Georgetown overcomes my temporary defection to Ohio State University and emerges triumphant in a lopsided victory. Clearly, the basketball team did not, much to my dismay, miss my tremendous personal contribution to their efforts.Filed as: Georgetown, Hoyas, and march madness

Marc Schulman wants his regular readers to publicize one of his recent posts, in which he reflects on French philosopher André Glucksmann's recent article in Democratiya, "Separating Truth and Belief." It is an interesting read. Marc emphasizes a particular passage:Civilised discourse analyses and defines scientific truths, historic truths and matters of fact relating to knowledge, not to faith. And it does this irrespective of race or confession. We may believe these facts are profane or undignified, yet they remain distinct from religious truths. Our planet is not in the grips of a clash...

Two polls on the motion to censure Bush show very different results. Yesterday an ARG poll found Americans favor censure for the President by a 46-44% margin, i.e., a statistical tie. Today, Rasmussen found Americans oppose censure by 38-45%. Seems like a big swing for a single day, eh? Perhaps one of the polls is screwy? After all, ARG and Rasmussen use different methodologies.There are number of plausible reasons for the apparently steep decline in support for censure. But one of the most obvious is that the polls used two different questions. Guess which question registered the higher...

If Barry Bonds had never taken steroids, never broken the single-season HR record, and never moved himself into baseball's holy trinity of HR hitters (i.e. Aaron, Ruth, and Mays), he still would have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer. In addition to his 8 gold gloves and 3 MVPs (pre-juice) he would have finished among the all time leaders in a number of prominent offensive categories. But what has been lost due to the hysteria over Bonds the last few seasons and a serious of injury-plagued seasons is the brilliance that is Ken Griffey, Jr.Still only 35, Junior has already climbed into the...

The new 2006 National Security Strategy is out. Bill has been anticipating this since early January. CSM has a March 17 story ...with some remarks by John Mearsheimer."It's not an especially hawkish document," says Professor Mearsheimer. "It makes arguments about using force that most security experts - left or right - would agree with. It goes out of its way to say that using force would be a last resort."Ivo Daalder of Brookings says that the "Bush Revolution is officially over." He ought to know since he wrote the much-read book on the Bush Revolution.I'm not sure I'll get around to...

Over at Donklephont, Michael Reynolds tackles foreign policy through his lens of self-proclaimed centrism. In doing so, he makes some important errors. The first, and less obvious, is that he conflates broader approaches to foreign policy with specific ideological positions within the American political tradition. Thus, he treats realism as co-equal with what he takes to be (a) contemporary American liberal outlooks on foreign policy, (b) neoconservativism, and (c) paleoconservativism. The second, and more obvious, is that he adopts Republican talking points about the liberal alternative to...

During one IR seminar in grad school (this would have been about 1985), George Quester pointed out on several occasions that a good book could be written comparing international relations and mobsters. Has anyone done that in the past two decades?Maybe the point is too obvious. It certainly would not be especially controversial to realists like John Mearsheimer:For Realists, all states are basically black boxes that behave the same way. If the United States has to be ruthless, the United States will be ruthless. That's the argument that Realists make.Like mobsters, self-interested states are...

Rodger is certainly right that posting has been light due to grading. However, in my case the combination of spring break and massive amounts of grading offered me the opportunity to watch the World Baseball Classic the past two days. And while I admit that I was somewhat skeptical of the whole enterprise when it was announced (Rob still has some issues with the WBC), the past two days of games that I was able to watch (and the highlights of the Korea-Japan game from last week) have brought me around.In each game I have watched so far both the fans and the players have shown great...