Is all relative. When a nation fundamentally abandons its values, enforces the breaking of laws with other, newer laws and claims all is well - then states, and their residents have every right to consider seceding.

The point Tom was trying to get through your titanium foil cap, is that we are now conditioned to think the states are indistinguishable from the nation, and their will is LESS than the national will by an order of magnitude. That the nation owns them and they must submit to whatever changes DC wants to make in our national fabric.

This is part of our national brainwashing. Kids were taught to revere Lincoln & Washington for the first 4/5ths of the 20th century (Now its MLK and Chavez). Preserving the Union was fine, but was actually illegal. The nation recovered at the cost of many lives and a new and dangerous theme that has only grown - obey DC.

In case you didn't get TB's other post - he basically illustrated this new administration now has published "official" enemies lists - far more detailed and broad reaching than Nixon could ever dream up. The Bush administration was tarred and feathered for taking away freedoms by what? Phone taps? Torturing terrorists? While the real freedoms - freedom of choice for everyone in the care of their own health, etc is for more significant a loss of freedom. The poor don't mind - they never mind when their freedom is taken away because poverty comes with its own chains. Obama and YOU will gladly take people's freedom and sugarcoat it with the "good for the poor" rhetoric minted back in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

But hey, it's not about freedom is it Buck? It's about power and the handouts. Support the administration and receive the handout - don't support it and get put on a bonafide real government enemies list - a list which by itself indicates the hostile nature of this administration to the freedom of speech, mind and belief of its citizens.

The US of A will likely someday be far worse than the nation its founders broke away from to set up their own nation.

I guess it never occurred to you when studying US history that our nation is founded by anarchists. Or that pledging loyalty to this particular nation means reserving the right to break away when the time comes. And when it comes it will be with its own Declaration that mirrors the first:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

When that day comes the founding founders will be cheering the new "enemies" of the state on. Creating new nations providing people the ultimate gift: FREEDOM.