It’s just too difficult for the Hedgemony, so Back to pencil and paper for 2010 census

WASHINGTON (AP) — Technology problems will force the government to count all of the nation’s 300 million residents the old-fashioned way in the 2010 census — with paper and pencil.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was scheduled to tell a House subcommittee Thursday that the government will scrap plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don’t return census forms mailed out by the government.

The change will add as much as $3 billion to the cost of the constitutionally mandated count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion.

The project to develop the computers “has experienced significant schedule, performance, and cost issues,” Gutierrez said in prepared testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee. “A lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors has significantly contributed to the challenges.

“As I have said before, the situation today is unacceptable, and we have been taking steps to address the issues,” he said.

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There are more fabulous legal opinions still classified: Memo On Illegal Searches Comes To Light

(CBS/AP) For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil did not apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

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