On the way home, I made the mistake of listening to Rush again (in the morning in the car, I sometimes listen to a local guy named Hoppy Kerchival, who is a conservative, but not of the insane crazy variety), and it seems Rush was off for a long weekend and some guy named Mark Davis was filling in. After listening for ten minutes, I began to truly appreciate how deep the wingnut bench really is. I’ve never even heard of this guy before, and yet here he was, promoted to the big leagues for a cup of coffee. Rush skipped past the c-list nutters at NRO, skipped over his normal stand-ins, and like a good talent scout, picked this guy up from the right-wing farm team. He was as wingnutty as a Red State diary, and the ease with which the nonsense rolled off his tongue was amazing.
At any rate, the issue for the day was the dreaded census (before I move on, I want to state that I do not remember any census angst in with 1989 or 1999, so I’m wondering if this is a new development or just found its origin in talk radio and has now bubbled up into the mainstream of wingnut thought). With no sense of irony, he then referred to Michelle Bachmann as a rising star of the Republican party and a long discussion followed regarding the intrusive questions in the census and how Republicans were wrong to cite a right to privacy because there is no right to privacy and besides, that would be dangerous anyway because of Roe v. Wade. Bork was then cited.
What followed then was an “intellectual exercise” (his phrase) on how to really tell off those census workers without breaking the law. The very first caller, with obligatory southern drawl, burst out of the gate with a real gem:
“I’m going to tell them how many people are in the household and then plead the fifth.”
Now, putting aside that even WingNut Daily, the gold standard for right wing fact-checking, has noted that no one has ever been prosecuted for not answering these questions, most of would laugh at this scenario:
Census Worker: Which FUEL is used MOST for heating this house, apartment, or mobile home?
Wingnut: I plead the fifth.
And yes, that is one of the actual questions (.pdf here).
Instead of laughing, though, our intrepid host then spent five minutes deciding that the portion of the fifth amendment that states “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” does, in fact, when discussing liberty, provide Americans with a constitutionally sound method for refusing to answer census questions by pleading the fifth. What is liberty if not the right to not answer questions, asked our host.
A later caller decided that asking these “intrusive” questions constituted an unreasonable search and seizure as described in the 4th Amendment. I’m dying to hear Scalia and Alito’s thoughts on that one.
Up Next: How to oppose gay marriage without having a homophobic thought. Mark Davis says it can be done, and he has done it his whole life.
Zifnab
The trick is to just not think at all, right?
Ultimately, all I can do is hope and pray that these nutters finally drink enough of the kool-aid that they all ACTUALLY start going “Galt” (remember when that phrase was back in vogue).
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Stay single so you can keep playing the field?
El Cid
Neal Boortz too is pushing the ‘defy the oppressive un-Constitutional Census’ line.
Supposedly it’s not only a heroic defense of our liberty in the face of the Democrat Stalinists nosing their way into our houses (the fundies would prefer only monitoring the bedrooms).
It’s also a clever strategy to STOPPASPENDIN’ and CUTDATAXES by robbing the Obama-Stalin-Mao government from having the information it needs to come up with reasons to steal our money.
Joe
The anti-census crowd was around in 2000, and that’s why the gov. got rid of the long form and started the ACS. The long form went to 1 in 5 households, and they had too much difficulty with the crazies, so they are statistically sampling about 1 in 500 or 1000 in targeted areas each year to make up for it.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Zifnab:
Does anyone know what would the census people would do if you declined to answer their questions because you’ve gone Galt?
Besides laughing hysterically, I mean.
J.W. Hamner
Damn… that thing’s like 76 pages. Is there an inalienable right to be lazy that’s enshrined in the Constitution? Lawyer guys help me out here.
anonevent
Mark Davis is one of the local radio wingnuts here in Dallas who also shows up every Thursday for a brief political discussion on the morning local fox news program. Not quite national, but he does have a large market. But yeah, all of them are basically interchangeable nuts.
Krista
I feel so, so sorry for those census workers. They’re just trying to do their jobs in professional manner and likely have to deal with a lot of rude people, and now they have to deal with Rush’s dittobots acting like complete arsewipes?
Dulcie
I still believe that the ramp up of RW craziness can be directly traced back to there being a scary neeeeeeeegro in the WH. Run for your lives, white people – he’s coming to take your guns, and he’s really doing the census so he can determine how much us black folks will be getting in reparations.
Oh, and ACORN, also.
CapMidnight
Try: “I’m going to tell them how many dinks are in my house and then turn on my Rush radio.”
asiangrrlMN
ACORN!
Man, I wish ACORN was a tenth as powerful as the rightwing seems to think they are.
How you can oppose gay marriage without being homophobic? Oppose all marriages. That would do it.
stevie314159
Pete Hoekstra bait:
A census taker came to my house. Now I know what it felt like during the Spanish Inquisition.
TenguPhule
So the key here is to secretly spy on them to find out and don’t even bother asking and that will make it alright?
Little Dreamer
I hope these obtuse assholes silence themselves out of congressional representation. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.
TenguPhule
Improved.
PGE
I think the most pertinent question is how many census workers are going to be shot.
Rommie
I think you’ll need a Wingnut Mirror Universe tag sooner than later, as the wingnuts seem ever-so-closer to taking the reality ball and going Galt to play Calvinball.
El Cid
@TenguPhule: Warrantless wiretapping and surveillance is okay — it’s the knock on the door which makes it super evil Hitler Stalin authoritarian.
Napoleon
If they keep this up with the census I predict one or more census workers end up dead because they happen to knock on the wrong wingnuts door.
Unless you are a Muslim, then they will torture you to get an answer, any answer.
cleek
they’ll take any excuse to get their black helicopter fantasies a-churning. and in this case it’s about ACORN. and you’d never think it, but FOX News is happy to help feed the fear:
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Krista:
Just wait. Rush and Bachmann will be making thinly-veiled hints that they should be shot. We’re already pretty close to that now.
TenguPhule
$17/hour really isn’t enough.
Legalize
Look, if I refuse to answer census questions can I please compare myself to Iranians marching in the streets?
gbear
The answer is obvious: Census takers shall be equipped with forms, pens and tazers.
Joshua Norton
Funny, but it’s the same stuff from the 2000 census. The 28%er’s didn’t seem to mind at all when it those questions were asked during the Reign of Chimpster.
Let ’em refuse to be counted. Just means more Congressional reps for our side.
Dulcie
@PGE: Word.
Little Dreamer
@Krista:
You know, as frustrating as it may be, I’m of half a mind to sign up to become a census taker just so I can get a feel for how many people will fall for the Bachmann/Limbaugh bait.
It would be an interesting exercise in seeing the demographics of the current GOP up close and personal.
El Cid
@Legalize: We need to wear red armbands to show our solidarity with right wingers & libertarians unwilling to submit to the totalitarianism of a government voluntary survey.
CapMidnight
At the diner, I saw Pete Hoekstra pocket an extra penny from the “take a penny/leave a penny” dish. Now I know what it felt like to be ripped off by Bernie Madoff.
gbear
This point has been made before, but I’m all for this if the heavily-wingnut districts are so badly undercounted that they lose their congresscritters. This may be a win-win (as long as no one gets shot).
binzinerator
I’ll betcha the latter. Suspicion and fear over the census would fit in perfectly with the black helicopter crowd, a.k.a. the fringe right wing. Dave Neiwert over at Orcinus has written some stuff about how the fringe craziness gets transmitted into the mainstream right. In fact I do believe he identifies winger radio as one of those transmitters.
omen
isn’t this a good thing? if wingnut paranoia causes them to dodge the census, doesn’t that undercut their representation? isn’t the census used to reassess voting precincts?
talk about going galt.
Krista
That’s how much they get paid? I no longer pity them, then, as I put up with a lot of crap for $5 fewer an hour. (More like $6 once you factor in the exchange rate.)
Punchy
My two cents says the consensus Census sense since 2008 has been nonsense.
Bill E Pilgrim
All you need to do is watch the great epic Wingnut cinematic poem, right there in Red Dawn the first thing the Russian commander says is “Go to the police station, they’ll have a list of everyone who has guns. Bring it to me”.
I think the census takers should mess with them and say things like “Okay, lastly, did you see where the black helicopter that brought me went to afterwards? Uh! I mean…. the van! Not helicopter, van! Heh heh.”
Or, well, maybe they shouldn’t.
Little Dreamer
@Punchy:
That deserves a freaking award!
;)
Tonal Crow
I love this. The census form violates the 4th Amendment, but unlimited warrantless spying doesn’t. In GOPland, everything is truly its opposite.
kay
@gbear:
The census is so big, Rush’s minions won’t even make a ripple.
I’m with you though, I was hoping the nitwits would boycott, because every federal and state allocation of anything is justified based on census numbers.
Death By Mosquito Truck
Years ago I worked for the census bureau. In addition to the ten year people count, the census bureau also does other interval data collection, like the Housing Survey I worked on. The question you quoted sounds like one from the housing survey as I remember it.
The Housing Survey, which we conducted on supplied IBM Thinkpads, was a pages long monster that would sometimes require multiple visits with a homeowner. Because of the length of the survey I’d sometimes run into antagonistic folks, usually older, who didn’t want to participate.
I’d usually try to talk them into participating by lying to them and telling them that surveys like these helped the Federal Government distribute federal tax money back to the states. If they absolutely refused to cooperate, we’d come back at night and burn down their house so they no longer technically qualified for participation in the housing survey.
Zifnab
@CapMidnight: You know he probably just grabs a fist full of coins, spits in your face, and calls you a communist pig.
linda
wanna bet there aren’t a couple of census workers who get assaulted; most certainly threatened. just waiting for one of them to be run off property at the point of a gun.
oh really
There. Fixed.
There is only one Amendment in the WingNut’s Bill of Rights.
Little Dreamer
@Tonal Crow:
George Orwell thanks you for taking notice.
Katharsis
They asked me how many people live in my house, now I know what MK-ULTRA felt like.
Zifnab
@kay:
Remember when he tried to get Clinton the Dem nomination with “Operation Chaos!” How well did that work again?
The Other Steve
Why don’t they start describing the Census as the Doom’s Day Book?
Little Dreamer
@Death By Mosquito Truck:
You just know some freeper is going to link to that and freak out. ;)
How does one get to be a census taker? Can you give me some pointers?
Would it be possible for you to email TZ for my email address and send me info? I know you two are in communications. ;)
Thanks in advance.
Alan
I haven’t listened to Neil Boortz in a long time but he usually rails against the intrusiveness of the questions. Like one of the callers you heard, Boortz says he’ll answer how many persons live in his household and that’s it.
asiangrrlMN
@Krista: Yes, but are you gonna get shot in your line of duty? Huh?
@gbear:
I’m with gbear. Then, we can do a Cops-like episode about it. Hm. Maybe I will become a census taker in Michele Bachmann’s district. Am I allowed to do that as I don’t live in it?
Oh, and to counter: FREE AL FRANKEN!
gbear
@Death By Mosquito Truck:
Did you move on to foreign policy work once you were done with your census gig?
MikeJ
I plead the third. There are no soldiers quartered in my house.
Keith
I am in awe of the most elaborate pouting scheme of all time, surpassing even Newt Gingrich shutting down the govt
Krista
You raise a good point, madam. I’d forgotten that the census is not done by phone, but door-to-door. In which case those souls deserve every penny of their pay and more, considering some of the whackjobs they likely come across.
Shinobi
God forbid someone might be Dun dun DUNNNN collecting data about you!
I hope these people refuse to do the following in order to avoid more unwarranted data collection:
Use those club cards at Grocery Stores, or any other stores
Walk through doorways or turnstiles
Provide their telephone number to cashiers at stores
Use any form of payment besides cash
Take out a loan
Use a bank
Buy Stock
Drive through lights with automated traffic censors
Visit any websites
Use Twitter
Use a cell phone
Use a home phone
Buy anything on the internet
Check out books from the library
Go to the Doctor
… etc
There is a very good chance (and more than a chance in most cases) that when you do any one of the above things data about you is being collected, and then used, by the government, by data services, and companies. Sometimes this data is as simple as counting that you were there, and sometimes it is complex data of every purchase you make matched up to a purchase history and compared to other information. People are stalking you behind the scenes every moment of your life trying to figure out who you are, what you want and what you’re likely to do in the future.
I know this, because I am one of these people.
At least with the Census they take the time to ask you in person.
Little Dreamer
@Zifnab:
Ask Olive Garden and the other companies who contracted to air advertisements and didn’t even realize they were sponsoring David Letterman, they are now receiving all sorts of hate letters and phone calls from PUMA (Operation Chaos operatives).
Operation Chaos is still going on. We dodged a bullet when HIllary wasn’t elected, but I don’t fault Limbaugh for that, I blame it on Hillary’s Tuzla moment, (among other things she said in her campaign). It is my personal belief that Tuzla is what really hurt her.
Death By Mosquito Truck
@gbear:
Nope, went to work for the Dale Carnegie institute.
KG
I have to admit, all the extra stuff in the census kind of annoys me. But I also understand why they do it. Still, I can’t get this dialog from the West Wing out of my head (may not be exactly right, but close enough):
CJ: [after rattling off strange stats about the US population] I can tell you anything about the US population based on the census data.
President: How many people live in the US?
CJ: um…
burnspbesq
Here’s a thought: let’s have the FBI Hostage Rescue Team do the census. And make sure the rules of engagement are such that any wingnut who meets the census-taker at the door with a gun in his or her hand is fair game.
Fuck ’em.
omen
@The Other Steve:
it’s a UN plot in a scheme for a new world order.
SpotWeld
Not to be dense here.. but people refusing to answer census questions has been something that has had to have been dealt with since it started?
Why are conservatives suddenly finding solidarity with people here on greencards who’re afriad they’ll be deported.
Little Dreamer
@Shinobi:
You forgot the biggest one of all, “PAY TAXES” !!
;)
kay
@Zifnab:
I worked the polls during the primary. I always work my own precinct, and it’s overwhelmingly Republican.
The Operation Chaos people were not regular GOP voters. They were registered, but they weren’t the stalwarts that care about local elections.
They took a Dem ballot and missed the big local race, which was a GOP primary for County Commissioner.
Two distinct groups. Republicans and Lunatics.
SpotWeld
I assume it involves sticking your fingers in your ears while humming “God Bless American” loudly.
Bill E Pilgrim
Last year just a month before the election I drove across the entire country, which I hadn’t done since I was a kid, from NYC across the midwest then up through Iowa to Idaho and Montana, finally to Oregon and down to California.
The country was astoundingly beautiful, the people were great, and the talk radio was so astonishingly weird and scary that I went from initial optimism to wondering how in the world Obama could ever win the election. I really didn’t think it was possible after hearing that, at least until I got back into more familiar territory and modes of thinking.
For someone who’s never lived in the heartland, well not since very very young, man oh man is it an awakening and not a pleasant one.
On the other hand, I understand that Michael Savage is based in my home town of San Francisco, so go figure.
Joshua Norton
Nope. An undisclosed location in Marin. Which is even weirder. Might as well be Berkeley.
Zifnab
@Little Dreamer: I’m more willing to believe that Oliver Garden pulled it’s Letterman ads because one of the advertising execs watches too much FOX News than I am to believe they pulled the ads over a bunch of panicky “Why do you hate Umerika?!” emails.
We didn’t “dodge a bullet” with Clinton any more than McCain “dodged a bullet” when Kos tried to get Mitt the win in Michigan. Did you see the anti-Letterman protests up on YouTube? They were way more hilarious than effective. Parading around after Rush talking points just makes you look like an idiot. Limbaugh flip-flopped on Obama more than once in the campaign when he was alternately calling McCain a RINO and Hillary the second coming of Stan.
They are much less influential than they want you to believe.
malraux
I can remember similar excitement about the 2000’s intrusive questions. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/jan-june00/census_3-30.html
I mean really, have the right winger’s had any original though in years, rather than just echoing previous thoughts.
Mudge
I know Hoppy fairly well. A nice, interesting guy, although I do not espouse his politics.
Once upon a time, I had a short term summer job going house to house in an unnamed New Jersey town with a questionaire about local fire and police service. I was instructed to identify all of the “hostiles”, those who refused or lectured me about privacy, etc. The census bureau now has a means to identify the “hostiles” and do statistics on them.
Another well thought out strategy by the paranoid right.
omen
@kay:
i fault kos for the idea of cross interference. he thought it would be “fun” for dems to cross over and vote for romney in michigan since the primary wouldn’t officially count. that kind of mischief just cheapens the process when it should be held as something sacred.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Joshua Norton:
Ah. Actually that makes more sense to me. Novato, or something. It’s changed now I’m sure as it’s gotten more upscale and etc but still. You don’t have to go far outside of the liberal enclaves of SF and Berkeley proper to find Pennsyltucky, sometimes.
He’s probably hiding in Bolinas, that would be hilarious. And almost make a sort of sense.
Chuck Butcher
@Shinobi:
OMG I am now outed as a lefty Democrat and therefore entirely immaterial….
Shinobi
Little Dreamer: I think I was assuming they had already “gone Galt.”
Chuck:
I totally forgot “Contribute to Political Campaigns”!
Little Dreamer
@Zifnab:
Well, unless news has changed, I heard Olive Garden DIDN’T pull their ads. Am I wrong? Should I do a Google search?
Ash Can
OK, the census has been around for over two hundred fucking years and now these morons are whining about it? I agree with Dulcie. As soon as (stage whisper) one of them is elected President, anything and everything associated with the federal government immediately becomes the embodiment of evil, with the single exception of the second amendment. And I agree with other posters here that — as long as no one gets shot — the wackos going Galt on the census is nothing but good.
Donald G
I worked as a census enumerator during the 1990 census going door-to-door doing follow-up visits to addresses that didn’t mail in their form. When we met with resistance to answering questions then, we were told to stress that federal privacy laws prevented the Census Bureau from sharing specific individual answers to the questionaire with other federal agencies, but only statistical aggregate data. [After -9-11 and the lowering of the privacy wall and data protection, I no longer know if this is still true.]
I ran into a couple of people who didn’t want the government having any information on them. If we couldn’t persuade them with words, then we were to drop the matter and go on to the next household on our route, but to make a note on the paperwork of the reason we couldn’t get a response.
SLKRR
A thread on crazies afraid of census takers and no one has mentioned fava beans and a nice chianti yet?
Little Dreamer
@Mudge:
How do they know who became hostile in the last ten years?
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
@Little Dreamer:
I think Olive Garden has a new slogan:
Through June, arugula salads are just $1.99, all you can eat.
New spokesman:
Popeye the Sailor: Ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo, Olive (Garden)!
( I just got off the treadmill and had a large iced coffee, I am really full of this stuff right now.)
Adam C
When it comes to Bush listening in on their phone calls, these people are upset that you even want to talk about it (and therefore damage state security).
Yet they’ll freak out over the census. Insane.
Augustine
@Punchy:
Senescence has since set in…
robertdsc
Ha ha ha. You win the thread.
The Saff
“The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct…”
Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States
I’m guessing most of these wingnuts have never read this document before.
Woodrowfan
Um, Clinton was still President in 2000, the Chimp came in January 2001.
D-Chance.
FYI, Cole, Mark Davis is (was? haven’t listened to the station for a long time) the morning conservative talking head for WBAP 820AM in Dallas.
He used to be a fine host… covered local news, state news, even no news (just cultural or family or plain old everyday observation). He’d sometimes just wander out into the hallway, grab 3-4 fellow WBAP employees and hold impromptu roundtable discussions about the Cowboys or politics or whatever. Some very serious segments, but the overall tone of the program was light-hearted and definitely bent towards entertainment during the work hours over political grandstanding.
But, a few years ago, he did what many of the “local” or territorial morning talk hosts did… he sign a national syndication deal. And his show immediately experienced a total makeover in content and tone. Basically, he sold out.
Best of luck to the man. I understand doing what has to be done to promote oneself in a competitive industry and to put food on the table; but, he lost me as a listener years ago when he went from local “let’s see what going on around the area” coffee table yammerer to unabashed Bush toadie and strident “rah-rah, and if you don’t agree, you’re a traitor” propagandist for the authoritarians.
David Hunt
Funny coincidence. So do they. It’s just that you’re the only one the would be made any happier by them getting their wish.
steve s
Friend of mine is middle management at a call center in North Florida. They’ll get a contract to call several thousand homes to, say, try to sell them a subscription to the Gainesville Sun. She said about every 2 or 3 calls, instead of a hang-up or a polite no thanks, the recipient of the call will launch into a righteous lecture about how “I ain’t gonna subscribe to that damn paper cause it’s nothin but libral lies and a bunch of libral BS that’s biased. And maybe if ya’ll weren’t so biased I’d get a subscription but until you start tellin’ people The TRUTH about stuff insteada yer Libral ‘In-ter-pre-ta-tions’ of the truth or whatever Obama tells you to think maybe you wouldn’t be in so much trouble. You ever think of that? Ya’ll ever think you should maybe start tellin people the truth and then maybe people would subscribe blah blah blah…”
The tard doing the speechifying is, of course, completely unaware that the person he’s talking to is not sitting in the Gainesville Sun newsroom next to the editor, but just some poor schmuck making $9 an hour listening to idiotic rants like this all day long.
kay
@omen:
It was interesting. Polling places have their own energy. Whatever we might think about the candidates, the voting part is serious. It’s a little like the atmosphere in a courthouse. Muted.
We sit two to a table in my state, one Democrat and one Republican “judge” per table. MY GOP cohort was embarrassed.
The Limbaugh voters breached the weird voting decorum. They were loud. They held their noses when they took the Dem ballot. The clowned around and used wingnutty language. They arrived in groups. They announced how they were voting and why.
They violated the space. Whatever else it is, it isn’t a joke.
steve s
HISTORY FAIL.
ETA: dang. Someone beat me to it.
NY Texan
Growing up in Dallas, my mom would always play Mark Davis (dunno if she still does, but she’s pretty Republican so mebbe), and what’s interesting about him is this distilled crazy is actually relatively new to him.
Back in the day (mid-90s on), he would often offer up rather reasonable viewpoints – for example, he argued Republicans can’t be the party of no abortions, but instead fewer abortions. I won’t say he was consistently reasonable, but he was always a right-winger I could respect, a kind of pre-Expelled Ben Stein.
He started going crazy right about the time of the 9/11 commission, when he argued vociferously that Condi Rice had a stellar(!) performance in front of Congress when she testified about the “Bin Ladin determined…” memo, and that the Bush Administration bore zero responsibility for what happened.
It really seems like 9/11 took conservatism off the deep end, and took a lot of people who were (in general) people you could have a polite discussion with and shipped them off to Bachmann-land where only tax cuts, neocons, religious fanatics, racists and tinfoil hats reside.
sbjules
I’m into genealogy & I am so glad my ancestors did not believe in avoiding the census. And the more questions they ask, the better for historians–family & other. The census is a window on life in the U.S.
Ked
In a hurry, so I can’t devote this the words it deserves, but think of the poor, bewildered census workers!
A solid “what-the-fuck-was-that” 1.4 wingularity masses
Though if they hurry, “fifth amendment” checkboxes can no doubt still be added to the census forms, which are all electronic this year I think.
gex
Hey, plenty of commenters on this blog do it. Either they prefer civil unions over marriage for gays or the prefer to eliminate marriage altogether. Others feel we aren’t being denied rights and frankly there are more important things to do. And I do not think that many, if any, of your commenters are homophobic.
So yes, you can oppose same sex marriage without being a homophobe. Plenty of people do.
Little Dreamer
@sbjules:
I’m a genealogy buff too, but I gotta say, it might be a blessing that the progeny of these folks in future days might not learn much about them, they might not be happy with what they find.
inpdx
@Krista:
It is kind of disingenuous to say that census workers make $17 per hour. Census pay is based on living wages and is different around the country. In large cities like New York, census workers make over $20/hour, and I believe Alaskans make $17/hour, but those are the highest wages, and understandable considering the cost of living, and the fact that workers use their own vehicles (especially important in a place like Alaska, where public transportation and pedestrian access is limited). I worked as an enumerator in Portland for the initial census data collection, and believe me, I was not getting paid $17 an hour.
PurpleGirl
Little Dreamer: If you want a Census job, today is the last day to apply. Go to the Census Bureau website and you apply on-line.
Tonal Crow
@The Saff:
Of course they haven’t read it. Still, your citation doesn’t account for the fact that Amendments can change the operation of previously-enacted Constitutional provisions. I have significant sympathy for the 4th Amendment arguments, though I find it derisively absurd that cons are yelling about this while simultaneously mocking all objections to warrantless spying, border laptop searches, war-on-drugs madness, driving-while-black searches, and so forth.
The Grand Panjandrum
Only read a few of the comments so my apologies if this is a repeat but I do recall reading somewhere in a comments section (Freep, Malkin, RS?) that this Very Intrusive Census was a plot by Obama to figure out where all the guns were at so they could later confiscate them. I don’t remember the argument presented but it was pure wingnut platinum. I meant to save that link it was so good but I must have gotten distracted and now cannot find it.
MCA
Prediction: The first time a 2010 Census figure is used to justify a shift in appropriations that doesn’t sit particularly well with the Right, we’ll be treated to a two-week cycle of Bachmann, et. al. raging about how the census itself is a tool of oppression, and that Obama (or, better yet, ACORN) instructed censustakers to disproportionately hit up the homes of those who voted for him for interviews.
Either that or they’ll bitch about how the census is unfair because it doesn’t represent the black helicopter libertarians and Galtists who don’t turn their forms in out of a sense of superior patriotism, and demand a constitutional amendment to require all census results be actuarially skewed toward the assumed preference of said wingnuts by using Rush’s radio audience shares as proxy for their numbers.
Will
I remember then-presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush in ’99 recommending that people just refuse to answer the questions. It was up the right’s a$$ then too.
Tsulagi
Well, no doubt that Rush wannabe radio host will get into black helicopter territory when a Census worker shows up to take the GPS coordinates of his front door. One showed up at our house about a month ago to do just that. Was a little surprising, and I did check his credentials before letting him walk up to the door to do that. He also took the coordinates of a detached guest cottage we have on the property.
After he left I checked and it seems the Census Bureau plans to get the GPS coordinates of every home front door in the country. I’m sure that’ll trigger some conspiracy theories. Maybe the Rush wannabe will advise their really smart target audience to hang a huge tinfoil umbrella over their property to brilliantly thwart the evil Census collection of GPS data.
Little Dreamer
@PurpleGirl:
Interesting, I just checked the Census Bureau page and I found this:
What are they going to do if rightwingers don’t participate as a whole, based on a Repub fatwa proposed by Limbaugh et al.?
The page say they are not hiring at this time but will be hiring in the fall (peak hiring phase).
Thanks!
dmsilev
@Donald G:
Nitpick, but a sort of nifty one: After several decades (72 years, I think), the raw data is made public. The National Archives has it on microfilm, publicly accessible, going all the way back to the first census in 1790. Some years ago, I spent a day there and was able to track down the census data for a couple of grandparents and several family members of the great-grandparent generation. Some interesting bits and pieces of info, like my grandmother’s family was the one of the few families on the block who owned a radio in 1930. Not all that new technology at the time, but penetration into working-class Jewish neighborhoods was apparently limited.
-dms
Mike G
I encourage all red staters and wingnuts to refuse to answer the census. Their population will be undercounted, so they’ll receive less appropriations from the federal treasury. Who knows, maybe they’ll actually end up paying as much taxes as they consume, for the first time ever.
Little Dreamer
@Tsulagi:
Then we’d be able to identify them easily. ;)
PurpleGirl
The past two census surveys (if not further back) had problems over how they counted or didn’t count Hispanics, homeless people and some other ethnicity questions. Watch for this again when they begin processing and aggregating the numbers.
Little Dreamer — Thank you.
Remember folks, the form is mailed to all households; the door-to-door comes later after they see who didn’t mail the form back to them.
scav
mmm. I’m suddenly intrigued by the idea of combining all their issues – say, Going Galt and Not Answering The Census can merge into a DIY Rapture and then, if they’re real real literal about the whole thing (please), things might get simpler for the rest of us. Preemptive Rapture might still be a step too far.
Death By Mosquito Truck
Onliest thing we can do is brand ’em with a number on their hand or forehead to make it easier to count ’em going forward.
bvac
What ever happened to the “if you don’t have anything to hide..” mentality of the GOP? Oh wait, they usually do have something to hide. Like stashes of firearms and child pornography.
Nevermind.
David
Let them not answer – it seems to me that it would reduce their weight in the census. It would therefore provide sane people with a larger portion of the censused population.
Another case of conservatives whining, crying, and taking their ball home.
Comrade Dread
So, we don’t worry about the NSA and CIA listening in on our conversations and reading our emails because hell, what’s the worst that can happen with that, right? It’s not like we said the President could declare you an enemy combatant and ship you off to a super happy fun torturing prison without any legal recourse? Wait, we did say that? Oh… well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.
But if a damn gubbmint census taker asks ya sum questions about your energy preference, it’s an invasion of privacy, I tells ya!!!
And, Republicans, there is a right to privacy. Aside from the inferences in the 4th amendment, you’ve got explicit text in the 9th amendment that says that just because the founders didn’t sit down and enumerate a right doesn’t mean that we don’t have it.
I’d think strict constructionists would know that.
Tonal Crow
@Comrade Dread: Republicans hate the 9th Amendment more than they hate DFHs. The “strict constructionist” types tend to call it an “inkblot” that has no decipherable meaning — and therefore no force of law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution .
Comrade Darkness
Not being counted will play perfectly into the victim mentality… the whites can become a minority even earlier than expected.
Adrienne
I just skipped right to the bottom, but I thought that a link to Dave Chappelle about the fifth amendment would be awesome right here….
PurpleGirl
David @ 109 & Comrade Darkness @ 112 — Good comments. An end devoutedly to be wished & From your mouth to ghod’s ear.
Litlebritdifrnt
I have not read all the comments, so I apologize if this has been brought up but the caller said “I will plead the fifth” Mark then read the entire fifth amendment to him and it was OBVIOUS that the caller had no clue what he was talking about, absolutely none! Then Mark had to go into all sorts of machinations about how “liberty” was somehow being free of having to answer questions, however it was obvious that the caller, while spouting “I plead the fifth” didn’t have a clue what he was pleading.
Litlebritdifrnt
@gex:
I think it should be civil unions for everyone, gay hetro whatever, and only marriage if you want to do it in a church.
UncleCharlie
Sweet Jesus. Did he really give that explanation of the 5th amendment? If I ever get lobotomized I am going to become a talk show host. Fuck.
Little Dreamer
@Litlebritdifrnt:
You only recognize it because we have bullshit meters which are honed in on this kind of thing. I’m sure there were plenty of people listening to that radio broadcast saying “that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to just tell those census workers it’s a violation of the fifth amendment”.
Census workers this year may need to add a footnote about the ineptitude of certain hostile citizens. ;)
Get This
Davis also has a column in the Dallas Morning News. Seriously.
I canceled my subscription. Douches all.
alex milstein
Let’s just hope hope hope that – as this Mark Davis says – Michelle Bachmann is the GOP’s rising star.
BC
Actually, if the wingnuts get the census long form and don’t want to answer all the questions, all they have to do is answer the question of number of people, put in an envelope and send back to the Census Bureau and that’s that – no one will visit them at all. We don’t do the census door to door – we only go door to door for those who don’t return the mailed form. If you return the long form with all the “intrusive” questions unanswered, that is accepted as a response by Census Bureau and the door to door guys never get your name. I did the door to door thing in Denver suburb in 2000 – pretty eye opening about who didn’t return the short or long form. But only a few people are asked the questions on the long form. So how are all these people who are going to stick it to the government going to feel when all they get is the short form and no intrusive questions at all? Project Fail!!
Svensker
@BC:
Spoil sport.
handy
I’m guessing most of these wingnuts have never read this document before.
And by most you mean 99.99999% of course.
low-tech cyclist
Joe @4: The anti-census crowd was around in 2000, and that’s why the gov. got rid of the long form and started the ACS. The long form went to 1 in 5 households, and they had too much difficulty with the crazies, so they are statistically sampling about 1 in 500 or 1000 in targeted areas each year to make up for it.
Census guy putting in his 2 cents here. While the anti-Census crowd was around in 2000, it merely provided added impetus to the plans for the American Community Survey (ACS) as a permanent, rolling replacement for the old Long Form (1 in 6 households, not 1 in 5, just to nitpick) which was already on the drawing boards.
The ACS goes to about 2 million households a year, and the U.S. has ~120 million households, which means that over a 10-year period, about 1 in 6 households get the ACS. So we’re doing the same thing, just on a rolling basis. The data stays current, rather than being a dozen years out of date before the data from the next Long Form was available in the past. (The 2000 long form data was available in 2002 or 2003, at which point the 1990 long form data gave you information about the country as it was in 1990, of course.)
Donald G @75: I worked as a census enumerator during the 1990 census going door-to-door doing follow-up visits to addresses that didn’t mail in their form. When we met with resistance to answering questions then, we were told to stress that federal privacy laws prevented the Census Bureau from sharing specific individual answers to the questionaire with other federal agencies, but only statistical aggregate data. [After 911 and the lowering of the privacy wall and data protection, I no longer know if this is still true.]
Thanks for being one of our followup enumerators back then – I know it’s often far from being a walk in the park. I just want to say that 9/11 HASN’T changed the privacy wall around the Census: we’re pretty damned touchy about that, because we know that if people start believing that the data they give us might get into wider circulation, even if it’s not true, then it’s game over for us: we just wouldn’t be able to get the response rates we do to our surveys, and the data we’d get would undoubtedly be skewed. Anyhow, we take the firewall around our data EXTREMELY seriously.
Meanwhile, some anonymous GOP Senator has put a hold on our incoming Census director, a guy named Bob Groves who’s a topnotch statistician (just went to a talk he gave on nonresponse bias), as well as someone who’s got good administrative experience. I don’t know whether that’s impeding the Census Bureau from pushing back against this nonsense, or whether they’re only dimly aware of what’s going on in wingnuttia, or whether there’s been a conscious decision not to respond (which I think would be misguided).
tess
Census documents stay confidential for 72 years after they were taken. That’s why genealogists and other researchers can only go back to 1930 to do their research, and the 1940 Census won’t be released until 2012. Given that we have a longer life expectancy now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the time extended at some point in the near future.
The information one can glean from the released forms is wonderful for a researcher–occupations, place of birth, year of naturalization, and, for (I think) 1880 and 1900 (at least; 1890 was mostly destroyed) asking women how many children they’d had and how many were alive today. Somehow I think that was a far more intrusive question than whether or not you have hot water in your bathroom.
Davis X. Machina
Census data.
B
@Shinobi: Good point, I doubt many people even give this much thought.