Secessionist Farmers Want to Split California in Two

There has long been a common saying on the Left Coast that there are "two Californias": a liberal California on the Pacific coast, primarily concerned with getting organic breast augmentations, and a conservative California inland, focused on hog-rearing and firing rifles into the air.

Now, a group of inland farmers, led by a former state representative, wants to make the two Californias a legal reality.

Bill Maze, a termed-out Assembly member turned rebel ... is pushing for California to split in two: the conservative interior as one state and the liberal coast as another.

He's serious.

"We're looking at establishing a breakaway state," he said, with a new government and a new capital. "We'd actually be creating a 51st state."

Maze and his rural supporters were particularly motivated by Proposition 2, a statewide referendum passed in November that will prevent cruelty to farm animals (by mandating cages that are large enough for them to turn around in). Their feeling is that liberal Hollywood types don't understand the economic importance of torturing animals, and they shouldn't get a say in the matter.

The proposed coastal state would stretch from Marin County to Los Angeles County, including the major urban population centers of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and LA. San Diego and Orange County, Republican strongholds, would go with the new conservative interior state.

The plan would need to pass California voters and then gain Congressional approval ... a highly unlikely scenario.

And that's for the best, because this could have the potential to turn into a dangerous trend. Can you imagine New York City seceding from the rest of the Empire State, or conservative Eastern Washington leaving the liberal Seattle suburbs, or even urban Southern Maine seceding from the state's sparsely-populated northern tier?

Oh wait. All of those have been seriously proposed, by elected officials.