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.)

But given that I don't possess much certitude or expertise on the topic, I've decided I can't add much of substance to any public discussion of the matter. So I refrain.

And it's possible that makes me a coward. I acknowledge that.

On the Kermit Gosnell arrest: It sounds like the man was a monster and his actions horrifiying. My conscience is troubled, by what I've read, and I haven't mustered the courage to actually read the grand jury report that goes into some detail on the matter.

That said, I'm fairly sure that was Gosnell is accused of doing is in not the way legalized abortion is supposed to be carried out. In fact, I can say that with some confidence because abortion IS generally legal in the first trimester, and yet the Democratic district attorney in this very Democratic city is talking about the death penalty for the doctor. Legal abortion isn't supposed to kill the women who seek it. And the officials who failed to meet their regulatory duties in ensuring the safety of Gosnell's clinic need to be held to account, so that women who do have abortions don't have to risk their lives, health, or dignity in doing so.

But like I say, I'm ambivalent -- at best -- about the whole topic, and I'll probably not let myself be drawn into an intricate conversation about the topic. I'm certain my take on this disappoints you, and that saddens me. I've tried to be honest, however, about a topic I'd rather not engage at all.

I only post this publicly, because I suspect that many Americans feel like I do: They don't really like abortion, but they don't want access to it prohibited. Those folks, I think, try to keep their heads down and avoid the discussion. Somebody might as well say something.

* To the extent there are comments on this post, incidentally -- either here or on my Facebook page -- I'm going to ask people to be respectful to each other. I'll have no problem deleting comments that I think cross a line into abusiveness, even if you're a friend of mine.

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 their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.

via nytimes.com

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

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.

Should civil libertarians vote for Obama in 2012? Or is there a good GOP challenger in the offing?

Conor Friedersdorf:

Our last two presidents are unlike one another in most ways. It so happens that what they have in common is tremendously consequential. Both presidents needlessly undermined civil liberties, the separation of powers, and the rule of law in the course of fighting the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Had President Obama merely lived up to his own pre-election rhetoric on civil liberties, I'd be here arguing for his second term. As it is, I'm very much hoping for a change of leadership.

So why haven't I pledged my support to his eventual opponent? The way I see it, my vote is the GOP's to lose, and they may well do it, because several contenders for the nomination would be even worse than President Obama. Put simply, I won't vote for any Republican who thinks that our current leadership is excessively solicitous of civil liberties in the war on terror, or whose main foreign policy critique is that our leaders are insufficiently bellicose. It isn't much to say that the current administration hasn't tortured anyone, or launched any unwinnable foreign wars, but one couldn't say it about its predecessor.

Let's hope that America doesn't suffer a terrorist attack between 2012 and 2016. But level with yourself. It's a possibility. It isn't unthinkable for it to be worse than 9/11. How will the man or woman in the White House respond? That's one question I'll be asking myself as I evaluate the candidates in the next election. In such a scenario, do I trust Barack Obama to avoid overreacting in a way that hurts America? To refrain from using an attack as a pretext to seize greater power for the executive branch? Or to launch an ill-advised war?

I trust him more than Bush/Cheney or McCain/Palin. I trust him less than Bush/Quayle or Clinton/Gore.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com