posted
I just thought we'd share some of our home states (or provinces for the Canadians we have here- or whoever) that we wish wasn't in our state history. Let's see here, Tennessee.
1. In Pulaski, TN Nathan Bedford Forest start the KKK. 2. Andrew Jackson came from Tennessee- he later went against the supreme court's ruling and began the forced migration of Native Americans (the Trail of Tears) 3. Andrew Johnson, first president to be impeached was from Tennessee. 4. More Civil War battles were fought in TN than anywhere else. 5. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in TN. 6. Elvis Presley died in TN. 7. We have a town named "Buck Snort" 8. The world's most famous global-warming prophet of doom hails from TN. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that one)
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1. Tulsa Race Riot 2. Designated Oklahoma as Indian Territory then gave land away 3. Next to last in average teacher salary (take that South Dakota) 4. Oklahoma State University (Boomer Sooner) 5. Garth Brooks (just kidding)
I'm sure there is more.
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posted
Well we had witch trials, dumped large amounts of other people's tea into several harbors in political protest, we gave Indian tribes smallpox-laden blankets, and we had some of the worst polluted rivers on the east coast for the better part of 2 centuries. And then there's the Big Dig.
Oh and we breed smarmy sports fans. Sorry about that.
posted
New Jersey 1. Dumped women's voting rights in 1807 (last state to do so by 20 years but still) 2. Last northern state to abolish slavery
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Watts Riots. Rodney King (and subsequent riots.) OJ Simpson. We've elected TWO actors as governor. Almost every bad movie ever made. The Valley is the porn capital of the world. The Santa Anita racetrack was used as a camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII. (Not that the confinement decision was ours to make, but we willingly provided an awful lot of places to keep and did the actual rounding up of most Japanese-Americans.)
And heck, most of that is just the L.A. area...
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posted
Texas is too easy, you're right. But allow me a quick Texas rant. They have a "Welcome to Texas" fee of $90. Per person, per car. So to move here for two adults with two cars, you pay $360 bucks. You PAY Texas money to let you move here and start paying sales tax here.
But at least they don't have state income tax.
edit: Not sure if that's technically a cultural heritage. But whatever.
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posted
I was born in Utah and although this is only my 5th year here, I'll do it.
1: Mountain Meadows Massacre 2: Japanese internment camps during WWII 3: Warren Jeffs 4: Orrin Hatch 5: And depending how you feel about it you can thank Utah for casting the deciding vote that overturned prohibition.
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1. Home of that preacher who I won't name from Topeka. 2. Senator Brownback. 3. Dry counties? Kansas endured the wrath of Carry Nation. You still can't buy alcohol on Sunday in most places... (I don't drink) 4. Kansas was one of the first states to start a requirement for teaching 'intelligent design' over evolution. Then they revoked that. Then they voted it in again. Then they revoked it again.
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posted
Never thought about him, because I don't consider a serial killer to be a cultural heritage unique to this state. He's unimportant; his impact was felt pretty much exclusively in the media. (For the media.)
Perhaps a more appropriate choice in this vein would be the "In Cold Blood" case, which Truman Capote capitalized on. The murder of the Clutter family. I guess I wasn't thinking about murderers when I made my list.
I'd list John Brown, but I'm not so sure I'm ashamed of the heritage he gives my state. This is purely a personal view, though.
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posted
While my state song i sung from the point of view of a former slave that refers to himself as a "darkey" and is optimistically awaiting to be reunited with his "massa" and his "missis" in heaven.
Not so awesome!
There was a vote to look for a new song in 1997, but that vote was still only 24-15. In 1997. I don't think we have a new song, yet. Even if we do, "Carry me back to ol' Virginny" is still our state song emeritus. Pretty shameful.
I value preserving the song for the sake of remembering how things were none too good, but institutionalizing it by the government? Double you to the tee to the eff, yo.
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posted
Somewhere my mom has a copy of the letter I wrote to my state rep asking our song to get changed when I was 8 or so. Thurman agreed with me but said the legislature had trouble finding a new one. They've been working on it off and on for at least a couple decades now, you'd think they'd have found something.
Maybe we could get Tom Petty to write us a new one? With all the bad things we have in Florida, we do at least have Tom Petty.
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posted
We started the Civil War. (oh I'm sorry, as it is referred to here "The War of Northern Aggression")
We refused to remove the Rebel flag from our capital building until a couple of years ago, and then we just put it on the grounds right in front of the building.
We are almost always 48th in education, but first in things like teen pregnancy and STD's.
It's not considered real food unless it's been deep fried, or contains at least 1 cup of fat.
I am sure there are many more examples but having a South Carolina education I didn't learn about them.
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quote: Um, I've never heard to that, and I moved to Texas... Of course, I didn't have my own car.
Yeah, it was assessed to us when we registered our cars for the first time (they had Arizona titles.) These were fees assessed on top of the normal registration fees. All in all, to register my cars and get driver licenses in Texas it cost me about $500 dollars. (That was including the "title fee" of $34 dollars. When I asked if I could just keep my Arizona title they said sure, but they would still have to charge me the fee.)
edit: But you may know that Texas charges you sales tax when you register a car that you have purchased from a private seller based on the approx. value of the car, so it was explained to me that since I didn't buy those cars in Texas, we get the fee instead. Basically, they have to get the money somewhere.
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posted
If I move back to Texas, I don't mind paying that fee. I pay much much much more just to renew the registration on my car in AZ annually than I'd pay for fee + registration + license in Texas.
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posted
Registration for my car last year was $296, and that is after depreciating for four years. It's holding it's value well appearantly (and isn't even a sport ute or truck).
Plus a state income tax here.
Yeah, a new residency fee doesn't sound all that bad.
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posted
Why is it that high? I never had a really new car but I had one that was about 7-8 years old and I didn't pay more than $50.
But really, for the state income tax thing, (I know, I brought it up first) they use that as an excuse here in Texas for taking all your money for every other venture. "Why is property tax so high?!" "No state income tax!" And so on for everything else. I'd have to say that in my experience, Texas takes the most money from you and gives you the least in return. I paid state income tax in Arizona, but my whole family had health insurance.
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posted
Arizona bases registration on value. I paid 600 dollars the first year, so it has dropped by half from what it was. I'll probably drop to 200 this year, and 120 the next. After 8 years, I'll likely be paying about 60-80 dollars. Texas bases their registration fees based on weight of the car, not value. It's fair in the sense that the less a car weighs, the less wear and tear it's likely to put on the roads (civic vs. suburban vs. semi). But you don't have the expensive $150,000 cars financing the roads like they do here in AZ.
I'm not remotely close to affording a house courtesy of the last boom, so I'm apartment bound for the time being. As such, I see property taxes sucked up into my rent, and since there are so many residents on this piece of property it's impact is almost negligible to me. State income taxes, however, I can see leave my pay checks quite clearly. I also live in probably the only the part of Arizona where the sales tax is in fact higher than Dallas's and Lubbock's. Our employer is far too frugal (trying to be nice) to provide health insurance for his employees, and as a single male with no dependents, I don't qualify for state assisted insurance or any of the tax return programs.
Then again, when I was in HS in Dallas, my parents had a house in a town that had horridly high property taxes. I know they can amount to a serious chunk of a mortgage payment, and will probably know it even better when I move back there (in the near or not-so-near future).
I imagine it's a matter of perspective... I feel the amount the federal, state, and local governments take from me plus what I pay to cover health, fuel, etc expenses is higher here than it was in Texas (mostly because other than use of the roads, libraries, and public safety I don't get anything back from the government). I suppose that this is getting close to a cost of living comparison though...
To keep the thread on topic...
- Texas was the direct cause of one of the United States' expansionary wars. - Texas got other states' heroes killed (Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett). - JFK was assassinated in Dallas. - Bush - Texas spawned one of the first generations of oil-tycoons and provided a good footing for that industry's current power. - Texas held on to segregation and racism as an openly accepted attributes at least as long as any other state (my opinion only on this one of course).
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posted
Threads - that's all you could come up with for New Jersey?
I don't even know where to start.
- Newark Riots - Hypodermic needles on the beaches in the 80s - Some of the most corrupt politics in the country (Sharpe James, Jim McGreevey, Bergen County) - Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton - As many mafia stories as you can count - The very existence of Camden
...the list can go on.
Granted, there's lots of great things - but that list seemed awful short.
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Not really cultural heritage. I'd say vertical integration and the modern assembly line, but I think it's done more good than bad.
The only thing I could really pin down would be Detroit's race riots in the 60's and our contributions to White Flight. But really, that's Detroit's bad cultural heritage.
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posted
We won that fair and square by letting Ohio have Toledo.
Seriously though, it's not like they are the Quebec of Michigan. Though that'd be ironic for me since I'm mostly French Canadian. I know some of the Yoopers want to be their own state, but I really don't ever see that happening. Even if we let them leave (and you can bet they wouldn't get the land they want from Wisconsin too), they'd never be able to survive on their own. They get almost all their money from two places: 1. Money from the government provided by Troll taxpayers, and 2. Tourism. Well when the state falls on hard times, tourism drops quite a bit, and a lot of Michiganders go local, not all the way up to Houghton.
The iron mines are mostly, if not entirely, closed up there now, and timber, while still a booming industry, isn't what it used to be with new environmental forestry regulations, and calls from industry for forestry practices to be transparently sustainable, to say nothing of the fact that there's a fairly small number of people up there. Michigan Tech would almost certainly close, or the tuition would be jacked up so high that no one could afford it, since they wouldn't be getting state funding from the Trolls anymore. Same story with Lake Superior State.
We've been stuck together since the Toledo Strip War, and I don't see that much changing in the future.
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Texas: Stopping the imperial presidency in its tracks
quote:The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—not to put too fine a point on this one—told the president to eat his shorts. Bush, the court said, "has violated the separation of powers doctrine by intruding into the domain of the judiciary." So there you have it: One team consists of the Imperial President and the unrepentant rapist; the other is Texas, a state that has never met a death-row candidate it can kill fast enough.
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