Local Teacher Honored

Yesterday we had bad news from our local schools. Sad to say, we hear that a lot.

Today, we have some good news, as a local high school teacher was honored as a secondary educator of the year.

RACINE – For the second year in a row, a Lutheran High School teacher has been selected as teacher of the year out of educators at Lutheran high schools in the southern half of Wisconsin.

Nick Gasau, a social studies teacher at Lutheran, was chosen as secondary teacher of the year by the South Wisconsin District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a group of Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod congregations, ministries, pastors, teachers and other professionals in the southern half of Wisconsin. The group includes six Lutheran high schools in the lower half of the state, said Robin Mueller, administrative assistant in the South Wisconsin District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s department of schools, youth and family.

From those high schools, teachers were nominated by parents, colleagues or administrators, and those nominations were reviewed by a selection committee, which deemed Gasau the winner.

We’ve blogged over and over ad nauseum about the problems in our schools, bad teachers, underachieving students. It’s nice to hear some good things our schools are doing and accomplishments our teachers are receiving for their work in the classroom.

Congratulations to Nick Gasau on this honor.

Valerie Jarrett: Tea Party People Are Dummies

The arrogance and condescension of the Left never ceases to amaze.

Now it’s White House adviser Valerie Jarrett insulting the intelligence level of Tea Party protesters, claiming they are just too simple-minded to understand what Our Lord and Savior wants to do for them.

Says Hot Air’s Allahpundit:

Just as Obama’s supposedly going down the tubes because he hasn’t been aggressive enough in building Great Society II, the ObamaCare meltdown is due not to public antipathy to the bill on the merits but to the failure of our American Pericles to properly explain it the first 8,000 times he talked about it on camera. It’s a teachable moment — everything is — and he simply hasn’t taught yet. No worries, though. He’ll get it through our thick heads one of these days.

Here’s video from Jarrett’s appearance at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Hahvahd University (via The Ol’ Broad):

Jarrett believes the White House needs to issue books on its plans and proposals similar to the popular The Idiot’s Guide and For Dummies series.

Seriously. They think we are just a bunch of simpletons who are too stupid to understand what they want to do unless they talk to us like first graders.

Remember Algore in the 2000 debate when he talked to the physical and viewing audience like they were about six years old? Killed him in the post-debate polls.

Go back and re-read what we wrote here. Recall Obama Himself from the 2008 campaign about middle America voters:

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Translated: You are ignorant. You act in fear based on ignorance, especially if you are religious. Not only that, because the President is a (half) black man with a Muslim name, you are also raaaaacist! Everything you believe is based on hatred, fear, ignorance, bigotry and raaaaacism!

November cannot come fast enough to castrate this bastard. Then we throw him out of office in two years.

Those Sneaky Democrats

Democrats across the nation are trying to run an end-around on the Electoral College.

The latest stand? Right here in Wisconsin, where they’ve introduced legislation to make Wisconsin’s electoral votes go to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, no matter who actually wins in Wisconsin.

Talk about disenfranchising Wisconsin’s voters.

It’s Assembly Bill 751, introduced on February 15 and fast-tracked for a hearing the following day.

Here’s what the bill does:

SECTION 3. 5.11 of the statutes is created to read:
5.11 Interstate compact on election of president and vice president.
AGREEMENT AMONG THE STATES TO ELECT THE PRESIDENT BY NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE.

It subverts the U.S. Constitution. Period. From Article II of the U.S. Constitution:

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; a quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

The last two sentences were modified by the 12th Amendment, but it’s clear: the Founding Fathers did not want direct popular election of the President. Four times in our history, a candidate won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, the most recent being in 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency but lost the popular vote to Algore.

This bill renders the votes in Wisconsin meaningless. If Candidate A wins in Wisconsin but Candidate B wins the overall national vote, Candidate B gets the state’s electoral votes, contrary to the wishes of the people. And when enough states composing 238 electoral votes approve such legislation, it goes into effect.

Right now, as a swing state, Wisconsin sees quite a bit of national candidates. We see both Republican and Democrat presidential candidates regularly. So do states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, etc. Both candidates tend to avoid states that are solid red or blue states. The Battleground States get most of the attention.

This changes under the Democrats’ scenario. Our vote here becomes irrelevant, since which candidate gets our electoral votes is determined by voters in other states. The cemetery precincts in Chicago, for example, can determine who gets Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

Writing at the MU Law School Faculty Blog, Shark and Shepherd‘s Rick Esenberg notes:

The Electoral College forces candidates to pay attention to states that they otherwise might not. But there may be a certain genius to that. Forcing candidates into battleground states requires the candidates to engage each other before an electorate that is truly up for grabs and to do so by engaging – at least to some degree – in retail politics – much as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary do in the nomination process.

That truly is the genius of the Electoral College.

Esenberg also drops a dirty little secret about just who is financing this effort to subvert the Constitution: George Soros.

Imagine that: the Left’s Dr. Evil wants to reduce the U.S. Constitution to two-ply and be able to essentially select the President by himself with his money. Soros, a traitorous Jew who spent his youth in Nazi-occupied Hungary selling out Hungarian Jews to the Nazis, wants to run the United States as his personal fiefdom and subjugate it under United Nations control. His dirty money is behind just about every leftwing project from Media Matters to Center For American Progress to Open Society to ACORN that you can name. No surprise here that he’s trying to circumvent the Constitution to guarantee an endless string of progressive Presidents.

The bill is also unconstitutional under Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, the Compact Clause:

[T]he National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is examined and found constitutionally deficient. The Compact is actually a compact under the Compact Clause of the Constitution, because the Court has broadly construed what makes a compact. In particular, because the Compact is not effective until a critical mass of States have enacted it, and because States are constrained from withdrawing from the Compact too close to a presidential election, the Compact falls under constitutional scrutiny. Additionally, the Compact addresses a political matter that affects the interests of non-compacting sister States, and the compacting States enhance their political power at the expense of other States.

Article I, Section 10 reads in part:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

Wisconsin Family Voices objects to the disenfranchisement of Badger State voters:

If you think your vote is just one of many in the state right now, imagine what little impact your vote would have if it was only one of millions and millions of votes! With the Electoral College, your vote is a higher percentage of the total votes from the state and has a greater impact on the presidential election. With a national popular vote, the states with the highest populations determine the president, and then Wisconsin is forced to ratify their vote, regardless of whether that candidate was the choice of the majority of Wisconsin voters.

Even the Racine Journal Times is opposed to this legislation. Via Fred at RDW:

Whenever we hear the words “fast track” and “legislation” in the same breath, our ears perk up because we know there is a bag of rubbish someone is trying to speed through the Capitol before it gets full scrutiny or the public has a chance to react.

The latest fast-trash bill hit the Assembly last week. It was introduced on Feb. 15 by state Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, and already had a hearing before the end of the day Wednesday.

The bill would change the way the United States elects its president and would essentially make the Electoral College useless.

Supporters say it would guarantee that the presidential candidate with the most popular votes would be elected president. That idea has a lot of traction with the public and those who argue that in a democracy the majority rules – or should rule, anyhow.

Except, of course, the United States is a republic, a representative democracy, and we always have been.

It was set up that way by the nation’s Founding Fathers – who also set up the Electoral College in that small, precious document known as the Constitution. According to some historians, their motives were to set up a little buffer against democracy out of fears that average work-a-day citizens might be stampeded by impulse on a popular vote.

“… fears that average work-a-day citizens might be stampeded by impulse …”

Gee, ya mean like Hopenchange in 2008?

Truancy And Athletics

Seems like a cloud has developed over the unbeaten season of the Racine Park boys basketball team.

A Racine Journal Times report by Janine Anderson and Gery Woelfel indicates that some members of the team are under investigation for eligibility issues that may involve truancies dating back to September.

The Racine Unified School District confirmed Friday that questions have emerged regarding the eligibility of some of Park’s players. At the request of Directing Principal Dan Thielen, RUSD has initiated a review. Area Superintendent Brian Colbert will perform the review.

If violations of the RUSD Athletic Code emerge, according to the statement, players may be suspended from game participation. Other disciplinary actions may also take place.

District spokesman Paul Holley said he can’t say how many or which players are under investigation, or exactly what kind of violations are being investigated.

A grandmother of one of the team’s players said Friday that truancy is the issue.

If ineligible players are found to have been used, all of the Panthers’ victories in which those players participated could become forfeits, and the team’s No. 1 ranking in the state’s Division 1 polls would become history.

I have no problems with that if indeed that is the case. Students’ first priority should be in the classroom, not athletics.

What concerns me is the possibility that students may have been truant dating back to September and nothing was done. Was it just bureaucratic ineptness that allowed a bad situation to get worse and emerge five months into the school year? Or did officials know about problems and hope to keep them quiet in order to avoid jeopardizing a potential championship season, hoping the facts would never emerge?

Here’s a listing of Park’s victories this year. There’s no indicated which ones are in potential jeopardy of becoming forfeits:

• Nov. 27 Park 74, West DePere 50
• Nov. 28 Park 78, Baraboo 54
• Dec. 1 Park 89, Milwaukee Custer 44
• Dec. 11 Park 75, Kenosha Bradford 33
• Dec. 18 Park 61, Somers Shoreland Lutheran 51
• Dec. 19 Park 51, Racine Lutheran 47
• Dec. 29 Park 65, Beloit Memorial 51
• Dec. 30 Park 62, Waterford 58
• Jan. 5 Park 60, Muskego 38
• Jan. 12 Park 73, Racine Case 54
• Jan. 15 Park 72, Franklin 61
• Jan. 16 Park 69, Chicago Fenger 42
• Jan. 19 Park 58, Kenosha Tremper 46
• Jan. 22 Park 80, Oak Creek 75 (OT)
• Jan. 29 Park 65, Kenosha Bradford 63 (OT)
• Feb. 2 Park 66, Racine Horlick 61
• Feb. 5 Park 62, Muskego 52
• Feb. 16 Park 75, Franklin 63
• Feb. 19 Park 75, Kenosha Tremper 41

It would be interesting to know which players are being investigated — some names have surfaced but we won’t identify them, since it’s pure speculation — and the games in which they were involved. The Panthers have had only seven games (highlighted in bold) which were decided by 10 or fewer points; had those players not played — presuming they were ineligible — how many of those games would still have been victories?

12-Time Repeat Offender Released …

Guess what happened?

He committed yet another criminal offense.

Finally, the Sentinel Journal reported what Jessica McBride had reported at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute earlier this year — and the newspaper didn’t even acknowledge the WPRI reports.

From the WPRI report:

Take Derrick Parnell, 39, of Milwaukee. He is a twelve-time convicted felon. Sentenced most recently for burglary, his sentence was modified in 2005 after he completed a special Corrections program, but his supervision was revoked, and he was re-confined. In 2009, he asked to get out again, but a judge ruled that his early release was not in the public interest. Corrections agreed that he should not be released but reversed itself in November 2009, according to court records.

From the Sentinel Journal:

Derrick M. Parnell blew his chance at freedom.

The convicted burglar was released almost a month early from a state correctional facility in January. He is one of nearly 30 inmates who are the first to have their incarceration time trimmed through a program created last year to help the state save money in the face of a $6.6 billion budget shortfall.

Just more than a month after he was released, however, Parnell was back behind bars. He has been in custody at the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility since Feb. 10 for violating the terms of his probation, according to the facility’s records.

Details of his most recent violation were not available Monday, but it’s not the first time Parnell, 39, has struggled to follow the rules.

A review of court records for Parnell and other offenders from Milwaukee who have been released early this year shows that several of the men – convicted of a range of felonies including drug dealing and identity theft – have extensive criminal records and a history of returning to crime during previous stints on the streets.

Under his budget, Gov. Jim Doyle claimed that the catch and early release program was necessary because of the record state budget deficits that have occurred on his watch in direct violation of the state constitution, which requires a balanced budget, and to deal with alleged overcrowding.

Doyle also claimed that the only inmates released would be the so-called nonviolent offenders. So tell me, how does a 12-time convicted felon qualify as a nonviolent offender?

This is a habitual offender that should be locked up and kept away from law abiding society, not let out as part of the revolving door, Get Out Of Jail Free policy of the Doyle administration.

Also, under Doyle’s proposal, it’s the Department of Corrections — in other words, unelected, unaccountable state bureaucrats — that are determining which inmates get released, not judges and prosecutors.

More from the WPRI report:

But the sentencing changes approved by the state Legislature now mean judges don’t always get to decide anymore – the Department of Corrections can release some felons on its own. And the WPRI review shows that, in most of the cases of the first inmates released under the changes, elected judges would have kept them behind bars.

In several cases, prosecutors also had objected to the inmates’ release.  In the remaining cases, judges were never petitioned by the inmates for release, and in one case the judge simply said the sentencing court no longer had authority to decide.
The first inmate released was convicted of homicide in Milwaukee County and released for health reasons. Others released include a fifth offense drunk driver, a repeat burglar, a cocaine dealer, and thieves.

In 13 of the 15 cases where judges had previously denied the inmates’ petitions for early release, they did so by specifically stating the early release was “not in the public interest,” court records say. In the other two cases, the records just say the judges denied the release or denied it because of prosecutorial objection.

In one case, the felon’s request for early release was denied three previous times by judges. In other cases, the felons were released just a few weeks after judges denied their petitions for sentence adjustment.

One person who is not pleased with the Doyle catch and release program is Ed Flynn, Milwaukee’s Chief of Police:

“Getting into prison is not easy,” Milwaukee Police Chief Edward A. Flynn said in an interview. “You’ve got to get locked up and convicted a lot of times before we get you prison space. We’re looking at a class of offenders that have already demonstrated a history of reoffending, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.”

…

In addition to his concerns that offenders who are released early might commit new crimes, Flynn said he is also worried that the state’s efforts to save money could increase costs for large cities, especially Milwaukee.

“It’s not enough for the state to save money,” Flynn said. “We understand they need to. But just transferring their problem to the city creates a situation in which money may be saved by the state, but new victims are created in the city.”

That’s the intent of the Doyle catch and release program: pass the costs on to local communities, who then must raise local property taxes or impose other local taxes to meet those increased financial burdens.

One must wonder, however, if this doesn’t have anything to do with determining who gets released. That would be the infamous report from Doyle’s Commission on Reducing Racial Disparities in the Wisconsin Justice System. Translated: a racial quota system for Wisconsin’s prisons.

Meaning that, since Doyle and the Left believe that too many blacks are incarcerated in Wisconsin, simply open the prison doors until those racial quotas are met.

Never mind that those inmates were in prison for actually committing crimes that warranted prison sentences. Besides, everyone knows that they were just victims of racism anyway.

Here’s the WPRI report on the arrest of Derrick Parnell, five weeks after being released by Doyle’s Department of Corrections. Here’s a follow-up WPRI report on a second inmate that had been released having been rearrested.

Jessica McBride points out:

Eight of those first 22 released inmates were from Milwaukee County. That’s a 25 percent recidivism rate for Milwaukee County early release inmates in less than 2 months.

November cannot come soon enough to elect candidates to the governor’s office and the state Legislature who will undo the damage that’s been done by this awful program.

Suspect Confesses In Holloway Murder

Next up, O.J. announces he’s found the real killers by looking in the mirror.

News: Joran van der Sloot has confessed to participating in the murder of missing American student Natalee Holloway and disposing of her body in a marsh in Aruba in 2005.

Views: in other breaking news, the sun was shockingly discovered to rise in the east, an undercover news investigation has revealed the Pope to be Catholic and the bear was caught on video taking a dump in the woods.

Says Dan Riehl:

Not sure what to make of this just now. He likely has some reason for doing it at this point and I’m not sure it’s only about coming clean.

Nature Fights Back

This looks funny. The new Brendan Fraser comedy Furry Vengeance. Watch for the animals hot-wiring the car:

There’s also a funny scene that is reminiscent of this:

Doomsday For Dems?

H/T to Jim Geraghty at NRO’s The Campaign Spot.

Venerable pollster Charlie Cook doesn’t see any scenario in which the Democrats don’t lose control of the House of Representatives in November.

I’ve spent the last couple of days talking to some of the brightest Democrats in the party that are not in the White House. And it’s very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don’t lose the House. It’s very hard. Are the seats there right this second? No. But we’re on a trajectory on the House turning over….

Say good-bye to Speaker Bela Pelosi, folks!

Cook says the unpopular government takeover of the health care system is to Our Lord and Savior what the Iraq war was to George W. Bush:

I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it’s just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq. While Bush went, “We’re going to go after Afghanistan as a reaction to 9/11,” and then just pretty soon got distracted and obsessed with going into Iraq with varying rationalizations that sort of evolved over time.

This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn’t big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn’t want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.

And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn’t worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn’t a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.

And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we’ve seen in modern political history.

Fact is, there was no mandate out there for government-run health care. Most people agreed that some reform was needed, but having the government take over and run the system was not what anyone wanted — other than the statists who were pushing it as a veiled means of controlling Americans’ lives.

What most Americans wanted was a focus on the economy, and everything the Obama administration and Congress did took a bad situation and made it worse: record-breaking deficits, massive and unsustainable debt, porkulus, bailouts, government takeovers of banking, Wall Street and the auto industry, cap-and-tax, demonization of everything from doctors to Las Vegas as enemies of the people. You name it.

It’s why we have 10 percent unemployment and will continue to have until well past the election. All porkulus did was transfer more money borrowed from China to powerful public employee unions and bureaucrats. Created or saved no real jobs. Just further buoyed the growing public sector.

It’s why Democrats have taken a pounding at the polls in every election since November 2008. Every time The Messiah comes in to campaign for a Democrat, it’s a loss. Prediction: he’ll be as popular this fall as Bush was in 2006 and 2008.

Please keep running against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the same straw men you did in 2006 and 2008. Please keep blaming Bush for every one of your screw-ups. It’ll only increase the tsunami this November that will begin the process of sweeping the statists from power and restoring a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Stumbling Toward Oblivion

The earliest lame duck President in U.S. history continues His decline.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shows Our Lord and Savior’s approval gap at minus-19 percent, with just 22 percent strongly approving and 41 percent strongly disapproving of the performance of the Worst. President. Ever.

Here’s a graphic depiction of The Little Black Man-Child’s slide toward oblivion:

Rasmussen notes that the only day in which the gap in Obama’s approval-disapproval rating was on December 22, 2009, the day the U.S. Senate announced it would approve its version of government-run health care.

The latest report shows bad news for the Democrats’ plan to have the federal government take over the national health care system:

Currently, 39% of voters nationwide favor the health care plan proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats. Fifty-eight percent (58%) are opposed. Only 35% believe Congress should pass health care reform before the upcoming midterm elections anyway. Fifty-four percent (54%) say Congress should wait until voters select new congressional representatives in November.

If the proposed health care plan becomes law, 78% of voters expect it will cost more than projected. Voters overwhelmingly believe passage of the plan will increase the federal deficit and lead to middle-class tax hikes. Most of those with insurance fear that they could be forced to change their coverage if the health care legislation passes.

Those numbers stand out as Democrats in Congress prepare to use the budget reconciliation process, or the nuclear option, to ram through the takeover.

Either they’re suicidal in the face of the November elections or they know something we don’t (see universal voter registration).

Consent Of The Governed

That phrase is contained in the founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence. The words of Thomas Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …

Translated, that means the government gets its authority from the people. Our elected officials in Washington are not our rulers, contrary to their opinion.

The latest Rasmussen Reports poll shows that only one in five Americans believes Washington is ruling with consent of the governed, while three in five in the political class  believes Washington is doing the people’s will.

The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.

However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

That last part is the disregard in which Americans hold crony capitalism and the all-too-cozy fascistic relationship between large corporations and government.

A complete disconnect from a ruling political class that is clearly out of touch with the people. But then, how many real Americans do members of the ruling political class in the Boston-Washington corridor come into contact with on a regular basis at their Georgetown cocktail parties or on K Street?

The politicians and the pundits — which, sad to say, includes some conservatives who’ve gone native by spending too much time inside the Beltway — look down their noses and haughtily sneer at the little people, the Great Unwashed, in what they freely call “flyover country,” the part of the U.S. that they see beneath their jetliners as they fly from coast to coast and back.

This does not bode well in November for the current crop of folks who put the “con” in Congress:

Nearly half of all voters believe that people randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress.

Sounds like William F. Buckley is still alive and well. WFB once famously opined:

I would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.

Fitting, since we now have the Harvard Law Professor-in-Chief.

Change is a-comin’, folks. Real change, not the phony Hopenchange talked about in the last election cycle.