For more from Dave Granlund, visit www.davegranlund.com.

For a look at the state of America's youth, there's probably no better resource than the U.S. military, which examines thousands of them every year to fill its recruitment goals.

This week's number that President Barack Obama needs to worry about is not two, the number of governorships the Democrats lost on Tuesday. It is 10.2 percent, the unemployment rate for October announced Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor.

This weekend I was out doing errands for a few hours, and it turned out I forgot my cell phone. It was fantastic! My kids couldn't bug me every eight minutes with "Where are you, when are you coming home, and can you please get to the store for 'fill in the blank?' "

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qa'ida' in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses - without their achieving anything of note!" - Osama bin Laden, November 2004

In announcing deep spending cuts to close a $600 million budget cap, Gov. Deval Patrick last week stressed that he was leaving the main sources of state aid to education intact. What he didn't say was that he was making cuts in another account that will cause immediate hardships for the state's regional school districts.

Does anybody really know what time it is?

In the history of modern politics, we've never seen a worse case of media overkill.

The Board of Selectmen and other committees in town need to be careful about how they write our bylaws in the Town of Framingham.

The conversation continues at Holmes & Company, a new blog that is the online cousin of the Daily News Opinion pages.  Editor Rick Holmes and a wide range of commentators opine on a wide range of topics - and readers can weigh in as well.