anysia | Oh, this is a great idea

Dear Red States,

We, the Blue States, are tired and embarrassed of being associated with you and have declared July 5th to be our New Independence Day from you. We now have a two day holiday since we will, of course, continue to honor July 4th for our independence from England in addition to July 5th for our independence from your ignorance.

We intend to form our own country, and in case you're unaware that means California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and all of New England and the Northeast are now independent from you. By the way, Washington D.C. is Blue too, so we retain it as our capital. You will have to find a new national capital (Houston and Atlanta can battle it out for that one).

Since we've got our current capital, plus Philadelphia's Independence Hall and Liberty Bell, Boston Harbor, Lexington and Concord, and most of the original 13 colonies, we also will be retaining the name the United States of America (USA). You will need to choose a new name, possibly the Confederacy of Fundamentalist States (CFS).

We believe this split will be beneficial to both the USA and the CFS.

To sum up briefly:
You get Texas, North Dakota, and all the slave states. We get New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco.

We get stem cell research and the all of the Pacific Ocean's beaches. You get "right to life" and the Great Salt Lake.

We get the Statue of Liberty, the Space Needle and the Golden Gate Bridge. You get the Gateway Arch in a city no one wants to visit anyway.

We get Broadway, off-Broadway, and the Tony Award winning Guthrie, de la Jeune Lune, and Children's Theatres of Minneapolis. You get the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter FL, the Knoxville Opera, the Omaha Ballet, and the Fort Worth Symphony.

We get Michigan Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive and the Mall of America. You get the Tallahassee Outlet Mall and Wal-Mart.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom and Enron.

We get Harvard. You get Bob Jones University.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue.

You get to start making the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families, including those with two moms or two dads, which we welcome, support, and marry.

Please be aware that the USA will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your CFS evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care when you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home
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We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMD's turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in your President Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve the fine wines of Montana at state dinners), 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high-tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, and all the living redwoods, sequoias and condors in existence.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), nearly 95 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Bob Barr, Zell Miller, and Rush Limbaugh.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and 61 percent of your new CFS citizens actually believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.

Sure we'll miss Las Vegas, but Atlantic City's true potential can finally be realized when we build our own. Plus ours will have an ocean and won't be 108 degrees.

Sure, we'll miss New Orleans, Key West, and the Grand Canyon too, but traveling to those places was always like visiting a foreign country anyway and now really will have the cache of international travel.

By the way, don't be surprised if the sovereign nations of the Navaho, Apache, Zuni, and Cherokee decide they want to align themselves with us, meaning large sections of Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma will be carved out to remain in the USA.

Thank you and good luck. See you at the United Nations - um, or maybe not since you'll probably pull out of the UN once we've split.