• When logic secedes

    People supporting break from U.S. need lesson in perspective
  • Nearly 1 million Americans say they don't want to be Americans anymore, at least not part of the United States.
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    The tempest-tossed million are so upset that Barack Obama won a second term that they signed online petitions demanding they be allowed to secede.
    How'd that work out the last time we tried it?
    Yep, people in every state across this great land want out, but because they are so spread out, their chances are pretty slim. They'll have to concentrate themselves in, say, Texas, where hordes of secession signers already live.
    Or, maybe they could self-deport if they're so miserable. After all, Mitt Romney suggested during his campaign that we make life so miserable here for illegal aliens that "self-deportation" solves the nation's immigration problem.
    Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk radio blowfly somehow sired by P.T. Barnum and Jabba the Hutt, threatened self-deportation two years ago.
    He said if the health reform bill passed "and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented - I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica."
    He's backed off from that a bit. Well, actually it seems he hasn't mentioned it for months and months. Maybe he found out Costa Rica has nationalized health care considered by some second only to Canada's in the Western Hemisphere.
    Still, Texas is a possibility for the nation's secessionists. Some Texans already consider the place a nation-state so why not go all out? They can have Lone Star Beer and the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo. We get the Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson. The Chicks were boycotted years back for popping off about George W. Bush, and Nelson's cannabis consumption is the stuff of lore.
    But one little lesson in perspective seems in order for all those anti-federal government secessionists: As Ken Burns noted in his recent PBS documentary on the 1930s Dust Bowl, a lot of people were kept from starving by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, a federal government program. A lot those people resided in what are now the ruby red states of the nation's midsection.
    And today, a lot of people in those red states profit handsomely from crop price supports.
    All that, and much more, goes away in a new Confederate America. But at least they'll have Rush ... if he's not moved to Afghanistan, where a centralized government is not nearly such a problem and medicinal relief is only a poppy field away.
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