The ultra-conservative US Tea Party movement is taking a page from Stephen Harper's playbook: gutting the census. Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would shutter several Census Bureau projects and programs. Robert Groves is the Bureau's director: [Video link] My mother, a school board member in her tiny Maine town, had a bumper sticker that read, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." You might equally, if less pithily, say, "If you think the census is expensive, try not knowing what's happening to your country's population." Gathering statistical information about a country's demographics has been a hallmark...