Census May Add First New Ethnic Group since 1997

A new proposal from the Biden Administration calls for the census and federal surveys to add a new group labeled “Middle Eastern and North African,” which would mark the first new ethnic group added to federal records since 1997. According to ABC News, the new proposals released Thursday would combine all questions about race and Hispanic ethnicity into a single question, rather than keeping them separate as the 1997 standards do. The proposals were crafted by a group of selected representatives from multiple federal agencies, organized by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

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Commentary: The Federal Government’s Bungled Census Is Bad News for Red States

If a politician from Florida decides to run for president in 2024, his (or her) home state will be short two votes in the Electoral College, and when the new session of the U.S. House of Representatives convenes in January 2023, Florida will be missing two congressional seats to which it is entitled.

Why? Because according to a post-2020 census survey, the U.S. Census Bureau significantly undercounted the population of Florida, as well as Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. At the same time, it overcounted the population of eight states, all but one of which is a blue state.

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Commentary: Dogma, Not Facts, Risks the Navy’s Readiness to Defend the Nation

Airplanes in the air above Navy ships

After the 2020 summer of riots, the U.S. Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations stood up Task Force One Navy (TF1N) on July 1, 2020. After a six-month effort, the final 142-page report was submitted on January 28, 2021 Its two operating assumptions are, first, that the Navy, as an institution, is systemically racist, and, second, that “Mission readiness is stronger when diverse strengths are used and differing perspectives are applied.” Notwithstanding several key military principles—such as unit cohesion, strict discipline across the chain of command, and, well, uniforms—the Navy is now ideologically committed to the mantra that “diversity is strength.”

Not surprisingly, considering the key entering assumptions, the task force report identified problems with Navy systems, climate, and culture; and submitted almost 60 recommendations aligned with four lines of inquiry: Recruiting, Talent Management/Retention, Professional Development, and Innovation and STEM (as well as a fifth line for miscellaneous recommendations).

One should be skeptical, however, about the entire exercise and the recommendations that flow from it. It inaccurately depicts the proud institution of the United States Navy as systemically racist—a slander that has more potential to undermine morale, good order, discipline, and military effectiveness than any geostrategic adversary. 

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Justices to Weigh Trump Census Plan to Exclude Noncitizens

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up President Donald Trump’s policy, blocked by a lower court, to exclude people living in the U.S. illegally from the census count that will be used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives.

Never in U.S. history have immigrants been excluded from the population count that determines how House seats, and by extension Electoral College votes, are divided among the states, a three-judge federal count said in September when it held Trump’s policy illegal.

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Citizenship Question Has Been Included on Canada’s Census Since 1901

  The debate over whether or not to include a citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. census has become the latest division in American politics, but a similar question has been included on Canada’s census for more than a century. On Saturday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported that America’s…

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