Break away from the USA? The effort to cleave California faces its own split. (Hello new State of Jefferson?)

If the State of Jefferson ever happens I will try to buy a house there. No kidding. Rural northern California without San Francisco or Sacramento? Count me in. (Assuming its spirit remains libertarian and low tax.)

(From The LA Times)

Efforts have been underway since before World War II to break off more than a dozen rural counties and combine them with a chunk of southern Oregon to form Jefferson, the nation’s 51^st state.

The impetus is the same that drives backers of secession: the notion of a far-off government (in this case, Sacramento) ignoring local sentiments and a sense of being outnumbered and outvoted by a population whose social and political views are at odds with the prevailing (in this instance, conservative) culture. The proposed flag — a pair of Xs, or double cross — captures the animating sentiment.

“We really don’t have fair representation,” said Terry Rapoza, 67, a leader of the Jefferson movement in Shasta County, where he sells T-shirts and other souvenir clothing in Redding.

He cited recent passage of a 10-year, $52-billion road repair and transportation bill; the hike in gas taxes, he said, will have much less impact in urban California than in rural stretches, where people might drive 20 miles to the grocery store, or a dozen miles to pick up their mail.

But he has little use for secession, which strikes him as bizarre — would the new California nation have its own nuclear arsenal and U.N. representative, he wonders — and fruitless in ending the urban-rural divide he blames for persistently short-changing his part of the state.

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