Are you aware that the U.S. Census Bureau counts illegal aliens when determining how many seats in Congress a state should receive? That means states with large illegal alien populations are now receiving a disproportionate amount of seats in Congress and therefore more power in establishing national policy.

Judicial Watch is now involved in a high-stakes legal campaign to put a stop to this unconstitutional policy.

Recently, we filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the State of Louisiana challenging the current federal policy in which “unlawfully present aliens” were counted in the 2010 Census (Louisiana v. Bryson).

The government used these census numbers to reapportion seats in the House of Representatives and, as a result, the State of Louisiana lost a House seat to which it was entitled. Louisiana is asking that the Supreme Court order the federal government to recalculate the 2010 apportionment of House seats based upon legal residents as the U.S. Constitution requires.

Judicial Watch, in partnership with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF), filed the brief on January 13, 2012, in a lawsuit filed by the State of Louisiana against John Bryson, U.S. Secretary of Commerce; Robert Groves, Director of the U.S. Census Bureau; and Karen Lehman Hass, Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Here’s a brief excerpt from our amicus:

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During a trip to India a few years ago and after observing the New Delhi traffic, I devised a great idea for Tata, the Indian car maker: manufacture the cars so that once the car is started the horn turns on and stays on until the car is turned off.  I was sure the drivers in New Delhi would appreciate such a feature, seeing that they drive with the horn on most of the time anyway.

Kind of like the way that politicians of Indian descent are making their presence known in the American political scene, except maybe not as noisy.  While there are others, two prominent Indian-American politicians stand out: Louisiana Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.

Following two terms in Congress representing Louisiana’s 1st congressional district in the House, and having been the Congress’ second Indian-American, Republican Bobby Jindal was first elected governor of Lousiana in 2007 and re-elected earlier this year in a landslide.  Throughout his term as governor he has become known as a fiscal conservative who refused to raise taxes.  After the BP Oil Spill of April-July, 2010, Jindal loudly criticized Obama administration’s response and eventually persuaded the administration into lifting a permit moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Big Government has learned that a major internal fight has erupted among Occupy Wall Street organizers after activists began circulating an infographic published by FastCompany, the “progressive business” magazine.

The infographic in question depicts the results of an internal online survey conducted by Occupy Wall Street supporters at occupywallst.org.

The data, compiled by advertising analyst Harrison Schultz and Ford Foundation sociologist Dr. Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán, were intended to promote the idea, as Dr. Cordero-Guzmán put it, that “the 99% movement comes from and looks like the 99%.”

Some activists were outraged, however, that the survey results and the infographic show Occupy Wall Street to be 81.2 percent white, and only 1.6 percent black.

By comparison, the U.S. population is 77.1 percent white and 12.9 percent black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau–making the Occupy Wall Street movement disproportionately white.

The infographic, depicted below, caused instant controversy when it was shared among Occupy Wall Street organizers. One activist reacted: “81% white protestors–and you actually made a flyer proudly advertising this lie, in a multicultural city like NYC? You must be crazy and blind.”

She later accused Schultz of “insidious racism” and “white supremacy,” and demanded “serious mediation” from organizers on the Safer Spaces working group, the internal security apparatus of Occupy Wall Street.

The argument then escalated, according to Big Government sources, with threats of intervention from the “people of color working group” and the sarcastic suggestion that the analysts “join the Tea Party.” (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson:

While there has been a lot of he said – she said about the Congressional Black Caucus Convention last week, it seems no one sought to report on the deeper purpose of the meeting. Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson covered black Americans’ feelings toward President Obama and the state of our Republic.  We gathered exclusive reactions from movie stars, civil rights leaders, athletes, politicians, military heroes and a Nigerian priest in the process.

The CBC was a practice in how well Barack Obama has served the black community.  Even though their allegiance lay (almost) exclusively with the President, there seemed to be a need to explain the shortcomings of the last three years.

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From National Journal:

As lawmakers continue to joust over how to accelerate growth and unleash job creation, the Census numbers are a timely reminder of how mightily the U.S. economy struggled over the last decade — and particularly over the last few years, during and after the Great Recession.

Consider:

• Last year, real median income dipped below $50,000 a year for the first time since 1996.
• By that measure — median income — this is the worst post-recession economy ever recorded by the Census Bureau (which began compiling this data in 1967). From 2009 to 2010, real median income fell by 2.3 percent, a steeper drop than the years that followed the end of recessions in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s.

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THEN (April 4, 2010):
Administration officials say growing labor force is “a great sign”

Behind the high unemployment rate, “there’s just been a tremendous increase in the labor force,” Christina Romer, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’  “Over the last three months, we’ve added more than a million people to the labor force. And that’s actually, that’s a great sign,” Romer added. “That’s a sign that people that might have been discouraged dropped out because of the terrible recession, have started to have some hope again and are looking for work again.”

NOW (February 4, 2011):
What will the Administration say now that the labor force is shrinking?

Facts reveal sharp declines in the labor force since the March 2010 data Romer described above, with especially steep drops in the last two months.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force has shrunk by 709,000 since March 2010.  Given this reality, will the Administration now say this trend is a “not great sign” indicating people have “lost hope again”?

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From the Associated Press:

Texas gained four House seats and Florida picked up two, while New York and Ohio each lost two seats in the new census count.

The Census Bureau released highly awaited 2010 census results.

Other winners included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington. They each gained one seat.

States losing one seat each were Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Read the whole thing here. For the first time since the 19th Century, California did not gain a Congressional seat. The GOP will have unprecedented power to redraw congressional lines this year, especially in the states picking up seats. Also noteworthy that the states gaining seats had far lower levels of taxation than those losing seats. Hmmm…

As 2010 Census operations wind down, the Census Bureau has been forced to get rid of many of its temporary employees. However, the few employees who are still employed at the Detroit Regional Census Center’s “partnership” office have one thing in common: They are closely connected to the Detroit political machine and/or the Democratic Party. And the one current employee who doesn’t fit the above description is Twoine Murphy, who was indicted by the State of Michigan for his involvement in a Ponzi scheme.

To give you some background on the word “Partnership” in 2010 Census terms, the Census Bureau created an outreach program for the 2010 Census intended to boost involvement by linguistic, racial, and sexual minorities. The stimulus package gave this program a mega boost when it awarded upwards of $500 million in additional cash to the Census Bureau for outreach efforts, many of which are coordinated by “Partnership Specialists” and “Partnership Coordinators.”

(Some of these partnership employees have been paid upwards of $85,000 per year at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels of pay for federal employees.)

Let’s look at the cast of characters in the Detroit Regional Census Center who were NOT let go from the Census Bureau — even though “partnership” activities are long finished and the vast majority of employees in this office were let go in early June. The survivors are as follows:

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NOT the Census Totem. Feel better?

Earlier today, I wrote that the Census Bureau commissioned a totem pole to be constructed in Alaska and then hauled to DC. Steve Jost of the Census Bureau responded to my claims as follows:

The image you posted is not that of the 2010 Census Totem.  You can see the totem in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny0-29Ig-FY

Since you have prejudged the value of this important promotional effort before knowing anything about the cost, I’m doubtful the following will be of much solace to you.

In early 2010 while plans were being made for the first enumeration in Noorvik, Alaska, one of the oldest native organizations in the state made a significant gesture. The Alaska Native Brotherhood passed a resolution supporting the Census and forming the creation of a totem pole to mark this significant event.  Our Seattle Region put together a plan to commission the art, and have it travel Alaska and Washington State tribal events for several months  to promote participation in the 2010 Census.  The totem pole is a storytelling icon steeped in the culture and traditions of the Alaska Native and Northwest Pacific Coastal peoples. It is an immediately recognizable symbol to the native people throughout America’s largest state.

The art was commissioned at a cost of $20,000.  The cost to have it travel across the country for permanent display at Census is $3,111.   We believe strongly that this has been a very effective promotional investment that symbolizes the Census Bureau’s constitutional mandate to ensure a complete count of all tribal lands, especially the 564 Federally recognized tribes.

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Now, this must be one of the most flagrant instances of waste that I have ever read about. A “totem pole” that has been created to celebrate the 2010 Census is traveling thousands of miles from Juneau, Alaska to Washington D.C. I’ve already e-mailed Steve Jost at the Census Bureau to find out some more info about the cost of this commission and the transportation of this object. Here’s the report from the Juneau Empire:

JUNEAU – For the first time in history, the 2010 Census commissioned Sitka carver Tommy Joseph to design and carve a totem pole specifically for the Census. Since its completion this spring, the totem pole has traveled throughout many communities in Southeast Alaska during the census data collection process. The totem is currently on display at Goldbelt’s Mt. Roberts Tramway in Juneau.

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Last week, Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves said to Fox News that you can “trust 2010 Census data.” What our director fails to tell us is that the two software applications have operational problems that will ultimately lead to inaccurate data. Just spend a day working in PBOCS, the Paper-Based Operational Control System which processes enumerator questionnaires from the field, or MARCS, the Matching Address Review Coding System which shows a data capture of every questionnaire that was scanned at the Baltimore Data Capture Center and you will see the poor quality of work.

Thousands upon thousands of questionnaires are being scanned that show conflicting or incomplete data such as: vacant housing units with a population count, incorrect enumerator IDs, occupied housing units with no demographic information and the list goes on.

During the peak of the non-response follow-up (NRFU) phase of 2010 Census operations (around mid May), the Census switched to a shipping application built off a PeopleSoft/Oracle interface in order to take the load off PBOCS. Although this was a good thought in theory, the application allowed questionnaires to be shipped that were not even checked in PBOCS. In the final closeout days of the operation, PBOCS claimed many questionnaires were not checked in even though enumerators fervently claimed they turned them in.

Fortunately some of those were found in MARCS having been received at the data capture center but never scanned for shipping nor checked in. However because there was such a bottleneck sometimes it was few weeks between the time they were shipped and scanned; some questionnaires that never showed in MARCS were re-enumerated. Sometimes PBOCS would just revert some cases back to not being checked in. In a mad dash to finish and meet deadlines enumerators submitted second versions of questionnaires with little or less than accurate data replacing what may or may not have been originally submitted. Immediately after offices finished NRFU, headquarters closed the PBOCS to the local census offices to prevent further glitches.

As it has been mentioned time and time again, the Census never made it clear what constituted a completed questionnaire.

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Rafael Dominguez, a New York-based regional partnership coordinator for the US Census Bureau since early 2008 has filed a petition to run as a Democrat for Assemblyman for New York’s 82nd District. Yet, as Census Bureau Associate Director Steve Jost recently commented on a MyTwoCensus.com post, the Hatch Act, “prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities while on duty.”

The problem is not that Mr. Dominguez is running for office, the problem is that he is running for office while an employee of the federal government and campaigning on the Census Bureau/taxpayer’s dime. MyTwoCensus.com has also learned that other Census Bureau employees who are underlings of Mr. Dominguez have been performing campaign activities while on official Census Bureau duty. These employees include other partnership assistants in the New York area: Ed LaFranco and Adrian Tapia.

New Yorkers should be entitled to a partisan-free census, and Mr. Dominguez’s overt Democratic Party affiliations require the Census Bureau to fire him immediately. MyTwoCensus has subsequently learned that Mr. Dominguez used his (massive) budget for partnership materials to fund events and organizations that will benefit his political campaign.

Admittedly, it will be difficult to prove that partnership  funding was diverted for specific purposes that relate to the campaign, but such activities should immediately be scrutinized and audited more thoroughly than they already are. (MyTwoCensus.com has learned that the New York Census Bureau’s partnership office is currently undergoing a major audit.)

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What happened last month at the Brooklyn census office was indeed unfortunate. But let us not be naive: Data collection inaccuracies and falsifications are happening throughout the entire New York Regional Area and possibly the entire nation, though perhaps on a smaller scale than in Brooklyn.

There are many luxury rental and condominum buildings where real estate management companies have a strict “no enumerator” policy, as well as tenement buildings  and brownstones where it is impossible to gain access. There are also one or two family houses where it is unclear how many people live there and a knowledgeable proxy could not be located.

For these units, some enumerators went to public search records on the Internet or merely wrote the names off the mailboxes. The mid and upper level census managers encouraged field staff to use techniques to “guesstimate,” creating major operational ambiguity for the once in a decade headcount.

What was acceptable inside the questionnaire was another problem. Most enumerators tried to get all the information but those who went to a proxy who gave them little, no, or inaccurate information, finished their areas quickly. These same field staff were rewarded with more work and allowed to clean up districts that were lagging behind.

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At  Washington D.C. news conference, held at the Offices of the Center for American Progress,  archeologists working for the Smithsonian Institution have announced an incredible discovery, a revised copy of the U.S Constitution dated 1790. This document was passed by the original 13 States with the intention of  supplanting the version  ratified in 1788. The Chief Archeologist on the project called the document “the Dead Potomac River Scrolls,” because they were found in a previously unknown cave on the bank of the Potomac.

According to the scientists, a 13-year-old boy named Zach Emanuel was walking his dog near the river, threw a stick and and heard some glass shatter. He followed the noise into the cave and found the document amongst some broken beer bottles left over from some ancient beer summit. Scientists determined  the cave was once occupied by some ancient cult of prognosticators. Also found in the cave was and old mens-style  tutu and some leftover yarmulkes from Rahm Emanuel’s Bar Mitzvah.

The cult known in history books as the Progressenes, wrote the document in English and it begins with an amazingly prophetic preamble,

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a Union even more perfecter than we did two years ago, do ordain and establish this brand spanking new Constitution for the United States of America recognizing that the document approved in 1788 forgot to talk about social justice.

The over-all document is very similar to the Constitution passed in 1788, it just adds a few things:

• Under the census provision it adds, “if a large group of foreign nationals come into the country illegally, they are to be counted in the census as not to appear racist.”

• The executive branch articles include a provision that says, “The President is to enforce all laws equally except in the case of radical organizations such as the New Black Panthers or other African American organizations trying to intimidate voters from voting the wrong way. Housing organizations that commit voter fraud by registering illegible voters multiple times, cartoon characters, or the deceased are not to be prosecuted, as long as they are named after the seed of an oak tree.”

It is quite amazing the way these Progressenes were able to see into the future.

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As a 2010 Census watchdog, I am extremely disturbed to learn that a man so deeply involved in the Blagojevich/Obama-Senate-seat-for-sale scandal is now employed in an upper level management position by the Census Bureau in Chicago.

Even if the man, Joseph Aramanda, has not been convicted (yet) of  a crime, his reputation for being involved in illegal activities seriously undermines the credibility of Census Bureau operations in Chicago. In a city with corruptionlinked to 2010 Census advertising, the public should not have to worry that upper management positions are being filled by individuals who are directly tied to government corruption and fraud.

Furthermore, Joseph Aramanda’s experiences as a pizza franchise owner (his job prior to the Census Bureau gig) don’t qualify him to be in charge of 1,000+ employees.

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For most of you, this is old news by now, but I hesitated to report it because it would probably just make you more angry. It recently came out that most of America’s new jobs are temporary Census Bureau positions that will soon end, which is dismal news for the economy. As MyTwoCensus.com observed, some people on the right are outraged by what they report as false job statistics since Census Bureau employees have been hired and let go (for various reasons) and then re-hired to work for other 2010 Census operations down the road.

FoxNews published reports from Commerce Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics spokespersons:

Commerce Department spokesman Nick Kimball:

“The Census Bureau — like all other employers — reports the number of individuals on its payroll for the specific week the Labor Department uses as a point of reference for measuring the nation’s level of This is not a tally of positions filled during the past month — instead, it is the number of actual individual human beings who received paychecks that week. That number can then be compared to the reports from previous months to understand the changing jobs environment over time.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics spokeswoman Stacey Standish:

“Each month the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES) program publishes the employment levels for total nonfarm and component industries. Establishments, including the Census Bureau, are asked to report the total number of workers on their payroll. That is, the establishment is asked to report the total number of employees who worked or received pay for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. The CES program does not ask establishments to report the number of new hires or created, or the number of persons who were laid off.”

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So, as usual, I was at the gym straddling the stairclimber (Sven, he’s Dutch) watching CNN against my choice, when the network reported some seemingly positive news: apparently the U.S. just saw the biggest gain in employment in a decade!

Break out the champagne! Do a little dance! Make a little love! Throw another houseboy on the rotating action pit!

Yep, thanks to President Obama, this month the economy added 431,000 jobs, the biggest monthly gain since March of 2000. But of those new jobs, 390,000 were government. Private sector jobs actually came crashing down from 218 thousand in April, to just 41,000.

Eh.

So the gain CNN was championing, it turns out, was made up of census jobs. Which, to me, is cheating. It’s kinda like saying you won the lottery, and proving it by flashing a large wad of Monopoly money.

That’s how I feel about census jobs. they’re phony. (more…)

Friday’s May jobs figure is vastly skewed because of the hundreds of thousands of temporary census employees—approximately 411,000—hired to perform the decennial enumeration of the U.S. population and gather concomitant vital information. In the coming days, economists will be assessing the distorting effect the addition of these temporary public sector workers has on the restoration or creation of employment and the overall strength or weakness of the economic recovery.

A few non-economists like myself, however, will be asking a very different question.

Namely—what can the history of the cost of performing the once-a-decade head count reveal about how government-run health care costs will behave? Will Obamacare be the exception to the runaway cost rule? Let’s use the census as a yardstick.

To keep this analysis at its most simple, let us compare the rate at which the population increased with the rate at which the cost of counting it (the decennial census) increased. That sounds sensical enough.

According to Appendix A-1 of Jason Gauthier’s 2002 study entitled Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses from 1790 to 2000, the cost to perform the census has risen over the decades at a rate staggeringly higher than the rate of the growth of the population itself. What does this mean? Simply put, that bureaucracy is obese. Morbidly obese.

Whatever the opposite of efficiency is, the cost of taking the census epitomizes it.

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Yesterday, MyTwoCensus.com reported that 2010 Census workers from Colorado have arrived in New York to assist with operations. Each of these employees is put up at a hotel and paid a per diem rate. (I’ve heard that Hilton Hotels are being used for this purpose — which isn’t surprising since Census Bureau officials are known to stay at Ritz Carleton Hotels while on government business).

Michael C. Cook of the Census Bureau’s Public Information Office wrote to me yesterday, “When we assess that a particular office is either not following procedures or has weak management we often make staffing changes, or even send in experienced managers to help improve operations and re-train the temporary staff.” So the Census Bureau is saying that nobody in New York, a city of 8 million people,  is capable of handling these procedures? (Two sources have confirmed to me that one manager from Washington DC is even being put up in New York’s Battery Park in a $4,500 per month apartment on your dime.)

The federal government outlines hotel and per diem rates for New York quite clearly. This means that in addition to their salaries as Census Bureau employees, each individual is spending up to $411 per day, not including flights or other expenditures, merely to eat and sleep in New York.

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From The Hill:

Hiring by the U.S. Census Bureau is expected to spike May’s job figures dramatically.

Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s.com projects the economy will have added 575,000 jobs in May, while the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) rough projection is for 560,000 jobs.

Either figure would represent the largest number of jobs created in any month since the dot-com crash of 2000.

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser on Tuesday, touted what he said would be a positive report for Democrats, who are hoping a revitalized economy will help them in this fall’s elections. He said the May report would be “well beyond” the 290,000 jobs created in April, according to Reuters.

The numbers pose a problem for the administration, however, in terms of their reflection of economic growth.

Zandi expects that only 150,000 of the jobs created in May will come from the private sector, with 425,000 new jobs sparked by the once-a-decade Census. (more…)