[lentulusgracchus]

I was thinking of allowing Canada to come in as two states.

No dice. We don't want the populous liberal eastern provinces screwing up our politics even more.

My solution: Split the sheets in both countries, and we get Manitoba and everything west of it including the territories (unless the Indians in Nunavut and the old Northwest Territories, want to go it alone), Quebec becomes an independent Francophone country, and eastern Canada has to take New England whom we'll kick out of the Union, together with the entire right bank of the Hudson from Montauk Point to the Fishkill River. We keep the rest of upstate New York and Bedloes Island and all of the Hudson River, the boundary being at the low-water mark on the right bank. We drop the Hudson River bridges in the harbor (except for the Narrows), sink the ferries, and dynamite the tunnel and embargo everything east of the boundary. Joizy and Perth Amboy become the entrepot. And Staten Island, I guess.

So Canada gets Barney Frank, Hillary, Slick, Charlie Schumer, the whole Kennedy family, and Penny Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Sen. Jeffords. We get the Athabaska Tar Sands, the Alberta oil fields and frontier-gas play, immense lakes, all the gold left in the Yukon, and a ton of prairie-province wheat, plus real estate that will only become more valuable with global warming, including the Arctic archipelago, whose mineral potential is practically untested.

Sound like a plan?

[lentulusgracchus]

Oh, and I almost forgot -- Canadian population bumps up from about 30 mil to about 42 mil, most of the increment being Yankees and/or liberals. Toronto won't be the big duck in the little pond anymore, so they might not be so enthusiastic about it; and the idiots running Vancouver with the help of their old college shower-buddies back in Ottawa will suddenly find themselves lost, lost in a sea of 5-6 million suddenly-empowered conservative Canadians who suddenly just remembered where they "lost" their unregistered autoloader rifles and shotguns, in a United States that has just dumped 12,000,000 Gorebot votes overboard -- and Hillary, their hive queen.

In the States, all the "mainstream media" are suddenly as foreign-national de jure as they've always been de facto, and all of a sudden the country's political center of gravity is the Midwest, home of Rush Limbaugh and John Ashcroft, politically and geographically halfway between the Old Confederacy and the Left Coast, which will suddenly begin to discover new depths of meaning in the word "patronize".

Sounds even better, doesn't it?

[HostileTerritory]

I'll ask for more respect. You wouldn't have a Union in the first place if not for the brave New Englanders of 1776 and 1861.

And you wouldn't have much of a Texas today if not for our tax dollars sent south by your politicians. Show a little more gratitude for our hard work, will ya?