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Mr. Mom Chronicles: The gross-out wars begin

Tobias has added aggressive licking to his arsenal. I may or may not have taught him that, but I'm certainly living with the consequences. I'm not feeling well, so I settled down for a nap this afternoon. Tobias crawled under the blanket with me, but apparently didn't want me to sleep -- he put his head next to mine and, not getting a response, did the unexpected: He ran his tongue up and down my nose. I laughed, but apparently it's not a one-time thing. A little later, after I'd gotten up, h e came over and licked my knee. So I grabbed his hand and stuffed it in my mouth. "Dat's gwoss," he told me. He's learning.

Rendell, Bissinger, and the changes at the Philadelphia Daily News

There's a lot of ground to cover in Larry Platt's memo to the staff of the Philadelphia Daily News. So I'll just stick with saying this sounds good.... In covering Power, the Daily News should report from street level, poking the reader in the ribs and telling him or her how things really do or don’t get done in this city. Philadelphia is a town that is run for and by the same group of 300 insiders. We have an obligation to provide a road map for our readers as to how the transactional nature of our town can conspire against the common good. And we can do that in an entertaining way that holds the usual suspects accountable.  ...but I can't help but juxtapose that mission statement with this:  I’m also honored to announce that another Pulitzer Prize winner, best-selling author Buzz Bissinger, will serve as an editorial advisor and occasional columnist in our pages. I’ve known Buzz for nearly twenty years; he’s passionate and inspiring and often outraged. I plan

Bernd Eichinger, maker of 'Neverending Story' and 'Downfall,' RIP

It's a heck of an expansive moviemaking resumé: Bernd Eichinger, who just died at age 61, was a writer or producer on "The Neverending Story" the "Resident Evil" franchise and some of Wim Wenders' earliest movies. But the movie that probably touched the deepest chord with me was "Downfall," Eichinger's film about Hitler's last days, as the Soviet army closed in around him. The controversy around the movie is remembered in his obit today:  “Downfall” (2004), which was written as well as produced by Mr. Eichinger (and was also nominated for an Oscar), tells the story of Hitler’s final days, portraying life with his close compatriots in his Berlin bunker. Based partly on a memoir by one of Hitler’s secretaries and partly on historical texts, the film, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, portrayed Hitler in an almost neutral fashion. It depicted his paranoid rantings as Berlin was under assault by Russian artillery and the Germans faced cert

Today in inequality reading: Egypt

A big reason for the unrest in Egypt? The widening gap between the rich and the poor : “These big guys are stealing all the money,” said Mohamed Ibraham, a 24-year-old textile worker standing at his second job as a fruit peddler in a hard-pressed neighborhood called Dar-al-Salam. “If they were giving us our rights, why would we protest? People are desperate.” He had little sympathy for those frightened by the specter of looting. He complained that he could barely afford his rent and said the police routinely humiliated him by shaking him down for money, overturning his cart or stealing his fruit. “And then we hear about how these big guys all have these new boats and the 100,000 pound villas. They are building housing, but not for us — for those people up high.” The widening chasm between rich and poor in Cairo has been one of the conspicuous aspects of city life over the last decade — and especially the last five years. Though there were always extremes of wealth and poverty h

Today in inequality reading: Egypt

A big reason for the unrest in Egypt? The widening gap between the rich and the poor : “These big guys are stealing all the money,” said Mohamed Ibraham, a 24-year-old textile worker standing at his second job as a fruit peddler in a hard-pressed neighborhood called Dar-al-Salam. “If they were giving us our rights, why would we protest? People are desperate.” He had little sympathy for those frightened by the specter of looting. He complained that he could barely afford his rent and said the police routinely humiliated him by shaking him down for money, overturning his cart or stealing his fruit. “And then we hear about how these big guys all have these new boats and the 100,000 pound villas. They are building housing, but not for us — for those people up high.” The widening chasm between rich and poor in Cairo has been one of the conspicuous aspects of city life over the last decade — and especially the last five years. Though there were always extremes of wealth and poverty h

Philly police: Probably worse than you think

God, I love the Philadelphia Daily News : THE NUMBER of complaints against Philadelphia police officers has spiked in the past few years, yet getting a complaint form isn't always as easy as it's supposed to be. At times, officers at some police-district headquarters pressure complainants for personal information regarding the complaint, and provide misinformation or even deny them the form needed to file a complaint. In spot checks conducted recently by the Daily News, supervisors at five police districts refused to allow the complainant to remain anonymous - which is against the Police Department's own policy - and wouldn't supply the form to reporters who posed as complainants. An additional 11 of the city's 21 police districts did not follow department policies for filing complaints. Problems included creating a hostile environment for complainants, and neglecting to inform them of the procedure and locations to file a complaint. Not that this is s

Social media vacation

I'm taking a break from Twitter and Facebook until Monday. Sometimes a mental cleanse is required.

This new highway is brought to you by Big Brother

In a somewhat intriguing article arguing for private funding of new road and infrastructure projects, AEI's R. Richard Geddes makes this following aside: More toll-funded roads wouldn't necessarily mean more toll plazas clogging our highways. Advanced satellite tracking technologies allow "open road" tolling, in which motorists would be charged per mile of road used--just as consumers are charged per kilowatt hour for electricity, per gallon of water, or per minute of cell phone use--without the backup at the toll booth. Private investors have the resources to utilize this new technology. It might be a bit late in the game to make this complaint-slash-observation, but I'm not really sure that I'd want some governmental-business partnership tracking every place I drive with a satellite. We're increasingly trackable thanks to our cell phones and standard in-car technologies at this point, so the horse may be out of the barn, but the idea still give

Challenger

Tucked in a drawer somewhere around here, I have an autographed picture of Judith Resnik. During the early 1980s, while other kids were swooning to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," I was writing fan letters to astronauts. And one of the original astronauts -- John Young, who'd flown on Gemini and Apollo and the first space shuttle -- had been kind enough to respond with a stack of autographed pictures. His own, for one. Guion Bluford, the first African-American in space, for another. And Resnik, the second American woman in space. I treasured these photos, would pull them out and stare at them, but return them carefully to their package when I was done. I was never a baseball card collector, but I understood the impulse. Resnik was the "other woman" aboard the shuttle Challenger, when it blew up 25 years ago today. Most people remember the teacher Christa McAuliffe, understandably; her presence on the doomed flight, as an amateur among risk-taking professiona

Can free markets save Afghanistan?

There's a suggestion of the sort in Sen. Marco Rubio's piece over at National Review: And if their people are to establish businesses and attract long-term economic development investments that help wean them off the opium trade, Afghanistan must become a country where basic property and commercial laws are respected and enforced. Now, Rubio is a bit of a Tea Party darling, but this is the first time I've heard hint of anybody trying to apply Tea Party philosophy to the war in Afghanistan. And I'd really like to see him expand on this theme. My initial reaction is that lots of Afghans are , in fact, responding to market forces by growing the opium that the West uses-slash-finds-so-problematic. Beyond that, though, I've not really heard that property right issues are a particular problem in a land where the central government is corrupt and ineffective. If there's a substantive critique to be made along these lines, I'd really be interested in seeing

Does gridlock defeat special interests, or serve them?

At the Cato Institute, Marcus Ethridge writes (PDF) a celebration of good old-fashioned government gridlock. By making government so inefficient, he says, you make it unlikely that special interests can dominate the decision-making process: A large and growing body of evidence makes it clear that the public interest is most secure when governmental institutions are inefficient decisionmakers. An arrangement that brings diverse interests into a complex, sluggish decisionmaking process is generally unattractive to special interests. Gridlock also neutralizes some political benefits that producer groups and other well-heeled interests inherently enjoy. By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups. This seems overly optimistic to me. It assumes that "well-heeled interests" don't understand how to employ the levers of power in negative fas

Commencing a Mark Steyn freakout in 3 ... 2 ...

Apparently jihadists aren't going out-baby us all into sharia law: Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent. Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, said that the report could challenge assertions by some scholars and far-right political parties about future demographic domination by Muslims. “There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States,” she said. “But the figures don’t even come close. I’m looking at all this and wondering, where is all th

Scott Rigell, the defense budget, and a Constitutional cop-out

Near the end of the New York Times' story about the desire of some Tea Party Republicans to cut the defense budget, I came across this striking passage: Representative Scott Rigell, a Republican newcomer from Virginia who at first sparred with the Tea Party but then signed a pledge supporting many of its positions, said that he, too, was committed to a strong military and the spending it required. In an interview after the hearing, he said that “as a very first priority, it is our constitutional duty to stand an army.” You hear a lot of this sort of thing from hawks who want to cut Medicare but continue pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a bloated defense budget, so it might be a good idea to understand how Rigell wrongly invokes the Constitution to avoid a hard discussion about the proper size of the defense budget. First of all, the Constitution empowers Congress to raise an army and a navy, it's true, but it doesn't actually create a duty (that is, i

Well, as long as I'm wading into the abortion topic anyway...

Nicholas Kristoff: The National Catholic Reporter newspaper  put it best : “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.” Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese. The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise. Bishop Olmsted initially  excommunicated a nun , Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. I get and won't try to dispute why the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. But this incident, like similar ones before it, does somewhat perple

Another reason to transfer my baseball loyalties from the Royals to the Phillies

You know things are bad when the best press your team has received in years is when your $12 million-a-year pitcher walks away from his contract a year early rather than pitch for you again.

Another letter to a Christian friend: This time, it's abortion

Even if you don't live in Philadelphia, you've probably heard about the arrest of Kermit Gosnell , the West Philly abortion doctor arrested and charged with multiple murder charges for delivering and killing live babies -- as well as a charge in the death of one of his patients. I haven't written about the matter publicly until now, because, well, I don't want to. But a Christian friend , from my older and churchier days, has written to inquire on my take. So here it goes. I don't expect it to satisfy anyone.* My initial take is that I try to avoid public discussions of abortion whenever possible. On an instinctive level, I generally find abortion to be personally repellent. As a legal matter, I'm unable to bring myself to the place of believing it should be prohibited - in the first trimester at least. (Why? Because I've come to believe that there are real issues of women's health, economic well-being and freedom that are involved in the matter.)

Bill Keller on revealing government secrets in a time of war

Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing

Matt Yglesias: We're No. 2! (Or will be soon.)

I don’t begrudge a president making a formal speech the chance to engage in some meaningless nationalism, but something I thought was really striking about Barack Obama’s speech last night was how utterly unprepared American political culture is for the idea of a world in which we’re not Top Nation. And yet the reality is that while we’re the world’s largest economy today, and will continue to be so tomorrow, we really just won’t be forever. The Economist predicts that China will pass us in 2019 . Maybe it’ll be 2018 or maybe it’ll be 2022. But it will happen. And fairly soon. And it’ll happen whether or not we reform education or invest in high speed rail or whatever. And the country doesn’t seem prepared to deal with it. via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Congress.org - News : More troops lost to suicide

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For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The reasons are complicated and the accounting uncertain — for instance, should returning soldiers who take their own lives after being mustered out be included? But the suicide rate is a further indication of the stress that military personnel live under after nearly a decade of war. via congress.org

With his grandaddy.

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