Philly police corruption watch

Inky:

"A 21-year veteran Philadelphia police officer has been arrested and charged with falsely claiming he was assaulted while making an arrest last year, the department said this morning.

Aleksande Shwarz, 54, who was assigned to the 2nd District, also has been charged with simple assault stemming from the arrest on March 4.

He was arrested Wednesday, the department said in a statement."

Slashing the defense budget

The Slatest:

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates presented his proposed defense budget Thursday, unveiling the most significant proposed cuts to military spending since Sept. 11. Gates called for the military to cut $78 billion in program spending and reduce personnel by 70,000 over the next five years. Most of those cuts wouldn't be felt for years, and the reduction in troop size (a loss of about 49,000 Army soldiers and 20,000 Marines) wouldn't begin until the U.S. starts to draw down its presence in Afghanistan next year. At a press conference Thursday, Gates cast the cuts as a matter of national security: 'This country's dire fiscal situation and the threat it poses to American influence and credibility around the world will only get worse unless the U.S. government gets its finances in order,' he said. 'My hope is what had been a culture of endless money will become a culture of savings and restraint.'"

And we'll still have the scariest, most-expensive armed forces in the world.

Is ObamaCare a losing issue for Democrats?

Tevi Troy at The Corner: "The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is pursuing a full-scale effort against the Republican’s planned repeal vote of the Obama health-care law. As I argue in this month’s Commentary, the Democrats are continuing to operate under the misperception that health care is a winning political issue for them, despite considerable and continuing evidence to the contrary. New York Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner recently acknowledged losing “round one” of the health-care debate to the Republicans. It’s not clear why Democrats think that things will go better for them in round two."

Two possible answers:

* There have been similar conservative freak-outs over the decades about previous entitlement programs. We've all heard Ronald Reagan's 1960s speech about the socialistic perils of Medicare; it blew over, and is a relatively uncontroversial part of the American fabric. History has tended to be on the side of Democrats on these issues.

* There's also the possibility that a lot of Democrats simply think that universal health insurance is the right thing to do, for a host of reasons. My impression on the day of the big vote was that a number of Democratic congressmen knew they were throwing away their career with their vote. They did it anyway -- and despite some real flaws in the bill itself -- hopeful that history will one day judge them the ultimate winners.

Huck Finn and the 'n word'

Here's the Scripps Howard column this week. I'm not sure I agree entirely with myself about the argument I make here. I don't favor censorship at all. But I think a lot of anti-censorship folks might be too cavalier about the feelings of people who legitimately find "Huckleberry Finn" hurtful, and I think it might be useful to contemplate that a little bit more.

Anyway, here goes. You know where to send your angry e-mail:

You can't pray a lie. And you can't have Huck Finn -- not the real Huck Finn, anyway -- without his frequent and casual use of the racial slur known as "the n-word." Mark Twain's novel is a document of a brutal time and place in American history, and the depths of that era's brutality to African-Americans cannot be fully contemplated apart from the constant, almost banal repetition of the term throughout the book.

Rather than remove the word from "Huckleberry Finn," though, there's another option that English teachers should consider: Maybe it is time to remove the book from high school curricula and leave it to be taught entirely at the college level.

That seems counterintuitive. "Huckleberry Finn," after all is perhaps the greatest American novel of all. Who can argue with the message of a book in which a young Southern boy grows from seeing a black man as a piece of property to recognizing their shared humanity? That argument is easy to make -- if you are white.

If you are a black reader, though, it is possible a book that makes the case that "African Americans are people too!" seems silly, perhaps even offensively obvious. Wrap that message inside a blanket of racial slurs, and it's easy to see why many readers could care less about context and instead find "Huckleberry Finn" to be almost purely hurtful.

Understand: "Finn" is a great novel. It is not necessarily a novel best read by the youngsters who are the intended audience for Gribben's bowdlerization. You can't take sex scenes out of "Tropic of Cancer" or the sadism from the Marquis de Sade's novels and have them make sense. We let readers discover the unexpurgated texts on their own, and save the classroom discussions for college. Perhaps it's time for "Huckleberry Finn" to join them on the shelf of classics that require careful handling and mature readers.

Test.

This is a test. Contemplating abandoning my Posterous site and returning to Blogspot as my full-time digs. The outcome relies on this test.

My son's gun obsession is becoming increasingly complex and alarming

The angled part to the right? That's what he was using for the stock of the block rifle he built for himself. That's the grip on the left. Kind of an extended Uzi thing going on. He came up to me brandishing it like you'd expect, making shooting noises. The kid is clever.

Harry Reid: 'The American people love government.'

I don't know if I'd go as far as Harry Reid does here:

“The American people love government, but they don’t like too much politics in government,” he said.

I don't think the American people "love" government. I think they even like it, in a generalized and monolithic sense. But I think they like having roads to drive on. An Internet to use. Education for their kids. Social Security and Medicare for their parents. I think they like that Hawaii isn't under Japanese control. I think they like having national parks to visit, and local libraries to aid their learning and reading. I think they like these things -- and a lot more services they receive or use all the time -- but don't always contemplate that it's government doing these things. This is why Republicans frequently talk in a general way about cutting government, but even now seem hesitant to name what, precisely, they would cut. (Paul Ryan, perhaps, being a notable exception.)

And I furthermore don't think they always remember that the idea of governance in the United States is that it derives its power from the citizens. It's not this other thing over there: It's us, either through our cheering support or passive assent. Those things government provides? It's because lots and lots of citizens want government to provide them. Lots of other folks don't. And politics is the process of engaging in and trying to resolve those disputes. Get rid of that, and you've gotten rid of self-governance. 

But, no, Americans don't love government. They just like what government does.