Earlier this year, Tim Russert came under fire for his "ethical lapse" in promoting his son's show while hosting his otherwise hard-hitting NBC Sunday news program. Or as blogger Arianna Huffington sharply critiqued the plug: Mr. Russert's "unseemly use of 'Meet the Press' to promote James Carville's new XM radio sports show while refusing to come clean about the fact that Carville's co-host is Russert's college-age son."
Carville and the younger Russert, a sophomore at Boston College, came up with the idea of hosting the show as their two families sat together at Washington Nationals baseball games. A graduate of St. Albans in Washington, Russert's resume supplied by XM reads like that of any privileged son with access to major sporting events:
"An avid sports fan, by the time he was 16 he had attended two Super Bowls, a World Series, five Major League Baseball All-Star Games, an NBA final, four NBA All- Star Games, two NCAA Final Fours, an NHL Stanley Cup Final, a U.S. Open and The Preakness Stakes."
NOT SO PAINFUL
Filed your taxes yet?
Since the April 15 statutory deadline for income tax filing falls on a Saturday this year, the IRS has pushed the deadline to the next business day. So breathe easier, your 2005 income tax return is due Monday, April 17.
For readers who complain their taxes are far too high - and we've heard from plenty of you in recent weeks - why not consider the personal tax burdens of other countries.
First, we visit Denmark and Germany, which take a combined 42 percent of a citizen's income in taxes and for social security. Belgium insists on 41 percent, according to the figures compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The Netherlands lifts 34 percent from paychecks; Finland, Sweden and Poland 31 percent; Turkey 30 percent; Norway and Austria 29 percent; Italy and France 27 percent; Hungary 26 percent; and Iceland and Canada 25 percent.
As for Uncle Sam's take?
A combined 24 percent of personal income is all.
NEWEST SOCIETY
"I read with interest your column referring to the debate in the Arlington Diocese regarding girls vs. boys as altar servers," writes Susie Mea, who attached a Sunday bulletin written by Father Franklyn McAfee, pastor of Saint John the Beloved Catholic Church in McLean.
"He very eloquently comes down on the side of having only boys serve; but the best part is the last paragraph," she writes.
The pastor pointed out that while Pope John Paul II in 1994 granted a diocese permission to authorize girls as altar servers, individual bishops were under no obligation to make the change. As it was, the late Arlington Bishop John R. Keating, who later died in Rome in 1998 after visiting with the pope, was one of only two bishops in the United States not to welcome girls to the altar.
It was the belief of Bishop Keating that, "The altar boy is to the priest as the page was to the knight." But as Father McAfee pointed out, many bishops who allowed girls to serve on the altar later told Bishop Keating that they wished they had waited.
"It is for these reasons that I your pastor have decided to maintain that noble tradition of male-only servers," he wrote in the church bulletin. "Henceforth our altar boys - which number more than 100 - shall be known collectively as the Bishop Keating Society."