South California, a conservative’s utopia:

Accusing Sacramento of pillaging local governments to feed its runaway spending and left-wing policies, a Riverside County politician is proposing a solution: He wants 13 mostly inland, conservative counties to break away to form a separate state of “South California.”

Supervisor Jeff Stone, a Republican pharmacist from Temecula, called California an “ungovernable” financial catastrophe from which businesses are fleeing and where taxpayers are being crushed by the burden of caring for welfare recipients and illegal immigrants.

On Tuesday, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors will consider Stone’s proposal to host a statewide summit for city and county leaders to sketch out a framework for secession….

A spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, called Stone’s proposal a laughable political stunt, saying the Riverside County supervisors should be more concerned about closing that county’s expected $130-million revenue shortfall in the next budget year and possible cutbacks to public safety.

“It’s a supremely ridiculous waste of everybody’s time,” said spokesman Gil Duran. “If you want to live in a Republican state with very conservative right-wing laws, then there’s a place called Arizona.”

OTB’s Doug Mataconis reminds us this is not new:

[T]here have been 26 other attempts to slice California up since it became a state in 1850. In each case, the proposals seem to be based in the tensions between Northern, Southern, and Central California, and the competing interests between the three… forming such a new state would require the consent of both the legislature of California and the United States Congress, as required by Article IV of the Constitution.