1. Don't panic.  The Yankees have made some great signings, no doubt.  As I pointed out here, however, their track record on this front has not been all that promising over the past decade.  Meanwhile, both Toronto and Tampa Bay should regress from the previous season.  Things are still pretty promising for the Red Sox.  The last time the Red Sox toyed with but rejected a swap of Mike Lowell for a high-profile first baseman, they won a World Series the next year.  In 2009, the parent club should expect useful contributions from prospects like Daniel Bard, Michael Bowden, and Lars Anderson.  BP's Joe Sheehan is correct when he points out, "The Yankees have been active by necessity; the Red Sox have been quiet by choice."  As Bill Burt concurs in the Berkshire Eagle-Tribune, "That's the beauty of the position the Red Sox are in. They did not need Mark Teixeira. He was a luxury, an expensive one."
2. Sign Kevin Youkilis and Jon Lester to long-term contracts.  Two-time World Series winners tend not to get much sympathy from the rest of the world, but signing Youkilis and Lester (along with Dustin Pedroia's recent contract) serves several baseball and PR purposes.  It locks up Boston's best three players from last year ; it highlights the fact that Boston's strength is its home-grown talent (in contrast to the Yankees); and it keeps together a core that has clearly thrived in the hothouse that is Boston sports. 
3. Sign Rocco Baldelli to a three year, $18 million contract; sign David Eckstein to a two-year, $8 million contract.  The Red Sox' biggest flaw last year was a weak bench.  There was no decent pinch-hitter in the group, in particular on the right-hand side.  Sean Casey was a great guy, but he couldn't field and I'm pretty sure that a 59-year old Bill Buckner could have beaten him in a foot race.  So if the Sox are going to overpay, overpay for bench strength.  Baldelli is a local New Englander, he can play all three outfield positions, and he is apparently less sick that previously thought.  Give him what he likely craves, which is a long-term deal.  He's great insurance for the inevitable J.D. Drew injury or Jacoby Ellsbury slump.  Eckstein is past his prime, but he can play both second base and shortstop, and is a pretty decent situational hitter when the need arises.  No one will offer him a two-year deal, so this guarantees we get him. 
4. Trade Clay Buchholz and Manny Delcarmen to the Texas Rangers for Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Hank Blalock; resign Jason Varitek once he realizes the non-existent market for his services.  The biggest weakness in the Red Sox lineup last year was at catcher, so deal with that.  There are debates about whether Saltalamacchia will be able to stay at catcher, but the great thing about getting him is that it doesn't matter.  He can catch for the next few years, by which point one could sign Joe Mauer (or promote Dusty Brown) and move him to DH or first base.  Varitek can be Saltalamacchia's caddy/advisor.  Blalock provides a corner bench player with some pop.  Trades and player development have made both Buchholz and Delcarmen expendable while still valuable, and Lord knows the Rangers need pitching. 
5. Convert Justin Masterson into a three-inning closer.  Here's an area where the Red Sox can make in innovation, or retrovation; bring back the three-inning closer.  Masterson would be perfect in this role, and helps to give the bullpen a guaranteed rest day.  Let him pitch once every three or games, and you get 120+ innings out of him, while easing the pressure of the rest of the 'pen.
6. Trade Julio Lugo and David Pauley to the Oakland Athletics for a bag of balls Jerry Blevins.  Lugo will be a distraction if he's around Boston, and if anyone recognizes Lugo's positive qualities, it's Billy Beane.  If the Sox offer to eat half his contract, then Beane will give up a decent lefty reliever in exchange for an inexpensive two years of a shortstop with an above-average OPS at his position.  The Red Sox would get a backstop to Hideki Okajima and end the Javier Lopez experiment.     
7. Sign John Smoltz to a one-year contract.  My wheeling/dealing leaves the Red Sox a little thin in the fifth starter/swingman/11th reliever category.  Smoltz has started and closed in their career, so he can fit the bill if Bowden or Masterson or Ramon Ramirez falls short somehow. 

• CF  Jacoby Ellsbury
• 2B  Dustin Pedroia
• DH  David Ortiz
• 1B  Kevin Youkilis
• 3B  Mike Lowell
• RF  J.D. Drew
• LF  Jason Bay
• C  Jarrod Saltalamacchia
• SS  Jed Lowrie

• OF Baldelli
• OF/INF Bailey
• INF Blalock
• INF Eckstein
• C  Varitek

• Beckett
• Lester
• Matsuzaka
• Wakefield
• Bowden/Smoltz

• Papelbon
• Okajima
• Ramirez
• Masterson
• Blevins
• Smoltz/Bard

"Isn’t it amazing," asks Krugman, "just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent." That certainly feels true. But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O'Neill --a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation -- as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia's Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed by graybeards like Baker and Scowcroft and Greenspan. What could go wrong?

Obama's got a much, much better economics team than Bush started out with.  I agree with his endorsement of Glenn Hubbard.  But Paul O'Neill wasn't exactly an a-lister even before he turned out to have fantastic(ally entertaining!) verbal impulse control problems.  And Larry Lindsay did not match up to Larry Summers in stature, though of course what he got fired for was not being incompetent, but telling the truth.  Bush's second term team has actually been pretty stellar, but his first term left a lot to be desired. 

In the Travel and Entertainment category, you will find that fewer requests to eat in restaurants will be approved, and requests for desserts in restaurants, particularly, will not be approved (unless they are included in the cost of a kid’s meal). In the case of Cabot’s or The Cheesecake Factory, where ice cream or cheesecake, respectively, is kind of the point, sharing is strongly encouraged. An additional benefit of this will be improved health. Netflix has been put on hold for 90 days, and we will reconsider that offering then; unopened red envelopes left on top of the TV indicate a lack of demand at present. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions are subject to elimination as well. Executives, including myself, are being asked to purchase regular coffee in place of more expensive coffee drinks while traveling, and to utilize meals from our on-site food service provider whenever possible.... Lastly, note that we have no plans to add human resources. Requests for non-human resources (i.e., pets) may be considered in a future fiscal year.

The Chinese government has begun drafting tax and spending policies to stimulate the economy after third-quarter growth of 9 percent, the slowest pace since an outbreak of Sars in 2003.... As part of the new policy, the State Council announced that it would increase export tax rebates for everything from labor-intensive products like garments and textile to high-value products like mechanical and electrical products. Banks will be encouraged to lend more money to small and medium-size enterprises and support programs will be drafted to help farmers, the government said.... Increased export tax rebates will make Chinese exports even more competitive in the United States and Europe, particularly as China has intervened heavily in currency markets to halt any further appreciation of China’s currency since mid-June. But with the United States heavily dependent on China to buy the Treasury bonds needed to finance a bailout of the American financial system, the Bush administration has stopped criticizing China’s trade and currency policies.

The past 14 days have transformed this election. The financial crisis has catapulted Obama into the lead both nationally and in key states. We have been saying for six months that the political environment has favored the Democrats significantly, but it took a near global financial meltdown for things to finally reach the tipping point. The economic situation has virtually ended John McCain's presidential aspirations and no amount of tactical maneuvering in the final 29 days is likely to change that equation.

1. Short of a complete fiasco of a performance by Obama, will the debates make any difference from here on in? 
2. Short of a 9/11-style attack, will any external news-making event affect the fundamentals?
3. Will the character mudslinging that framed yesterday's news cycle turn off voters for both men?  Who will deal better with the inevitable "Ponytail Guy question" in tonight's town hall? 
4. The question that really interests me -- how is McCain going to go out?  This is normally his favorite political terrain -- a complete and total underdog.  He's not going to get much sympathy, however, by using the Ayres/Wright/Rezko -- no one cares about that stuff when the credit markets are shutting down.  Will McCain decide to go out as the valiant but honorable loser?  Let me second Ross Douthat here:  "McCain is almost certainly going to lose this election. He can go down trying to talk about the issues that voters actually care about, and trying to make some headway in the debates that are going to dominate our politics for the next few years, or he can go down trying to change the subject. I really don't see any percentage in the latter."  Indeed.

The last three decades have seen two important shifts among advanced industrialized economies. The first is the move away from state ownership of large chunks of the economy, and the replacement of hands-on government control with a variety of regulatory instruments. This has happened across all countries in the industrialized world – there are few developed states which still directly own substantial parts of their economy. The second is more specific and recent – the tendency to replace ‘heavy-handed’ forms of regulation with ‘regulation with a light touch’ and self-regulation. This has been most marked in Anglo-American economies, but other countries (in continental Europe and elsewhere) have faced persistent ideological pressures to move in this direction. This is a large chunk of the so-called ‘reform’ agenda that the Economist magazine, the OECD and other such bodies keep pushing. Both of these shifts are largely ideological – that is, they gained much of their impetus from changes in the shared ideas which constitute policy-makers’ shared collective wisdom about how to deal with the economy. The second shift (the reform agenda) is now a busted flush. Its proponents are in disarray.... But what is utterly startling to me is that the first bit – the claim that the state shouldn’t be directly involved in running the economy – is under serious threat too. I genuinely hadn’t expected this to happen. As the NYT notes, countries like France are using US actions as a way to justify state involvement in picking and supporting national champions.

The Anti-Intellectual Presidency

• Using Flesch scores, the two least sophisticated set of presidential papers in the last eighty years are Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton -- i.e., they were written at an eleventh-grade reading level (the Bushes finish third and fourth).
• Using those same Flesch scores, social scientists write denser more sophisticated prose than those in law or the humanities. 

[C]an things fall apart again? Yes, they can. Consider how things have played out in the current food crisis. For years we were told that self-sufficiency was an outmoded concept, and that it was safe to rely on world markets for food supplies. But when the prices of wheat, rice and corn soared, Keynes’s “projects and politics” of “restrictions and exclusion” made a comeback: many governments rushed to protect domestic consumers by banning or limiting exports, leaving food-importing countries in dire straits. And now comes “militarism and imperialism.” By itself, as I said, the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization. Most obviously, Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous — more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices. And if Russia is willing and able to use force to assert control over its self-declared sphere of influence, won’t others do the same? Just think about the global economic disruption that would follow if China — which is about to surpass the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation — were to forcibly assert its claim to Taiwan.

1. Mounting Concern
2. Edge of the Cliff
3. Crossing the Rubicon
4. Point of No Return
5. Smoot-Hawley Lives!!!   Run for Your Lives!!!!!!

• Asking my mother when her hallucinations about Christine Baranski had started;
• Insisting that Christine Baranski must be stalking my mother, and that at that very moment she ight be right around the corner;
• Ending any story with, "and then, wouldn't you know it, Christine Baranski showed up -- in a bus!" 

Christine Baranski heard she got the part in the film version of "Mamma Mia!" while riding a Bonanza bus from New York to home in Connecticut.

Last week I communicated to Senator Obama and his presidential campaign my firm intention to remain in the United States Senate, where I believe I am best equipped to serve the people of Virginia and this country. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for Vice President.

A crazy question I have to ask: would there be any possibility of developing a useful "sabermetrics for geopolitics"?  I know such a correlation isn't obvious or perhaps even possible.  I realize too, that SABR has been in baseball for over 20 years and is only now discovering the vagaries of fielding...and that geopolitics is orders of magnitude more complex.  Moreover, what to analyze? how? what methods?  what data..and on and on.  I also realize that geopolitics and economics are already full of statistics, so "more" is simply not the answer in and of itself. That being said, is there more out there that can be done in how we organize and think about it?  I have to think there is.  Can it be studied and analyzed in ways that, like Billy Beane did, discover inefficiencies in way most people, governments and organizations look at things that can subsequently be looked at in a different way and/or exploited?

• The primary driver of the religious effect on happiness is not the belief in God or belief in heaven/hell -- it's chuch attendance.  The more often people attend their church (or synagogue or mosque), the happier they are;
• The primary driver of church attendance is the number of friends one makes at church.  Bear in mind that this research already controls for the total number of friends.  In other words, church friends are Superfriends. 
• The effect is more powerful if your non-church friends do not share your religious beliefs.  This is pretty common, by the way -- it turns out Americans are quite willing to befriend people outside one's faith community.  I want to label this the "everyone needs a Ned Flanders" effect, but since Homer and Ned attended the same church it actually doesn't apply. 
• Hitchens might have the last laugh -- the number of under-30 respondents who claim no religion in their survey responses is an order of magnitude greater than responses from previous generations at that age.  Generation Y has far fewer Superfriends. 

Looking at the long term, sovereign wealth funds are one component of an alternative development path, suggests a possible rival to liberal free-market democracy.  In state-led development societies, governments could use sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises and banks, national oil companies, extensive regulation, and other measures to accelerate economic development, buy off dissent and promote technology transfer.  If this model proves sustainable over the long run – and this is a big if – it could emerge as a viable challenger to the liberal democratic path taken by the advanced industrialized states.  More countries might think of sovereign wealth funds as a signal of being a “successful” country.  One could then envision the proliferation of such funds – even in situations in which there is no economic rationale for its creation.  This would have corrosive effects on America’s soft power.  It would be an open question whether the rest of the world would look at the democratic development model as one to emulate.  Crudely put, far fewer countries would want what America wants.   

Senior Chinese officials are publicly and loudly rebuking the Americans on their handling of the economy and defending their own more assertive style of regulation. Chinese officials seem to be galled by the apparent hypocrisy of Americans telling them what to do while the American economy is at best stagnant. China, on the other hand, has maintained its feverish growth. Some officials are promoting a Chinese style of economic management that they suggest serves developing countries better than the American model, in much the same way they argue that they are in no hurry to copy American-style multiparty democracy. In the last six weeks alone, a senior banking regulator blamed Washington’s “warped conception” of market regulation for the subprime mortgage crisis that is rattling the world economy; the Chinese envoy to the World Trade Organization called on the United States to halt the dollar’s unchecked depreciation before the slide further worsens soaring oil and food prices; and Chinese agencies denounced a federal committee charged with vetting foreign investments in the United States, saying the Americans were showing “hostility” and a “discriminatory attitude,” not least toward the Chinese. All this reflects a brash new sense of self-confidence on the part of the Chinese. China seems to feel unusually bold before the Summer Olympics, seen here as a curtain raiser for the nation’s ascent to pre-eminence in the world. The devastating earthquake last month helped by turning world sympathy toward China and dampening criticism of its handling of Tibet.

China, just months before it is set to take the world’s center stage during the 2008 Summer Olympics, still ranks below the United States as a multifaceted power in the opinion of its Asian neighbors. The report, which is based on public opinion survey in five East and Southeast Asian countries and the United States, reveals that perceptions of China’s soft power – the ability to wield influence by indirect, non-military means – generally trail those of the United States and Japan. These perceptions persist despite China’s strong economic relationships in Asia, and around the world, and its consistent and concerted efforts to leverage the Olympic Games to bolster its public image.

While other polls have detected declining U.S. global influence, the Chicago Council/EAI survey finds that in Asia, the United States is still highly regarded in all five of the key areas of soft power addressed in this survey: economics, culture, human capital, diplomacy, and politics. Whether this influence is a product of U.S. foreign policy or exists in spite of it, it is clear that the United States has a very strong foundation on which to build future policy in the region.

   

My hunch is that if the survey were broadened beyond the Pacific Rim, Chinese soft power would be inversely correlated with a country's distance from China. 

The 64,000 dollar renminbi questions are twofold:

1. Will Chinese power continue to grow at current rates?  It's easy to extrapolate from current trends, but it is not always so;
2. Will Chinese soft power eventually catch up to Chinese hard power - or will the natural reaction in the region be to balance rather than bandwagon? 

I trust my readers to weigh in.