With a hat tip to my friend David, we know now how Barack Obama intends to turn the Census into a political quagmire without pulling it into the White House. See this from the Washington Times.

President Obama is losing a member of his press shop just shy of his first 100 days in office.

Ellen Moran, White House communications director, will become chief of staff for Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

Mr. Obama issued a statement through the press office commending her service thus far.

The Commerce Department ostensibly controls the census and keeps politics out of it. However, Ellen Moran is a far left radical. She’s the former ED of Emily’s list, worked for DNC, DCCC, and AFL-CIO. Her resume is straight out of left-wing activism, not communications.

Putting a loyal lieutenant standing behind Gary Locke is the perfect way to ensure the Census makes up inaccurate numbers to better help the Democrats in the coming census.

Today, there was a hearing on the lessons learned from the 2008 elections and I was there to tell the unexamined story of ACORN.

Although ACORN has – routinely and repeatedly violated laws – it has been rewarded by the Democrats with up to $2 billion in taxpayer dollars. This is as outrageous as the bonuses AIG paid to the same executives who ran it into the ground.

If you reward bad behavior, you tend to encourage it – one shudders to think what ACORN would do with up to $2 billion, given the fraud and abuse it was engaged in prior to receiving stimulus money.

As background, ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is, despite its claims, a massive political enterprise that includes as many as 175 subsidiaries, including two labor union locals, and lobbying and political organizations.

ACORN, in violation of numerous laws, strongly supported then-Senator Obama’s presidential aspirations. Its political wing endorsed Obama, and during the 2008 primary, his campaign paid an ACORN affiliate more than $800,000 for political services.

It must be understood that ACORN has both official and unofficial programs called “Muscle for the Money.” The official “Muscle for Money” program is the ACORN political operation. Under this program, the Obama campaign paid an ACORN affiliate nearly $900,000 not only to register voters, but to also convert those voter registrations into votes at the polls. ACORN used employees of other subsidiaries, irrespective of the subsidiary’s tax status, to accomplish this objective.

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Bonnie Erbe, a columnist and blogger for U.S.News and World Report, is keen to make sure that Democrats continue to cheat on re-districting as much as possible. She is insisting that Democrats not fall for a bi-partisan or a fair approach to re-districting and says that the Census should stay “politicized” because, after all, it’s Democrats in power now! So, as far as she is concerned, the Democrats should “gerrymander away” and absolutely demands that the Census should be politicized.

Erbe writes that she wants to “gender-mander” the Census for “feminist leaders” and wants to make sure that “hispanics and Latinos” aren’t “under-counted.” She claims the Census is “part of the spoils of victory” and wants her lefties to be able to wield that power. She says that the Democrats should “spare us the theatrics of trying to look nonpartisan.” So, the Dems should continue to cynically use the Census merely for partisan political purposes.

So much for the new tone in Washington, eh?

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I mentioned earlier that the Democrats’ math does not add up when it came to jobs numbers.

Congressman Eric Cantor has prepared a chart that shows just how screwed up the White House’s numbers are. The White House attributes the error to a rounding error. That doesn’t quite add up though.

Small states have significant deviations from totals by the state versus total by the congressional district. And states with just one state wide congressional district have +20% swings.

Is this the same type of math and rounding they’ll use for census numbers?

If you watch the news, as I do, viewing can be a pretty discouraging thing these days. Recession, job losses, foreclosures, and the skyrocketing national debt seem to be plastered across every news program. And during these challenging times, the American people expect those who work in Washington to put aside their political weapons and focus on finding solutions to the difficulties we face.

In fact, no single word was more prominently used during the election cycle of 2008 than “change.” It was a rallying cry for both Republicans and Democrats and represented a promise to reform Washington into a more bipartisan and transparent government.

That was until the wave of promised bipartisanship suddenly hit a sea wall called the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Traditionally, it is the function of the Department of Commerce to oversee the nationwide census that is mandated by the Constitution to occur every ten years. But even as the President seeks to convince us that he is trying to reach out and be bipartisan in his approach to Washington by nominating a Republican Senator, Judd Gregg, to serve as Secretary of Commerce, the President is seeking to emasculate one of Commerce’s key functions by giving the White House power to conduct the census.

The excuse given is that the White House has to appease minority groups that complain that as a Senator, Gregg has not given sufficient support to census efforts and that in his Senate votes, Gregg has sought to eliminate the Commerce Department. Of course, if the Obama Administration were concerned about Gregg’s commitment to the work of the Commerce Secretary, they should not have appointed him and if these minority groups are concerned about the appointment, they should be targeting the White House, not Senator Gregg.

Call me cynical, but it seems to me that the reason for this effort to shut Gregg out of census-related issues has to do with the fact that the census will determine redistricting, which in turn will determine the balance of power in Congress. The Obama Administration, therefore, wants the census to be run out of the West Wing so that it can take a direct hand in helping determine the balance of power and making sure that it favors the Democrats.

If so, a Constitutional responsibility is being subsumed by a naked power grab. And let’s remember that taking the census operation and consolidating it in the White House lessens Congress’s oversight capabilities, because Congress will not be able to call up the relevant Cabinet officials to get answers out of them concerning census issues. Rather, Congress will have to fight to get White House officials like Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff, to come up to the Hill to testify and as we all know, getting White House officials to testify comes with a series of headaches and obstacles to be overcome.

But I suppose that the White House considers all of this preferable to having a Republican Commerce Secretary run the census as Commerce Secretaries are wont to do. I suppose as well that all of this is preferable to allowing Congressional hearings to take place more easily, and allowing Republicans to ask questions in those hearings as well.

No, I’m quite serious: since when?

This is all part of this little article (Glenn Reynolds summed it up perfectly, by the way) about Sen. Gregg’s real value to this administration:

MANCHESTER - Sen. Judd Gregg yesterday declined all comment on reports that the White House will strip him of his authority over the federal Census Bureau even before he becomes Secretary of Commerce.

Gregg spokesman Laena Fallon said all comment would come from the White House.

A White House spokesman last evening said, “From the first days of the transition the census has been a priority for the president, and a process he wanted to reevaluate. There is historic precedent for the director of the census, who works for the Commerce Secretary and the president, to work closely with White House senior management — given the number of decisions that will have to be put before the president. We plan to return to that model in this administration.”

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President Obama reveals that his sly attempt to appear bipartisan by nominating Republican Senator Judd Gregg to be Commerce Secretary is nothing more than pure partisan politics.

In an effort to mollify ruffled feathers of “black and Hispanic leaders” about Gregg’s commitment to funding the 2010 census, Obama has already decided to clip the wings of his Secretary of Commerce-designate:

The director of the Census Bureau will report directly to the White House and not the secretary of Commerce, according to a senior White House official.

“Funding the 2010 census” is Democrat code for cooking the census books.

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