Steve Thorngate

So it turns out that the president and first lady's tax burden for last year was only 20.5 percent. Does this make Obama a hypocrite for criticizing Mitt Romney's low tax rate? Only if he blames Romney personally for not voluntarily paying more. As I said in Romney's defense a while back, the problem isn't that presidential candidates with plenty of money aren't willing to pay their taxes. The problem is that their taxes are too low.

Skimming the NYT over the weekend, I read the following in Ross Douthat's summary of his new book: Our president embodies [America's] uncentered spiritual landscape in three ways. First, like a growing share of Americans (44 percent), President Obama changed his religion as an adult, joining Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in his 20s after a conversion experience brought him out of agnosticism into faith. Second, he was converted by a pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose highly politicized theology was self-consciously at odds with much of historic Christian practice and belief. Finally, since breaking with that pastor, Obama has become a believer without a denomination or a church, which makes him part of one of the country’s fastest-growing religious groups — what the Barna Group calls the “unchurched Christian” bloc, consisting of Americans who accept some tenets of Christian faith without participating in any specific religious community. The third point annoyed me.

Here's an impressive and heartwarming little stunt, pulled off by filmmaker Nirvan Mullick with a big assist from the internets. But the coolest part is the creativity of the nine-year-old whose day Mullick was determined to make.

The Century's sort-by-lectionary-day tool exists primarily as a way of organizing past Living by the Word columns and Blogging toward Sunday posts in a useful way. But we also put other content there--anything from the magazine or blogs that happens to deal with a given lection in a way that could plausibly be useful to a preacher or worship planner. So, while our lectionary columnists and bloggers mostly focus on Sundays, the lectionary pages have also collected a good bit of content related to the additional holy days of the (weekly) lectionary.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about: An anti-bullying session for fifth-graders, a guide for avoiding sexist campaign coverage, more.

So, who's playing politics with reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act? Sen. Schumer and the Democrats, or Sen. Grassley and the Republicans? Well, probably both. Yes, Democracts would love to bolster the narrative that Republicans don't care about women, even though Grassley et al. object to new provisions added to the VAWA, not the existing law. And yes, by threatening the whole bill based on objections to small parts of it, some Senate Republicans (not all of them) reveal that while they may in general favor services for domestic violence victims, it's not exactly a top priority to them. Of course both Senators Chuck are playing politics. That's their game, especially in leap years.

Bob Dylan released his first album 50 years ago this week. That self-titled debut is not the Dylan record anyone listens to most--it includes only two original tunes--and as Andy Greene details, it was not a smashing success. But it opened the door for Dylan to come back just months later and record The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which propelled Dylan's staggering career.

As I've said before, the objectivity-fetishizing conventions of straight news reporting make me crazy. It's not just the odd philosophical throwback of implying that reporters can somehow avoid writing as particular people situated in particular contexts. It's also the convoluted copy, in which even plain facts can't be stated plainly if they happen to be unpopular. So I was glad when NPR released its new ethics handbook, in which among other things the network states that it favors "truth" over "the appearance of balance" and adds that "if the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports."

I certainly don't hear from as many PR people as David Roberts does, but when I do hear from them it tends to annoy me for most of the same reasons it annoys him: no hyperlinks, buried ledes, missing background info, generally little evidence that the sender knows what I do or cares if I consider his or her pitch. I particularly enjoyed item #6 on his list of tips.

Two similar pieces are getting a lot of play this week: James Whittaker’s blog post about why he left Google and Greg Smith’s op-ed about why he left Goldman Sachs. Both talk of their high level of company loyalty and enthusiasm in the past. Both bemoan the changes in their respective corporate cultures that led them to leave. Neither seems all that hopeful about his company’s future. What neither of them does, however, is demonstrate that the problem is that Google/Goldman Sachs used to care about more than just making money but doesn’t anymore.

Michele Chabin reports that Israeli postal workers are refusing to deliver Hebrew-language New Testaments. Mark Silk asks an interesting question.

Colbert for the civil-libertarian win.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

My wife and I have been joking with our neighbors lately about TV ads that a Super PAC supporting their cat, Kobie, might run against our cat, Owl. Now Scott Simon's reporting on an ad someone actually made.