Our friends at labs…
…are discovering the inadequacies of federal data. It tells you something, but never everything you need to know. Data is useful, but it’s the digging into data–unlocking the details of the data–that justifies the expense of presenting it. By itself, data is really no more interesting than passages of the tax code or lists of earmarks. There was nothing inherently interesting about Dennis Hastert listing a 1/4 share of 69 acres (Plano, IL) on his financial disclosure form — it was seeing where that land was — an w