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A Democratic opposition-research firm has taken up the challenge of answering the 2010 U.S. Census questions that Rep. Michele Bachmann has vowed to leave blank: everything except the number of people living at her house. Third Coast Research tapped public sources to find most of the info, but the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire points out that president Will Caskey had to leave some answers blank, in spite of his team’s efforts:
He couldn’t find out quite everything about her: whether she is selling agricultural products in her home, the state of her mental health, how much she is spending on fuel, or her ancestry.
Bachmann’s office disputed the accuracy of some of Third Coast’s answers, but wouldn’t say which information was wrong.
See Third Coast’s handiwork for yourself at this pdf.
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4 Comments »
Comment posted July 3, 2009 @ 9:56 am
I worked the 2000 Census following up on people who did not return their form on time. In 2000, a small percentage of people received the “long form” which is what the pdf shows (I don’t remember the exact percentage so I won’t throw out a guess). Most people got the “short form” which had far fewer questions. The short form is a breeze.
The long form is a pain in the butt, for the person unlucky enough to get it and for the Census worker having to follow up. If Bachmann wanted to argue that the form was a burden to complete because of its length, I might find myself agreeing with her for the first time in history. No, she’d rather “do the wacky” than be rational.
Comment posted July 3, 2009 @ 9:57 am
Why are they perpetuating the myth about the census questions? On the census website it says: “The 2010 Census will be a short-form only census and will count all residents living in the United States as well as ask for name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, relationship and housing tenure – taking just minutes to complete. “
Comment posted July 3, 2009 @ 11:05 am
As others have noted, your credit card company – who seeks profits, not your enhanced general welfare and is not responsive to you through the ballot box – probably has more private and potentially harmful information about you than the government. And it’s use of that information is not as tightly restricted as access to census data is.
It’s a bit late to freak out about loss of privacy through census data collection. It’s like – when carrying a shipping trunk, saying the burden is too great when a fly lands on the trunk as you struggle along. The census fly is hardly the problem in my view
Comment posted July 6, 2009 @ 11:14 am
The reason why it’s so hard for Michele to complete her census form is because she’s actually a 300 year old vampire.
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