This Is Not Your Father's Census -- The United States Census in the 21st Century

Long gone are the days of completing the US census for the sake of civic duty or to ensure you are represented in Congress.

This is the Census of the 21st century (first minute is all you need):

It happens once every ten years.

It seeks to discover who we are and what we need.


It determines how we distribute more then $400 Billion dollars for things like schools, public works, emergency services, and senior centers.

It's the United States 2010  Census!

Or this one:

When you take, say, ten minutes to answer 10 questions you help our community get what it needs for, oh, the next ten years.

We can't move forward till you mail it back, 2010 Census.

DKK

Updated and bumpted (March 15, 2010):

And then there is the letter this week.  Here is the text, make sure you get your money!

Dear Resident:
About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly.

Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share. Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely, Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Not A Right, A Responsibility and Responsibility = Control

Health coverage is not a right, it is a responsibility.

As such the debate should be over who is responsible for your health coverage -- your employer, the government, or you.

Remember, responsibility for an issue is equal to control of that issue.
DKK

(Even today as the government assumes more control over health coverage the inevitable laws banning availability or taxing the consumables that may affect your health are creeping into the control over your body. Is there a right to control our own body as the left has always assured us?

Perhaps not, that is what we will decide as the health coverage debate begins again).

Didn't Believe Me Update, June 10, 2009:

Hot Air is reporting on a Politico story today:

Don’t be fooled by the presidential burger runs. Obama and Congress are moving across several fronts to give government a central role in making America healthier — raising expectations among public health experts of a new era of activism unlike any before.

Any health care reform plan that Obama signs is almost certain to call for nutrition counseling, obesity screenings and wellness programs at workplaces and community centers. He wants more time in the school day for physical fitness, more nutritious school lunches and more bike paths, walking paths and grocery stores in underserved areas.

The president is filling top posts at Health and Human Services with officials who, in their previous jobs, outlawed trans fats, banned public smoking or required restaurants to provide a calorie count with that slice of banana cream pie.

Even Congress is getting into the act, giving serious consideration to taxing sugary drinks and alcohol to help pay for the overhaul.

DKK

Updated and bumped:

On Red Eye early this AM (March 4, 2010) TV's Andy Levy pointed out that anything that requires you to do something like purchase insurance or requires another to provide you with a service cannot, by definition, be a right. 

From Master Strategist to Master Batter Of Blame

In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Barack Obama patted himself on the back for having "refocused the fight - bringing to a responsible end the war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks".
He then told people to remember that "our adversaries are those who would attack our country, not our fellow Americans", before decrying "fear and cynicism" and "partisanship and division" - the code phrases for horrid Republicans used during his 2008 election campaign.

Complacency, faux moralising and partisan shots at Republicans. It was a neat summary of where Obama is going wrong after the Christmas Day debacle when the Nigerian knicker bomber managed to waltz onto a Detroit-bound flight.

For a man who campaigned denouncing the politicisation of national security under President George W Bush, it is worth noting how intensely political Obama's treatment of what might henceforth be known as Underpantsgate has been.

His White House recognised its political vulnerability more readily than it comprehended the level of danger faced by Americans.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father had courageously contacted the American Embassy in Abuja in November and met the CIA station chief to tell him that his son was involved with fundamentalist elements in Yemen. American intelligence had also intercepted discussions in Yemen about a possible attack by "the Nigerian".

The Obama administration knew most, if not all, of this by last Sunday, 48 hours after the attack was thwarted. But the priority in Obamaland was to play things down and take pot shots at the Bush administration.

Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief – who prefers the term "man-caused disasters" to "terrorism" - blithely stated that there was "no indication that it is part of anything larger". She then insisted that the "system is working".

Although Napolitano has taken a lot of flak for these comic utterances, she was not "misspeaking" but trotting out the agreed talking points of the day.

Robert Gibbs, Obama's chief mouthpiece, also stated that "in many ways this system has worked" and would say nothing about a possible wider plot.

In Hawaii, where Obama was holidaying, Gibbs's deputy Bill Burton told the press that "we are winding down a war in Iraq that took our eye off of the terrorists that attacked us" and that Obama was reviewing "procedures that have been in place the last several years" (i.e. Bush instituted them). He added, without apparent irony, that "the President refuses to play politics with these issues".

Meanwhile, the White House was working overtime to build a case against Bush. A source in the White House counsel's office told The American Spectator of memos frantically seeking information that would "show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could".

Republicans smell blood. There is a pattern in the Obama administration of dismissing Islamist terrorist attacks as regrettable random acts. In his radio address after Major Nidal Hassan's slaughtered 13 at Fort Hood, Texas, Obama made no mention of terrorism or militant Islam, instead blandly promising that the "ongoing investigation into this terrible tragedy" would "look at the motives of the alleged gunman".

Hassan was a committed Islamist who had corresponded with the fanatical Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki. In June, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert being watched by the FBI and who had previously travelled to Yemen, murdered a US Army recruit in Arkansas. That rated only a tepid statement by Obama about a "senseless act of violence".

But the violence wasn't senseless, it had a calculated objective - just as Abdulmutallab was not, as Obama described him, an "isolated extremist". No wonder many Americans want to grab Obama by the lapels and scream: "It's the Jihad, stupid." Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, clearly struck a nerve when he charged last week that Obama was "trying to pretend we are not at war".

The White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer eagerly descended into the political fray, responding to Cheney with the obligatory jibe about Iraq and also a litany of examples of Obama's "public statements that explicitly state we are at war".

It's a sure sign that you're losing the argument when you have to research quotes from your boss's speeches to prove that he gets it that America is at war. The problem for Obama is that people are now judging him by his actions as well as his words.

The incompetence of the US intelligence bureaucracy is not the only thing that makes Underpantsgate so damaging for Obama. More serious is his failure to understand or acknowledge the nature of the enemy - and to view war as mere politics.

Barack Obama is vulnerable on terror -- and he knows it -- Telegraph UK


We've gone from an administration of master strategists the press labeled as a bunch of bunglers to a bunch of bunglers the press labels as master strategists.

Iraq was no more a distraction from the War on Terror then the invasion of Sicily and Italy was in the War on Fascism.  It managed to eliminate thousands of al Qaeda from the battlefield in the same manner Churchill called Italy the soft underbelly of Europe.  (See reports early this year showing numbers of al Qaeda killed or captured in Iraq, al Qaeda appears near destroyed, zero combat deaths in 12/09 in Iraq, etc.)

As long as the left fails to see (for political reasons) that these aren't separate wars but separate battles in one war then we will never make headway again (as one US commentator said in late 2001, "we will just have to get used to terror attacks as a way of life like the rest of the world.")

We went from al Qaeda being near functional destruction, based on reports early 09, to resurgent and ready to attack by Christmas.

In 1989 after 8 years of Reagan the Berlin Wall fell because smart men kept up the pressure he had ramped up.  In 2009 the smart men were sent home in favor of the polished -- to all our loss.