To hear Bill Maze tell it, L.A. County takes all the money generated by the rest of hard-working California and squanders it on stuff like “public services and education.” Not only that, says the termed-out Assemblyman, but you've got places up north like San Francisco and Marin County that always vote to put farmers out of business by passing livestock confinement laws. Don't even get the Visalia Republican started about Alameda County, which is home to Berkeley. The problem is that the sheer number of voters who live along the Costa Obama consistently pass legislation that runs against the grain of common sense.

Maze is no complainer, though, but a man of action with a plan. That plan involves nothing less than the partitioning of California in two — not along a north-south divide, but something that scoops off most of the coastal cities, that currently form a kind of Red Belt of left-leaning politics, and leave the rest of the state's 45 counties intact.

Maze would prefer that his larger, far more conservative state keep the

name California, while the rest of us be happy with something like

Coastal California or Western California. (Talk about your left coast!)

Those of us who choose not to leave and join our more level-headed,

sober neighbors who would now surround us (Maze suspiciously wants to

keep San Diego in his new confederacy), would be part of a

truncated latte republic consisting of the following counties: Marin,

Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara,

Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara,

Ventura and Los Angeles. To be sure, there's a kind of historical symmetry here — the

abbreviated, coastal entity would consist of 13 counties, analogous to

the 13 Colonies that formed America's basis.

Maze

and his group, Citizens for Saving California Farming Industries, have

been talking up the idea before audiences at aggie expos in the Central

Valley, hoping to eventually find a legislator in Sacramento (which

would stay in plain-old California) to sponsor the split, or at least

to get enough petition signatures to put the measure on a ballot. But

then, if that happened, all us farm-hating lefties would just vote it

down anyway.
 

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