Stoopidity is
Our Strength!

noted tyrant and suppressor of civil liberties Thomas Jefferson

It shouldn't be surprising that the House of Representatives of Paul Ryan, Tea Party icon and champion of taking health care, food and education away from the poor to sponsor wars around the world, would follow Spiteful Steve's lead and attack the U.S. Census, just like the PsuedoCons did to StatsCan - even before they got their now cherished "majority." It is clear that facts are the enemy of the right wing and their ideology of supporting the greed of the 1%. If actual facts or data should enter the debate, they lose. The right wing fundie whackos can yell and scream all they want, but to their dismay, they just can't alter reality and change the facts of the world, the best they can do is obfuscate, distort and as much as possible make actual information difficult to impossible to access.  

According to a report at (bolding by kootcoot) HuffPo:

 WASHINGTON –- The House voted Wednesday to eliminate the detailed surveys of America that have been conducted by the Census Bureau since the nation’s earliest days.

House Republicans, increasingly suspicious of the census generally, advanced a measure to cut the American Community Survey. It passed 232 to 190.

The survey is not part of the constitutionally mandated population count, but some version of it has been done by law as part of the decennial survey since the time of Thomas Jefferson to assess the needs of the nation. It’s generally considered a vital tool for business.

Republicans, acknowledging its usefulness, attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, arguing that the government has no business knowing how many flush toilets someone has, for instance.

“It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution,” said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment.

“This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars,” Webster added. “It’s the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It’s the picture of what's wrong in Washington, D.C. It's unconstitutional.”

The survey used to be done every 10 years, along with the census, when 1 out of 6 Americans were required to answer the so-called “long form.” But the administration of President George W. Bush reformed the process in 2005 to do an annual survey of 250,000 households, making the survey more manageable, cheaper and more timely.

Democrats were perplexed by the move, which would deprive policymakers and businesses of vast, vital troves of data that they use to make decisions,

“The Republicans have earned a reputation as the ‘do-nothing party’ and now they want to also be the ‘know-nothing party,’ “ said Rep. Carolyn Maloney after the vote. “This vote repeals the work done by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama and six Congresses to modernize the census, and does so without even a hearing or full debate.”

Over at Lawyer's, Guns and Money,  where I was alerted to this recent stupid attack on sense and reason, they highlighted some  choice quotes in Your Republican Party!

  The modern Republican Party: creating myths about what the Founders thought out of thin air yet actually opposing what the Founders invented while screaming tyranny.

The latest example of the second part of this equation comes from the House passing a bill eliminating the census surveys that have been part of the census process ever since 1790 when noted tyrant and suppressor of civil liberties Thomas Jefferson created it to learn more about how the nation’s people lived.

Some choice quotes:

    “It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution,” said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment. “This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars,” Webster added. “It’s the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It’s the picture of what’s wrong in Washington, D.C. It’s unconstitutional.”

Yes, because the government that created the census surveys didn’t know much about the Constitution since it only consisted of several delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

Also, the real Daniel Webster is no doubt rolling over in his grave (or more likely giving a 15 hour speech about it in the afterlife) about what an idiot his namesake is.

Come on people, wake up, we should be SMARTER in the twenty first century than we were in the eighteenth, but it certainly is difficult to find evidence to support that likelihood.  If we continue to allow the Republicans on both sides of the 49th parallel to win the war against knowledge and reason, we better learn to enjoy our descent into fascism and a return to feudalism.  As they stated over at Lawyers, Guns & Dough to end their alert to this insanity:  

I guess this all makes sense though, because there’s no question the Republicans are opposed to the Enlightenment.