In Toronto I once brought a group of my fellow graduate students almost to tears of laughter by commenting offhand that I thought that anyone who talked much about supervenience ought to be drug out in the street and shot. It's a common enough idiom, but seems to be largely confined to the Southern U.S. (hence the use of the dialectical 'drug' rather than 'dragged'). They'd never heard the expression before; they recognized it as hyperbole, but still found the lack of proportion hilariously funny. One could imagine, though, some people taking it quite literally and being shocked about it -- so very primitive, barbaric, and bloodthirsty! -- and one can even imagine a few misguided people, trying to be helpful, arguing that, in fact, there could very well be circumstances where you might want to shoot anyone who talks about supervenience.
The fact of the matter is, hyperbole is a standard trope in Texan conversation, and secession is a common topos in Texan discourse.* Except in very rare cases it has nothing to do with separatism; it's a way of expressing (1) annoyance at non-Texans and (2) pride at being Texan, both of which are common themes in Texan rhetoric. I remember reading somewhere, I forget where, of someone's shock that in a recent poll about 1/5 of Texan men and women said that they think Texas should secede from the Union. This is precisely why you should not trust polls; if you know enough Texans, you know it's precisely the sort of thing a lot of us would tell someone regardless of whether we literally believed it. There's no way, from the wording of the question, to tell who means it literally and who means it figuratively. Texan hyperbole, again. You have to remember that we're the sort of people who set up the unsuspecting by casually commenting that Texas is the biggest state and, when the literal-minded reply that Alaska is the biggest state, disdainfully respond, "Only on the outside," or, "The inside of my grandmother's freezer is bigger and more interesting than Alaska," or, "I was talking about the biggest state on God's map." And it really does confirm the prejudices of a lot of Texans that 'Yankees' are pinched-lipped, finger-wagging idiots when people can't see that Ted Nugent is obviously joking or that Perry's comments about secession were standard boilerplate rhetoric in parts of Texas. No doubt it's different elsewhere, and no doubt that's the problem here, but in the context of Texas trying to read anything into comments like that, at least beyond a general expression of dissatisfaction, is as worthless as trying to read what tea leaves tell you about the stock market.
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* It is not equally common everywhere in Texas. In my experience the secession topos tends to be less common in urban centers, and also less common in Central Texas -- the latter almost certainly having to do with the influence of Austin, which contains an odd and ever-intriguing mix of the stereotypically Texan, hippy affectations, and cosmopolitan pretensions. It is very common in West and North Texas, however. It's possible that there are other factors.
