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The Nation's Pulse
Can America Come to Its Census?
As Doctor Livingstone famously responded, "Never presume." Most of us tend to presume good faith on the part of opponents and often pay a high price for naïveté. Just because you wait for the green light to cross does not assure that the driver bearing down will treat his red with the same respect.
Just in case this election has not been alarming enough, with Democrats selling their phony tax cuts to a strangely gullible populace, I invite you to join me in absolute horror. My Democrat sources have just revealed to me a plan to hijack the census in 2010 and to move vast amounts of electoral votes from red to blue states.
To start at the beginning, with each passing day Democrat friends have been taunting me more mordantly. The polls have consistently favored Obama, building their confidence. As they become more convinced that victory will be theirs, they become less restrained in their modes of expression.
This weekend I was briefly excited by the one-day Zogby poll which showed McCain ahead by a point. I made the mistake of citing this to a Democrat operative. He laughed mockingly, and added this ominous line: "Not only is this election in the bag, we have a plan to guarantee Democrat victories for years to come."
"What are you talking about?"
"The census in 2010, brother."
Here is the scenario. Beginning in 2009, they will start planting articles in the media about how minorities have historically been intimidated by the census. They will interview people in black and Hispanic neighborhoods who explain they never trusted the government in the past. They were afraid their information would be used against them, especially if they had relatives of "intermediate" immigration status.
All that has changed now, will be the theme. The Obama administration is reaching out to everybody, every citizen, to be sure they are not disenfranchised. Huge grants will be given to ACORN-like groups to help educate and sensitize minority groups into the importance of participating in the census.
Another set of articles will appear, quizzing both census-takers and residents. They will be full of heart-warming stories of families who have been here for generations but only now are standing up to be counted. It feels good to sign up for the first time, now in the new America, the country that has matured and finally blossomed into a true land of opportunity.
If anyone grumbles too loudly at these reports, they will be portrayed as racist Scrooges who want to keep a permanent underclass uncounted and unrepresented. This will be a poignant reminder that America has not quite succeeded yet in fully eradicating its discriminatory and xenophobic tendencies.
At the end of the day, the Democrat White House and the Democrat Congress will find that many electoral votes need to shift from red states to blue states. This will be particularly true in states that also have a legislature controlled by Democrats who can then rearrange the Congressional districts in ways that guarantee their party a lot of easily held seats.
No one has the slightest inkling that this is in the cards, and the McCain-Palin campaign never raises the census as an issue. Yet when I heard this gleeful boast I was immediately overcome by the sickening realization: this is definitely plausible and there is nothing we can do to stop it in its tracks.
In truth, political paranoia has never been my cup of tea. But even after drinking the reasonable brand, the tea still leaves leaves. Failure to read them may leave the Republicans on ice for years to come.
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Tejas calling| 11.4.08 @ 7:28AM
Welcome to the new USSA...
God help us all.
I-Colorado| 11.4.08 @ 9:47AM
Re your comment: "...Democrats selling their phony tax cuts to a strangely gullible populace..."
The issue is not that the populace is "gullible", rather the demographics of the populace has shifted in a number of ways:
A. The Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, identified early that they could not win the election by relying on the historic voter. Instead they have recruited the those who have the least to risk (college students, the inner-city poor) who historically have low voter turnouts.
B. The fact that 90%-95% of all blacks will support Obama simply for the fact that he is "black" is indicative that this is not an "issues" election, but a popularity contest.
C. Lastly, the 40% of the population who do not pay any income taxes and who expect to see some long term financial "reward" by supporting a person who promotes tax credits and "resdistribution of wealth" have nothing to lose. If Obama wins--they win; and if he doesn't--there is not any downside for them.
The net of the issue is that these same "least informed" individuals assume zero risk for an Obama win. College students do not pay taxes (yet) and can afford to vote based on ideology; the poor and blacks seek more "entitlements" which they do not earn.
Should Obama win--those that supported him, as well as those who didn't, may be sorely disappointed. There is not any way that the country can fund all of his promises to the 40%, and any movement in that direction will penalize those who will have to foot the bill.
Spicy Joker| 11.4.08 @ 2:41PM
Don't forget that public schools have dumbed people down, encouraged disrespect for traditional values and institutions, and promoted identity politics.
Mike| 11.4.08 @ 4:12PM
God help us all indeed!
Google Ezra Taft Benson on socialism. We will adopt it one step at a time until we wake up one day fully entrenched in it.
Avitar| 11.4.08 @ 4:45PM
This same scheme was used in the 1960 using the “One Man One” Supreme Court ruling to nullify 49 of the 50 states anti-gerrymandering laws. This allowed the Democrats to retain control of the congress after suffering one of the greatest electoral defeats in history in the 1972 election. They were able impeach Richard Nixon and dictate the loss of the Vietnam War. Committee chairmen like Frank Church announced the names of working, on station CIA operative from the floor of the Senate. Patriots were helpless to stop the insanity.
Fortunately, the Roe effect is built into American’s demographics carrying the population toward red state status. We are also beginning this cycle in an era of new information technology that the Democrats may find harder to control than the information technology in the era of the New Deal or the Great Society. The importance of information control in politics and its technology almost cannot be overstated. They may control the wealth of the nation for the next two terms of President but even if the Republicans fail utterly the Liberals’ reign will end with the 2020 election.
gazinya| 11.4.08 @ 6:45PM
Wow. It is like watching an avalanche. It starts slow then builds into this hugely unstoppable torrent of debris. A mudslide of political garbage that is uncomonly spectacular in its design. FDR gave it a push, then the 1947 Supreme Court gave it a blast with the "Wall of Seperation". Then we taxed and embarrased the mothers out of the home. Took God out of our schools. Paid people to have bastard children, who were left like dogs on the street to fend for themselves. And now we are electing a government that is totally bent on destroying the constitution and re-writing it to codify godlessness. I know pornography when I see it. This is a wonderful example of what happens when a people become amoral. Beautiful, isn't it.
Baba Ganoush| 11.5.08 @ 12:37PM
The article doesn't say how the hijacking of the census will be accomplished. The claim will be that in certain areas the census is incomplete. Because census workers were not able to count everyone, the actual numbers will be statistically adjusted. It is this step that will be subject to abuse for political ends. We've been down this road before and while such a radical change from the past has been resisted, this time look for the Democrats to force the Census to change its methodology.
Richard L. Kent, Esq.| 11.5.08 @ 2:14PM
This is not news to those of us in the know.
I worked on the Subcommittee on the Census in 1998-1999 in the House of Representatives. This is exactly the same thing they tried last time. It took a House compromise (remember the GOP controlled the House in 1999 and therefore we compromised with the Democrats) plus a Supreme Court ruling to find that the Constitution is not joking when it says 'actual enumeration'.
Hopefully there will still be a conservative majority in the Supreme Court when this thing hits in 2010. In which case they will throw the whole thing out on its stinking ear. What part of the phrase "Actual Enumeration" don't they understand?
Richard L. Kent, Esq.| 11.5.08 @ 2:19PM
How will it be hijacked?
By using something called "statistical sampling." Basically it will be an attempt to turn the Census, which requires an ACTUAL ENUMERATION (it's right there in Article I of the U.S. Constitution), into an exit poll. If someone is not home, they'll be able to "impute" the presence of those who are not counted without actually having to find them.
This is very useful when assigning social funding needs (like building firehouses for instance) in neighborhood that have large numbers of census non-respondents in them. It is however unconstitutional when applied to reapportionment and redistricting, as it is an obscene violation of the one-man-one-vote (Oh! Sorry! one-*person*-one-vote) rule. U.S. Congressional districts must equal one another within a state +-1 voter. "Imputatation" renders that requirement as meaningless as it was when the Democrats still openly ran the white-supremacist machine and disenfranchised the black populace of the South.
It's gonna be a rough ride. If we don't stop this in its tracks, we'll never see a GOP majority again in our lifetimes.
Dorothe H. Brenneman| 11.5.08 @ 8:24PM
Appropo to Election 2008, quote my late son:
"IT REFLECTS THE MENTALITY OF THE POPULACE."
MK| 11.6.08 @ 2:30AM
As you sow so you reap. First Bush, and now you nutters were planning to foist a moron like Palin on the world. The conservative brand is in shambles ("Conservatives = Morons"). Wake up and shake of the unholy alliance with the religious right. And then let us see if you have any good ideas...
Talisyn| 11.6.08 @ 10:40AM
The last 8 years have been one of the outer circles of Democrat hell. How does it feel to fear for the survival of your country? Been there, done that, not gonna do it again until 2012. And guess what? The beauty is this is a 2 party country, and the balance of power goes back and forth. Stop whining, and try to make this world a better place. I assure you us Dems will be doing the same.
Ms. Know | 11.14.08 @ 11:26AM
The mainstream media illuminati have made America make a decision they will soon regret. Hope they can pitch in to help us when we go down.
SB| 12.11.08 @ 6:19PM
If the republicans actually ran on reducing immigration overall, they would peel off enough democrats to win.
But they'll never do it. There's a lot of money to be made off of entitlement programs. Even more if use cheap immigrant labor... and they get rid of social-cons by burying them with gangsters, drug-runners, Islamic fundamentalists... your town gets flooded with the world's impoverished trash, our elitist leaders fill their accounts with taxpayers' money and hide on private estates. Oh, and our boys get sprayed all over Iraq and Afganhistan trying to solve the problems immigrants left behind.