WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating whether anti-government sentiment led to the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest.It appears the natives are getting restless.
(H/T to Billy Beck.)
I'm all for hanging uppity Feds, should they need it, but isn't the census one of those constitutionally "OK" things for them to do?
ReplyDeleteOne one hand, the Census is pretty bland, as unconstitutionality goes. On the other hand, I guess Census guys are easier to take down than DEA or ATF agents.
ReplyDeleteHeath: It would be, if they stayed within the scope of their authorization, which they don't.
ReplyDeleteWhat was the census worker doing at the cemetary, registering new voters?
ReplyDeleteDoesn't that just mean he had his last meal before he was hung?
ReplyDelete:)
But here's the last line of the article:
ReplyDelete"Even as illustrated in town hall meetings today, there is a distinct hostility in a large segment of the population toward people who work for their government," Ruch said.
Somehow they connected people not wanting cap & trade, bailouts and stimuli, or IRS health care to people who want to hurt federal employees. And they're the sane, reasonable ones?
wv: berdise - where bears can sit in the river and catch fish all day, and the Dumpsters are always full.
Interesting.
ReplyDeletePutting this one down in the calendar, marked in red.
This deserves more observation.
Personally, I was wondering if said 'Fed' because they couldn't spell 'revenuer'.
ReplyDeleteCertainly bears watching, I wouldn't bet on the media interpretation being right, though.
Hmmmmm...."Unintended Consequences" are starting to happen?
ReplyDelete"Investigators are still trying to determine whether his death was a killing or a suicide..."
ReplyDeleteInteresting theory, that he may have written "fed" on his own chest before hanging himself...as if the guilt of being associated with this hope&change stuff finally got to his conscience, and he just couln't live with himself anymore...
(Aside, isn't suicide also a form of killing?)
Whether he was taking census questions or soil samples, he did nothing to deserve a lynching (assumption of foul play, of course).
ReplyDeleteI like the revenuer thought. Odds are he just stumbled onto something that was not quite within the law.
Watch this one. It has legs, and it has the making of being a match, ready to strike.
ReplyDeleteIn 1970 my mother did a census of the Ridge, and was okay to send to see families that hadn't been recorded on earlier ones. She said it was because I was her son and friends with boys that lived up there, one time being me and a bit bad worked in someone's favor. They really don't want government folks up there much, seems like they are always hauling relatives away.
ReplyDeleteThis one will resolve quickly.
ReplyDeleteThey have the computer, with data from house 1, 2, 3, 4, ... hrmm, no house 5... I wonder what could have stopped the data entry.
Ricn8or wins!
ReplyDeleteDid Nancy Pelosi's staff write this?
Everything after Secretary Locke's comment is straight propaganda and lefty talking points.
As it stands now, this case has no more to do with Tim McVeigh than it does with Tawana Brawley.
I wonder what local people would say about that cemetery?
I particularly like the advert for PEER, whose E. D. actually says nothing at all.
Personal grudge? Knew something about Whitewater real estate deals?
ReplyDeleteThe Clintons are still alive and well ya know.
Considering it's in rural KY it's always possible he ran across some paranoid tweaker with a meth lab.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing meth lab, as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing meth lab, as well.
ReplyDeleteYeah, corn squeezins is entirely too passé.
@Heath,
I assume you're unacquainted with census's "Long Form" or the department's "Survey of Business Owners and Self Employed Persons." It's a LONG way from "Who are you? Where do you live?"
Meth lab, Pot field,... All are possible (likely, even).
ReplyDeleteStill this bears watching.
wv: spocker (does this mean I need to, "Get a life?"
I suppose that it's more fun for the writers to invoke McVeigh and to paint town hall meetings as terrorist cells than to hold on and wait to find out wtf actually happened out there.
ReplyDeleteMeth lab? Possibly, but this is Kentucky's leading small farm agricultural region. His discovery of such probably has more to do with events than his work for the census.
ReplyDeleteThis has nothing to do with the current administration. People have always been hostile and untrusting of the census. My mother worked the 1970 census in South Dakota and the 1980 in Wyoming. Both times she was working urban areas, well at least as urban as SD and WY get. She's not in the inner cities, nor out in the sticks. Yet both times she was threatened with physical violance several times and twice each year told to "Get the hell off my property" by a guy holding, but not pointing at her, a gun.
ReplyDeleteEach time she just smiled said thank you and walked away. Then she entered "unresponsive" on the forms and turned them in. In one case where her supervisor told her to go back and check those houses, she refused.
We don't know what they did with those homes.
Personally I was conflicted when ACORN was tapped to do the census. I suspected that there would be a lot of foul play going on. But on the other hand it was an excellent opportunity to thin their ranks out.
Hannibal Lecter knew what to do with census takers.
ReplyDeleteOld Grouch has a point. Still as Joe Stalin supposedly said to Mr. Mikoyan, "One man's death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic".
ReplyDeleteI can't see a shooting war starting unless the Republicans continue sounding like Democrats Lite and lose the congressional elections next year, but there are a fair lot of loonies on the anarchistic fringe who might draw some encouragement from this. In the original sense of the word, as in "to encourage, to make braver".
Wrong things in our society, sadly, tend to engender waves of similar actions.
Most, if not all, of the school shootings/bombings/whatnot we've had were copycat operations predicated on Columbine and, more particularly, the media's wildly disproportionate and Kumbaya dripping coverage given to sick actions like it.
I might start looking at some of the 45 year old Gunshop Commandoes who still live at home with Mom, at least if a few of them start banding together.
We had an incident a number of years ago, here in Connecticut.
4 or 5 losers decided they were the local band of the Minutemen, and decided they'd massacre some hippy pacifist types down in the Voluntown woods.
One ran out of cookies and finked the operation out to the state P.D., but the boys figured in for a penny, in for a pound, and when to police spotlights came on, they ran for the house, guns blazing.
The only casualty was one of the peace/love/dove ladies, injured by a State Police shotgun blast, accidentally fired as the trooper parried a bayonet thrust.
They weren't very bright. And, while whacking the occasional Fed would gain the spotlight and give the left more ammunition against all such "conservatives" (read inbread monkeys married to their sisters), a bombing campaign would do a lot more damage, and could spread like wildfire.
With Bagdad or Belfast type controls put in place, how much financial damage would be done to our society, how much more government would we have interfering in every aspect of our life?
Hell, I'm half suprised the Obamists haven't started blasts around the country all ready, tied to right wing propaganda delivered to a willing media. What a jusification for the 1984 scenario they so obviously desire.
Sorry about the typos, babysitting again. Damn that kid is fast!
ReplyDeleteNow it's looking as if AP was either burned by a bad source, or their stringer got a little bit creative. Local cops are discounting a lot of the "details" in this "story."
ReplyDeleteNot that it will slow down the lefty blogs, which even now are demanding door to door gun confiscations and protective custody of all non-Democrats. Oh, they're going to be surprised and disappointed when they try to march us into all those FEMA concentration camps and find they don't actually exist.