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It’s still early in the investigation but this troubles me:
The AP is reporting that Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found hung to death in Kentucky with the word “fed” was scrawled on the dead man’s chest. Investigators are still trying to determine the motive, but “law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is ‘an apparent homicide.’” “Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved — and that’s part of the investigation — and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a census worker,” said FBI spokesman David Beyer.I’m certain that frothing rightwing fear-mongering about the census from the likes of people like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Crazytown) had nothing to do with this:
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., says Americans should refuse to comply with the Obama administration’s 2010 census because the data could be used for nefarious purposes, including the imprisonment of Americans in internment camps.
Appearing on Fox News, Bachmann said it was the census that allowed the internment of the Japanese during World War II. She also boasted about breaking the law in refusing to complete the census form she received.
“If we look at American history — between 1942 and 1947 — the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt,” Bachmann said.
“That’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up.”
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DOWN THE VINE
Syndication
maybe it was Bachmann who did it?
she doesn't seem like she has the upper body strength to string people up
I was employed by the Census for a while, would've been rehired for this phase if I hadn't found other work, wrote about the job in a very general, not-breaking-confidentiality sort of manner, and…. well, this scares the living daylights out of me.
And it's all paranoia, anyway. Last I checked, Census data had been established by the founding fathers to be confidential for seventy-two years following its collection, enough so that a lister isn't allowed to tell anyone not in the Census, not even the FBI, about any of the data she's collected. Even assuming nefarious plans on the part of the government, about which I continue to be highly skeptical, they'd have to get that through the Supreme Court, and since the confidentiality's built into the Constitution…. let's just say I find success in that highly unlikely. This isn't the 1940s, and we don't have a group that people would stand aside for that kind of treatment of (….or at least, we don't have a group the fearmongers would be concerned about, as I hear considerably more frequent threats of that sort against liberals. Pot, meet kettle?)
In short: The people who tell me I should be afraid of the government scare me far more than the government itself ever will.
Great quote: "The people who tell me I should be afraid of the government scare me far more than the government itself ever will. "
so horrifying picture i am getting afraid after seeing the picture of hanged body of census worker, it just a murder and nothing else.
As the fear mongers continue their war of terror in the USA. The Muslim Terrorists actually take the lessons that the KKK and Aryan Brother Hood teach to heart. We have more to fear from home grown terrorist than we do from the foreign ones.
No way, how terrible is that? I hope the FBI can get more details. That word FED scrawled on his chest is gruesome. What kind of person would do that?
I feel really bad for this seemingly very gentle family man.
This terrible tragedy. I hope they get to the bottom of this.