Out of Right Field

not really, but it's a piece by Republican David Frum on Huffington Post that addresses a point I've been making for a while about "constructed narratives"; definitely worth a read (it's about as fair and balanced analysis that you'll get from the right)--click link below to read: 

Think the U.S. Election Is About the Economy? Not.

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the following comes via the Daily Kos (remember, the guy who beat Dick Lugar last week? Well, this is how his type govern--mindlessly axing the budget): 

Census: I know it's fashionable to decry the GOP as "know-nothings," but that's because they keep doing things which indicate that they truly want to know nothing about the world around them. This time, their target is the American Community Survey, the ongoing sample that supplements the decennial census; House Republicans just passed an amendment that cuts the ACS from the Census Bureau's budget. The ACS is important not only because it provides constant adjustments of population and race numbers, but also because it completely replaced the Census's long form, meaning it's the only source of more detailed demographic information.

Of course, it's worth noting that this attack is unlikely to survive the Senate, not just because it's Dem-controlled but because Republican-leaning lobby groups (such as the National Federation of Independent Business) are likely to step in and disabuse a few Republican congresspersons' notions here. If you're a small businessman getting started and you, say, want to send your direct mail to zip codes in your metropolitan area that are at a particular income level or are populated by a particular kind of worker, and you don't have the tens of thousands of dollars handy to commission your own market research, what do you do? You crack open census data for free, the kind gathered through the ACS. I kinda doubt the Chamber of Commerce or NFIB wants to see its members flying blind without access to useful marketing data. (David Jarman)

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this one is definitely from the Left (field), but in one of those weird things that happens in politics, R's and Conservatives--about the same thing nowadays--aligning w/ some from the Left in their criticisms of this Administration:
Greenwald, Chomsky, and Obama--"progressivism from the heart"