My friend Jim Bovard lays it down to those dumb yankee Newsday readers:

"The typical voter fails to comprehend even the basics of government. Most Americans do not know the name of their representative in the House, the length of terms of House or Senate members, or what the Bill of Rights purportedly guarantees, according to surveys by the University of Michigan.

A survey by the Polling Company after the 2002 congressional election revealed that less than a third of Americans knew "that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives prior to the election." Almost two-thirds of Americans cannot name a single Supreme Court justice, according to another Polling Company survey.

An American Bar Association poll last summer found that barely half of respondents recognized the three branches of the federal government, and even fewer knew what "separation of powers" meant.

Read on from there. It get’s worse.