Drudge is linking to an incendiary Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog post by former congressman Bob Barr.
Barr claims in his headline that “Census workers can enter your apartment in your absence.” Which sounds awfully fishy to anyone not cowering in the census-is-taking-our-freedoms fever swamps, watching for black helicopters. Here’s Barr:
What many Americans don’t realize, is that census workers — from the head of the Bureau and the Secretary of Commerce (its parent agency) down to the lowliest and newest Census employee — are empowered under federal law to actually demand access to any apartment or any other type of home or room that is rented out, in order to count persons in the abode and for “the collection of statistics.” If the landlord of such apartment or other leased premises refuses to grant the government worker access to your living quarters, whether you are present or not, the landlord can be fined $500.00.
That’s right — not only can citizens be fined if they fail to answer the increasingly intrusive questions asked of them by the federal government under the guise of simply counting the number of people in the country; but a landlord must give them access to your apartment whether you’re there or not, in order to gather whatever “statistics” the law permits.
Get the shotgun, Mable!
Excuse me for being skeptical, but Barr doesn’t report any anecdotes of such home invasions. Surely they’d make for good copy and surely they’d exist since the relevant code is more than a half-century old. Nor does he link to anything like or quote from the U.S. Code so we can read it for ourselves. All red flags. And sure enough, there’s a good reason he doesn’t:
Here’s the relevant section (emphasis mine):
Sec. 223. Refusal, by owners, proprietors, etc., to assist census employees Whoever, being the owner, proprietor, manager, superintendent, or agent of any hotel, apartment house, boarding or lodging house, tenement, or other building, refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary or by any other officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof, acting under the instructions of the Secretary, to furnish the names of the occupants of such premises, or to give free ingress thereto and egress therefrom to any duly accredited representative of such Department or bureau or agency thereof, so as to permit the collection of statistics with respect to any census provided for in subchapters I and II of chapter 5 of this title, or any survey authorized by subchapter IV or V of such chapter insofar as such survey relates to any of the subjects for which censuses are provided by such subchapters I and II, including, when relevant to the census or survey being taken or made, the proper and correct enumeration of all persons having their usual place of abode in such premises, shall be fined not more than $500.
The law is clearly talking about landlords of community-housing buildings like apartment complexes and the like. “Ingress” and “egress” refer to requiring the landlord to let Census workers onto the property to knock on doors—not to let them into the apartments when you’re not there.
So Barr is willfully misreading the law. He adds the “in your absence” part just for spice and Drudge links.
Ryan, I'm glad you are on the case when it comes to the hyperbole of 'conservative' activists when it comes to their claims, their accents, and even the names of their wives. Out here in flyover land, it is usually spelled 'Mabel', however. You have to work on your spelling a little before impying other people are stupid.
In the real world, the enemies of the Bob Barrs are also (a) easily parodied, and (b) given to dumb statemtents, too. But as was the case when infammatory signs by Tea Partiers caused many reporters to require a change of underwear in contemplation of the Dark Night of Repression represented by retired grannies, while appearing recently not to notice equally extreme shouts and signs by open borders activists, I guess it just depends. Oh, I forgot. New York.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 1 Jun 2010 at 12:50 PM
Yeah, sorry about that, "Marc." Next time I spell "Brian" I'll ask you if I should go with an "i" or a "y."
And thanks for the lecture on flyover country, but I spent a quarter-century there, so I know it just fine.
#2 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 1 Jun 2010 at 01:17 PM
WHAT ABOUT OBAMAS CZARS
#3 Posted by FreedomTent, CJR on Tue 1 Jun 2010 at 04:42 PM
Oh, come on, Ryan. You can do better than that, I hope.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 2 Jun 2010 at 12:37 PM
I'm afraid Mark's got a point, Rian.
In the real world, Mabel is spelled V-I-C-T-O-R-I-A.
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/05/21/2768857/woman-killed-after-confronting.html
We should probably criticize the Bob Barr critics a little more. They're not doing their share of shotgun getting.
It's making the right look bad.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 2 Jun 2010 at 01:34 PM
As a postscript, PBS recently had to mildly rap Tavis Smiley on the knuckles for alleging that there was more 'Christian terrorism' than 'Moslem terrorism', citing Columbine (!) as an example. I look forward a CJR piece noting that Smiley appears to be trying to incite religious hatred, complete with a limp parody of how Smiley's supposed constituency pronounces the word 'goverment', the stereotypical names of their wives . . . etc.
#6 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 3 Jun 2010 at 12:15 PM
Oops, the word is spelled, if not always pronounced (by people of all races and classes) 'government'. I make typos, too, but not while accusing other people of being stupid.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 3 Jun 2010 at 12:17 PM
More Christian Terrorism than Muslim terrorism inside this country. 10 minutes in:
http://vodpod.com/watch/3725017-pbss-tavis-smiley-far-more-christian-terrorists-than-muslim-ones-tea-party-comparable-to-jihad
And I think Smiley pushed the point clumsily and too hard too, especially the columbine comment, but there's no denying that there is a radical right culture in America, which doesn't always identify itself with Christianity, but it does identify itself with conservative.
And the radical conservative culture in America exceeds by far the Jihadist culture in America, if any such even exists.
So it's a bit shady for you and your newsbusters link to claim Tavis equated ALL mulsim terrorism as smaller in quantity than christian terror.
And if you listen to what Ayaan Hirsi Al is saying, it doesn't sound like she's defending the radical, shoot the census worker, tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants, gays are evil, torture and profiling of people is okay so long as they're not white and swarthy, literal interpretationist bible thumping, Christians who want their country back.
It sounded like to me she was talking about the liberal movements in the Christian faith who are motivated by the spirit of sacrifice and love of fellow man, not the type that demands everyone respect his god and culture like the culture warriors demand on Fox.
PS.. Ryan did a treatment on Paul Krugman not to long ago for what I believe was a smaller misrepresentation.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/krugmans_too_big_to_fail_straw.php
Can we not have a discussion about misinformation without some partisan crying about "Wah. Why don't you cover the left too. Wah. You misspelled pig nuckle. Wah."
Ryan's been pretty even steven with his coverage and, even if it weren't, Ryan's balance shouldn't matter. The misinformation matters, not the side it's coming from.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 3 Jun 2010 at 02:28 PM
Thimbles, I specifically object to an urban-bourgeois attitude which degrades lower-and-working-class whites for many of the same behaviors that, in African-Americans, are celebrated as 'authenticity'. You know, an emotional religiosity; 'funny' names and accents; suspicion of the government and of big power generally; and other markers of working-class and lower-middle class life.
Ryan is pretty even-handed in his general coverage, but CJR is still marred by such glaring cultural double standards. I don't mind tough coverage of 'the Right'. What is missing is tough coverage (and social ridicule) of 'the Left' that specifically ties foolish statements and beliefs to the class and ideology of left-leaning people. When people on the Left say stupid things, their sins are their own, and are not extrapolated to characterize an entire social class.
Going off subject as you do, just a bit, about the only 'terrorists' I can identify as acting on the basis of their religious beliefs (re Tavis Smiley's contention) have been anti-abortion zealots. Nasan shot to death 13 people at Fort Hood last year; where is the equivalent action by a radical Christian terrorist? The abortion doctor Tiller was murdered the same week as a converted Moslem acting explicitly on the basis of religious zeal murdered two young men in Little Rock. Guess which of these murders has received more intensive coverage?
Ryan had occasion recently to tear into The Atlantic's cover story for trumpeting that 'Christianity' caused the recession - a story written by a Jewish journalist. Good. But somehow CJR and others never take the next step, grasping that this sort of thing doesn't occur in a vacuum, or represent just one writer's prejudices. A story alleging that 'Jews' caused the recession (on the evidence, at least as plausible as Rosin's thesis) would have all mainstream journalism in an uproar. But large statements about 'Christians', or 'whites', or 'males', or Republicans, or any of the other urban- modernist 'bad guy' categories are fairly routine.
I expect Rosin herself is a good person without much genuine bigotry about her. That's the thing. It's institutional. These attitudes are the air that mainstream journalism breathes, and you don't have to be 'prejudiced' to unthinkingly express them without fear of retaliation.
As for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she doesn't get denounced by conservatives for upholding traditional Western values - the 'liberal' ones in the original sense of the world. Part of the question has always been the one about whether people on 'the Left' really defend liberal values, or whether these values are 'instrumental'. 'The Left' represents self-interested groups, too, not just a set of abstract ideas. Sometimes I think 'the Left' simply translates into 'all power to the bourgeois urban intellectuals' - lawyers, academics, general administrators, etc. As Paul Berman moans in his book on the culture collision Hirsi Ali represents, her enemies are people on the multi-cultural western Left, who do not subscribe to liberal values. As liberal white people, they cannot bring themselves easily to denounce the same attitudes and actions in non-white peoples that they despise in lower-class white people, as I argue above. Hirsi Ali ends up invariably debating tired, establishmentarian, fin-de-siecle western European liberals like Garton Ash and Buruma - not 'conservatives'. I don't think that she feels there is as much of a problem, either in Europe or in America, with your ugly caricature of a fundamentalist Christian as with fundamentalist Moslem radicals. Maybe . . . she's correct? That liberal values will end up being defended by soldiers from the white lower classes, and not by Ivy League intellectuals?
#9 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 3 Jun 2010 at 05:43 PM
"Where is the equivalent action by a radical Christian terrorist?"
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jul/29/suspects-note-cites-liberal-movement-church-attack/
"Where is the equivalent action by a radical Christian terrorist?"
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/LAW/04/13/eric.rudolph/index.html
Two off the top of my head.
And Ayaan Hirsi Ali's views on homosexuality, mentioned both in the clip and in the gay muslim movie she's going to make, would not be included in the conservative's "traditional Western values - the 'liberal' ones in the original sense of the world" (your words, not mine). The religious right seek laws that reflect their dogma and text books which suit their ideologies.
They defend extreme tactics against those they define as infidels and embrace the imagery and weapons that accompany a holy war.
This is a path to radicalism, not a path from. The major difference between muslim and christian radicalism is the amount of time it's been allowed to fester, and muslim radicalism doesn't get to fester in America after 9-11.
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 3 Jun 2010 at 06:50 PM
Thimbles, if empirical victim counts matter, your comparisons are not 'equivalent'. I notice that you had to go back to Eric Rudolph's 1996 act (which took one life) to try to make your case. The other case you cite killed two - in 2008. By instructive contrast, the Little Rock shooting in 2010 killed two people, and Nasan (also in 2010) killed 13 and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood. This is in a country in which Christians overwhelmingly predominate, which makes the ratio even more compelling. Math class, anyone?
You haven't really addressed my comment on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, my friend. Her worst enemies in the West have repeatedly been 'liberal' establishment writers and politicians who are afraid she provokes Islam. When she came to this country, her sponsors were conservative think-tanks. You have no explanation for the hostility toward Hirsi Ali by so many western 'liberals', compared to 'conservatives'. I do.
#11 Posted by Mark RIchard, CJR on Fri 4 Jun 2010 at 08:48 AM