Tuesday round-up (= link-dump)

• A couple weeks old: Ohio Pastors File IRS Complaints Over C Street House. Weird Christian "frat house" set-up may be a taxable rent-subsidy.
  
  
• Don't Mess With Texas (Mortgages, That Is) -- they actually regulated mortgages and home equity loans, and thus avoided the worst disasters of the last couple of years. Maybe the rest of the country could learn something!
  
  
• On Flexing Your Rights. Or at Least Meagerly Trying to Hold on to Them. Advice on dealing with cops always recommends calm and courtesy -- good on a practical front, but seems to imply that the absence of meekness is an opening for aggression, as evidenced by the crazy story here of police tazing a pregnant woman on a routine traffic stop...
  
  
• When did the Senate become such a lonely, cynical place?

  "My father used to quote it: `The Senate allows you two years as a statesman, two years as a politician, and two years as a demagogue.' " He gave me a wistful look right then, and proceeded to say exactly what I’d been thinking. "And that’s actually changed. You’re now a demagogue the full six years."

  Hope we can find a way to salvage the institution.
  
  
• The Bias of Veteran Journalists

  The journalists at the press conference didn't have a bias as the term is normally used; that is, I didn't get the sense that they were inherently for or against the company or its product. They just appeared to think they knew the subject well enough, or had a set enough idea in their heads as to what this kind of story was about, that they pursued only the lines of questioning necessary to fill in the blanks of that presumed story line.

  If it's bad for product reviews, imagine what it does to ones ability to develop an understanding of the political landscape, policy, and the future of both!
  
  
• Robert Reich argues Why More Immigrants Are An Answer to the Coming Boomer Entitlement Mess. Not sure that his numbers game will convince the fundamentally xenophobic, but it's a good perspective for the rest of us.
  
  
• Think Before You Speak, a great video campaign to get kids out of the habit of using "so gay" as the ultimate put-down for things uncool. Worth watching all of the initial vids.
  [Someday, maybe we can take on the whole late-night talkshow host vocabulary, of calling people "pussy" and "douchebag" and the like, for similar reasons. But the urgency is almost certainly greater on this chosen front.]
  
  
• Just fun: Music video with a whole school as the instrument. Video and sound-mixing are a realm in which today's kids have a whole different fluency than do the middle-aged set, however computer savvy.
  
  
• Just mind-bending: This is not a spiral. Say, wha...?!