{"id":192393,"date":"2009-04-06T05:13:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T10:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/06\/republicans-hate-honest-math-census-edition\/"},"modified":"2009-04-06T05:13:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T10:13:00","slug":"republicans-hate-honest-math-census-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/06\/republicans-hate-honest-math-census-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Hate Honest Math: Census Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that Obama <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/04\/03\/washington\/03census.html?partner=rss&amp;emc=rss&amp;pagewanted=all\">selection of Robert Groves as director of the US Census has gotten Republicans worried<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Republicans expressed alarm because of one of Mr. Groves\u2019s specialties, statistical sampling \u2014 roughly speaking, the process of extrapolating from the numbers of people actually counted to arrive at estimates of those uncounted and, presumably, arriving at a realistic total.<\/p>\n<p>If minorities, immigrants, the poor and the homeless are those most likely to be missed in an actual head count, and if political stereotypes hold true, then statistical sampling would presumably benefit the Democrats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>First, let me note here that the reporter does not have a clue:  As a matter of settled law, the Supreme Court ruled that you <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">cannot<\/span> use a statistical sampling, but instead must use an <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">actual count<\/span> in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/advanced_search?q=%22Department+of+Commerce+v.+U.S.+House+of+Representatives%22&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;safe=off&amp;as_qdr=all&amp;num=100\"><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Department of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives<\/span><\/a> in 1999, so this is a non-issue.<\/p>\n<p>What is <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">not<\/span> a non issue is that statistical sampling can find people and places that have been <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">under-sampled<\/span>, and can so create a <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">more accurate<\/span> census, and a more accurate census is probably a bad thing<sup>\u2122<\/sup> for Republicans, because white males tend to be the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">easy<\/span> folks to count.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8216;Phants don&#8217;t oppose him because he will, &#8220;Politicize the Census,&#8221; they oppose him because he will do <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">the best job possible within his power<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>They don&#8217;t want someone to do a good job, they want someone to do a piss poor job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that Obama selection of Robert Groves as director of the US Census has gotten Republicans worried: Republicans expressed alarm because of one of Mr. Groves\u2019s specialties, statistical sampling \u2014 roughly speaking, the process of extrapolating from the numbers of people actually counted to arrive at estimates of those uncounted and, presumably, arriving at &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,978,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-politics","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}