Some Perspective on the Steroid Era

Mitchell looks at steroid use as it relates to the Baseball Hall of Fame and segregated big league ball playing

Play Ball-Baseball Season Is Here Again!

The beginning of the baseball season is only a few days away. This is good news to all baseball fans who have made it through another off-season, and another winter. This season, like all others, is full of possibility excitement and questions. Will this be the year the Yankees finally fall apart? How can Mike Trout top his extraordinary rookie season? Are the Nationals going to be as good as they look? Somewhere in the ephemera is Miguel Cabrera still waiting for that slider? All, or most, of these questions, and many others will be answered over the next seven months or so

Seinfeld Elections: Why Democracy Needs Conflict

Unity is an appealing abstract notion, but in democracies, other than a basic agreement on the rules, unity is not a very helpful dynamic. Democracies succeed not when people don’t argue and disagree, but when they argue and disagree on a range of issues. This allows for coalitions to evolve, for the winners in one fight to be the losers on another and for electoral outcomes to differ in each election

Changing Course on Missile Defense: Why Refusing to Pick a Fight with Moscow Is Not a Sign of Weakness

The Obama administration’s decision not to place missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic provides an interesting view into the work in progress that is the Obama administration’s foreign policy regarding Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is also perhaps the first indication that administration’s famous “reset” button with Russia is more than just talk

Faded Colors

Western media coverage of the Arab Spring has carried more than a hint of irrational exuberance. Largely forgotten in all this has been the historical experience of the Color Revolutions, whose initial high hopes yielded less-than-encouraging outcomes

Syria and the Libya Intervention

The criticism of the intervention in NATO on the grounds that if the west intervenes to stop mass killings in Libya, they should do it everywhere else as well, is troubling because the corollary is that if the west cannot stop mass killing somewhere, it shouldn‘t try to do it anywhere. Nonetheless, the intervention in Libya sets a precedent and creates expectations in the region that can create problems for the U.S. and its European allies

For Obama, Winning Reelection and Governing Effectively Are Not Conflicting Goals

After serving one year as president, Barack Obama gave an interview in which he stated that he would "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." This is a strange, but revealing statement for a president to make. On one level, it is meaningless, because asserting that it is more important to do one's job well than simply get reelected is something that politicians are expected to do. It is the equivalent of an athlete saying that winning is more important than individual achievements

Will Foreign Policy Be a Campaign Issue in 2012?

As the 2012 presidential campaign begins to take shape it is striking, and probably even more so to non-Americans, how little attention is being paid to foreign policy in the campaign. There is, of course, some criticism of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, but it is mostly moderate and fairly generic, usually along the lines of viewing Obama as insufficiently loyal to America‘s friends around the world and not fully aware of potential threats. This criticism, however, is not intense or central to the Republican campaigns

A Game of Georgian Chicken

Currently, with major parliamentary elections less than two weeks away, the Georgian government is playing game of chicken. It consists of a challenge from the Georgian government to the West to see who will blink first

A Second Chance in Kyrgyzstan?

Regardless of how events play out in Kyrgyzstan, it is now clear that U.S. policy there in recent years has been misguided. The U.S. allowed itself to be manipulated into supporting a government that was not only corrupt and undemocratic but also weak and incompetent because of the strong need to have access to the Manas Air Force Base which is only a few miles from Bishkek. The Manas Air Force Base plays a key role in transporting troops and materials to support the U.S. led effort in Afghanistan, so the U.S. was forced to accede to the demands of the Bakiev regime in exchange for access to the base. The U.S. largely overlooked the ample shortcomings of this key Central Asian regime because of the base. The failure of the U.S. to speak out against the increasingly authoritarian Kyrgyz government was not lost on the beleaguered opposition-the same beleaguered opposition which is currently running the country