HOWDY, NEIGHBOR! Nick Gillespie's "Jayhawk Down" musing on what keeps people flocking to high-tax, "unfree" places like my home town has spurred some interesting commentary. Here's a blue-state-hater firing back:

[Gillespie] never learned to live in a true rural lifestyle.

I was the reverse -- raised on a farm outside a small town and perfectly happy with the calm, regular life. Went off the see the world and wound up in LA for 20+ years. Everything is costly and you can't walk the streets at night or trust the neighbor in the next house -- if you know who it is. Forget about leaving your house or car unlocked.

One has to marvel at a mindset that, though marinated in Los Angeles for 20+ years, still describes the place in tones of horror one would expect from Bible Camper who had only wandered out of the downtown Greyhound terminal during a 20-minute layover.

He's also proud of the low crime rate out his way. "...as one local cop said, '95 percent of the people around here get along,'" he proudly reports. "'All the real crime is done by 5 percent of the people -- and it's always the same ones.'" Wonder what he thinks the crook-to-citizen ratio is here in New York? If it's as much as five percent of our population, our 400,000 criminals are clearly underperforming. (He also mentions the "'racial minorities' blue cities have so much trouble with" -- reflexively, one supposes.)

Then there's some bullshit about how we couldn't survive without their largesse --"Red counties will exist quite well if the cities were disconnected from them. City dwellers would quickly revert to mob rule and start starving en masse, rioting, and so on" -- a popular self-esteem fantasy funded by our tax dollars.

Finally the author invites us to come out his way to "unwind" (perhaps a quaint local slang expression for "get tied to the pick-up and dragged") when "you get too uptight with all that noise and bizarre action around you, when the oddball stories get you too uptight..."

I'm working on 49th Street today. U2 just went by on a flatbed truck, playing a free concert. I guess that's a pretty oddball story, but I don't really feel the need to recover at Branson.

Now, I don't mind a little ribbing about our depraved, dirty city. Such intramural raspberries are part of the fun of living in a large and -- oh, I know you hate the word but I'm gonna use it anyway -- diverse republic.

Lord knows I've given as good (or as bad) as I've got on that score. But let me say this: you may think you don't need us, and we may think we don't need you, but I don't think either of us really wants to split it up and find out.

Then who would we have to hate?