>Hi Bruce,
>
>>But aren't you people the "United Kingdom" under one flag? If we did things that way, each US state flag would need to be different, too. Say, now there's an idea :)
>
>Hmm, were the individual states of the US ever countries ?

Well, Texas was independent at one time. Hawaii was a an independent kingdom once. Those are the only ones that were truly independent I can think of. Others, of course, were parts of colonies of European nations at one time...