Some days, you wake up, check the news, and wonder just what the hell happened to this country. And I'm not talking about that nutty right-wing view that we've strayed from the original vision laid out for us by the authors of the Constitution or the Bible. I have just the opposite view: I'm wondering why those people seem so intent on dragging us back into the bad old days of bygone centuries, when white male property owners ran things as they saw fit.Read more »

The Bay Citizen has a fascinating map by census tract of poverty in the Bay Area. Among the things that jump out: There's plenty of serious poverty in the area -- and it's worst than the map shows. The definition of "poverty" is a family of four living on $22,113 -- in the Bay Area. Hard to imagine how a family of four can even pay rent, much less eat, in this part of the world on $22,000.Read more »

By Adrián Castañeda

Federal Census forms are being mailed out today, March 15. It’s a massive government effort to count everyone who lives in the United States that comes every 10 years, and it’s being matched by an equally strong effort by nonprofit groups to ensure that even marginalized residents get counted.

In a country that once counted slaves as 3/5 a person and did not count Native Americans at all, it appears that the 2010 census will come the closest to counting all people living in the U.S. Millions of dollars are being spent to inform people of the importance, and the function, of responding to the decennial census – and saving the feds from spending further millions on door-to-door enumerating. 

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