In the World

I keep seeing T. F. Charlton's Jason Collins post everywhere, and with good reason: Tim Tebow is an example of how the public face of Christian athletes, like the public face of American Christianity in general, is overwhelmingly white—despite the fact that black Americans are the racial demographic most likely to identify as “very religious.” A recent Barna poll found that Tebow is by far the most well-known Christian professional athlete in the U.S. (with 83% awareness from the public), with retired white quarterback Kurt Warner a distant second at 59%. Robert Griffin III (RGIII), a black quarterback who’s had a far more successful season with the Redskins than Tebow’s had with the Jets, trailed at 34%. It's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story.

A funeral director in Massachusetts is struggling to find a community willing to let Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev be buried there. It's sobering to belong to an ostensibly advanced, decent culture in which people find it reasonable to take revenge on a corpse. And what is this about if not revenge?

When I saw the MoJo headline "Why Your Supermarket Only Sells 5 Kinds of Apples," I expected an informative piece about industrial agriculture's disincentive for biodiversity and the various problems this causes. I've read that article before, but for whatever reason I clicked anyway.

So I've discontinued the sidebar link blogging, which was a bit of a pre-Twitter relic. But I'll still post semi-regular roundups of links, with a shift toward doing what Twitter's not always so good at: giving a taste of the actual writing. In other words, here's some quotes.

This is a welcome development: Call them the debt crisis dissenters. The two parties are miles apart on how to cut the deficit and national debt: Republicans want to slash spending even more. Democrats want to raise revenue. And then there are the other Democrats — the ones who reject the entire premise of the current high-stakes fiscal fight. There’s no short-term deficit problem, they say, and there isn’t even an urgent debt crisis that requires immediate attention.

In case you missed it last week, when the breaking-news kind of media kept dominating our attention: Jonathan Cohn's cover story on home-based child care is pretty startling.

When I filed my taxes earlier this month, I paid my use tax to the State of Illinois. A lot of people don't pay use tax, and enforcement is almost nonexistent. But there it was on the form I had to sign, and it was all of 50 bucks or something, so I paid it. Those of us who live in a state with a sales tax are required to pay tax on online purchases.

Yesterday I heard the NPR news desk transition from its top story, Boston, to the latest from West, Texas. Here's how they did it: "Let's check in on another major story that dominated our attention last week." That's not quite how I remember it.

Matt Yglesias makes some interesting points here, and I'll echo his pick for best pizza place in DC. Still: if making homemade pizza is doing it wrong, I don’t want to do it right.

Sometimes when a vote doesn't go the way you want, you just have to sigh and remind yourself that this is how democracy works. Other times you have to wish that it actually did work. The overwhelming majority of Americans support background checks for gun buyers. No matter.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing in Boston, an injured marathon spectator was tackled by another bystander and then taken into police custody. His apartment was searched. Read Amy Davidson's post.

When Ross Douthat's right, Ross Douthat's right: What I hope we don’t see, when the next race or a parade or festival looms up in front of us, are layers of extra stops and searches and checkpoints, wider and wider rings of closed streets, the kind of portable metal detectors that journalists remember unfondly from political conventions, more of the concrete barriers that Washingtonians have become accustomed to around our public buildings … more of everything that organized officialdom does to reassure us, and itself, that soft targets can somehow be eliminated entirely, and that everything anyone can think of is being done to keep the unthinkable at bay.

Brad Plumer has a helpful list of winners and losers in the White House budget. If you want to understand the president’s proposal at a deeper level than a soundbite (but a shallower level than actually reading the whole thing), I recommend starting here. One small quibble: Plumer’s list of losers includes “farms and agribusinesses.”

If you’re really into competing blueprints for the federal budget—and we both know you are—then it’s an exciting week. The president released his 2014 budget request today, and for the first time in many years there are White House, House and Senate budgets all on the table at the same time. There are also two other proposals, one from the House’s right wing and one from its left. These great graphs from the Washington Post compare these five plans to one another and to current policy. Note than on the first metric, the ever-popular question of budget deficits, all five dip lower than current projections in just a couple years.

I'm back from the annual gathering of the Associated Church Press. The week included the ACP's annual awards banquet, at which the Century was honored in eight categories.