Standing in the Slide Zone

• Part 3 and Part 4 of Jesse Curtis' series on American churches, Christianity, and Biblical exhortations.
• The Daily Howler:

  That said, Lyons made a direct statement: Obama didn’t rob, steal or otherwise remove that money from the trust fund. Obama hasn’t taken a dime from the fund, Lyons directly said.
  
  Indeed, Obama has extended the life of the Medicare trust fund, Lyons directly said. It’s hard to know how Obama could do that if he’s been stealing the trust fund's money. [Emphasis Added.]

  Apparently there's a rumor about money stolen from the Medicare fund. Apparently it is a false rumor, but the MSM don't seem to want to talk about it.  Mr. Somerby is citing Gene Lyons here.
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates has two pieces up today, one of which is in the hardcopy edition of The Atlantic:  "Irony of a Black President," which functions as introduction, plea for subscriptions, and teaser, and "Fear of a Black President."  I will post a tiny taste, but you really need to read the whole thing:

  These cultural cues became important during Obama’s presidential run and beyond. Obama doesn’t merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to signal and court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation—crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photo­graphed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair. There is often something mawkish about this signaling—like a Virginia politico thickening his southern accent when talking to certain audiences. If you’ve often been the butt of political signaling (Sister Souljah, Willie Horton), and rarely the recipient, these displays of cultural affinity are powerful. And they are all the more powerful because Obama has been successful.

• Via Mills River Progressive, Alex Baer of TV News Lies.org on the subject of Republicans above their competence.
• On the occasion of Twisted Sister objecting to Paul Ryan's use of "We're Not Gonna Take It," SFGate offers a slide show of "Musicians vs. Politicians."