Obama emerged from his car chewing gum; he's a well-known user of Nicorette, the smoking-cessation gum. But Chinese Internet users, accustomed to the highly formal standards of their stiff party leadership, quickly characterized the leader of the world's most powerful nation as an impolite "idler," or careless "rapper."

"We made this meeting so luxurious, with singing and dancing, but see Obama, stepping out of his car chewing gum like an idler," wrote Yin Hong, a professor of journalism at Beijing's Tsinghua University, on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo micro-blog service.

Elder Steven E. Snow, the church historian and a member of its senior leadership, said in an interview, "There is so much out there on the Internet that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history. We need to be truthful, and we need to understand our history... I believe our history is full of stories of faith and devotion and sacrifice, but these people weren't perfect."

The essay on "plural marriage" in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the "restoration" of the early, true Christian church....

Most of Smith's wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, "several months before her 15th birthday." A footnote says that according to "careful estimates," Smith had 30 to 40 wives. The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith's friends and followers....

Critics accused her of copying campaign materials after parts of her jobs plan and other proposals included segments that were identical to those other Democratic candidates. And just days before the election, a pair of former Trek employees with conservative ties alleged that she had been fired from her family's company, which was founded by her father.

"So they bring a hot coffee for him, like a cappuccino, and they bring the ice coffee for me and they put them together in the middle of the table, and he immediately grabs my ice coffee and starts drinking my ice coffee," Charles said. "And I'm watching him drink it and I'm not touching the other thing. I don't want the other thing. And finally he almost finishes my drink and he goes, 'Why aren't you drinking your drink?' And I'm like, 'You're drinking my drink.' And he laughed and that broke the ice. It's like a test. Like, he drank my drink. How would I react?"

Charles recalled Dylan bringing a box of scrap paper with phrases written on it and dumping it on the table. "I realized, that's how he writes songs," he said. "He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesize into a coherent thing. And that's how we wound up writing also. We wound up writing in a very 'cut-up' technique. We'd take scraps of paper, put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it. And we finally wrote...a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff."

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh's on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — "How many of you guys . . . have learned that 'no' means 'yes' if you know how to spot it?" — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

Don't we constantly extract quotes and clips from larger contexts? I do blog posts by that method all the time. I find the juiciest line and quote it often deliberately out of context or with intent to misdirect for humorous or shocking effect. It's the reader's responsibility to figure out what to do with it. I'm not ashamed to operate that way. For one thing, I give links, so you have a path to the larger context. And, more important, by depriving you of a pat, self-contained package, I'm forcing you to read critically and keep going.

There's always more to the story. When we purport to put something "in context," it's never the whole context. We're choosing the frame of information that serves our interests, interests that may include but are rarely limited to the pure understanding of the truth. Traditional newspapers may have led their readers to think that they'd processed all the information and digested it into a simple-to-read article, and they often abused their readers' trust. The web doesn't work like that. The web activates its readers, and I think that's for the good....

In a chat that aired on Howard Kurtz's Fox News media program yesterday, Attkisson addressed the apparent suppression/possible misplacement of that clip: "The 'Evening News' people who had access to that transcript, according to the e-mails I saw, when it was sent from '60 Minutes' to 'Evening News' the very day that it was taken, they in my view skipped over it, passed it up, kept it secret throughout the whole time when it would have been relevant to the news and I think that was because they were trying to defend the president — they thought that would be harmful to him," said Attkisson to Kurtz.

Even more damning: According to Attkisson, CBS Newsers directed her to use a "different clip from the same interview to give the misimpression that the president had done the opposite" — that is, that the president had indeed acknowledged terrorism early on.

"They said these are the scans of a dead man. I said, 'Is it curable?" And they said, "We don't use that word."...

Asked why he decided to dedicate his fortune and final months to animal rights, Simon was unequivocal. "The thing about animals that speaks to me so much is that my passion for the animals and against animal abuse is based on the knowledge that these creatures which think and feel can't speak for themselves"....