Remember, folks, Glenn Beck, Rush, and the rest are just entertainers:
Among the more troubling were incidents that arose from residents’ seething resentment that anyone from the government would seek their personal information.
Some people pointedly mentioned President Obama.
While conducting follow-ups in an upscale Seattle neighborhood, Grover Ellis said he came across a woman who considered him an agent of Obama, not the U.S. government.
“The idea of the census just enraged her,” said Ellis, 64, stressing that the overwhelming majority of people he met were welcoming and responsive. “The way she saw the census, she was required to help Obama. And she wasn’t going to do anything to help out Obama.”
[….]In a rural part of California’s Nevada County northeast of Sacramento, two census workers told authorities that a man ordered them off his land. He mentioned his submachine gun, then followed them down the drive with a crossbow in hand. No charges were brought against the resident, the sheriff’s department said.
This is all going to get a lot worse, of course. When terrible things happen it will probably be the work of liberal plants.
Hunter Gathers
As well all know, counting a nation’s population is nothing but a liberal conspiracy to take yer guns, yer propertai, and brainwash yer children into voting for a racist Muslin.
robertdsc
Isn’t the census part of the Constitution?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
And Seattle and California are two of our supposed commie havens. How would you like to be a census worker in east Cracker, Alabama?
All these dimwits know is the president is black. All the other shit excuses about spending, government takeovers, and violations of the Constitution is just that, shit excuses.
Obot Stuck — Agent of Obama. Hardcore division.
Martin
@robertdsc: The liberal part – like all the Amendments that aren’t the 2nd.
Anya
There are a lot of crazy people in this country. It’s really disheartening.
kdaug
My mother likes to call herself a strict constitutional originalist when it comes to the law.
I’ve always wanted to say – but avoid for obvious reasons – that she should shut up then, because as a woman she doesn’t have a vote, so her opinion is irrelevant anyway.
Discussing politics in my family is a high-effort/low-yield kind of affair.
suzanne
A submachine gun and a crossbow? What a wuss. That’s not frightening in the slightest.
If, however, he’d mentioned having some fava beans and a nice Chianti, *then* that census taker would know he meant business.
Uloborus
This is why, much as I could use a job and the income, I refused to get a census job in Kentucky. I really can’t deal with that much hostility.
matt
Census worker here.
Yeah. We get several of these instances every day.
I’ve had things like
(after explaining the basis for the census in the constitution): “I don’t agree with your constitutional analysis. Please leave.”
“in MY government they don’t come to our houses to count us”
“I don’t agree with this government’s massive waste of money on the census”
“You’re just a stooge for obama, helping get the employment numbers up”
“Census workers are considered trespassers and we will shoot you” -On a sign on the way to a house. (had to have a police escort for that one)
One house called the cops on us as we were there, and they were mad when the cops took our side.
Ive heard several stories through the home office of people taking shots at the census workers.
The census is required by law under the constitution.
It’s in the front too! The U.S. Constitution empowers the Congress to carry out the census in “such manner as they shall by Law direct” (Article I, Section 2).
It is literally one of the first things they put down while writing it.
Its been some interesting summer employment. Being a lawyer has come in handy arguing with some of the more difficult people.
There’s something funny when they realize that you’re going to keep coming back to their place over and over and over again to get their information. That moment they just give in, is delicious.
Geoduck
Probably wouldn’t help in a lot of case , but you should still probably carry a copy of the Constitution with you to show the part about the Census.
Martin
@Anya: Well, I don’t blame them. I blame the pigfuckers like Beck and Limbaugh and Bachmann that know better and are just whipping these poor rubes up for political gain or ratings.
If I were president I’d really have a hard time not de-orbiting a satellite on one of the jackasses.
suzanne
@matt: How many times can you bug someone before you give up? I’m wondering how many people are gonna be holdouts.
Yutsano
@Geoduck: Pfft. All they say is “That ain’t in MY Constitution!!” and continue to be obstinate. Remember these people are creating their own reality. There is no getting through that.
LD50
@matt:
And what government would that *be*? The imaginary Randian paradise in his head, I suppose.
FlipYrWhig
You know, these people aren’t 10 freakin’ years old. They’ve lived through other censuses without assuming they were being targeted for internment. And yet they really seem to think it was some strange new thing cooked up by Obama. You’d think that paranoia would at least be consistent.
Anya
@Martin: I am not sure if Buckman and Beck should be included on the sane but opportunistic category. Limbaugh, on the other hand is a disgusting opportunistic selfish asshole. That fat bastard’s arteries are resilient buggers.
Joey Maloney
Just entertainers, yep.
Nick
Country First!
Martin
@FlipYrWhig: This isn’t new. It happened in 2000, it happened in 1990. We didn’t have blogs to spread the word, but we also didn’t have government officials like Bachmann telling people it was some kind of plot.
She should have been impeached for that. Freedom of speech is one thing, but a government official telling citizens to ignore the Constitution should be grounds for being removed from office.
kdaug
@FlipYrWhig: Damn good point. It’s in the Constitution, not an amendment but part of the original document, and has happened every ten years since anyone’s been alive.
Why the hell is it suddenly “scary”?
ChockFullO'Nuts
I can tell you exactly why this is happening.
The rightwing noise machine pumps anywhere from 5-10 pieces of mail, and by that I mean snail mail, paper US mail, much of it First Class mail … into the mailboxes of people on their vast mailing lists EVERY DAY.
I am going to spare you the story about how I know this, but I can assure, I see it firsthand on a regular basis. That’s 30-60 pieces of mail per week, and the stuff covers the entire spectrum of wingnut madness from A to Z.
Every wildass conspiracy theory, every slur, every racial screed, every nihilist rant against taxation or government in general, every personal attack on every Democrat, every imaginable demonization of liberals and the left that you can imagine. Take everything you have ever seen and over a month’s time, multiply it by ten or twenty. Sixty pieces a week, 250 a month, several thousand a year. Literally pounds and pounds of this propaganda, week in and week out, over and over again. And always accompanied by pleas for money, with donation envelopes included. Well crafted, well produced, professional, relentless.
A certain percentage of the population is systematically brainwashed to believe the craziest shit you can possibly dream of. Census takers are agents of Obama? Trust me, that is not even close to the nuttiest shit going out in the mail every day. Not even close.
Splitting Image
I have trouble believing that these people aren’t aware that a census has been done in the U.S. every ten years for the past two centuries.
This is where the Hanlon axiom breaks down. (“Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.”)
Stupidity can’t explain this. So malice it is.
Wonder what’s got these people so angry all of a sudden.
Polish the Guillotines
@Splitting Image:
The President’s a black guy.
Roger Moore
I doubt that they’ll manage to pin it on a liberal plant. They will certainly try to find anything and everything the person said that makes them look liberal, and they may even make some stuff up to do the same. But the basic defense will be that it’s a lone nut who’s completely unconnected to the right wing crazy machine telling people that the census is an evil liberal plot.
bago
BP is a lot like Peter North. They both lay some pipe and tend to spill.
Polish the Guillotines
@bago: I wouldn’t touch that analogy with a 10″ pole.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin:
Hmm. I guess I’d want to make a distinction between fear of The Government and this kind of personalization of The Government as Obama’s Stormtroopers, but I take your point. If anything you’d think that people would have been _extra_ freaked out by the 2000 census, given the militia/survivalist groups and Y2K panic and all that. I don’t remember it from the news, though. (For that matter, the stuff about the New World Order goes back far enough that maybe those same people were spooked by the 1990 census too.)
But I definitely don’t remember people thinking that census workers were an ominous arm of the Clinton administration, or the Bush administration before that. It sounds to me like there’s a large-ish group of people who are on edge about it as an Obama-specific thing, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) as a Scary Government thing like water fluoridation or Area 51 or black helicopters.
suzanne
@Polish the Guillotines: And the President’s smarter than they are.
I’m always amazed at the tendency of the stupid, uneducated people I know to be so incredibly resentful and distrustful of people smarter than they are. I have an old friend who barely finished high school and now drives a FedEx truck who thinks he is an authority on the dangerous myth of global warming. I want to ask him why he thinks he has more credibility than scientists from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and so forth, but I’m sure he’ll just brush me off as elitist. I really don’t understand that psychological mechanism, though. I mean, I have zero education or experience in neurosurgery, so I don’t offer opinions about it.
Damn. Now I’m just getting angry that stupid people reproduce.
matt
@Geoduck:
I always carry my constitution :V
I’m a lawyer as well so I can explain to them in as much detail as they want about it. (i try not to bring up the lawyer card if i can avoid it, if there’s another group these hillfolk distrust…)
We have a hard limit of 3 in person visits but we’ll call an additional 3 times. Once that’s up, its up to us as supervisors to go in and try to be extra convincing.
There’s actually a fine and potential jail time for not cooperating with the census, which we can point out as a last resort.
Only had to use that one once, and that 101st fightin keyboarder folded so quickly.
Nick
@ChockFullO’Nuts: I don’t know how I end up on their mailing lists, but I get them all the time.
One day I got SIX pieces of mail from varoius wingnuts.
“National Ballot on Taxes”- complaining about how Obama is raising all of our taxes
“Obama will give amnesty to illegal aliens who kill people in Arizona”
“Repeal Obamacare! Let Your Voice Be Heard before you lost your healthcare!”
and so on.
It’s ridiculous.
FlipYrWhig
@ChockFullO’Nuts: I really wish this country had fewer gullible people in it. If everyone who forwarded those chain emails got some kind of electrical shock for doing it, life would be much, much better.
Or, if I created a chain email that said that the next chain email you received would give you a deadly electrical shock through the keyboard, that might have the same effect.
Polish the Guillotines
@suzanne: The thing I’m beginning to realize as I drift into middle age is that rational thinking simply isn’t the norm, it’s the outlier. Sure, it’d be great if the stupid people didn’t reproduce, but that’d pretty well doom the human race to extinction.
FlipYrWhig
@suzanne: I would guess that he would say that climate scientists aren’t stupid, they’re just lying, because they’re all in on the global warming scam. That way he doesn’t have to know _more_ than they do, he just has to see himself as more truthful and with more integrity.
There are plenty of people who aren’t too bright who nonetheless aren’t _gullible_. That’s what gets me. Why not be a skeptic across the board? Why presume that some random stranger who wrote an email is telling the truth? Why conclude that you can’t trust The Media and then go on to put your trust in the people sending you scary mail that asks for money? I mean, come on.
Distrust in officialdom and conventional wisdom is IMHO completely comprehensible. It’s the decision that the people targeted by those mailings and email spams make to give up that inherent distrust and put _trust_ in someone, anyone, even if it’s saying crazy shit, that I have never been able to get.
Zam
Don’t you guys know that the constitution is only amendments? The Bill of Rights was the original, then they added all those other ones tarnishing the perfect nature of this sacred document.
This is how many of the teabaggers I know interpret the constitution, to them the Bill of Rights is essentially the 10 commandments. Just like they 10 commandments there are certain numbers that are more important than others and thus it is O.K to violate them while using the “perfect” nature of the document or law to justify irrational adherence to other aspects of it.
Martin
@FlipYrWhig:
Fair enough. I do agree that the wurlitzer is personifying this stuff in a way they never did with Clinton. Clinton never had his own private ACORN army soçializing the nation.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: [Oooh, I like that idea of using a cedille to avoid the s-word…]
roshan
I don’t know why the media is highlighting the few times these census workers encountered people with guns or their hatred about Obama. What about all those occasions when nothing of this sort happened?
kdaug
@roshan: What about all those people I didn’t kill?
Flip’s right, but I’ll take it from the other direction – why are so many smart, professional people (I’ve got doctors, lawyers, and CPAs in the immediate family to whom this applies) so damn gullible?
Reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker: “Critical Thinking: The Other National Deficit”
Yutsano
@FlipYrWhig: I cheat by another method that WP is letting me get away with, at least for now. But WP can be rather capricious like that.
@roshan: Snark or stupidity? One can never tell in this day and age.
MikeJ
Only related to the topic, but I heard an excellent radio documentary today about the textbook war in WV in 1974. At a reunion of some of the people fighting the textbooks, a preacher (who had been sent to prison on charges of conspiracy to blow up school buses) told about how much rougher they had it back then with no Glenn Beck, no Hannity, no Fox at all.
Well worth a listen. Download and transcript at:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/textbooks/
Adam Collyer
@matt:
We’re never going to enforce that. It’ll be a added charge tacked on after some lunatic does something excessively stupid.
But this?
You know what fixes problems like this? Charging this idiot with assault or menacing or whatever someone wants to call it. You can’t casually mention your machine gun and threaten census takers (or anyone, for that matter) with a crossbow. File charges. Make him deal with the consequences of his actions.
Adam Collyer
@Polish the Guillotines:
To quote from Mel Brooks’ epic Robin Hood: Men in Tights:
“A black sheriff???? He’s black?”
“And why not? Worked in Blazing Saddles.”
“Ohhh yeah, that’s good.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdEgHcDw2V0
Adam Collyer
@FlipYrWhig:
Actually, July 7th, 1996.
For those of you that missed the whole pop culture phenomenon… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(professional_wrestling)
gocart mozart
What’s a liberal plant, Arugula?
Martin
Courtesy of ESPN3, I’m watching my first ever professional cricket match. Not bad. It could benefit from some visual effects to make it better for TV. The field is quite large and it’s hard to see much of it in a single camera shot. An overhead graphic showing where the fielders are for each over would be handy, things like that. The 7 hr 45 min run time for this match is more than a little daunting though. I can understand why they came up with rules for a shorter game. I can’t imagine playing for that long.
SectarianSofa
@Polish the Guillotines:
Yep. Well put.
bago
@suzanne: Sexy business.
Martin
@Adam Collyer: I agree. Cracking down on them is mandatory if any mention of weapons or violence comes up. It can’t make it any worse, and 30 days might send a message to some of them.
Yutsano
@Adam Collyer:
And just like that you’ve created the next right-wing martyr. Rush and Glenn will take that arrest as the next signal in Obama’s great oppression of Real Merikans. The Right will take that as a gift and exploit it for their own aims in a heartbeat. Again, you cannot win with these people by making them feel oppressed. Your only chance is long slow persistent education. And even that’s a crapshoot.
@Martin: Again, I want to believe that it’s this easy, but experience suggests that the idiot with the crossbow will be turned into the next Joe the Plumber. Remember these people WANT evidence for their case.
Adam Collyer
@Yutsano:
For me, it’s not about the right-wing’s reaction. The guy is breaking the law and threatening innocent people with deadly weapons. That’s unacceptable. Actions have consequences. If a person wants to behave in such a manner, they deserve what they get.
Let the right wing scream and holler about it. He threatened two people with a crossbow. If that’s the horse they want to hitch their wagon to, then by all means.
Martin
@Yutsano: And this would be worse than what we have now? They’ve never needed their fellow patriots locked up to crank up the bullshit – they’ll just make shit up like Obama giving $20B extorted from BP to ACORN to steal elections.
Lock the fuckers up.
gocart mozart
The fewer wingnuts that are counted, the less commie Fed subsidies they will receive. This should please their pretend Galt sensibilities. Since poor and middle class wingnuts always vote against their own interests, non shitheads will benefit more by less representation. It is better to have no congressman than one who wants to fuck you up the ass. Its a win win.
Calouste
@Martin:
7h 45 min is the shorter game. The real stuff lasts 5 days.
(Ok, these days there is the even shorter version that lasts about 2 h 45.)
Calouste
@suzanne:
Look up “Incompetent and unaware of it”. The basic gist is that smart people know what they don’t know, and basically assume that there is someone who is smarter than them and knows what they don’t know. Stupid people don’t know what they don’t know, and consequently can’t even imagine that there is someone who is smarter because they think they know everything there is to know. Of course rejecting facts and logic and not questioning anything rather helps with this mindset.
fucen tarmal
@Polish the Guillotines:
what is it they say? an intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex? now, much as i struggle with that one myself, you can see that keeping stupid people from reproducing is no more realistic than cutting taxes on the rich being good for the middle class.
Mark Twain
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
MikeJ
@Calouste: Limiting it to 50 overs means it’s just not cricket. I like the long game. Very relaxing to listen to it on the
wirelessinternet while relaxing on the patio with a Pimm’s.The Ashes start again at the end of November sometime. Lousy Pimm’s on the patio weather here.
Martin
@MikeJ: I’m still trying to determine how you would follow such a game – even a 7 hour one.
Martin
@Calouste: Yes, this is it.
It’s sufficiently pervasive a problem that we’re now gearing our university general education around the problem. Basically, our science courses are being designed not so much to teach someone a little bit of biology or physics or whatever to a student out of the field, but to teach them how the scientific method works, how peer review works, and that no matter what they think they know, they truly know fuck-all about the discipline. Basically we’re teaching them how to tell the difference between James Hansen and Glenn Beck, and that they should give deference to Hansen for the following reasons that they can chase down themselves.
Mike G
@Martin:
In my experience of Australian one-day cricket spectators it involves lots of beer.
Mike G
@Martin:
You should have heard the outrage from the traditionalists when the revolutionary one-day cricket was launched in the late 70s. The “only true form” of cricket, you see, is a 5-day Test Match, with both sides wearing identical white uniforms.
Kyle
Why must we constantly indulge these whiny dumfuck babies and excuse them from accountability because of their threats of violence?
Does anyone doubt that if this were dirty hippies threatening to shoot meter readers or somesuch, a fucking SWAT team would be busting down their door and the only question would be whether they would use tasers or bullets.
David
from the BBC:
“India is launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database.”
bago
@Polish the Guillotines: That’s what’s the riser pipe is for.
asiangrrlMN
@Adam Collyer:
@Martin: I’m with you guys. They already claim to be the victims of everything that the ebbbil Islamofascistcrazy (black man) stupidmind-melding Obama is doing right now. They’ll believe it no matter what. This idiot broke the law. Charge him.
Hey, all. Where my late-night Juicers at?
hurricanesmith
Worked for the census for six months, the last few months as a crew leader. I had to quit due to finding other employment, but, Lord, I was ready to quit after dealing with crazies. I noticed around the first week that the people who were violently refusing were all spouting the same two or three talking points – it being an Obama plot, the census being a waste of money, and us ONLY needing to know how many people lived there and NOTHING ELSE (this is technically true; if we can get a count, but nothing else, the gov’t will eventually write off the other information as a loss and just go with the raw numbers, though we’ll continue to bug that person for weeks and weeks). This is in Los Angeles County, too, so it’s not exactly a hot bed of conservatism. The worst scenario involved one of my assistants being hosed down by someone who told her she didn’t need to be poking in anyone’s business.
The irony is that the government thought we’d have far more problems with predominantly Hispanic districts around here, where people are often afraid we’ll write up illegal immigrants (this is something we don’t ask about). But we had FAR more issues in middle- to upper-class neighborhoods. The poorer neighborhoods? A comparative snap.
I’ll agree with matt above. The best part was when someone finally realized they were going to keep being bothered or when we caught their wife or older child at home, who had no problems with giving us the information. Once, an employee got to the end of an interview, only to have the person they’d been having trouble with come out and realize their wife had given the information. That was a fun story. Lots of shouting, but we got the information we needed (though I worried for the wife!).
But worse stuff was going on in San Diego. A friend of mine had this story to share about what happened to his wife:
Capn America
@asiangrrlMN: I’m still up!
@David: That sounds a bit extreme, plus I have a hard time believing that a corrupt and incompetent government like that in much of India can efficiently collect the photos and fingerprints of hundreds of millions of people.
fucen tarmal
@Kyle:
if obama were the next hitler, i mean reagan, he would introduce a new version of an old drug, one with a high toxicity and dependency, one that makes crystal meth look quaint, then decry the drug as an epidemic, then make its users and dealers, lifers or may as well be lifers in the pennitentiary….
that is how you deal with an emergent or latent radical element in this country. you enable them, while dessicating them,then eradicate them, by removing them…
somehow i just don’t think we have it in us to make a crack for the country folk.
Svensker
@fucen tarmal:
Um, you do know that small towns are the hotbed of meth use, don’t you? Remember Sarah’s “son-in-law’s” mom getting arrested for making/dealing meth? It’s a huge problem for country folk.
John S.
Ceensus crew leader here.
Yes, the teabaggers are frighteningly stupid, a little bit scary and highly entertaining. By far, though, the group of people who gave my enumerators the hardest time were COPS. Across the board, in every district, they were the most difficult assholes to deal with.
TruthOfAngels
You could have some fun with that.
‘I wouldn’t know, sir, I’m carrying out the Constitution of the United States of America, of which you are an inhabitant.’
‘A CITIZEN, and don’t you forget it!’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir, I haven’t seen your birth certificate. Now, how many death panels do you have in your house?’
WereBear
Giving in to the crazies never works. So by all means let’s charge them, and have Fox go crazy.
Peel off the mask.
People who still use their brains will be horrified that it’s gone this far. (A great big noisy fuss will communicate that, because I’m sure most solid citizens have no idea this is going on.)
And Fox will always have their wingnuts.
DarcyPennell
@hurricanesmith: You know a census worker who was threatened by a police detective? Aren’t census workers employed by the federal government? Did she consider contacting the FBI?
fucen tarmal
@Svensker:
i know, i am saying supercrazy meth, meth that does what crack did for cocaine…
i didn’t say it was a nice thought, of course it wasn’t a nice reality when it was done in the urban “ghetto” either.
it doesn’t have to be meth, it can be whatever drug of choice the wingnuts will go nuts for…the point is the process, make something extra-dangerous, make it extra-criminal in response to its extra-dangerousness, and lock them up, if the extra danger doesn’t get them first. either way you build a stigma….american traditional values.
El Cid
@hurricanesmith: Yeah. You go to the fucking mayor or town council or district attorney right then, or maybe even the U.S. Marshalls’ office as a federal employee threatened by violence.
Svensker
@fucen tarmal:
Wait, you’re saying the Feds deliberately pushed crack in order to lock up more poor black urban people?
ricky
I worked as an enumerator. Needed the money. Enjoyed it.
We cannot divulge Personal Information acquired by our work which limits what can be said.
First, almost all reports like this you will read on this year’s census experience are anecdotal, unlike the census itself. Take them as such.
Because much of the nations discourse is guided by the media, and the media is driving as well as reporting the wave of anti-government tea bagging, the anectdotal accounts involving such incidents will get greater play.
Assholes are assholes. Which came first? Beck or his audience?
By far the greatest problem I encountered was with self indulgent people who felt the two minutes required to answer the questions was a waste of their valuable time.
Invariably a televison set or a cell phone was involved. Almost all lived alone.
People who live in the places favored by the “new urbanist” vision of my city have no idea who their neighbors are.
For my own amusement, when someone was a real pissant about this being a government intrusion into their privacy,
I checked on them through free information available on the internet. Privacy is long gone, folks.
Finally, and most important, if you don’t want to divulge your phone number to a census worker, don’t put it on a pet’s collar.
El Cid
I don’t think the government promoted crack. What the Reaganites and Bush Sr’s did was happily let cocaine trafficking help fund their death squad wars in Central and South America — crack was simply a usage innovation. You send them guns, you let them fly back drugs on the same plane, wink at your staff who make kickbacks, or you let their friends cross over for ‘training’, etc.
By the way, when the crack epidemic was first hitting poor communities in a noticeably hard way, it was neighborhood and communities of color activists also demanding the toughest sentences for crack vs. non-crack cocaine because it was seen as a greater threat to these already fragile communities.
fucen tarmal
@Svensker:
hard to imagine that a more concentrated form of a product would be offered at a much lower price, any where else in the free market,much less an illegal commodity, unless there was some assurance to suppliers by the only entity capable of offering such assurance, that there would be some benefit, such as sustained access to a market that could, in theory but shut, or disrupted at any time.
fucen tarmal
@El Cid:
let me ask,at what level does it make business sense to concentrate the product, and sell it at a 5 fold reduction in price. dealers of the powdered product were still seeing how many cuts to the product(splitting the amount you buy in half, and adding whatever, so you could, in theory sell twice as much by weight/volume.
also those powdered dealers and their markets were left untouched as long as possible, so they could continue to sell 100 dollar grams, often a cost that was too high in the parts of america who got the 20 dollar concentrated rock form.
you can’t tell me a dealer or distributor thought that up, that had to come from someone who could be assured production.
JITC
These people are idiots and a**holes. They are not 10 years old. This is NOT their first census. It is likely, however, that this is the first census they are refusing to participate in. And why? Because Rush told them not to and a black man is in the Presidency.
The ignorance is stunning (non participation hurts them greatly in terms of representation and allocation of services) but the outright hostility is frightening.
gnomedad
They should burn their birth certificates. Who needs the government holding that kind of information about you?
ricky
@gnomedad:
When the next right wing nut crashes his Cessna into a Vital Statistics Office you will only have yourself to blame.
FlipYrWhig
@John S.:
Cops? Assholes who are difficult to deal with and give people a hard time for not much of a reason? Can this be? :P
JR
Every afternoon but Sunday, a UNIFORMED AGENT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT comes to my house, SEIZES my correspondence, and deposits only what correspondence others have sent me that has been STAMPED BY THE GOVERNMENT like it was British tea!
Where does this jackbooted thug in short pants get the idea that he can set foot on MY property at the behest of his FEDERAL overlords?!!
MY property, MY liberty! This tyranny of the post office must end, and if we can’t end it peacefully then there are always 2nd Amendment remedies to turn to! WATER THE TREES!!!!!!!1!
mark
@matt: Keep coming back? LOL! When the census worker who came to my door was last seen she was running down the driveway to the street with Daisy the American Bulldog a mere inch from her butt.
That was weeks ago, haven’t seen or heard hide nor hair since. Maybe it was the .20 ga shotgun that I answered the door with but I think that she just doesn’t like dogs.
The police did come by but when they left they assured me that I have every legal right to bar whomever I wish from my property unless they have a warrant and that I may use whatever reasonable level of force necessary to enforce that. My lawyer assures me that if I do defend again that I should shoot to kill because if I only wound I will be sued and a criminal defense is a lot easier when there is only one story to be told.
The worker in a previous post who used the Internet to gather data on people who would not respond is exhibit A as to why this census is not legitimate… take me for example. A records search on me will turn up a 25 year old black female, 48 year old white male, 73 year old Hmong with 8, 0, 15, 1 children and an income of under $25,000 through over $200,000 and education level from none through home schooled to advanced degrees. That is because I have planted all of that at every opportunity.
In official public records my race is always African no matter which color I claim because all humans come from Africa although lately I have been putting down “same as Obama” and let them figure it out.
ROTFLMAO!!!
mark
@matt: Keep coming back? LOL! When the census worker who came to my door was last seen she was running down the driveway to the street with Daisy the American Bulldog a mere inch from her butt.
That was weeks ago, haven’t seen or heard hide nor hair since. Maybe it was the .20 ga shotgun that I answered the door with but I think that she just doesn’t like dogs.
The police did come by but when they left they assured me that I have every legal right to bar whomever I wish from my property unless they have a warrant and that I may use whatever reasonable level of force necessary to enforce that. My lawyer assures me that if I do defend again that I should shoot to kill because if I only wound I will be sued and a criminal defense is a lot easier when there is only one story to be told.
The worker in a previous post who used the Internet to gather data on people who would not respond is exhibit A as to why this census is not legitimate… take me for example. A records search on me will turn up a 25 year old black female, 48 year old white male, 73 year old Hmong with 8, 0, 15, 1 children and an income of under $25,000 through over $200,000 and education level from none through home schooled to advanced degrees. That is because I have planted all of that at every opportunity.
In official public records my race is always African no matter which color I claim because all humans come from Africa although lately I have been putting down “same as Obama” and let them figure it out.
ROTFLMAO!!!
Boney Baloney
Third census in a row where I just bald-ass lied. Not outrageously; the point is to be polite and cooperative while pinching a loaf into the data pool.
THAT’S civil disobedience, not threatening someone you don’t really intend to kill and disperse the remains of. Besides, can you imagine the brain-splodin if the Census Police followed up, used their Dark Arts to prove you reported factually incorrect horseshit, and pressed charges? The Applesauce-Banjo Rifle Association stops being a funny chuckle joke within twelve hours. “Remember back when every ten years, some freak would fly an airplane into a building? Thooooose were the daaaaays.”
In 1990 my attitude was “I double dog dare you,” but now, I just tape everything and upload it to GooberShare. What the hell are they going to do, prosecute and turn you into a folk hero? Prove I don’t eat raw meat six times a day. Prove how, exactly? And then what, book ’em, Danno, under the Blowing Smoke up Census Workers’ Asses Act? The pigs can’t afford that kind of distraction, now more than ever.
Don’t get belligerent. Don’t stand on your rights and refuse to answer. Just make shit up as helpfully as possible and send ’em on their way with a box checked off in black ink.
bago
@mark: June 20th, at 1PM will forever be demarcated as the time this post got linked on some idiot site.
urbanmeemaw
@robertdsc: Yes, it is mandated in the Constitution. The first census was conducted in the 1700’s.
FlipYrWhig
@mark:
You forgot to mention how your Canadian girlfriend was really impressed and decided to reward you with a wild three-way. It was a red-letter day in the annals of imaginary macho exploits.
urbanmeemaw
@roshan: I’m a Crew Leader in an urban neighborhood comprised of a mix of African American, Hispanic and white residents. The income levels range from poor to middle class to upper middle class. My crew visited over 900 addresses and we only encountered one instance in which a person physically threatened an enumerator (with hedge clippers) and unleashed a torrent of racial epithets. Many respondents were reluctant and ignored knocks on the door and notices of visit. Many respondents just refused to provide information (without threats or insults.) On the whole, the crew felt most people were pretty nice and they thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I’m sure there are horror stories, but fortunately for us ours were very minimal.
El Cid
@fucen tarmal:
First, it isn’t like crack was developed in some exclusive narco-trafficking institute using fantastic technology which no one else possessed.
Second, it expands the market vastly, just like cheap LCD TV’s from Chinese contract companies make a lot less profit than the first Pioneers did, but now you’ve got revenues out the ass.
El Cid
Any time I see the mailman or street pavers coming near my house I run out with my shotgun and tell them that I’m a fierce guard of my civil liberties, and I feel highly threatened that one of them might come in my yard and make fun of my tiny tiny penis.
fucen tarmal
@El Cid:
no, but with govt help, they could harvest a ton more than they were doing, and with govt help, a ton more was going to get into the market place. so they had excess capacity. then they needed a market.
the part about the government looking the other way to help the contras traffic cocaine has been documented well. the kerry commission’s conclusions support at least that part. as far as where the new product ended up, again, no one who was was merely marketing would have the vision to sell a concentrated product at a lower price, not the insight that the supply could meet the demand needed to support the new product. that had to come from deep in the chain.
as to why those products took hold where they did? its an open question….
Nickws
@mark:
“My lawyer assures me that if I do defend again that I should shoot to kill because if I only wound I will be sued and a criminal defense is a lot easier when there is only one story to be told.”
Murder census workers? Your legal counsel is entering you in the Darwin Awards lethal injection category, my cheetos stained, overweight, video-game-addicted friend.
Just stay online and release your childish impulses against the fictional creatures in WoW or whatever it is you normally get lost in.
Kyle
@mark:
We now have a convenient dictionary definition for “insecure cowardly douchebag with small genitalia”
hurricanesmith
My understanding is the girl who ran into the unfriendly police officer went over his head to his superior, who read the officer the riot act. But I do not know for sure.