Free Spokane!

A reader called NoStar informs us that 11 Washington State legislators are pushing a bill to split the state in two. I don't expect the proposal to get anywhere, but I certainly sympathize. When I lived in the northwest, I had a hard time figuring out just why the Washington-Oregon border had been drawn from east to west rather than from north to south, since it was painfully clear that the eastern and western halves of the two states had more in common with each other than with those oddballs on the other side of the Cascades.

Speaking of which: Whatever happened to that Republic of Cascadia that was supposed to unite the American northwest and British Columbia in ecotopian harmony? I could swear this was being pushed by some serioso yuppie types back in the '90s, but a Google search revealed only a parody site that proposed to defend the new nation with a Sasquatch Militia. Not that there's anything wrong with that!