temper tantrum currently being thrown by a handful of breathtakingly stupid secessionists in the wake of the Obama victory (what Hannity has personally dubbed “Secession Fever”).

Yeah, if you thought Fox News was going to calm the fuck down even for a little while — man, did you back the wrong horse. What’s interesting, though, is that for Ailes and Fox News, the decision to continue throwing gasoline on the fires of white fury is strictly a business one. There was, again, a lot of hemming and hawing last week about how conservative media did such a disservice to its audience by reinforcing the epistemic information bubble most of it lives in in the lead-up to the election. But there’s money in blowing that bubble up once again, this time potentially even bigger and stronger, and that’s got to be the primary consideration. Fox News has never been more powerful than when it’s the blaring voice of opposition. The last four years have been a boon to it and I doubt the next four will be any different.

As for the kind of conspiratorial fanaticism we can count on over the next leg of the Obama presidency and now that our brief moment of sanity has passed, well, meet the new birtherism: the election was stolen. Sure, there’s zero evidence whatsoever of any kind of voter fraud — although there’s plenty proof of official and under-the-table GOP voter suppression and intimidation leading up to the election — but since when has that stopped the most unhinged on the right? Still holding on tightly to the alternative reality it was fed by conservative media, those who believe that there’s simply no way Obama could have won again are convinced he didn’t, that a dastardly plot by urban voters and their enablers rigged the game. Again, no evidence, but who needs it when you’ve got unfocused, white-hot rage, suspicion and the absolute faith that you’re right?

So, yeah, secessionists, racists, cries for impeachment, threats of violence, conspiracies everywhere, four years of absolute chaos as a once-respectable political movement gruesomely death-spasms its way inexorably down the road to oblivion.

It’s good to have things back to normal on the right.

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By Bob Cesca: I hate to disappoint the 675,000 whiny diaper babies calling for secession in the wake of the election but, sorry, no matter how hard they stomp their feet and pout and fling their feces at the electoral map, demands for secession might as well be demands for goblins and unicorns. They’re equally as realistic.

Secession from the United States will never happen.

Ever.

Not only is it illegal, but it’s technically an act of treason as defined by the Constitution, and it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White. Furthermore, the secessionists aren’t merely condemning the Obama administration, secession is by definition a categorical rejection of the United States and its Constitution, say nothing of the beloved Pledge of Allegiance, which specifically includes the word “indivisible” right after the word “God.” I thought these things were sacrosanct to conservatives.

I’m not breaking any news here, but the red states tried this already and it failed miserably. The core motivation behind the 1861 secession movement was, of course, the defense of slavery as the cornerstone of the Southern economy, and, subsequently, state sovereignty over the legality and regulation of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, secessionist fire-eaters were convinced that the initially unconvinced Abraham Lincoln would summarily free the slaves and possibly arm them for an insurrection against their masters, thus undermining the southern economy in a massive display of executive “tyranny.” And so the southern states, one by one, seceded. In the four years that followed, 2.5 percent of the American population was wiped out in the American Civil War — the equivalent to 7,850,000 people in terms of today’s population, or roughly the entire 2010 population of Virginia. And, in the end, the decimated seceding states were forced by military attrition to return to the Union.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that all of the former Confederate states defied the astronomical one-in-a-million odds and actually seceded again. (I can’t help but to think about Jim Carrey’s reaction in Dumb and Dumber when presented with one-in-a-million odds: “So you’re saying there’s a chance…”)

What would actually happen?

Unless these states were able to muster an army of disloyal soldiers and militia and fired upon military bases loyal to the United States, it’s doubtful that a modern secession movement would result in another civil war. But if it did, the U.S. military of 2012 clearly possesses capabilities and manpower far beyond anything imaged in 1861 and would summarily wipe out an army of rag-tags, even if they did manage to seize a couple of bases and persuade a few commanders to join the cause. If it escalated into war, the bloodshed would be unspeakable. The late Civil War historian Shelby Foote once observed that the most brutal fistfights he’d ever seen were between two brothers.

However, with a modern economy, there would be no need for President Obama to order the military to retake the seceding states by force. Again, we’re talking about pure fantasy here, but if the president took seriously the various Ordinances of Secession and the subsequent formation of an anti-federalist confederation of sovereign states, my strong hunch is that the president would merely starve out the states until they simply gave up.

To avoid the inevitable sanctions, there would be a massive refugee crisis of non-secessionists flooding out of the secessionist states. They’d be the smart ones.

Most of the red states — now the hypothetical “New Confederacy” — had heretofore taken more federal aid than they paid back in federal taxes. South Carolina, for example, takes $1.35 in federal money for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. Louisiana takes $1.78 for every dollar it pays into the system. Talk about moochers and freeloaders. By the way, this money is redistributed from other states, including the blue states with their abortion-on-demand and evil healthcare mandate. After secession, that gravy train would cease to exist. Farmers, corporations, small businesses, universities and law enforcement would crumble without federal aid — grants, contracts, matching funds, tax breaks, etc.

If the reality of losing federal money wasn’t enough to convince the New Confederacy to stop behaving like petulant, tantrum-throwing children, then an array of more hard-core sanctions would begin. It’s likely the power grid, pipelines, shipping lanes and, yes, satellite and internet communications would be summarily blocked by the U.S. government. The confederacy would be totally cut off from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, without federal regulations on food safety, clean water, clean air, and without the CDC, rampant disease would spread across the confederacy. How would northern medical equipment and pharmaceuticals reach the seceded states? Inflation, especially on medicine, would skyrocket as demand for dwindling supplies increased. Black-marketeers would spring up in every town.

The solidly blue areas inside the seceded states — Austin, for instance — would be the Texas equivalent to West Berlin in the heart of East Germany. We’d have to airlift supplies to those areas and hope that hoards of desperate and well-armed suburban and rural warlords didn’t swoop in try to swipe the supplies. Needless to say, there would be a large scale humanitarian crisis.

At the governmental level of the New Confederacy, presuming there’s something holding all the states together, leaders would quickly learn the hard lessons of both the Articles of Confederation and the CSA: it’s nearly impossible to govern and do business as a confederacy, especially in a 2012 world. There wouldn’t be a standard national currency. There wouldn’t be national trade agreements even though, on the bright side, nations like China, which has been known to do business with rogue nations like Iran, might continue to ship cheap crap to Walmart and other stores inside this loose conglomeration of nations.

Instead of one large national economy, there would be individual state-level economies — each of them too weak to compete in the global marketplace. How would the New Confederacy generate revenue without a central system of taxation? If it came down to a fighting war against the U.S., how would the central government raise and finance a military?

Welcome, New Confederacy, to third world status!

But it gets worse. The impossible reality of a successful confederacy would be further exacerbated by the secession precedent. States would end up splitting into smaller and smaller pieces with parts of states seceded from other parts — subdividing and subdividing until the confederacy vaporized or was reunified into a more traditional federalist system.

Again, this isn’t speculative. This is tested reality. The Confederate States of America ended up with a strong central government because it quickly learned that it couldn’t fight a war and manage its economy without one. Years earlier, the disastrous Articles of Confederation were dismantled and replaced with the U.S. Constitution with a strong central government and a powerful chief executive as its centerpiece.

So if you’re one of the now hundreds of thousands of signatories to these ridiculous petitions, think about the reality of what you’ve endorsed. You signed a petition to disconnect yourself from the United States of America and, perhaps, to wage war against it. If you’re on Social Security — gone. If you’re on Medicare — gone. If your children attend public or charter schools — gone. If you work for a defense contractor or another corporation that relies on government contracts — gone. Hell, if you rely on the internet to do business — gone. And in the worst case scenario, you should be prepared to wage war against the most powerful military in the history of mankind, augmented by the military might of other allied nations.

And if you’re inclined to storm off like a drama-queen reality show contestant — if you’re inclined to “Go Galt” as so many conservatives threatened to do four years ago — then run off into the forest and live off the grid for while until you calm down from your post-election hysteria. While you’re there, wise up.

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Dear Texas,

So word has it you’re talking about seceding from the United States and, I guess, forming your own country. I wish I could react with shock, but the truth is we’ve heard this kind of thing before; we hear rumbles of it every time something happens politically on a national scale that rattles your ironically fragile sense of independence and sends you into a Texas-sized panic. It usually amounts to nothing more than petulant whining disguised as a lot of cock-grabbing bravado and bluster, but this time you’ve managed to quickly amass enough signatures calling for secession in the wake of last week’s Obama victory — more than 80,000 — that the White House has no choice but to respond to your “request.” Let me save you the suspense and the delusion that this little tantrum is going to be the least bit effective: the answer’s gonna be “no.”

And that’s a shame. Because I think I speak for a good portion of the United States when I say that frankly I’d be thrilled to see you go. I’m a full-on supporter of the Independent Republic of Texastan. There’s honestly nothing I’d enjoy more than watching you split off from the rest of us and take a shot at creating your own Jesus-blowing conservative-libertarian utopia. I mean, with your legendary ingenuity, creativity, and all-around smarts, your experiment wouldn’t possibly become a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior hellscape in a matter of weeks, right?

A couple of years back, your governor, pretend shit-kicker and Sears mannequin haircut-cultivator Rick Perry, talked about the possibility of your seceding from the U.S. and going your own way. You didn’t hear anyone complain about it then, did you? This time, it’s worth noting, Perry isn’t on board with your plans. He’s already made it clear that he has no intention of supporting secession — a move I consider more of a threat than reassurance — and to everyone with a brain, that is everyone not you guys, it should be obvious why.

The reality is that for all your bombast and thoroughly misplaced pride in your state and its supposed self-reliance, Texas happily gobbled up a total of $259,196,392,892 in federal money just this past year, making it possibly the most hypocritical of the eight or so red states that bitch about the government, shriek about makers-vs.-takers, but sit comfortably atop the list of areas drawing the most federal funds while not paying for it with comparable taxes. In other words — you couldn’t survive without the United States government to help prop up your fat asses. And still, this is how you repay all that largess, since you sure as hell aren’t ever going to be able to repay it with cash: by acting like a dumb teenager who threatens to run away from the home provided by his parents every time something happens that makes him all angry.

Look, Texas, you have the highest percentage of uninsured children in the nation. You’re dead last when it comes to the number of people with a high school diploma. You have the dirtiest air in the country. You rank 49th in the number of low-income residents covered by Medicaid. You’re 46th in the number of people who regularly visit the dentist. You’re 47th in the nation in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores. In 2011 you took more money in federal aid than any other state to teach abstinence education and yet you still have the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in America. I know you’re dumb but are you starting to see the picture?

Apparently not, because here you are, with people like Lubbock judge and conspiratorial yokel stereotype Tom Head warning about how the U.N. was going to invade Texas if Obama won and promising that he’d stand in defiance of the invasion along with the local sheriff. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman actually responded to that lunacy by basically calling it just that. Then there’s Hardin County Republican Party Treasurer Peter Morrison, who just a couple of days ago said that you “must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity.” He then joined in the calls for your secession and wondered aloud why Texas couldn’t just sign some kind of free-trade agreement that would be beneficial to both you and the rest of the now-Texasless United States.

Sure thing. We can send you food, water, medical supplies for the kids who are dying in droves and every form of technology still being produced within the United States borders and by our partners around the globe. You can make sure we never run out of big hats, roadside kitsch and rusted F-150 truck parts.

One more thing to keep in mind, Texas: secession is treason. And while I know you pride yourselves on the number of guns you own, unless you’ve got access to tactical nukes, a Navy and a shitload of Hellfire-equipped drones, I don’t think you’re going to come out on the winning end of a confrontation with the U.S. military. Also, being that my 4-year-old daughter lives in Dallas these days, I’d rather not have to figure out a way to get her out from behind enemy lines via some kind of underground railroad for people with more than seven working brain cells while 5,000-pound JDAMs are turning places like Beaumont into glass. I’d do it if I had to — hell, I’d even be willing to get her mom out if it came to that — but it’s not exactly an ideal situation.

So look, while I know it makes you feel better to swing your limp dick around and make histrionic threats nobody gives a crap about every time there’s a political victory for progress in this country — and while I really would love to see the overall IQ of the United States increase sharply overnight — you’re basically just making a lot of noise for nothing. You’re never gonna get what you want. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with the United States. And even more unfortunately, we’re stuck with you.

Now Shut the Fuck Up and Sit Down,

Chez

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

If hardcore conservatives are looking for generals in their post-election civil war, they may have to look beyond some of the biggest names on the right.

Following President Obama’s re-election last week, a group of virulently anti-Obama Republicans has apparently suggested pulling the plug on the whole United States of America thing and splintering off into nations for which Obama is not at the top of the government. Two of the most incendiary conservative leaders, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and RedState founder Erick Erickson, called on the would-be secessionists to stand down on Tuesday, potentially pitting them against a grassroots backlash following last week’s election.

It’s not clear how serious the movement is, exactly. Somewhat anonymous petitions have been filed on the White House website in the days following Obama’s reelection calling for dozens of states to be allowed to leave the US. The Texas petition is garnering the most notoriety, both because it has the most signatures and because it involves Texas, a state where talk of secession pops up regularly.

Last time around, the man at the center of the Republic Of Texas talk was Perry, who gave a shoutout to seceding from Obama’s America’s in 2009 while not directly endorsing the concept. It was all part of Perry’s plan to cast himself as Mr. Tenth Amendment in the run up to his own bid to lead all 50 of the United States as president. The secession stuff followed Perry to his short presidential campaign, forcing Perry to distance himself from Texas secessionists in 2011.

With Texas secessionism back in the news, Perry is again declining to get on board.

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