Eideard

The $15 billion U.S. Census is near completion with a response rate unchanged from a decade ago, defying concerns it might be derailed by anti-government sentiment and widespread violence against census takers.

Conservative figures like television commentator Glenn Beck and Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann had urged Americans to provide only minimal information on the census form.

That sparked fears that Obama administration critics such as supporters of the limited-government Tea Party movement would hinder the once-in-a-decade project.

But now that the counting is nearly done, government officials and political analysts say there is no sign that the political climate had much impact on the census.

The mail-in response rate for the 10-question census was unchanged at 72 percent from 2000, bucking a national trend showing declining participation in surveys of any kind. And despite technical challenges, it is on schedule and under budget.

“This proves that Americans still have common sense,” said political analyst Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “You’re only hurting your own localities when you don’t fill in your form.”

I’m convinced American have some common sense – once in a while.

You have to hope that most people will just raise their eyebrows and lower the volume when they see the looneybird brigade on television.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court.

If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.

Conservative groups reacted with sharp criticism on Tuesday morning. “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network…

Judge Sotomayor has sat for the last 11 years on the federal appeals bench in Manhattan. As the top federal appeals court in the nation’s commercial center, the court is known in particular for its expertise in corporate and securities law. For six years before that, she was a federal district judge in New York…

Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.

Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and and attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office before entering private practice.

But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush.

That appointment was made by a Republican who was a conservative – not a neocon mouthpiece.

Previously approved by two bi-partisan efforts in Congress, no doubt the Party of “NO” will waste a couple of months on preaching their ideology, trying to stop her appointment to the bench.

Only recently, however, have economists turned their attention to vengeance and tried to measure it in the real world. In a working paper published last month, Naci Mocan, an economist, gathered information on 89,000 people in 53 countries to draw a map of vengefulness. What he found was that among the most vengeful are women, older people, the poor and residents of high-crime areas.

“There was a question of whether or not we can quantify vengeful feelings in a scientific fashion,” Mocan said. “It’s the first analysis of the issue looking at actual data.”

It turns out that personal attributes — age, income, gender — as well as the characteristics of one’s culture and country contribute to a person’s desire for revenge, Mocan said. “A feeling such as vengeance,” he said, “which can be considered primal, is nonetheless influenced by the economic and social circumstances of the person and the country he or she lives in.”
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