Steve Thorngate
This just in: Romney paid the taxes he owed, not the taxes some of us think he should have owed!
It's not what the headlines are highlighting, but Mitt Romney's 2010 tax return
includes one impressive fact: his charitable contributions amounted to
$7 million. I know, this hardly put him at risk of losing one of his houses
and ending up out on the street till his driver could pick him up and
take him to one of his other houses. Still, giving away almost a third
of your income is nothing to sneeze at.
How high are our taxes?
Among those of us who maintain that not everything the federal
government does should be either privatized or eliminated, it's common
to point out that income tax rates are a lot lower than they used to be,
especially but not only for the rich.
Gingrich's food stamps ad
Here's the ad Newt Gingrich has been running in South Carolina since Monday night's debate.
Links? Links.
Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.
A day without Wiki
Till today, I had no idea how much I rely on Wikipedia for my day-to-day work. I imagine I'm not alone in this realization....
No pipeline
It's official: President Obama has announced that he's turning down the application to b...
In which the NYT (again) makes my second-city blood boil
The New York Times has never been exactly hesitant to publish articles that look cluelessly down on the cultural life of U.S. cities with fewer than 8 million residents. So I'm not sure I'd blame nepotism alone for the A. G. Sulzberger clunker the paper published this week.
"Seriously. Are you a Baptist?"
This "Which denomination are you?" flowchart from Lutheran Satire has been making the rounds this week.
Political gambles
Paul Waldman is right that the media would do us all a service by focusing more on who wins elect...
Which Colbert was that again?
I enjoyed Charles McGrath's profile of Stephen Colbert.
McGrath's framework is that there used to be two Colberts, the man
himself and the blowhard-pundit character. Now there's a third: a real
live political actor. I think that's all about right. But I don't know why McGrath writes off Colbert's 2010 congressional testimony as part of the old paradigm.
An impressive showing by Rick Santorum?
It's rare for me to disagree with Mark Silk and rarer still for me to agree with Erick Erickson....
My most popular blog posts of the year
Thanks for reading and commenting on my blog. Here are the ten posts people read the most this year.
The most popular subscriber-only articles of the year
Here's a separate top-ten list of just our paid content--i.e., the most
popular articles of the year that were read online only by Century subscribers.
Are food drives worthwhile?
Are good deeds primarily about the good done for others or the good the doing does for the do-gooder?
...Tony Perkins tells us what parables mean
A lot of people didn't like Tony Perkins' CNN Belief Blog post last week, and rightly so. Jesus was a free marketer, long before the concept was developed? Sure, if you say so.
Erasing the mainline
Anytime you say something is new while also ignoring something old, it begs the question of what labels you use and how slippery their definitions are.
Are Iowa's conservative evangelicals irrelevant?
There's a sort of dualism that comes up when political commentators talk about conservative evangelicals: either they're powerful and unflappable advocates for the couple of causes we've always associated with them, or they don't really exist as a voting bloc at all.
Sounding nice and getting tough
Tuesday's speech was the most fired up and the readiest to go that we've seen Obama in a good long while.
Links? Links.
Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.