SoCal!

Raised in Texas, moved to Michigan, lived a decade in DC, and now retired in San Francisco!

And if so positively or negatively?

Bryant

---

Transplant to Florida from NY. If I didn't have to be here (husband's job), I would move back to NY for more reasons than one. This trial is just the icing on the cake.

it's a cool little state

sure it has faults, but by and large it's pretty much ok

Love Hawaii second.

almost impossible to get a Dem elected in most counties. The state is going down hill fast.

US House seats are 13/18 teabagger. One teabagger US senator.

Mark me down for North Carolina.

I love the people of North Carolina. So I am not ashamed of the state, but I am ashamed of the current crop of hijackers in the legislature, who are supported by only 20% of the population.

I love Nevada, born and raised here, plan to spend my last days here.

IN does have its moments (it isn't called North Mississippi for nothing), but Indy isn't too bad.

the scene over the 4th of gun hoarders stuffing their bags and buying up 20,000 clips makes me sick and frightened.

But I will confess there is the occasional silliness and fuckwittery....

We don't claim Florida.

I do realize there are people out there who like to paint with a broad brush and condemn ALL members of a group for what some members do.
I do believe that is called stereotyping, is it not?

While I would agree that saying Floridians are morons or racists would be stereotyping, pointing out that we have a messed up legal system - well that's the responsibility of Floridians. Even if I have voted against it and don't support it it's still in my ball park. By the same token, Texas's new repressive laws are the responsibility of Texans - even if they don't agree with them. They are done in their name.

Bryant

against LGBT people in employment and housing.
Does it concern me that folks who allow discrimination against me might feel slighted by a broad brush in the criticism of that discrimination? Not so you can notice.

it has come a long way, going for Obama twice, it has a long way to go. I love the geographical area I live in but the politics are pretty damn right wing. I try to focus on the positive, do what I can to change the negative, and just live my life.

I lived there. Vermont is awesome.

How could I not be with some of the bullshit politics they legislate here.

I do love Minneapolis.

I live in the National Laboratory for Bad Government.

At least we got barbeque!

So not at all.

what do YOU think?

has happened here on occasion (like Scott Brown), but in general I would say we are pretty sane here in Massachusetts.

Not ashamed at all.

love it and miss it, but I am In CA now, and that is cool too

.

We are now BLUE! We are the healthiest of all states. Plus... Legal Weed!

but rest of the state seems to be a bunch of wack-a-doodles. I did live south of Richmond once, a wee bit too conservative for me. Here, it doesn't seem that bad.

I have neighbors who are very conservative, but I swear, they are hippies. They recycle, believe in climate change, fair wage, pet rescue....I could go on, but they are teabaggers. I love them, though. I just say things, every once in a while. Maybe their can be some changes, who know.

Unfortunately, once you get south of Fredericksburg, you might as well be in Mississippi.

unbearable.

Why does it - nationwide - always take a Dem to clean up after a Republican?

There be stupid in this state

CALIFORNIANS taking it all the way to the SC in the hopes that we would get a ruling that would cover all states. We COULD have just done another referendum and reversed it easily but we thought we'd try to get the same rights for the rest of the U.S.

Prop. 8 passed because of MILLIONS of dollars of out of state monies from the churches that preached that that HO-MI-SECSHUALS IS EVIL (and the stupid, gullible faithful believing it), too many people didn't understand that a "no" vote meant a "yes" vote, and vice versa AND that nobody in their right minds believed it was going to pass. True, they caught us off-guard but the second it was passed we worked to reverse it and we did.

Totally blue. Surplus. Marriage equality. Nuff said.

I've always been proud of it.

all Democratic congressmen.

A good place to live, especially when I read the awful accounts of casual racism posted by DUers who live elsewhere.

I hate my state government and am doing everything I can to change it. And in time we will change it. Fact is, if you want to find progressives bravely fighting the system, the red states are where the action is.

Besides, we got beaches, mountains, forrests, deserts, wide open plians, cosmopolitan multicultural cities, Tex-Mex, BBQ, Cajun, Vietnamese......

We have brought the world, Molly Ivins, Ann Richards, Barbara Jordan, Mickie Leland, LBJ...

Boycotts worked on South Africa, they can work on red states. Why not buy northern built UAW cars instead of red state non-union cars? Why not vacation on the west coast or New England instead of Florida and Texas? We need to reward progress and defund anti-progress.

Yes, racism and bigotry is everywhere but it's far worse in the south. The first step is resolving a problem, is one has to admit there's a problem. For the most part, the institutional south won't even admit the Civil war was about slavery let alone apologize to black people.

I'm sure glad you got the fuck out. What state do you live in anyway?

I agree. My folks were working hard back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, for unions, fair wages, and such with the Harris County Democrats, the progressive wing of the local Houston Dems, founded by Billie Carr and Frankie Carter Randolph. They started the HCDs b/c they were disgusted by the formation of "Democrats for Eisenhower". (no shit)

Dad was a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 4-367 and worked hard helping people who were beaten up and hauled off to jail merely for exercising their free speech rights by showing up at a picket line.

My grandmother was a county extension agent for the Texas A&M Extension Service. She saw how teaching poor people about canning food, household planning and budgeting, and gardening could get them out of horrendous poverty during the Great Depression. She thought that Franklin D. Roosevelt hung the moon.

My family was fighting the good fight decades before I was born. I have NEVER voted for a republican politician in my life, in my many decades in Texas.

Texas will go Democratic eventually. It won't be too much longer before the old white guys are outnumbered and rendered completely irrelevant.

"It's Like a whole 'nother country"--that's because we were the Republic of Texas from 1836 through 1845. I have a land grant signed by Anson Jones, last President of the Republic of Texas.

"Revolution. By rising up against tyranny, many Texans felt they were following in the footsteps of their grandparents, who had fought for independence from Britain. The Texans even outlined their objections to Mexican rule in a declaration of independence, signed only a few days before the Alamo fell.

One issue notably absent from the Texas declaration--and from all previous Alamo movies--was slavery. Almost a quarter of the original American settlers in Texas owned slaves. When the Mexican government abolished the practice, Texans viewed it as yet another infringement on their liberty. "The colonists were overwhelmingly southerners," says William C. Davis, author of Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic, "and they felt they needed slaves to capitalize on that vast arable land in the eastern part of the state." To take away slavery, they felt, was to take away Texas.

The slavery question has muddied the pristine image of the Texas revolution. John Quincy Adams, two months after the Alamo, argued on the floor of the U.S. House that "the war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished." Popular history never mentions it, says Davis, in the Texas revolution "you have the same contradiction [that you do in] the Civil War, when you've got several million Confederate citizens and soldiers preaching all the rhetoric of liberty while owning 3 million slaves." The difference, he insists, is that in the fight for Texas, slavery was only an issue, not the issue."

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/040412/12alamo_2.htm

Texas fought twice for slavery.

There is so much of Texas that I still want to explore - maybe one of these days I can hit the road again. I need to visit Enchanted Rock, Amarillo, King Ranch, El Paso, the ghost town of Terlingua (preferrably during the chili cook-off), Laredo, Marfa...

It's easy for me to separate the state from the freakalopes who currently run it. We've tried to get them voted out, but not enough voters bothered to get off their asses and help us. I trust they have finally learned their lesson.

and all the states that I've lived in that have hunger , ignorance and poverty at the expense of 1%ers .But enough of this stary eyed idealism bullshit .

Public transportation is virtually non-existent. I've been in California since '69 and I still can't get used to the masses of people. People, people everywhere, constantly in their cars going everywhere. In Orange County, the U.C. Irvine college teams have long carried the nickname of the Anteaters as a way of mocking the outrageous over-population. Suburban developments are all private enclaves with only one or two ways in, to prevent through traffic which makes traffic on major roads even worse. Everyone wants to live in a separate house with a green lawn in front and behind their house which takes up land and uses up resources. Before I retired, I was driving about 50 miles to work, one way, taking about an hour and a half to get there. I know that the years and years that I spent with daily commutes totaling three hours or more in my car took years off my life from the stress. Once, while my car was in the shop, I decided to try the bus to go those 50 miles. It took 4.5 hours and four buses to get there. Nine hours of public transportation to get to and from work is not having a life. And it's equal to not having a public transportation system (when buses run only once an hour and are not coordinated and are so full that you can never find a seat). I spent a year living in Europe in 1999 and it was a difference of night and day. Public transportation was abundant and took you all over town. People live in town and don't all want little estates with swimming pools and lawns (I hate lawns). Towns are much smaller and distances shorter (I still can't get used to the enormous distances in California to get anywhere). And for those who would ask me why I commuted 50 miles one way each day to work for years and didn't try to find a job closer to home, I admit that you can always find a job near home in the exciting retail clerk or fast food industry. But those jobs don't come close to paying a livable wage, especially not in California. Since distances in California are enormous and everything is so outlandishly spread out, the chances of finding a job in your field where you can use your education and make enough money to survive and that's close by are remote. I can't wait to get out of this place. Right now, small town America with peace and quiet and no Walmarts or streets lined with burger joints sounds good but can it be found?

I could get into my embarrassment over the non-existent health care system, but that's nationwide and not limited to California.

love, love, love my state even though we still have work to do. it's been wonderful to watch it turn progressively bluer and more liberal over my lifetime.

gone are the days of amendment two and i can see us overturning the one man one woman amendment as soon as the midterms. i just hope the state doesn't eff up the commercial pot stuff. if we can handle this properly, i think we have the potential to effect positive change in the ridiculous war on marijuana.

Am I ashamed of some Floridians? Florida politics? The joke of a verdict in the Zimmerman trial?

You bet your ass I am.

But the State of Florida itself I love, and I wouldn't be living anywhere else. Except maybe Hawaii.

I'm not enamored with several of our politicians, but the state is beautiful and the people are good. I have my issues with some oil patch transplants from Texas and the influence that Big Oil has had on our political landscape over the past 30 years or so, but people are starting to fight back, so I feel good about that.

I will die here.

Can't stand Corer and Alexander, and then of course we have that crazy woman in Congress.

We do some pretty stupid things. Some are flat out inexcusable. We also have some amazing parks, nature, reefs, restaurants, ect.. We have some amazing people who achieve amazing things. I take the good with the bad and keep on keeping on. We are also an important state in the big picture. I was more ashamed of the outside influences in my own party who fought to elect a conservative over a great progressive a couple years back. There was even support for Crist over Meeks here on DU. Bums ended up with Rubio.

so I don't feel ashamed on a personal level but I do think NJ can be a lot more liberal. I'm certainly hyper-aware there are many low-brow, Jonny Contractor, bare-knuckle politics, low-info, right wingers all over this state. And whether it is a chill work environment or social, they never fail to poison everything. NJ right wingers are the most ignorant.

I am looking forward to finding a nice liberal bastion in the Catskills soon or at least a place in the sticks to put some distance between me and the madness for a while. I need a break from it.

We have a dumb ass repuke guv and steve king is the clown prince of the teahadists, but all in all, we have good people here in Iowa, especially eastern Iowa.
And quite frankly, the reason we have a repuke as gov is because the Dem who ran against him was weak. Now if we get a good strong Dem candidate, I believe he can be beaten next time around.

A black guy was high school president and quarterback on the football team

Pennsylvania is a place filled with warm and friendly people. It's a shame what the repukes are doing to the schools and communities.

and the fence could do with a lick of paint ...

that live in my state.

And, with nothing but trees and mountains to look at....we like WA, a lot.

FTW

Site of the nation's first ever national river. National forest. Duck hunting capital of the world. A top-notch presidential library. Great tasting tap water (in LR, anyway). Government constitutionally prohibit from taking on debt (outside of bond issues for a specific purpose approved by voters), so no deficit spending. People friendly (almost to a fault). The Razorbacks. (On edit) Site of the continent's only active diamond mine (open to the public).

We're no New York or California in terms of cultural stuff or urban nightlife or the like, but, then, we don't want to be.

We rock.

I still don't like how some of them behave, but NC is one of the most beautiful states in the country. Okay, I don't know that for certain having not traveled a lot.

I have seen some good leaders (Askew, Graham, Chiles in FL, Richards in Texas) and many crap ones too numerous to mention. But both are good places to live and are mostly populated by folks who want things a lot better.

ND is currently one of the few states (if not the only) with a budget surplus, due largely to the oil boom in the western part of the state. Instead of investing in our crumbling infrastructure (now being exponentially overloaded by the influx of 21st century Joad families), raising teacher's salaries (45th in the nation) to meet with the skyrocketing cost of living (in some areas on par with Manhattan), or, hell, even giving tax relief to long-term residents, we instead invest it into overturning Roe v. Wade.

We may have squeaked Heidi Heitkamp through into the Senate against price-gouging real estate parasite Rick Berg, but our elected officials are doing a piss-poor job representing the brand of high plains common sense which we have historically been known for.

but I had to vote "somewhat" because of our rethug statehouse at the moment. Fortunately, I live in a small "purple" pocket in the Alleghany Highlands, so have some Dem representation. Am very happy to see the Dems leading in the polls.

Texas is vast and it's beautiful. From our fragrant pine wood forest, to our amazing hill country with its lakes, tall grass prairies and their stunning wildflowers, to our rugged mountainous regions and our southern plains. And, Texas is filled with the influence of various cultures which has shaped its food and architecture.

No, I'm not ashamed to live here, even if it means I have to work hard to counter the brainwashing, hate and manipulation which the current Republicans have instilled.

I'm proud of the people I know, and am actively working with to change my home state of Texas to a battleground state. We're tough, we know the work ahead of us, and we're still taking it on. We're from all different walks of life, many of us even have the same Texas drawl I hear mocked repeatedly. We're young and old, we represent every nationality in the state. We're progressives, liberals, and moderates. We all work together with open minds toward one goal. Changing our leadership.

I've never been more proud of my state than I am since I became a part of Battleground Texas. I've learned a great deal about Texans in these past few months. One of the lessons I learned was not to stereotype people or regions. I learned that after meeting a cowboy from a rural district who does the rodeo circuit, who just happens to be a proud Democrat to his very core who volunteers in his spare time for the cause.

I won't let my politicians berating me and belittling me make me feel like I matter less here ever again. The same goes for the media which lets them get away with the hate and lies they propagate. They want me to be ashamed, to be beaten down, to give up and give in. I'm not, and I won't. Eventually we tenacious Texans working for change will succeed. Then, when it's easier to say in public I'm not ashamed of Texas, I plan on helping other people in repressive states be set free as well.

I'm a permanent resident of NJ (where I vote), but was just sent to NC on a contract for work. I can comment about both of them.


NJ--We are in love with the 'moderate' (my ass) GOP governor because he handled a disaster well. Meanwhile the state party is throwing his opponent under the bus because of her gender.

NC--- Teabagger paradise right now (part of the reason I am here).

MA, NH, NY, VT

Born and raised in NY.