I am certain that far more rational results will obtain in California, New York, and Michigan (though for slightly different reasons in Michigan).

No rational person is going to want to handicap their children by brainwashing them with an irrational belief system. I hold that there are far more irrational liberals in the three states I mention than there are "crap-assed" christians in the entire South. Your statement that Christianity is some sort of "infestation" is a strong datum for assigning you to the "irrational" category.

You either belive in rational thought or you don't.

Damn you great-great-great-grandpa! Why didn't you get some safeguards in place?

What standards would those be? And if it is something the Feds can do, let them prove it in the one school sytem Congress can take direct responsibility for. After all, if the DC school system is truly excellent, then there should be no problem applying those policies and funding decisions to other school systems. What, the DC school system is not among the finest in the nation?

Maybe we should return control of local school systems back to local school boards. And let Congress and the DOE control only the DC school system. When the DC school system is ranked among the top 25 then perhaps we might want to pay attention to the example set by Washington. Pay attention to the example - not do as they say. Under local control, some schools would undoubtably do better, some might do worse, but DC is dead last right now - so even your religious nutjob nightmare districts are still likely to do a better job than the nations capital.

"A republic - if you can keep it" (Ben Franklin)

My point is, we are not keeping it. (a republic)

Instead we are going for a democracy:

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" (H L Mencken)

But not as an independent country. It could possibly be demoted back to the status of "Territory". That could mean a loss of representation in both houses of Cngress and in the Electoral College.

For the scessionist types, you might want to consider how much of that vaunted industrial machine (high tech and entertainment) would actually be likely to stay as opposed to wanting to move to a country where it would be more appreciated and not subject to rolling brownouts and the unfinded pension demands of rapacious public employee unions. And for those that stay, you might want to consider how much it is going to cost them to export to the US, Canada, and Mexico since the Nation of California will not be part of NAFTA.

A goatse reference that fits and you had the further taste to not include the link.

I salute you.

But will California please take Nancy Pelosi when they go?

Our Founding Fathers gave us a republic actually, but only if we could "keep it" (per Ben Franklin). In short, it was acknowledged from the very beginning that we had a "high maintenance" government and we have not been maintaining it properly.

As to the issue of illegals, we may not be quite so far apart - blaming them for coming with such a sweet rewards is rather dumb. I would posit it is not too late to start going after the employers (cheaper employees pay less taxes after all). We should still beef up border security - because we are getting more than just folks who want better rewards for honest work coming across.

California already has stricter emissions requirements on cars than other states. Just try and license a car you bought in another state in CA and you will discocer it has to be retrofitted to meet CA emissions standards.

I like this idea! Will you emigrants from the USA to come to your new country without restriction and be granted immediate residency/citizenship? How about emigrants from Mexico? What financial incentives will you offer prospective immigrants?

Will you have a democratic form of government? If so, may I nominate Nancy Pelosi for the head of State?

This is a win-win-win-win solution for California.

1> These measures ensure that California's current power plants will be capable of supplying all the electricity nmeeded for the foreseeable future. There be no need for trying to find a safe place to put new power plants that will either vastly increase CO2 emissions or worse cause increased radioactive contamination from nuclear power.
2>In addition, it will vastly increase employment opportunities in the state. When you cross back into California with your illegal power-hogging bigscreen, you will be met by "inspectors" from the newly expanded agriculture department. They will confiscate your contraband and charge you with crimes against humanity. you will then be temporarily incarcerted in facilites which will require many new prison guards until such time as you can be deported for trial by the ICC in their Somalian facility.
3>As you will be unable to pay taxes/rent/mortgage your home/apartment will be seized by the state. As it is now owned by the state, there can be no possibility of it being foreclosed upon which will operate to further reinforce the rock solid stability of the CA banking industry.
4>The vastly increased payroll requirements of all the new state workers will of course consume the current budget surplus so that there will be no need for any tax cuts - and in the years following, the taxes paid by those state employees will result in further surplusses so that even more state employees can be hired.

Well my tongue was pretty firmly in my cheek on the whole sushi storage bit.

But, I do love to twit those soft-headed individuals who seem not to think things through. Hence my emphasis on uranium from seawater over thorium - as an easier "sell" to the econuts (defined as those who would oppose chipped flint knives because of th environmental impact of the flint chips). My personal preference is that we have lots of power and that it be cheap. For the US, spending a trillion bucks on *building* power plants (to a standard design - with streamlined approval process) would certainly provide an abundance of cheap power and an abundance of high paying jobs that would not be moved overseas. Consider the economic effects of the TVA on the economic development of the area it served. Our most recent few trillion dollars has provided precious little in the way of jobs - and certainly done no favors to the National Guard.

But it seems to me we should consider extracting uranium from seawater as well.
Let's face facts here, if we dig thorium out of the ground we are going to be bringing up more nuclear waste and that is a BAD THING. But, if we extract uranuim from seawater, we are removing a toxic and radioactive! material from the oceans - you know that place where the whales and dolphins live. And if that does not make you realize we need to be pruifying the oceans via uranium extraction, - well then think of the sushi.
Unlike a regular mining operation, not only are we removing that uranium from our global sushi storage facility, but when we use it in our reactors we will be converting some of that nasty stuff into pure energy (helping it to "ascend" as it were). This means that when we are done using it in a reactor - even if we don't do anything else with it, there will actually be less radioactive materials in our ecosphere than before.

more seriously:

BTW current uranium price is $44 per pound - while the above quote is ten years old, it does suggest that the process is certainly as feasible as extracting oil from shale and or tar sands. And it can be sold as removing dangerous poisons from the ocean rather than adding new ones that have been sequestered deep underground.

Becasue young whippersnapper, one of the effects of ageing is that you can lose the ability to focus on things that are too close. (I hear the opthamologists are pushing a new type of laser surgery that can "soften" the cornea to regain thet close-in focusing ability)

From personal experience - I have 20/20 vision, but when I found myself somewhere north of 40 I found I could no longer read 6pt type because I had to hold things at nearly arms length before I could focus on them. And as a codemonkey, I needed small fonts so I could keep as much code onscreen as possible. Reading glasses can help with that, but they screw up regular distance viewing something fierce (resulting in nasty headaches etc.).

This was also a design flaw in the original Mac. Older folks had no use for the darn thing becasue the monitor was too darn small to be useful for them, and as it was an integrated unit, there was no option for an external monitor.

Now get off my lawn.

and all the other big names come under the heading of blowing the budget on special effects to me.

Seriously, once you drop the 20 million on your big box lead, and 50 million plus for FX, what have you got left to spend on writers?

Instead of a "Footfall" series - we get a rehash of "V"
Instead of "Lucifer's Hammer" - we got "Deep Impact", and "Armageddon" which were rip-offs of a low budget made-for-TV movie from the 80s (or was it 70s) - and that was a remake of "Meteor" with Sean Connery

"Think aircraft carriers in WWII"

Interesting thought there - despite what the Japanese did to the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor (and were planning on doing far before it happened), the Japanese also suffered from the same shortsightedness and were building "super battleships" (Yamato and Musahsi plus their unfinished sister ships). Had they put the same resources into building more carriers prior to the war like the ones used against Pearl Harbor, one study suggests that both the Aleutians and Hawaii could have been sucessfully invaded and occupied.