Odunde Festival!

Taken at ODUNDE!!!

Ronald Reagan, missile defense, and the end of nuclear weapons

My friend and occasional nemesis Julie Ponzi on Thursday posted an argument against the Obama Administration sharing missile defense technology with the Russians, suggesting that technology would end up in the wrong hands: "Whatever may be said about the "resetting" of relations with Russia, it remain cozy with nations--like Iran--that pose an unquestionable threat to U.S. security."

Me being snarky, I offered this rebuttal: "I remember when Ronald Reagan wanted to share "Star Wars" technology with the Soviets."

Julie didn't get mad. Instead, she sicced Reagan biographer Steven Hayward upon me. Steve concludes: "The circumstances today are vastly different that under the bipolar world of the US--USSR. I suspect Reagan today would share technology with allies against the rogues and not with Russia; he'd want partnerships with nations more reliable than Russia, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, who are keen to deploy our missile defenses."

You know what? I'll concede the point: Reagan was willing to make concessions on occasion, but it was in the service of increasing our security. In a multipolar world, the calculations are different, and Steve—well, Steve's a Reagan scholar. I'm not. I'll defer to his insights.

Instead, I'll change the subject.

I do think it's worth asking my conservative friends if there are any tradeoffs, any concessions they're willing to make that might look like a lowering of the guard but might actually increase overall American security. Part of President Obama's mission—it seems to me—is to reduce the overall number of warheads in the world. Not out of some Pollyanna belief in peace, and certainly not to leave the United States without security, but mostly out of a simple ability to do math: the more nukes there are in the world, the more likely it is that one of them falls into the wrong hand and is used in anger. That, in turn, creates a greater likelihood that a lot more of those warheads will be used. It's difficult for me to see how worldwide armaggedon would serve the security interests of the United States.

Yes, President Obama proposes to—eventually—eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. Ronald Reagan (just to keep this near the original topic) shared that dream—and though today's world is a less-predictable and thus in certain respects more dangerous, I will hazard a guess and suggest his horror of a nuclear holocaust would still be a motivating factor for him.

Right now, if I'm looking at the right reports, the United States has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads. Russia has 3,000. (These are very provisional numbers; estimates range widely.) It seems to me that we could reduce these numbers greatly, to just a few hundred on each side, and still retain both a meaningful deterrent and the ability to destroy all life on earth.

But we'd reduce the chances that a warhead would end up in those aforementioned wrong hands. We'd greatly reduce the costs of maintaining, modernizing, and protecting our arsenal. We would, it seems to me, be more secure.

Republican objections to the START Treaty have been couched in issues like missile defense, but my overall impression is that they don't buy into the logic I just laid out, believing instead that more! more! more! is the route to defensive superiority and security—or that President Obama (implausibly) is ready to give away the whole kit-and-kaboodle and leave us defenseless. But sometimes less is more.

Joe McGinniss sexually demeans Sarah Palin

Here's how Joe McGinniss describes Sarah Palin in his forthcoming book:

Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.

I'm no Sarah Palin fan, but McGinnis' use of sexual imagery to demean Palin is frankly disgusting. Is Sarah Palin a feminist? Not by my definition. But my definition of feminism precludes sexually demeaning a woman in any circumstance—not because she thinks the right things or even because she's embraces feminism, but because, you know, she's human. But you see this kind of sexism directed at Palin far too often from folks who are ostensibly allies of the feminist left.

Here's the truth: We have far more examples—some of them fairly recent!—of male politicians waving their genitalia at strangers. Yet for some reason, Male Politician Wang Showing doesn't tend to become the same kind of metaphor that stripping and prostitution—activities performed by females—is for female politicians. McGinniss sweatily envisions Palin in a g-string and it's not a surprise; but would anybody in the mainstream talk in terms of (say) Chuck Shumer baring his ass invitingly for Wall Street donors? Maybe Matt Taibbi, and he only barely counts. Sarah Palin isn't bad for America because she's a woman or because she's an attractive woman; demeaning her on those counts isn't just sexist and mean-spirited, it also misses the point.

Should Weiner resign?

That's the question of this week's column for Scripps. I say no:

If Washington were emptied of every politician who violated a marriage oath, paid for sex or otherwise engaged in unseemly conduct -- well, our nation's capital would probably be a ghost town.

Rich, powerful men tend to seek out the company and favors of young, attractive people. That's often part of why they become rich, powerful men in the first place.

So sex isn't really the problem: After all, there's plenty of it going on, and yet our government still manages to function, more or less. The real problem is when a politician gets caught.

A worse problem is when a politician lies about it. But the only real reason a politician should resign over such behavior is if he broke the law or abused his office in committing or concealing hanky-panky. Otherwise, he should stay in office.

After all, would you quit your job if you were caught having an affair? Probably not. Your sexual choices probably don't have much bearing on how well you can perform your job as a paper salesman or accountant. Why should it be any different for elected officials? They were elected to pass laws and govern, not serve as priests.

Again, there are exceptions. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., recently relinquished his office when evidence emerged that he abused his office in order to keep an affair under wraps. He should have lost his job.

For remaining politicians, they still have voters to keep them accountable. And voters can be very forgiving. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., might be very embarrassed right now, but don't be surprised if he still achieves his dream of becoming New York mayor.

Ben, meanwhile, has a few things to say about Weiner's "enormous self-regard." (See what he did there?)

Mr. Mom Chronicles: On not getting to parent anymore

My son, Tobias, has been in Arkansas for the last week, staying with his grandparents. It's not a vacation--or, at least, not merely a vacation. Since the surgery, I've not been strong enough to wrangle him on my own. My wife still has to go to work every day. So he's with people who possess the physical wherewithal to handle a nearly 3-year-old boy.

Truth is, I haven't actively parented Tobias since the surgery. That's five weeks now. And I've discovered something that I'm not quite sure how to understand.

Which is this: Parenthood has apparently changed me. I like having time to read the paper, to sit with coffee, to be alone in my head. These are things I loved before Tobias came along, and missed once he did. But ... I'm no longer really complete with those things.

It's not just the relationship I miss. I miss parenting him. It's hard. It's energy-sapping. It's rage-inducing on occasion. But it's part of my purpose now. He is part of my purpose now.

By the time I get back to full strength, it will be something like three months or more since I've had that active role in his life. That bothers me. There's nothing that can be done about it. I miss my boy. And I miss parenting him. I can hardly believe that.

I was (possibly) wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times

Remember when I said Ta-Nehisi Coates writing a column for the New York Times would be a really bad idea? "If the pressures of the format and platform didn't push him into becoming stridently ideological, the danger is that he might end up like David Brooks--following his muse into places better addressed somewhere other than the New York Times op-ed pages."

Well, one column does not a body of work make. But Coates is doing a guest-stint columnizing for the Times, starting today, and his first piece is typical of him: Thought-provoking and humane. The last few paragraphs nearly made me weep this morning.

My son is 10 and a romantic, as all 10-year-olds surely have the right to be. How then do I speak to him of this world’s masterminds who render you a supporting actor in your own story? How do I speak of the Sentinels whose eyes melt history, until the world forgets that in 1962, the quintessential mutants of America were black?

Who do you think has the coolest power, Daddy?

His great caramel eyes were an amusement park.

You do, son.

Beautiful. So I sincerely hope that the confines and deadline pressures of the column don't push Ta-Nehisi Coates into not being Ta-Nehisi Coates. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Philly, sunset.

Taken at Grace Tavern

How low should taxes go? So low that taxpayers fund corporate profits.

Katrina Trinko reports on Tim Pawlenty's tax proposal:

Among the proposals Pawlenty will push for are cutting the business tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent and eliminating “special interest handouts, carve-outs, subsidies, and loopholes” in the tax code.

This is standard stuff: Republicans call for lowering the tax rate, but for getting rid of exemptions so that the new tax rate still brings in enough money to ensure proper funding of government operations. Only problem is this: the history of tax reform shows us that the exemptions always, always, always come back into play. Kevin Drum noted this yesterday:

It's always satisfying to take a hard line and demand that the tax code be pure, but human nature just doesn't seem to work that way. Everyone has behavior they believe should be encouraged or discouraged, and sometimes the tax code is the most efficient way of doing it. I'm happy with efforts to scrape barnacles away periodically, but there's no point in pretending that the hull is going to stay clean forever.

Perhaps the certainty of those reappearing exemptions in why business execs are so hot for Pawlenty-style tax-cut-and-reform. The LA Times:

Corporate tax breaks, such as credits for manufacturing in the U.S. and write-offs for equipment purchases, will total about $124 billion this year, according to the Senate Budget Committee.

By taking advantage of those breaks, Boeing, General Electric Co. and 10 other large U.S. corporations were able to avoid paying any taxes on a combined $171 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits from 2008 to 2010, Citizens for Tax Justice said in a report this week.

The companies received a total of $2.5 billion in tax refunds, for a combined effective tax rate of negative 1.5%, the report said.

Taxpayers are paying these companies to do business, in other words. And that's under the current tax structure. I wonder how much more we'd be paying them if the tax rate were cut to 15 percent—and then the exemptions were added back in over a series of years?

That this is happening shows the current tax structure isn't really working all that well, of course. Companies will always seek to minimize their taxes and maximize their profits: of course! But Pawlenty's proposal almost assuredly leads America down the path of funding big-corporation profits at taxpayer expense. If a Democrat did that—say by bailing out car companies—that would be called socialism. When Republicans do it, we call it capitalism.

Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand, and Jesus

Man, oh man, I hate this ad:

From a pure politics perspective, fair play is fair play: Republicans have spent a couple of generations using religion as a cudgel to portray Democrats and liberals as un-Christian and un-American, and it's a strategy they continue to pursue. Goose, gander, etc.

But liberals have mostly resented this line of attack, believing—rightly, I think—that it veers pretty closely to violating the spirit of the Constitution's "no religious test" for candidates for public office. Creating and running this ad means we've decided the principle isn't so important after all—if we can find a way to use religion as a cudgel from a position of strength, we'll do it!

And I can't help but think that weakens the foundation of our ability to defend the rights of religious minorities—Muslims, Jews, atheists, agnostics, and so forth. Maybe it's fair play; I'm not at all sure it's wise.

UPDATE: And politically, it's not that smart either. If Democrats get into a pissing match with Republicans about who is most Christian, Democrats are mostly going to lose.

How low should taxes go? A reply to Bill Voegeli

Last week I posed a question: What level of taxation do conservatives consider appropriate? I'm not sure that I expected much of an answer, but I got one from William Voegeli, whose book "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State" I referenced in posing the question. It was a thoughtful and civil reply, and though Dr. Voegeli and I have philosphical/instinctive differences, I'm grateful he took the time to craft such a response.

In composing my own reply, I wrestle with a few issues. A) Much of Voegeli's reply occupies itself not so much with the question I posed, but with restating the argument from his book--that overreaching advocates of the welfare state in the United States have created and continually seek to create institutions that have grown unsustainably large. I'm not going to spend much time defending liberals in this post (there are several portions of Voegeli's post that seem to deserve their own replies) because I'm still principally concerned with the question of how much conservatives are willing to pay to sustain the government they do envision. B) When he does settle on an answer, it is so broadly reasonable that I (and, I think, most liberals) couldn't quarrel with it. But C) the daylight between Voegeli's conservative response and the actions of America's conservative party is broad enough that a response purely on Voegeli's points seems to omit a lot of real-world ramifications. We're going to have to talk about Paul Ryan here.

Enough throat-clearing. Let's take a look at a couple of key points in Voegeli's response.

My answer is that one way to describe the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want government spending to be the independent variable that determines tax levels, and conservatives want government spending to be the dependent variable determined by taxes.

I think this is an oversimplication. A slightly different way of putting it, I think, would be this: Liberals want taxes to be determined by what they want government to do. Conservatives want taxes to be determined both by what they want government to do and what they want it not to do. (There is, after all, a whole discussion to be had about what the tax level would look like if we had a much, much smaller defense establishment.) That's still an oversimplication--and one that's very charitable to conservatives, as we shall see.

I'm not entirely comfortable with his "liberals want/conservatives want" framework, though, because it is so oversimplified. Put another way: Voegeli's half-right. He and his fellow conservatives want to determine the size of the government and the welfare state, lock it in, and throw away the key. But I don't think it's the case that liberals want to build their utopia now and then figure out how to pay for it. To me, there's plenty of evidence that liberals try to balance goals and resources; the welfare state we expect and hope to build in the United States is not the welfare state we would expect and hope to build in, say, The Solomon Islands. That's a bug to conservatives, I suppose—Voegeli: "One of the reasons to like a growing economy should be that it makes a smaller welfare state possible, rather than because it makes a bigger one possible."—but not to me. A richer society is more capable of providing a safety net; I'm OK with the idea that that increased capability creates something of an increased--though not unlimited--obligation to do so.

But hey: Suppose we were all in agreement about the size of government and the welfare state? That still requires an answer to my question: What level of taxation do conservatives think is the right level of taxation? The conservative answer in our politics always seems to be "a little bit less." Voegeli, bless him, sounds slightly more reasonable.

So, Mathis asks, how high should do (sic) conservatives want our taxes to be? High enough to pay for the things the government needs to do. Which are those? In a democracy, all the things the people feel the government really ought to do. I'm happy to abide by the outcome of the democratic debate over that question, but I think it should be conducted honestly. Honesty requires stipulating that the amount of government we get is no larger than the amount we're willing to pay for, as opposed to the dream-world welfare state we would build if wealth were limitless.

See? I don't think I can argue with a single point in that paragraph. I really can't. We should only build what we can sustain. Let's shut 'er down and go home--after all, not even Paul Krugman thinks we should consign ourselves to a future of ever-larger debts!

So maybe my argument here isn't with Voegeli. Maybe it's with the Republican Party instead. Because it seems to me that over the last generation, welfare-state-loving Democrats have always tried to find the resources to finance their additions to the welfare state--that is, to pay for the things they believed government should do. And Republicans haven't.

Just to cite the two most-obvious examples: Much of the effort in building and passing the Affordable Care Act--known, sneeringly, in some quarters as "ObamaCare"--went into making sure that the act is deficit-neutral during the first 10 years of its life. You can argue that there was some trickiness involved, or that the 10-year-shelf-life of the deficit neutrality is too short a window. Fine. But Democrats actually tried to expand the welfare state without reaching for the national credit card first.

Republicans? Well, back in 2003, A Republican Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit. The law was signed by a Republican president. It reportedly added up to $1.2 trillion to the deficit over a decade. And Republicans couldn't come up with one dime to cover the costs. If there's been a disparity between the willingness to grow the welfare state and the willingness to pay for it, I'd argue that disparity can be found primarily in the actions of America's conservative party.

And we're not even mentioning the unfunded wars of the last decade.

I hear the objections: George W. Bush wasn't a "real" conservative. The Republican Party has learned its lesson. The Tea Party will hold this generation of Republicans accountable.

Enter Paul Ryan. The Republican congressman has introduced one of the more radical budget proposals ever seen. It commands near-unanimous support from the Republican Party in Congress, and to criticize it on the right is conservative apostasy. It is the "rightward pole" in the budget debate.

So what does it actually do? Well it reins in domestic and entitlement spending, reducing the anticipated costs of Medicare, Medicaid, and discretionary spending by more than $2 trillion over the next decade. Presumably, this is what America's conservative party sees as a "right-sized" federal budget—or, at least the closest thing to right-sized that Republicans think entitlement-loving voters will accept.

So. What level of taxation is appropriate to sustain Ryan's budget vision? Well, uh...a little bit less.

It cuts the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. It lowers the marginal tax rate for top incomes from 35 percent to 25 percent. (This at a time when both the rates and the actual taxes collected are really, really low.) And so on. The result? Washington Post columnist Matt Miller gives us the overview:

“The spending spree is over,” Ryan said the other day, after the House passed his blueprint. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.” Except that by his own reckoning Ryan is planning to spend $6 trillion we don’t have in the next decade alone.

“We have too many people worried about the next election and not worried about the next generation,” Ryan added. So Ryan is expressing his concern by adding at least $14 trillion to the debt between now and when his plan finally balances the budget sometime in the 2030s (and only then if a number of the plan’s dubious assumptions come to pass).

In other words, America's conservative party has set out its plan for balancing government goals and resources, and it still can't bring itself to pay the bill.* But it can cut taxes. It can always cut taxes.

*President Obama's budget proposal doesn't do any better over the long term, admittedly. Tee up on that if you like. But my purpose here is to determine how conservatives are willing to act.

Now, this isn't William Voegeli's fault. I don't know if he supports Paul Ryan's plan or not, and I'm not inclined to hold him rhetorically responsible. (No more than I'm willing to defend LBJ's 40-year-old comments about "reducing boredom" that Voegeli cites in his reply.) But the "conservative" plan supported by the conservative establishment seems to me a betrayal of the core principle that Voegeli espouses, which is that our leaders should honestly stipulate "that the amount of government we get is no larger than the amount we're willing to pay."

Do Democrats want to strengthen the safety net? Sure. But their efforts in the last generation, while imperfect, have sought to balance goals and resources. Republicans haven't even offered that much. Voegeli, in his book, suggests that Democrats and Republicans can come to a grand bargain on financing the welfare state if Democrats agree to limits on the size of that state. It seems to me, though, that if Republicans take his advice they must also agree to some level of financial support for that state—and right now, that goal appears impossible. What's the right level of taxation for Republicans? A little less, always and forever.

On 'Mediscare'

After a surgery-induced vacation, Ben and I return with the Scripps column to debate the "Medicscare" controversy:

Here, in Paul Ryan's own words, is how he plans to reform Medicare: "Give seniors a voucher for private health insurance that grows at a much smaller rate than actual healthcare costs."

What that means is that as health costs grow ever larger over time, elderly Americans will be forced to bear more and more of the price burden. And if they can't afford to do so? They're on their own.

Conservatives love Ryan's proposal, not because it saves Medicare -- it doesn't -- but because it gradually gets the government out of one part of the safety net business. They don't like the safety net! The problem is that most Americans do like having that safety net: A new CNN poll shows 58 percent of the public dislikes Ryan's proposal.

Republicans argue that poll numbers matter less than dollar numbers: Medicare will run out of money over the next decade if reform isn't made. But it's interesting that Ryan's budget proposal also calls for cutting taxes for the wealthy--when effective tax rates for the rich are already at their lowest point in decades.

The GOP had to decide between preserving the safety net or making the rich richer. Is anybody surprised the rich won? Democrats aren't "Mediscaring" voters on the issue -- they're describing Ryan's plans accurately. But they're not covering themselves in glory, either: They haven't offered a plan to shore up Medicare's finances.

Instead, they're counting on the issue to carry the day in 2012.

Republicans want to shrink, even end, the safety net. Democrats want to save it. By opposing Paul Ryan's proposal, Dems are doing necessary work. Unfortunately, it's only half the job that needs to be done.

Liberals must offer their own proposal for Medicare's future.

Ben argues that the "ObamaCare" bill is the Dem vision for saving Medicare, and he's almost right—but the wonkiest liberals believe there's still work to be done.

How low should taxes go?

A few months ago, Ben and I interviewed William Voegeli, author of "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." As you might guess, Voegeli's thesis is that Democrats will never stop making more demands for more social welfare programs, and that they need to come up with a limiting principle in order to get Republican buy-in to support any kind of welfare state--which, despite conservative rhetoric, has the support of voters.

I thought of Voegeli when reading Bruce Bartlett today:

Federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

The postwar annual average is about 18.5 percent of G.D.P. Revenues averaged 18.2 percent of G.D.P. during Ronald Reagan’s administration; the lowest percentage during that administration was 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984.

In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of G.D.P. in both 2009 and 2010.

I've been trying to grasp at this question for some time, but seeing it through the Voegeli lens has helped me frame it properly. It's well-established that in good times and bad, Republicans call for lower taxes. Always. So I guess my question for my conservative friends is this: How low is low enough?

I presume that most of my conservative/Republican friends believe that the state should exist and has some functions to perform. (I'm excluding my anarcho-libertarian friends from the conversation for the moment.) And I guess their first response would be: "The minimum it takes to support those minimal tasks and not a cent more." But that doesn't really tell us anything, and it keeps things sufficiently vague that Republicans can make the same pitch, generation after generation. What I want to know is: According to conservatives, what's an appropriate level of taxation to sustain government without unduly oppressing citizens? Is it lower than 14.8 percent of GDP? If so, how much lower? Can we get a number?

Somebody will provide a number, I hope. But I'm guessing for most Republicans, the answer is always and will ever be: "Just a little lower."

Would mandatory paid sick days hurt Philadelphia businesses? Maybe not

The Philadelphia City Council is considering a bill that would require the city's employers to offer paid sick leave to their employees—a new regulation that seems, perhaps, counterintuitive considering the poor nature of the job market here. But it turns out that the state of Connecticut is considering similar legislation—and the Economic Policy Institute has a memorandum suggesting the requirement wouldn't be so burdensome, and might offer some benefits to employers.

Among the highlights:

• If all employees used all five paid sick days, the average cost to an employer that currently provides no paid sick days to any employees would be 0.40% of sales.

• Among workers who currently have access to five paid sick days, the industry-weighted average number of days taken is 2.41 days; if employees used this average number of paid sick days, the total cost would be 0.19% of sales.

Says EPI: "The data clearly show that the potential cost of providing paid sick days is in fact extremely small relative to the total sales of a firm. In addition, available research shows cost-savings for employers that provide paid sick days, largely resulting from reduced employee turnover."

It would be interesting to see similar research brought to bear on Philadelphia, but I'm guessing the outlook wouldn't be all that different. In any case, if I were running a business, I'm not sure why I'd want to put my employees in the position of coming to work sick—infecting other employees, my customers, and even me. Based on EPI's memo, such burdens appear unnecessary.

In Afghanistan, learning the wrong lessons from Bin Laden

Good story in today's Washington Post about whether the Afghanistan war is worth the cost. But even the folks who want to reduce the American footprint there don't seem to have a full grasp of the bigger picture:

Civilian officials argue that recent gains against the Taliban and al-Qaeda have largely been the result of a counterterrorism strategy implemented by Special Operations forces, not the costly, large-footprint counterinsurgency mission that aims to secure the country district by district. Reducing conventional forces, some civilians assert, will not fundamentally alter the calculus that has led to interest among Taliban leaders in exploring peace talks with the Afghan government and U.S. representatives.

“Our mission is to disrupt and dismantle al-Qaeda, and what the bin Laden killing shows us is that you can do that with a small number of highly skilled guys,” the second senior official said. “You don’t need Army and Marine battalions in dozens of districts.”

I think you ought to go a step further and say this: What the bin Laden killing shows us is that you don't need to tie yourself down in Afghanistan if your focus is on Al Qaeda. Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan! Maybe, at this point, America's bases in Afghanistan are designed to prosecute anti-terror operations in Pakistan. But the mission—destroy a small, nimble, stateless group—and the strategy—tie down tens of thousands of troops in a single country—don't fit each other. Per the WaPo story, we probably can't afford to sustain our Afghanistan commitment. But even if we could, that doesn't make it the smart play.

Philadelphia cops want to run the city without living here

I'm not fond of this idea, frankly:

The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 is taking Mayor Nutter and the city's Ethics Board to court.

FOP president John McNesby said the union filed a civil lawsuit against the city last week over a decades-old rule that prohibits cops from making political donations.

The police union is the only one in the city that can't make donations to politicians or to a political-action committee.

"We're treated like second-class citizens," McNesby said. "Enough is enough."

The FOP is clearly one of the city's power-brokers, so maybe it's pointless to complain about the union putting its money where it's mouth is. And certainly, I'm not generally one to oppose unions—even municipal unions—acting in the political realm.

It's just that McNesby's "second-class citizens" comment sticks in my craw a bit. After all, McNesby won for his union the right for cops not to have to live in the city limits. That has always been a bad idea. And the result, when combined with McNesby's new effort, is to create a Philadelphia police force that has sway over the city's politics even if—potentially—a substantial portion of its membership doesn't live here anymore. That bothers me.

It might not bother me so much if the department weren't continually awash in corruption scandals. But it is. From where I sit, it appears that the FOP is seeking to expand its power in the community while continually eluding accountability—both formal, and the informal type that comes from having to live among the people you police. It's a toxic mix, and bad for the rest of us.

David Mamet's conversion to conservatism

Over the weekend, a few of my conservative friends touted this Weekly Standard profile of playwright David Mamet, who is rather famously converting to conservatism. Put aside, for the moment, the spectacle of conservatives who profess to disdain Hollywood high-fiving each other when a celebrity turns out to be Republican. There are hints that Mamet—smart as he is—is motivated more by contrarianism than other factors. You don't have to be dumb to be conservative, but (as represented in the article, anyway) Mamet seems to be guilty of rather shallow thinking.

I'll pluck out two of my favorite examples:

“But I saw the liberals hated George Bush. It was vicious. And I thought about it, and I didn’t get it. He was no worse than the others, was he? And I’d ask my liberal friends, ‘Well, why do you hate him?’ They’d all say: ‘He lied about WMD.’ Okay. You love Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t write Profiles in Courage—he lied about that. ‘Bush is in bed with the Saudis!’ Okay, Kennedy was in bed with the mafia.”

I dunno. Lies are lies, I suppose, but to me there's a vast difference between lying about a best-selling book and, say, misrepresenting and hyping intelligence about non-existent WMDs in order to sell an invasion that will bog your country down in a war for a decade, at great cost and at the expense of thousands of lives. Moreover, while both "lies" might reflect on the character of the particular president, only one seems to have real bearing on governance. That Mamet reduces the two to a kind of equivalency suggests A) an overly simplistic moral imagination and B) a carelessness about what the president actually does.

Next example:

“The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people’s? One thing they can’t do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd.”

This statement comes in a magazine edited by Bill Kristol.

I'm not saying liberals are morally pure, or don't succumb to a herd instinct. But I don't think it's an ideological problem; it's a human nature problem. David Mamet, from what I can tell, is just changing herds. And that's fine. I just wish he'd spare us the sanctimony.

Facebook made my hospital stay less miserable

When the doctors told me they were admitting me to the hospital for surgery, the first thing I did—after calling my wife and parents to let them know how dire things had become—was go to Facebook and Twitter.

Surgery for sure. Apparently this is quite serious and disturbing. This account may be dark awhile.

And I meant it. I assumed that if I wasn't too overcome with pain to care about social networking, then I'd at least choose to be stoic and not inflict the details of my illness upon my friends.

Who was I kidding? I'm not one to endure pain silently—or, really, anything silently. It's why I blog. I'm a compulsive oversharer. Indeed, my first update to Facebook—dictated to my wife, apparently, through a morphine haze—came just a couple of hours after surgery.

Surgery done. Colostomy! Diverticulitis! Pain! (sec:jcm)

And over the next 24 hours, there were 26 comments appended.

Here's the thing: Surgery is an isolating thing. You're taken away from the people you love, drugged and cut open. After that you have days spent watching TV, giving blood, and drifting in and out of consciousness. The pain was the worst thing about surgery; the colostomy bag was the second. The loneliness could've ranked right up there with it.

But it didn't, quite. Because I kept posting, three and four times a day, to both Facebook and Twitter—and, thank God, folks kept posting right back at me.

Just a few hours after my first update, in fact, President Obama took the airwaves to announce the death of Osama bin Laden. Slightly more alert this time—and leaving the TV on around-the-clock to reduce my sense of dislocation—I posted this at 12:40 a.m.:

News flash: Osama bin Laden was hiding in my gut.

Probably not that funny, I realize. But I'd realized that I'd probably be giving folks regular updates on my recovery. And I'm not an optimist. But I didn't want to scare people away. So I figured a few jokes sprinkled in amongst the self-pity might be helpful.

I wrote about the food. I wrote about my roommates. I wrote about feeling sorry for myself. I wrote about the bad TV. And people kept responding. It was absolutely what I needed.

Social networking's limitations were also helpful. I've been writing longer blog posts this week, but while I was in the hospital I could barely stay awake or concentrate for five minutes at a time. (There were a couple of times I actually did fall asleep while updating my social networks, only to snap awake when I dropped my iPhone in my lap.) One-hundred-forty characters allowed me to communicate without spending the kind of energy required from an actual hospital visit. I could dip in and out of the communications stream as I was able.

Does this mean anything? I don't know. I Googled around to see if there was any link between a patient's social networking practices and their health outcomes, but it doesn't look like the kind of thing that's been researched. (Yet.) All I know is that I've had a love-hate relationship with Facebook and Twitter. It's why I invented "Single-Tasking Sundays" for myself.(Suspended for the duration.) But when I went into the hospital, I was able to take all my living relationships with me, staying in conversation and feeling the love. It was great.

So I hate my fucking colostomy

Warning: This is really gross.

When the doctors came to me that Saturday afternoon and told me I was probably going to need surgery, I got weepy. It wasn't the surgery itself that brought tears to my eyes—though knowing that my belly was about to be sliced open wasn't exactly comforting—but what the docs told me was waiting on the other side: a colostomy bag.

Surgery scared me. The colostomy offended me.

There was my vanity, first off all. Who gets colostomies after all? Old guys, that's who, grampas who've had their sexual day in the sun and don't have to worry about looking good and being attractive to the opposite sex. (I'm married and faithful, but I don't want to be repulsive to other women; this made me feel like I'd be repulsive to both my wife and other women.) Young, virile men don't have colostomies. I'm not young exactly—I'm 38—but I suspected the surgery was a too-early arrival in the precincts of the elderly.

Beyond that, though, the problem was literally visceral: Part of my insides would be hanging outside. I'd be carrying a bag of shit on my gut. It would be like walking around as an extra from a zombie movie, only all the time. Or all the time until it's reversed, which I'm told will happen in the first couple of months.

Truth be told, I didn't do very well the first couple of times the nurses emptied the colostomy bag while I was in the hospital. The fact of clearing out my guts through my gut made me lightheaded; the smell made it worse. The nurses told me that I'd have to start emptying my own bag; even more, I'd have to change it myself once I went home—actually wiping my intestines clean before adhering a new bag to myself.

I felt ... petulant.

Complicating matters was the fact that the colostomy wasn't the only hole in my gut. When I went into the hospital—and here is where I might be guilty of oversharing—I hadn't pooped for two weeks. I was distended, my entire gastrointestinal system inflamed to the point of cutting off the blood supply to vital organs. I was so distended, in fact, that when surgeons tried to make the first colostomy hole in me—at the top of my belly, just under my sternum—it didn't work: they couldn't access my intestine. So they tried again an inch down from there, and managed to open up the pipes. I'm told I popped like a zit, two weeks of pressure buildup in my insides suddenly finding a quick, messy release.

The result of the first incision, though, is that I have two holes in my gut: the colostomy, and what I like to call the "superfluous wound." It's about an inch deep and an inch wide, and requires daily dressing. And the nurses told me that this, too, would require my personal care. The prospect filled me with dread.

Fast forward to this morning. I woke up at 6:16 am and—as has become my habit—felt under my shirt to see if the bag had filled overnight and needed emptying. Something worse had happened: It ruptured on the top side; waste was pooling on my chest and around my wound.

We called the nurse's office. One would be coming at 9, my wife was told. But I might want to clean up and dress everything myself before she got there, if I could.

The choice was to replace my colostomy bag and wound dressing, or sit around a couple of hours and let filth leak into my wound. It didn't seem like a real choice.

So I did what I had to do, with the assistance of my wife. First I cleaned my wound, extracting soupy gauze from the hole and packing fresh stuff in, then covering it up with medical tape. Then we found a fresh colostomy bag and cut a hole in it to match the size of my stoma. It was gross. But I was clear-headed—I even took a photo of the whole mess to show the nurse, just in case some visual help was needed later on.

So I'm proud that I could handle situations I'd dreaded. Sometimes you find you're capable of more than you realized because you're forced to do more than you want to.

On the other hand, the incident only exacerbated my anger about parts of the surgery that no doubt saved my life. I hate my fucking colostomy, and I can't wait for it to be fixed.

Notes from surgery: Pain, then the sponge bath

There are almost no visual components to the memories of my first waking moments after surgery. Mostly, I suspect, this is because I was still pretty doped up—and thus mostly unable to open my eyes. What's left is a mishmash of sound and pain.

Pain. I knew before I was even told that the doctor had made two holes in my body, because I could feel them both, individually, one on top of the other on my abdomen, two fingers of fire—no, something worse than fire, because fire can be extinguished and there was nothing to the intensity of agony in my belly that suggested a temporary nature. I screamed—or tried to at least. Most likely I grunted angrily.

It was going to get worse: I still needed to be transferred from the operating table to a recuperation bed. I could hear the nurses around me talking–male and female voices mixing together in a kind of urgent incoherence—and then the sheet below me tighten in a one-two-three! movement to lift me to my new repose. It squeezed my wounds a little. I screamed. "YOU'RE HURTING ME!" I wanted to say, but I don't think I managed actual speech.

And then: blackness.

Soon after, though, a new sensation emerged. I still hurt, still hurt too much to want to endure or survive. But then the sponge touched my skin: someone was cleaning me, a soothing touch in the midst of misery. Along my left leg, up the calf and thigh. And then, finally, up from there. The post-surgical moment when I first thought I might survive occurred when a nurse—whose face I've still never seen, I don't think—oh-so-briefly washed my balls.

There's nothing erotic to this. But the pain had been so thorough, so penetrating—and the warm, sudsy sponge against my testacles made me feel ... loved. And then, blackness again.

Something similar would happen over my next few days in the hospital. Young men wiped my ass. Older women washed me all over. A beautiful young Indian woman showed me how to empty the shit from the bag on my stomach. At one point on my last day—seriously, I'm not making this up—a woman washed my feet while singing Negro spirituals. It was a resonant moment—possibly slightly absurd, but it felt resonant—that did not get me to return to the Christianity of my youth. But that's as clean a shot as anybody will get, most likely.

Losing control over these basic functions, I guess, should make me angry on some level. But for whatever reason, I resigned myself pretty quickly to the idea that I didn't have control of this situation. And so I accepted it: Every ass-wipe was a gift, a step closer to home and recovery.

Where I've been

At the moment, I have a hole in my belly where I do most—but not all!—of my pooping and farting. It's a colostomy. It's also temporary, knock on wood. And it's why I've been absent from my own blog the last two weeks.

There is no official diagnosis: the main suspect is diverticulitis. The surgery that gave me the hole in my belly wasn't trying to fix any underlying problems—it was simply trying to ease the pressure on a gastrointestinal system that was so distended that the blood supply to critical organs was in jeopardy. A colonoscopy and two more surgeries await me. I've been in such pain, post-surgery, that I'm not really happy at the prospect. Gotta get fixed, though.

Absent an official diagnosis, I'm full of self-recrimination, suspecting that a lifetime of bad decisions about my health and life have led inexorably to this moment. I am being judged. And I am judging myself. My uncertainty—and I'm self-aware enough to know this is all probably just post-op depression talking—is wide enough to encompass nearly all the choices I've made the last two decades. I have a loving wife, and a beautiful son, both of whom are burdened by my circumstances. I feel this keenly.

So I don't know what this blog will be for the next couple of months, given A) that my life will be dominated by medical events and B) I've not been able to sustain the attention span for an entire Sports Illustrated article lately, much less keep up with the nuances of politics. And beyond this, I'm not sure what the blog will be anymore because I'm not certain who I will be anymore. This is re-evaluation time: I must ensure that I am living a creditable life. Anything that doesn't add to the balance probably goes by the wayside.