Monday, January 31, 2011

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, he 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 on having some regular big-picture brainstorming sessions, often with Buzz in attendance. Yes, he cut his teeth at the Inquirer, and, until recently, penned a column for our sister publication. But Buzz is excited about what we’re doing here and his is a voice our city desperately needs.

Speaking of loud voices, I also want to welcome our new sports columnist, none other than Ed Rendell. 

Ah, yes, Ed Rendell and Buzz Bissinger. Such fresh, establishment-challenging voices! If Larry Platt weren't giving us these guys, how would I know what they think or where to find their views?

I've been in the business long enough to have read a few of these memos. (And to have written one or two myself, frankly.) Revolutions are often promised but rarely realized. But it's not usually so naked that the promise of great change and reinvention is accompanied by fanfare of drawing from the same well that you've been drawing from for the last 25 years. 

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 certain defeat, but also featured moments of warmth and thoughtfulness. Many critics, especially inside Germany, felt that any attempt to humanize Hitler was ill advised.

“The lack of narrative position alone,” the filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote, escorts the audience “into a black hole in which they are led, almost unnoticeably, toward looking at this time through the eyes of the perpetrators, and generates a kind of benevolent understanding of them.”

Mr. Eichinger rejected such criticism, saying in a 2005 interview that the Nazi period was the “darkest” in German history and that it “traumatized not only the generation which was involved, but traumatized also my generation.” He added that to attack the film for showing that Hitler had human traits was unjust.

“There is no such thing as telling the truth and not taking everything into consideration,” he said. “Otherwise you are a Stalinist with one view of things. You burn what doesn’t fit your position or put it into the archives because you want to show only bad and good. When I wrote this script, for me the important thing was to show the gray.”

Watching "Downfall" didn't make me feel sympathy to Hitler, nor to any of the people in his cadre. But it did make me feel a small twinge of empathy for the people around him. Yes, these people committed themselves to a horrible and monstrous ideology — but they were people, after all. I took the depiction of them as a warning about how easy it is to commit oneself to misguided or even hideous dogmas, even with the best of intentions, and how difficult it can be to extract oneself from those visions even as they cause the world to crumble about you. Few people think of themselves as evil. Instead, they operate the gas ovens and the furnaces  and convince themselves that they may be doing difficult work, but they are doing it for a greater good. Eichinger's movie didn't make me want to be a Nazi; it made me see how easy it would be to be a Nazi, and provided a warning against slipping down that slope. It was cinematic art at its most thought-provoking and valuable. RIP.

 

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 here, until recently the rich lived more or less among the poor — in grander apartments or more spacious apartments but mixed together in the same city.

In the next few days, I'll start summing up some of my first impressions from the opening month of my year of income inequality-welfare state reading. The United States isn't Egypt, in any number of ways, but it still seems that Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale to our own elites. Widening income inequality -- a system in which the rich get richer and everyone else gets left behind -- is ultimately destabilizing over time. America's own problems with a growing income chasm aren't just a problem for the middle class and poor; they could end up being a problem for everybody. Don't kid yourselves: It could happen here

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 here, until recently the rich lived more or less among the poor — in grander apartments or more spacious apartments but mixed together in the same city.

In the next few days, I'll start summing up some of my first impressions from the opening month of my year of income inequality-welfare state reading. The United States isn't Egypt, in any number of ways, but it still seems that Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale to our own elites. Widening income inequality -- a system in which the rich get richer and everyone else gets left behind -- is ultimately destabilizing over time. America's own problems with a growing income chasm aren't just a problem for the middle class and poor; they could end up being a problem for everybody. Don't kid yourselves: It could happen here

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 shocking, but what this likely means is that all the arrests and firings of Philadelphia cops in recent years probably represents just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption and abuses of official power. The stuff we've heard about is just the stuff that was successfully reported and investigated. Doesn't it seem likely there are a lot more problems that never draw official notice because citizens either A) don't bother or B) get the runaround?

Friday, January 28, 2011

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 gives me the creeps.

 

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 professionals, compounded the sense of tragedy. But I felt more connected to Resnik. Her autographed photo had created a connection between us, in my mind. And while I would've been upset by the explosion, the fact that I possessed something she'd once touched enhanced my own personal sense of devastation.

Weird thing, though, is that I never cried about it. Not until 10 years later, in 1996, when I caught a TV special commemorating the anniversary of Challenger's demise. It was only then -- as an adult, in my first full-time newspaper job -- that I broke down and sobbed. I was probably weeping for myself; the explosion was the beginning of the end of my intensely held childhood dream, after all. I am not an astronaut, and I will never slip the surly bonds. 

But Judy Resnik did. 

Thursday, January 27, 2011

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 it. Admittedly, I suspect it's a throwaway line that doesn't actually mean anything.

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 fashion as well as positive ones. The United States Senate tried for decades to pass civil rights legislation--like anti-lynching laws--only to be frustrated time and again by a band of Southerners who used the filibuster to great effect. In that case, there was broad-based recognition in American society that it was bad to kill black people, but the filibuster served the purpose of protecting Southern white guys. Who was the "special interest" in that case?

Ethridge never once uses the word "filibuster" in his piece, though, celebrating instead on the checks and balances provided in the Constitution--the filibuster isn't in there--and bemoaning the rise of the regulatory state. I'm not really sure how you honestly examine gridlock (and deride the "rent seeking" associated with unelected regulators making rules for the rest of us) without dealing with the ramifications of the filibuster. There's an argument to be made that the filibuster so constrains Congress that the legislative branch has ended up deferring to executive branch rulemakers to get stuff done instead of doing their jobs. The framers of the Constitution may have created a limited government, but they also wanted it to be energetic. The filibuster, as currently used, is a gridlocked step too far. And I see little evidence it serves anybody but small interest groups.

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 the hysteria coming from?”

In the United States, the Muslim population might someday be as high as 1.7 percent of the population. There's this wild-eyed segment of conservatives who believe that every single American Muslim is a secret radical bent on establishing a caliphate to make all of us grow beards, wear burkhas and stop watching HBO. Even if that was true -- uh, it's not -- the numbers simply don't bode well for that proposition.

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, if I'm reading Rigell properly, a requirement) to do so. In fact, it limits army appropriations to just two years at a time. Why? So that the Congress can frequently discuss whether the size and footing of that army is appropriate to the needs of the nation.In Federalist 24, after all, Alexander Hamilton writes "that clause which forbids the appropriation of money for the support of an army for any longer period than two years a precaution ... will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity."

"Evident necessity."  Read, oh, Federalist 23 through 29, and the idea of "evident necessity" becomes clear: The Founders wanted the European powers to keep their mitts off the United States and its territories. (They also wanted a strong navy to protect American mercantile shipping.) Since Tea Partiers and Republicans continually raise the topic of the Founders' vision for America, it's worth emphasizing very strongly: The United States current defense posture -- one in which we have so many bases around the world that we've literally lost count -- is light years away from what the Founders articulated. They were fighting fears that the U.S. military would become so large that it could oppress the American people; they didn't even consider the idea of bestriding the entire globe.

Just for emphasis, though, let's rejoin Hamilton in Federalist 26

The legislature of the United States will be obliged, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. ... The provision for the support of a military force will always be a favorable topic for declamation. As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition; and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.

Finally, in Federalist 28, Hamilton suggests that Americans don't need to worry about the military getting too big for its britches. "We should recollect that the extent of the military force must, at all events, be regulated by the resources of the country. " 

The debate over defense spending doesn't end with a listing of Congress' enumerated powers, in other words. The Founders wanted us to debate that spending, vigorously. They expected that the size of military would be kept in line with the actual need to defend the (ugh) homeland, and reined in if the military was getting too large. And they expected that the size and power of the military would be constrained by our national ability to spend money on that military. There are indications on all fronts that the American government in the 21st century is running afoul of all those ideas. Congrats to Tea Partiers who are sincere enough in their vision to go down this road. And watch out for Republicans who mutter the words "Constitutional duty" in order to short-circuit a very needed debate.

 

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 perplex me: If the ethic at stake is the preservation of life, why is the life of a child considered more valuable -- as it apparently is in this case -- than the life of the mother? Or, in more abstract terms, than the lives of four other children who would have been deprived of the care of their mother?

For comparison's sake, I note that the Catholic Church more or less originated and provided the intellectual energy behind the "just war doctrine." Broadly speaking, it lets church members justify a course of action that always results in the maiming and killing of many innocent people—precisely so that greater harm, or evil, won't result from inaction. 

I, for one, don't expect Catholic hospitals to start offering abortions right and left. Certainly, I'm not a Catholic. But Catholic hospitals provide much of the care available to people in rural and poor areas of the country, and it concerns me if they're being confined by policies that don't seem to place much value on the lives of actual living women.

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.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

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.

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.

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.

Soldiers

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.