Mayor: stand up and be counted

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin may be one of the most controversial political figures in the land. But it's hard to argue against him this time.

The mayor is urging residents temporarily displaced by Hurricane Katrina to claim their New Orleans addresses in the looming 2010 census.

The wingnutosphere is throwing a fit about this campaign right now. But guess what? By law, Nagin is right.

The census is supposed to count your official place of residence. If residents are only temporarily displaced, New Orleans is still their official home.

If somebody is displaced by a disaster and has to stay in a hotel, does that mean they have to claim the hotel as their residence? If a person is hospitalized for an illness, does that mean they have to claim the hospital as their residence?

This is an important issue, because the census determines federal funding - and apportionment of congressional seats and electoral votes.

And that's why the rightist brain trust is bent out of shape over Nagin's proposal. Nagin's plan would keep residents counted in New Orleans instead of counting them in places like Lafayette - which was one of the largest cities (except suburbs of other cities) to go Republican in the presidential election.

Active efforts were made in 1990 and 2000 to undercount Democratic areas - or skip them entirely. (Some communities had a census population of zero, despite the fact that people lived there.) In 2010, every effort has to be made to see that such miscounts are not repeated.

(Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124805246069464101.html)