From my varied travels around the US, it has been my impression that certain "wingers" in Michigan and Wisconsin considered much of the "South," and particularly Georgia, a hotbed of "pinko" sympathizers, so it's reasonable that the might refer to the State of Georgia as the "Soviet Republic of Georgia." For a few, it might be "sarcasm?" but at least some apparently think that is the name of the state.

Quite likely, the majority people in the US don't know there is "another Georgia," much less that it's a nation "over on the other side of one or the other of the oceans." Quite a few can name "both oceans" that border the US, but about half of those - more than 50 miles from either coast - can't tell you which is the one on the east and which on the west. The "highly literate" ones can tell you that the Panama Canal runs from the Atlantic west to the Pacific, which of course is wrong; but can't tell you whether it's in North, Central, or South America.

People in the State of Georgia, especially in Atlanta, do often refer to it as the "Sovereign State of Georgia," believe that it is a nation in its own right, and that it won "the WAR" and that the rest of the US just "doesn't understand that they lost."

A confusion similar to that between the country, Georgia, and the state pops up frequently with "Washington" as a by-line, apparently without the reporter knowing whether the event reported was in the state or in the district (DC). I've seen inset maps in articles that disagreed with the text on this one as well.

Just once, quite a few years back, a map of Russia was printed in a local (Kansas) newsrag for an article about Moscow, Kansas.

A classic "boner" appeared a couple of decades ago when "Wichita State University" in Wichita Kansas announced the creation of the "first school of entrepreneurship in the US." I notice the glitch the first time I saw it, but they ran the TV ad for more than three years before anyone at the U noticed that they misspelled the key word as "enterperneurship." Then they tried to lie and convince people "we did it on purpose." (The average kitty cat can fake that one better than they did.)

John