By Geoffrey Dickens | January 4, 2010 | 4:57 PM EST

NBC's Today show invited on Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Census Bureau Director Robert Groves to promote their Portrait of America road tour as a way to encourage people to fill out the Census forms or risk, as Locke warned, miss out on "$400 billion of federal funds," to which Matt Lauer underlined, "This is vitally important to communities."

The entire Today cast braved 20 degree weather outside to stand alongside one of the vans set to tour the country to publicize the Census that, as the former Democratic Governor of Washington state alerted viewers, "will determine the allocation of federal funds to their communities for the next 10 years and could actually give them more political power in the United States Congress."

The following segment was aired on the January 4 Today show:

By Matthew Vadum | July 17, 2009 | 4:14 AM EDT

The New York Times was less than truthful in an editorial yesterday on ACORN's involvement in the 2010 census and implied that Republicans and Obama administration critics were paranoid. After pontificating that Republicans' fears were overblown about Robert M. Groves, the statistical voodoo practitioner who was recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate as census director, the Old Gray Lady opined