7 @ 9: Reporters missing deadlines

1. Ruth Graham covers the Mark Driscoll plagiarism affair for Slate. Graham’s summary links to the vital coverage of this from Warren Throckmorton and Jonathan Merritt, but like most of the reporting on this she neglects to mention that: 1) some of the passages Driscoll swiped were terrible — inaccurate, third-rate culture-war banality; and 2) Janet Mefferd, the radio host who first publicized these charges, is herself a fringe-right whackaloon who makes Alex Jones seem mainstream.

Kudos to Graham, though, for mentioning the Matthew 18 dodge. Whenever any public figure in the church gets caught red-handed, they always go running to Matthew 18. Anyone who responds to critics by piously citing that passage should be presumed to be guilty, guilty, guilty.

2. The Healthcare.gov website was a bug-ridden frustration machine when it first launched. Now that it’s running better, a lot of people are signing up for insurance coverage they could never afford before.

But almost all of the stories I’ve read about health care enrollment — pro or con — have been written from the weird, fringe perspective of those kids from school who did their homework early. We’re Americans. If we’re gonna sign up for health insurance, then our first question is “When’s the deadline?” Nobody says “When’s the first possible day on which I can enroll?” We’re looking at the other end of the calendar — when’s the latest possible day for me to start working on this?

A lot of the Healthcare.gov coverage of the past two months has read like an article written March 1, fretting that most Americans hadn’t yet filed their income tax returns. This is how most of us do things. Reporters, of all people, should know this.

3. Mother Jones has a must-read special report: “Newtown: One Year After.”

“A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides.” And they’ve posted an interactive photo album with portraits of these young victims.

As Kurt Vonnegut said, “I like the American culture, such as it is, but let ‘s get rid of the f–king guns.”

4. A new report uses the Millennium Development Goals to measure how one backward city in the developing world is losing ground on maternal mortality and newborns’ health. Where is this Third World city? It’s right here, in Philadelphia.

5. You’re Not Allowed to Kill Civilians. And for God’s sake, how many weddings are these idiots going to bomb? There is nothing brave, honorable, constructive about bombing weddings. Bombing weddings does not protect our freedoms. Bombing weddings does not defend America. Bombing weddings does not serve our national interest. Bombing weddings just kills people at weddings.

Yet we’ve been doing it for years, and apparently no one at the Pentagon or the CIA has the slightest clue how to not bomb weddings. Idiots.

6. Jan Edmiston: “Repeat After Me: I Have Enormous Power”

You have enormous power too – especially if you are a pastor or if you are a church person of any kind.  You have the power to mess with people’s impressions of Christianity.  You have the power to welcome someone who is unwelcome in conventional culture.  You have the power to introduce a different narrative about what Jesus is about and who God is.

7. Since we already did “Christmas in Prison,” here’s a great Aussie take on a similar idea, Paul Kelly’s “How to Make Gravy“: