Paul,
Well, as I have come to expect, you are right. I remember I put those there for a reason. In fact, you can look at the actual conversation that led up to here:
https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=48012
I was getting an "call of overloaded 'print(DHT*&)" error and I applied the "fix" to all of them. Well, at some point later I thought that was rather stupid and just had it print i during the loop and didn't bother to see of I still needed the other cast.
It's almost embarrassing.
Tim