2011 Louisville Sluggers

If you are really bored, I suppose the natural followup to yesterday's post on the 2011 Bolts from the Blue of the Hardy House League is a post about the 2011 Louisville Sluggers of the Original Bitnet Fantasy Baseball League.

The OBFLB crowns champions for both the "A" first half and "B" second half of the baseball season, divided by the All Star game. For obvious reason, I can only report results of the draft in preparation for the first half season. As I describe the team, keep in mind that the OBFLB is a 24 team head-to-head fantasy baseball league using 10 categories: HR, SB, batting average, runs produced average, plate appearances, innings pitched, wins, saves, ERA and "ratio."

Here are the 2011 Sluggers (players in red were retained from 2010). Since I retained 14 players, I started the draft in round 15:

Starters
C: John Jaso (19th round)
1B: Joey Votto (CIN)
2B: Gordon Beckham (CHX)
3B: Chipper Jones (ATL) (16th round)
SS: Troy Tulowitzki (COL)
OF: Peter Bourjos (LAA)
OF: Michael Brantley (CLE) (15th round)
OF: David DeJesus (OAK) (18th round)
DH: Billy Butler (KC)

SP: Tim Lincecum (SF)
SP: Josh Beckett (BOS)
SP: Brandon Morrow (TOR) (obtained in pre-draft trade)
SP: Ricky Nolasco (FLA)
SP: Jonathan Sanchez (SF)
RP: Chris Perez (CLE)
RP: Joel Hanrahan (PIT)
RP: Jesse Crain (MIN) (27th round)

Bench
C: Ramon Castro (28th round)
2B Jason Kipnis (CLE) (23rd round)
3B: Anthony Rendon (Rice University) (25th round)
IF: Ramon Santiago (DET) (26th round)
UT: Mark Teahan (CHX) (24th round)
OF: Chris Carter (OAK) (17th round) (AAA)
OF: Pat Burrell (20th round)

SP: Wade Davis (TB)
SP: Jonathan Niese (NYM)
SP John Lamb (KC) (21st round) (AA)
RP: Bobby Jenks (BOS) (22nd round)


The Kipnis, Rendon and Lamb picks indicate the premium my league puts on talented young prospects, especially at skill positions (2B/3B and pitcher in this case). In other words, I was drafting for the even longer-term future -- or perhaps for a mid-year trade in case I have an injury.

You may wonder why I have 7 starting pitchings retained in a league that uses only 5 per week. Basically, I couldn't get any value in trade talks for Wade Davis, Ricky Nolasco, or Jonathan Niese and traded for Brandon Morrow because I believe he's a breakout candidate.


I'll probably be looking to move one of my starting pitchers and the prospects before the second half season begins. My greatest needs are at catcher and perhaps outfielder.



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2011 Bolts from the Blue

For some years, I've been posting the roster of my entry in the Hardy House fantasy baseball league. On Saturday, April 2, in Oak Park, IL, I attended my 23rd consecutive auction draft. Three owners had to participate by phone, but the rest of us enjoyed the draft, the food of Greektown, some college hoops, and camaraderie.

As previously discussed here, my 2010 squad won the league championship -- the team's first such success since 1998. I was not especially hopeful going into this season's auction because I traded away a number of discount-priced players in order to win last year. Other owners retained many of those guys. Unfortunately, I had few good alternative choices, so I kept a couple of overpriced star-level players who promise to produce a lot of value.

As a reminder: the league has 12 teams and uses American League players exclusively to accumulate statistics in various hitting and pitching categories. For 22 years, we tabulated results in the traditional 8 categories (HR, RBI, SBs, BA, Wins, Saves, ERA and WHIP), but this off-season we voted to dump BA in favor of OBA. Also, we added runs scored (R) for hitters and strikeouts (K) for pitchers.

Note also one roster quirk now in its fourth year: we added a 10th pitcher and subtracted an outfielder. We continue to believe that this better reflects roster management decisions that real baseball teams have made over the past 20 years. This year, we also reduced the maximum size of our reserve roster from 8 to 5 players, ended the 3-player reserve draft, and allowed the purchase of any player on the 40 man roster. After the auction, only players on 25 man active rosters or the major league DL could be obtained.

The 2011 Bolts from the Blue (7 retained players in blue)

C Mike Napoli (TEX) $16
C Jarrod Saltalamacchia (BOS) $6
1B Derrek Lee (BAL) $19

2B Robinson Cano (NYY) $33

3B Kevin Kouzmanoff (OAK) $13

SS Orlando Cabrera (CLE) $3

MI Gordon Beckham (CHX) $19
CR Brent Morel (CHX) $10

OF Vernon Wells (Tor) $19

OF J.D. Drew (BOS) $13

OF Torii Hunter (LAA) $18
OF Ben Revere (MIN) $1 (AAA)
DH Travis Hafner (CLE) $5
Hitting $175 (up $1 from last season)

P Felix Hernandez (SEA) $33

P Jered Weaver (LAA) $20

P Jeff Niemann (TB) $5 (acquired in pre-draft trade for P Jon Lester BOS)
P Jeff Francis (KC) $3
P Chris Tillman (BAL) $1
P Rafael Soriano (NYY) $9
P Brian Fuentes (OAK) $7
P Joaquin Benoit (DET) $3
P Juan Cruz (TB) $1
P J.P. Howell (TB) $1 (DL)
Pitching $83 ($2 less than last year)

I left $2 on the table, but I had reserved some extra cash to find steals or saves. That largely failed and I'm going to need them, eventually, if this team is to compete. I tried to buy steals, but they were very costly and one team ended up buying surplus.

Since losing expensive Toronto closer B.J. Ryan to injury hours after the auction ended in 2007, I have avoided paying for saves on draft day. So, where may I find saves? Oakland's bullpen has been hit with injuries and Fuentes has nearly 200 career saves. Tampa does not have a healthy "proven" closer, but Howell had 17 saves in 2009 and is supposedly on the road to recovery. NYY's Mariano Rivera is 41 years old and will suffer injuries and/or face retirement eventually. Soriano was one of the top closers in the league last year and should get some random saves when Rivera has already pitched in multiple games in a row. Thus, I targeted those bullpens and players. Notably, closers were a little cheaper this year as we moved from 4x4 to 5x5.

Saltalamacchia was on my 2010 team and I bought him again for a lower salary.

To replace Revere and Howell on my active roster, I bought OF Mike Cameron (BOS) for $2 and P Adam Russell (TB) for $1. I also nabbed P Jake Arrieta (BAL) for $3 so that I can juggle my rotation regularly -- we moved to daily transactions this year too.

Clearly, I believe in drafting some players John Hunt used to call "post-hype." Those are guys who are still young, but their disappointing performance to-date has caused their value to decline a little.  Beckham, Tillman, and Saltalamacchia are my main post-hype picks, though Beckham was not especially cheap in this league that originated in Chicago.

Too many of my guys are deep into their 30s and I worry about OBA. I should be OK in R/RBI and HR, plus ERA/WHIP and K, and perhaps wins if that works out. If I can put myself into a position to compete later in the year, I can trade for steals and saves.

You can find posts about the 2005, 2007 , 2008, 2009 and 2010 drafts elsewhere on this blog.


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The Real Thing

These are the Coca-Cola marketing slogans I recall from my childhood:

# 1963 - Things go better with Coke.
# 1966 - Coke ... after Coke ... after Coke.
# 1969 - It's the real thing.
# 1971 - I'd like to buy the world a Coke.

Fareed Zakaria explains that the company's early global impulses have now flowered. The world has returned the favor and now buys a lot of Coke:

The companies on the S&P 500 generate 46% of their profits outside the U.S., and for many of the biggest American names, the proportion is much higher. You might think of Coca-Cola as the quintessentially American company. In fact it is a vast global enterprise, operating in 206 countries. "We have a factory in Ramallah that employs 2,000 people. We have a factory in Afghanistan. We have factories everywhere," explains Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coke. Nearly 80% of Coca-Cola's revenue comes from outside the U.S., and an even greater percentage of its employees are in foreign countries. "We are a global company that happens to be headquartered in Atlanta," says Kent.

Lots of "American" companies are creating far more jobs abroad than domestically in the current recovery.

I'm not sure what this says about sales of Mecca Cola.


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Nuclear nightmares with strange bedfellows

The Fukushima nuclear "event" in Japan has now been categorized as a Level 7 accident on the INES scale. The only other instance for this rating was the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Many engineers, however, do not believe the latest accident will be as devastating as Chernobyl because of the specific circumstances surrounding the different accidents. The BBC story I linked explains the rationale.

In any event, anti-nuclear analysts have been referencing Chernobyl a great deal in the past month -- and the implications of their arguments are disturbing.

Noted lefty climate skeptic Alexander Cockburn offers the most frightening summary:

In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, a 327-page volume by three scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko. It is the definitive study to date.

In the summary of his chapter 'Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe', Yablokov says flatly: "A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0 per cent of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe...

"Since 1990, mortality among the clean-up teams has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups. From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators [members of clean-up crews] died before 2005 - that is, some 15 per cent of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl clean-up teams.

"The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout."

Long-time anti-nuclear crusader, Dr. Helen Caldicott, has likewise referenced this report in her recent writings about the Japanese accident.

However, environmental journalist George Monbiot has been attacking Caldicott for sloppy use of scientific evidence -- including reference to the study cited also by Cockburn. He quotes other comprehensive studies and reviews of studies, including one completed by UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear), which he calls "the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation(6). The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, included four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia. In the rest of the population, there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children, arising “almost entirely” from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131(7). Otherwise, “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure.”(8) People living in the countries affected today “need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident.”(9)

Those parenthetical numbers in the text are citations to original sources, which I have included below.

Monbiot points to a published "devastating" review of the Yablokov, Nesterenko, and Nesterenko study, authored by Monty W. Charles of University of Birmingham. I cannot gain access to the full review, but Monbiot writes that

"the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

Monbiot also says that the New York Academy of Sciences published the book without peer review, which is certainly odd if true.

I found the first page of the Charles review on-line, and it does note that the literature on Chernobyl includes a vast rage of findings about the harms. "This book," he writes, "covers the high cancer mortality tail of the distribution of predictions of health effects from Chernobyl." Moreover, Charles says that the range of findings makes it difficult even for scholars in the field to have a good feel for the evidence: "how can professional scientists—such as most readers of this review—arrive at an informed opinion on the radiation-related adverse health effects from the Chernobyl accident? The answer is with great difficulty!"

Monbiot does not quote from a somewhat more sympathetic review by Ian Fairlie of the same research published in the same issue of the journal. Nonetheless, even Fairlie finds some troubling flaws in the book's methodology:

However, one major difficulty in interpreting Chernobyl mortality studies is the large recent decrease in average male life spans in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in all areas not just contaminated ones: this deserves more attention in eastern studies.

....Also greater efforts should be made in reconstructing doses (and resources be made available for this), and in estimating individual and collective doses and discussing their implications for both eastern and western Europe.

Based on the physical evidence he has reviewed, Fairlie has argued elsewhere that the deaths attributed to Chernobyl are significantly underestimated by many scientists. For example Fairlie and David Sumner found that "about 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths are predicted, 7 to 15 times greater than the figure of 4,000 in the IAEA press release."

Obviously, even 60,000 cancer deaths would be only a fraction of 900,000 as estimated by the Yablokov et al study.

I am not 100% sure what to make of this debate, but it does seem clear that official estimates of Chernobyl's effects may be on the low end of the continuum -- and that high end estimates may have some serious methodological flaws. An environmentalist like Monbiot seems to be dismissing radiation threats tied to the nuclear industry (at least in part out of concerns for global warming), while lefty writer Cockburn is extremely worried about nuclear radiation -- but is quite skeptical about global warming. In fact, he's a denialist who sees conspiracy.

Whatever the truth, I suspect that nuclear power will have a difficult time politically for the foreseeable future and it will thus not be a viable near-term solution to climate change.


Appendix: Monbiot's sources.

6. United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2011. Volume II, Annex D: Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident. This is the latest section of the 2008 report Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation: Report to the General Assembly. See Paragraph 2, page 1 and Figure VII and paragraph 63, page 14. http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_D_Chernobyl_Report.pdf

7. Para 33, page 8 and para 4, page one. As above.

8. Para 99, page 19. As above.

9. Para 100, page 19. As above.

15. MW Charles, 2010. Review of Chernobyl: consequences of the catastrophe for people and the environment. Radiation Protection Dosimetry (2010) 141(1): 101-104. doi: 10.1093/rpd/ncq185. http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/141/1/101.full

16. The authors announce that they reject this method in the introduction to the book. Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko, as above, page 2

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Tech check

Obviously, these past few weeks and months, members of the media have filed numerous stories about the important role of Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, and other technologies in empowering democratic activists around the world.

This is not fundamentally new. I've been in meetings about the Grawemeyer Award when serious people suggested and discussed the prospect of Twitter (its founders, I suppose) winning the prize because it was such a useful tool during the (failed) Iranian Green uprising. Similarly, a number of former students have contacted me electronically during the past few months to discuss the role of technology in coordinating demonstrations in Egypt and other middle eastern states.

This is a topic I've been thinking, writing, and teaching about for many years. In many respects, I have been a technological optimist and my former students recall the pre-9/11 discussions we had about information technologies and the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico in 1994 (remember Subcomandante Marcos?) and the democratic movement in Indonesia in 1998.

However, it now seems obvious that information technology can be used effectively by non-progressive forces as well. As Chris Lehman wrote recently in The Nation:

plenty of equally unsavory nonstate actors have also adapted to the new networked web—most notoriously in the cellphone-enabled Mumbai terrorist attacks, in which jihadists used Google maps to identify their targets. Mexican crime gangs have used Facebook to compile lists of kidnapping targets, while Indonesians can use a Craigslist-style service to arrange the sale of children’s organs. While Kenya has played host to a vital and influential site called Ushahidi, which helped modernize accurate citizen reporting of violence during the disputed 2007 elections, in that same episode ethnic leaders on both sides of the dispute used text messaging to spread violent attacks on their enemies.

Lehman also discusses the ability of governments to censor the internet and the willingness of western corporations to help them deny access to their populations.

Other pundits are also taking this position. This week, for instance, Harvard's Niall Ferguson's Newsweek piece argues that social networks can "empower the enemies of freedom." "Our most dangerous foes," he writes "are the Islamists who understand how to post fatwas on Facebook, email the holy Quran, and tweet the call to jihad.:

While critics and skeptics like Lehman and Ferguson make some good points, I continue to argue that decentralized information technology is bound to have progressive consequences. Wikileaks demonstrates that it is very difficult even for a powerful national security state to censor sensitive information. Useful technologies are cheap and getting cheaper, making them quite widely available around the globe. Given that participation in open discussion is a recipe for democracy in the public sphere, I do not see how some undesirable users can outweigh the communicative potential of everyone else. Sure, criminals and terrorists can foment hate in their niches of the world wide web, but that's certainly no reason to censor the rest of us. What's Ferguson's take home point?



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2011 Grawemeyer Week

This is Grawemeyer week at University of Louisville. The 2011 World Order winner, Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves, will be speaking Monday April 11 at 2 pm in the Floyd Theater in the Swain Student Activities Center.

Several months ago, I blogged about Bales on the Duck of Minerva. The title of his talk reflects his subject matter: “Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves.”

Update: Bales taped this interview Monday morning:




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Elites rule

Chris Hayes of The Nation recently highlighted some political science research that suggests an explanation for the latest budget deal. By his analysis, it is no surprise at all that US political leaders agree to cut social spending that helps the general public rather than pursue funds from corporate tax evaders:

...our system is responsive only to voices at the top of the social pyramid—the bankers and businessmen who are raking in record bonuses and the professional upper middle class, which is recovering much faster than the nation as a whole. In a 2007 paper titled “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness in the United States,” Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens analyzed 2,000 survey questions from 1981 to 2002, looking for the relationship between public opinion and policy outcomes. He found that “when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans.”

This echoes the point I quoted yesterday from Fareed Zakaria.

In my freshman political science class in fall 1979, our primary text was Dye and Zeigler's Irony of Democracy. I don't teach Intro American classes, but I do not think I have ever seen this book in my building...


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America's Political Corruption and Taxes

Late Friday night, Republicans and Democrats in the Congress compromised and a government shutdown was avoided. The White House, many members of the news media, and elected officials from both political parties are celebrating nearly $40 billion in spending cuts:

The agreement cuts about $38 billion in spending for the fiscal year that ends on September 30, a decrease that the parties call the biggest annual spending cut in history.

Despite the celebration of "bipartisanship" at work, many top economists say that this is bad public policy. The U.S. needs more economic stimulus rather than reduced spending. Government spending foments demand that can help spark the economy.

In Britain, ordinary people opposed to their government's spending cuts organized and conducted high profile protests to highlight the fact that deficits could be addressed by taxing corporations. Specifically, UK Uncut points out that many very profitable businesses pay little to no taxes. A couple of weeks ago, they achieved a political victory -- a public inquiry into corporate tax avoidance.

The US has not yet had many protests aimed at corporate tax evasion, but the Wisconsin rallies signal the potential for mass unrest caused by government cutbacks. And the US is a prime target for US Uncut. As their new website points out, General Electric paid $0 in taxes on over $5 billion in profits. Bank of America, Verizon, and Citigroup likewise have lower tax burdens than the average American household, get billions in refunds from the government, or pay no taxes (despite getting bailouts as well).

Fareed Zakaria explains the problem, politically:

The American tax code is a monstrosity, cumbersome and inefficient. It is 16,000 pages long and riddled with exemptions and loopholes, specific favors to special interests. As such, it represents the deep, institutionalized corruption at the heart of the American political process, in which it is now considered routine to buy a member of Congress's support for a particular, narrow provision that will be advantageous for your business.

Instead of celebrating billions in spending reductions during difficult economic times, the U.S. could be collecting revenues from businesses that pay little to nothing in taxes.

And then, the government could go after government subsidies that encourage ecologically undesirable activity -- oil, mineral rights, etc. The libertarian right agrees that "corporate welfare" is anathema; thus, this could be a great area for bipartisan cooperation.

As I've blogged before, libertarians also agree with progressives that Pentagon spending should be in for a major correction. They might not agree to buy more butter, but they certainly favor fewer guns.


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Debunking the Dominant Iraq Narrative

I've occasionally blogged about the power of "the surge" narrative. Both the Bush administration, for obvious reasons, and the Obama administration (because of Afghanistan) have a strong political interest in embracing the alleged success in Iraq.

Time magazine intern Nate Rawlings, formerly of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division and now a student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, returned briefly to Iraq last fall and addressed this powerful framing of events. The following analysis appeared just before the November 2010 elections, though Iraq was NOT a significant issue in the campaign:

RAWLINGS: According to the American narrative, enlightened U.S. military commanders co-opted the insurgents, persuading them to point their guns away from us and toward al-Qaeda. But the story is told differently here: Sheik Abdel Jabbar al-Feydawi, leader of the Albu Fahed tribe, rallied his people against al-Qaeda because the terrorists murdered his brother. He did it with little assistance from the Americans and took none of their reconstruction money.

What is perhaps most interesting about this is that Rawlings is not really debunking "the surge" narrative related to increasing manpower. Rather, he is challenging the Anbar Awakening and, at least indirectly, the effectiveness of U.S. COIN strategy.


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From ECON 101

Over the past few months, Republican governors have been attacking public workers as if they were to blame for the prolonged recession. Their salaries, benefits or jobs must be slashed to balance budgets. The banks and Wall Street investors who promoted a real estate bubble and trashed the economy are apparently long forgotten. The most affluent Americans, who benefited disproportionately from the unsustainable growth -- and who are again back on their feet -- are not being asked to shoulder more of a burden. Indeed, they got renewed tax cuts when the "Bush" (now Obama) cuts were renewed.

Thus, it seems, only the local librarians, teachers, fire fighters, or police officers can be blamed and made to pay.

Many critics of public sector workers reference seemingly damning statistics from a January 2009 Forbes magazine piece by Stephane Fitch:

The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector's $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%.

That piece of information certainly makes it sound as if the public sector might be a place to make cuts when states are facing budgetary pressures.

However, the statistic is very misleading -- making a false comparison according to economists Robert Pollin and Jeffrey Thompson in the March 7-14, 2011, issue of The Nation:

What figures such as these fail to reflect is that state and local government workers are older and substantially better educated than private-sector workers. Forbes is therefore comparing apples and oranges. As John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research recently showed, when state and local government employees are matched against private sector workers of the same age and educational levels, the public workers earn, on average, about 4 percent less than their private counterparts. Moreover, the results of Schmitt’s apples-to-apples comparison are fully consistent with numerous studies examining this same question over the past twenty years.

Public sector employment should provide some job security -- workers earn less than their peers in the private sector.

Indeed, educated workers in the private sector should support them. If they are fired from their public sector jobs, then the employment market will be flooded with a larger number of more-educated workers. With a greater supply of workers chasing scarce jobs, salaries and benefits for private sector workers will go down. While the current recession has led to very high unemployment rates, the rate for college graduates has been at 5% or less. That's far too high, but the rate for all other job-seekers has been at least double that figure.


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Pragmatic cosmopolitanism?

Now that the US has intervened in Libya, many political analysts have speculated about an "Obama Doctrine." Last night on MSNBC's "Hardball," Andrea Mitchell identifed a doctrine in response to host Chris Matthews' question:

MATTHEWS: Is there a doctrine? In the first segment of the show tonight, we had McDonough on trying to find out if there is a doctrine. Is there a vision—what did G.W.‘s father call it, a vision thing? Is there a vision thing here?

MITCHELL: Well, I think there is a vision. It‘s emerging, and I think people have questioned whether there‘s a strategy.

The president tried to outline that in answers to our own Savannah Guthrie last night at the news conference in El Salvador. And basically what he says is, when you have a catastrophe that you can avert and the benefits outweigh the costs, and you have international or multilateral support, go for it...

You cannot stand idly by. That‘s what I would call the Obama doctrine.

MATTHEWS: It has conditions, too. We have to have friends who will join us, and we have to have an enemy who we can go after.

MITCHELL: Exactly.

Video here.

On Twitter earlier today (yes, I've just started tweeting), I labeled this "pragmatic cosmopolitianism."

There have been prior efforts to describe an Obama Doctrine, such as the one offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel, which focused on the President's major speeches of 2009 (arguably leading to the Nobel Prize):

support for diplomacy and the UN; commitment to a nuclear-free world; a belief that democracy is strengthened not through US intervention but when people win for themselves their rights and liberties; and engagement and cooperation with, rather than antagonism toward, the Muslim world.

In March 2008, Spencer Ackerman outlined something similar:

Ackerman describes how Obama and his advisors support a "human dignity" agenda that would -- contra the current policy approach -- seek to "fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen."

I think "pragmatic cosmopolitanism" still works to describe all these ideas.


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Hot Duck

Today, on the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Libya: R2P or Regime Change?" R2P means responsibility to protect, a framing of the authorized intervention that is too rarely used by American media.

On Thursday, I posted "Nuclear Disarmament: Looking Back at Reykjavik." Nearly 25 years ago, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev both offered proposals to disarm offensive nuclear arsenals within 10 years. Declassified documents reveal that this aim was prevented by U.S. desire to research and potentially deploy anti-ballistic missile.



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NCAA Hoops

As usual, I picked Kansas to win the NCAA tournament. The team is again a #1 seed -- and was again picked by President Obama to win the national championship. He correctly picked UNC in 2009, but had KU last year.

This is a typical 2011 bracket for me, though I picked a few extra upsets in a pool weighted towards rewarding them and made a few different tactical choices in a pool involving some local competitors.

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Spring Break 2011: Hoops and Nukes

Most of my colleagues at the Duck of Minerva group IR blog are at the annual ISA convention in Montreal. Thus, I'm posting over there this week to provide fresh content. Of course, most of the readers are probably in Montreal too...

In any case, today, March 16, I posted "No Nukes: Arms Division" about the ongoing work by former Defense Secretary William Perry to achieve nuclear disarmament. Perry recently provided some scary details about a 1970s-era computer error in the Pentagon.

Tuesday, March 15, I blogged "Multiple Meltdowns?" about the ongoing crisis at the Japanese nuclear plants. I linked to some expert blogs to read and went out on a (short and sturdy) limb by predicting more political problems for the nuclear power industry.

While I'm pointing to Duck posts, I might as well link to my February 17 article on "A Truth Commission for Iraq." The piece calls for a U.S. inquiry in order to puncture the developing narrative about the success of counterinsurgency tactics (and "the surge") in Iraq.

Finally, I'll post my 2011 NCAA bracket on here tomorrow. If any old friends or colleagues want to participate in a private pool, just shoot me an email. Also, I am running the old Journolist private pool to see if Nate Silver can win for a third straight time. However, without the list, it is difficult to publicize the contest and only a portion of last year's entrants has submitted a bracket. So far, Silver is not among them.


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Rumours

Saturday night, my family headed out to The Rud for dinner and to see a group of local musicians perform Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" LP live from start-to-finish (plus a few other hits as encores). Show video here (yes, I'm in the front row for the early show).

The performers were danny flanigan, Kimmet Cantwell, Brigid Kaelin, Todd Johnson, Tim Halcomb, and Ray Rizzo. Rizzo and his beard were channeling Mick Fleetwood, Kaelin and Cantwell sang and looked a bit like Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, bassist Halcomb played the role well of John McVie, and guitarist Johnson has an angular face and the look of eventual solo-artist Lindsey Buckingham. Old friend danny flanigan didn't really look like a member of Fleetwood Mac from the Rumours period (they had 5 members for that recording), but he could have been representing founding guitarist Peter Green -- or maybe eventual solo artist and former member Bob Welch.

The evening created a flood of old memories from the late 1970s. My long-time college roommate had the album on 8-track tape and I recall borrowing it before a big date my freshman year -- and playing it a lot.

Oh, and "Don't Stop" reminded me of the 1992 Clinton campaign. The song made me feel kind of depressed about promise lost.

In all, it was a fun evening and the music was very entertaining. Unfortunately, the Falls City Pale Ale I had during the show was not as good as other local brews.


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ICC in Film

I viewed Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" last weekend and thought it was a reasonably entertaining political thriller. It wasn't exactly "Chinatown," but that's a pretty high standard.

The story is pretty simple: A new ghost writer is brought on to an autobiography project for a former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang, who seems quite obviously modeled on Tony Blair. The film is based on a book by Robert Harris, who was apparently friendly with the Blair government until the Iraq war. In the story, the original ghostwriter, a long-time political confident of the PM, has died under mysterious circumstances. Some characters suspect foul play.

In the film, the Lang character is under investigation from the International Criminal Court for his alleged "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity." The charges do not stem from Iraq, but rather from the UK's cooperation with American rendition program involving terrorism suspects.

The ICC plotline is somewhat implausible given that the ICC is designed to be initially deferential to state investigations of alleged crimes. The ICC webpage:

In general, a case will be inadmissible if it has been or is being investigated or prosecuted by a State with jurisdiction.

Despite this shortcoming, it was nonetheless interesting to think about the ICC as if it was a meaningful player in these kinds of circumstances.

The film also accurately teaches viewers a simple lesson about world politics. Not all states are party to the Rome Convention and accept ICC jurisdiction, but the list of non-member states is somewhat embarrassing for the US. I couldn't find the script on-line, but this section of dialogue is pretty close to the scene from the movie:

While the Blair/Lang comparison is obvious, I could not help but think of Polanski's similar situation.

As is well-known, the infamous director pled guilty on the charge of statutory rape (the alleged victim was 13) and fled the US in 1978. Despite extradition attempts, the director continues to make movies. Indeed, he won an Oscar in 2003 for directing "The Pianist."

I won't spoil the film's ending by revealing what happens to Lang (and other characters). You might want to check it out for yourself (now on DVD and on Showtime, I think).


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Outsourcing

Middlebury Political Scientist Allison Stanger was on "The Daily Show" earlier this week discussing her book about outsourcing in American foreign policy.

I just wanted to post a couple of items that suggest the issue is even bigger than she discussed on the show.

First, Stanger didn't emphasize the fact that even intelligence agencies are outsourcing their work for higher pay. Tim Shorrock in the September/October 2009 Mother Jones:

more than 70 percent of the US intelligence budget—estimated this year at more than $60 billion—is now spent on contractors. Nearly 40,000 private contractors work for intelligence agencies including the CIA and the NSA, according to Ronald Sanders, a human resources official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; these contractors pull in salaries that average about $207,000 a year—almost double the pay of their cubicle mates employed by the government.

At the NSA, my sources estimate that at least half the jobs are contracted out. (The agency won't disclose the official breakdown.) At the National Reconnaissance Office, the top-secret agency that manages military spy satellites, a full 95 percent of personnel actually work for contractors.

Like Stanger, Shorrock wrote a book about this problem.

Second, though it is not "privatization," it is noteworthy that the US and other affluent states essentially outsource international peacekeeping to poorer countries. James Gibney, in the July/August 2009 The Atlantic:

the top 10 payers of peacekeeping dues (rich countries like the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.) rely on the top 10 troop contributors (poor countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Jordan, Nepal, Ghana, etc.) to do their dirty work...

Gibney calls it a mercenary system, which is what Stanger implies when she discusses privatization.


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Not all deficit hawks are defense hawks

Many partisan deficit hawks are simply using the current political context to pursue policies that they have long supported for other reasons. Where were their deficit concerns when voting to renew the "Bush tax cuts" -- particularly since they insisted that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were included in any final deal?

And many are happy to see Pentagon spending increase when other spending is facing significant reductions. As one Washington insider recently told The Nation, “When the Soviet Union disappeared...a lot of people on the right failed to notice.”

It may be that the circumstances are changing in Washington. The unnamed Washington insider I just quoted is Grover Norquist, a long-time conservative activist.

On November 30, a coalition of conservative groups signed a joint letter calling for defense cuts as part of any reductions in government spending (pdf here).

The Pentagon is slated to spend $6.5 trillion over the next ten years – equal to the current projected deficit spending in the same time period....True fiscal stewards cannot eschew real spending reform by protecting pet projects in the federal budget. Any such Department of Defense favoritism would signal that the new Congress is not serious about fiscal responsibility and not ready to lead.

The coalition includes a number of libertarians, including Christopher Preble and Ben Friedman of the Cato Institute.

Robert Dreyfuss in that February 14, 2011, issue of The Nation reported that a counter-coalition of conservatives who are hawkish on defense are leading the fight to preserve defense spending. The names are familiar from the Bush years: William Kristol, Thomas Donnelly, and Danielle Pletka.

Dreyfuss says that Kristol's Foreign Policy Initiative is an updated version of the Project for a New American Century. Indeed, FPI has been scolding the Obama administration for planned future defense cuts.

If the question was of less importance, I would suggest making some popcorn and watching the conservatives commit fratricide. Instead, it looks like the libertarians might need some help.

Good progressives may need to help Tom Coburn cut defense. What would such a Faustian bargain entail?

Corrections: Ben Friedman wrote to point out that he is not a libertarian even though he works at Cato. Also, I didn't mean to imply he's a signatory to the letter (he's not). Rather, Dreyfuss reported that Friedman and Preble gave a Capitol Hill forum calling for substantial defense cuts.


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