I ordered this thing as soon as I heard about it and now I have it in my evil librul clutches. I will be cherry-picking the quotes, not more than 3 or 4.
So here we go.
Update: this is from 'The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals' by The New Yorker's (yes that one) excellent Jane Mayer.
Chapter 1:

"Some of those around Cheney wondered if the attacks...had exacerbated his natural pessimism"

"But instead of trying to learn from what had essentially been a collosal bureaucratic failure...the Bush White House deferred the focus elsewhere"

"As wilkerson, Powell's former chief of staff..., put it 'He[Cheney] had a single-minded objective in black and white, that American security was achievable. I can't fault the man for wanting to keep America safe. But he was willing to corrupt the country to save it."

Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe
By Arianna Huffington
Alfred A. Knopf
New York: 2008
400 pages, $24.95

"There's going to be other wars," John McCain said in January 2008. "We will never surrender but there will be other wars." And, shockingly, the idea did not seem to fill him with unbearable sadness. In fact, he seemed like a grizzled football coach at the tail end of a long career, finally about to get a shot at coaching the Super Bowl.

It's tempting to slide into thinking some pundits' personalities loom larger than their actual output, and Arianna Huffington, I confess, is one of those for me. Her stage presence, her accent, her command of the microphone when put on the spot, all dazzle and make it easy to forget she writes--and blogs--as the basis of her current success. With Right Is Wrong, however, her ability to cut to the chase and make her case in print shines through as she gallops readers through all the ways and on all the topics on which the right has been ... well ... wrong during the Bush ascendancy.

Needless to say, it is not a pretty picture. Iraq, the economy, privacy rights ... Daily Kos readers know the drill. What Huffington does though is pull the strands together--or take them apart at times--to examine how it all is of one piece. She does this with writing that snaps, crackles and pops , and a goodly dose of humor. I never thought I'd say revisiting the dreary record of the Bush years could be a romp, but here you have it: It's a romp, with lots of indignation and direct-hit metaphors. Take, for example, the latter part of a chart she inserts when discussing the Bush's love of sloganeering:

2006. NEW WAY FORWARD

2007. SURGE TO VICTORY

2008. A NEW WAY BACKWARD

        A FASTER NEW WAY BACKWARD
        HOLY SHIT, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE

2009. A NEW WAY OF FORGETTING IT EVER HAPPENED

2010. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

2011. THE NEW GATHERING THREAT

Huffington has a real gift for marrying indignation and dark humor--it's one of the secrets of her success, if you look closely. She's a zippy and entertaining writer who stands out in a field in which the dreary and ponderous often gain more renown, and I've often thought she's underrated because she's often the most accessible. Right Is Wrong is a case in point--this is the ideal book to buy and pass on to undecideds you know, or people who aren't as immersed in the day-to-day shenanigans of the Bush administration as your average blog reader. There is an assumption throughout that readers are at least loosely aware of current events (the full blow-by-blow of the Plame outing, for example, is not provided, but just the mere outline), and that's what is needed to clarify the situation is equal doses parody, documentation and electric editorializing. It's an amusing batch she whips up, that's for sure.

Take, for example, her bull's eye take on the media, and one of its most revered scions in particular:

So how come Woodward, supposedly the preeminent investigative reporter of our time, missed the biggest story of our time-—a story that was taking place right under his nose?

Some would say it was because he was carrying water for the Bushies. I disagree. I think it's because he's the dumb blonde of American journalism, so awed by his proximity to power that he buys watever he's being sold.

I doubt I'll ever listen to Woodward on Larry King Live again without a neon sign flashing in my mind: Dumb blonde. Dumb blonde.

Or consider her skewering of David Gergen, who remarked, "While the benchmarks may seem like sort of a Washington game, in some ways, they're a very important prelude to the United States beginning to look for a way to disengage." Clear the way, folks, Arianna's whipped out a pair of sardonic knives:

A prelude to beginning to look for a way to disengage? In other words, let's wait six more months to see how things are going, the, if this latest in a long line of unmet benchmarks also goes unmet, we can begin to commence to initiate the starting of thinking about the mulling over of the consideration of a possible path that could, in time, lead us to begin to commence to start looking for a means that could, with any luck, result in America beginning to commence to start withdrawing from Iraq. Eventually.

Or the wry, painful observation that "We may yet reach a point where the only sector of scientific inquiry that is safe from the anti-science mobs on the Right is weapons research."

She also fires off some cunning analysis too, as she reviews the Bush administration's sanction of torture. Many critics have cited the need for revenge, or desperation for results, or general depravity or the desire to carve out more authoritarian territory for the unitary executive. While acknowledging that these other motives probably are play, Huffington makes an additional argument seemingly self-evident in its simplicity:

But there's also a way in which torture is a by-product of the well-known Bush laziness: the 9-5 workday, the long summer vacations, the impatience with detail. Torture is trying to get intelligence on the cheap.

The one oddity in the book--which can be skipped, obviously--is that each chapter closes with a kind of recap summary of the section's material that settles into a far duller and more prosaic voice (I suspect an editor urged this upon author). These closings are headed:Why the Right Was Wrong About [fill in the blank: Iraq, the economy, health care, etc.]. Huffington has a kind of giddy zest in her writing, particularly evident in book length, and these tacked-on afterthought summations appear to be an attempt to rein her in and make her less brash and more serious. This is not a good idea. She is at her best when running unhampered, and praise the heavens she's on our side and is the bigger-than-life personality--and writer-- that she is.

a review of Moving a Nation to Care when I bought a copy of it in Chicago last year.

I will say that when I finished it, I was entirely impressed by both the information and the presentation.  I heartily recommend it to anyone concerned about PTSD who does not already own a copy.

But this is not going to be a review as much as a small story.

As books go, this one is very short. That, however, is one of it's strengths. By leaving out the details of climate change, which one can find in many other books and reports, and focusing instead on a synthesis of our current knowledge of climate science, Dr. Emanuel has written an extremely useful summary.

I have read many books on global warming, climate change, or, to use the term that I prefer, Climaticide. This volume is one of the most useful for the non-scientist because it presents all the major concepts in a concise, clearly written, yet comprehensive account.

Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics
By Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox
Praeger Publishers
Westport, CT: 2008
230 Pages, $39.95

... we believe that once people get a taste of activist, netroots democracy it will be difficult--if not impossible--to convince them to return to mass media passivity.

When Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox speak, political activists everywhere should listen. And luckily for us, they've come together to share their vast online organizing experience -- Feld as the founder of Raising Kaine, Wilcox as premier online communications director for various national campaigns -- in the splendid Netroots Rising, a chronicle of war stories and lessons learned from the trenches of the nascent online movement.

Make no mistake: This book is simply the best account of the origin and mission of the netroots out there, bar none, in any medium.

It's a terrific read on every level. First off, it's simply storytelling at its best. Feld and Wilcox manage to juggle different storylines--the Draft Clark movement/campaign, the Draft Webb movement/campaign, Texas redistricting, just to name a few--and write about them with an immediacy and clarity that keep you on the edge of your seat ... even when you know how it ends. The glimpses behind the scene of the personalities, frustrations and debates over tactics are revelatory and gripping, even for high-information political junkies. The authors bounce back and forth between the different storylines fairly easily, keeping a chronological feel to the work as a whole even as they face the difficulty of jumping from Texas to Virginia, from national to local. This is no mean feat, and while some of this switching is slightly jarring, it's hard to see how the information could have been structured any differently and still come together as a coherent whole.

Secondly, the authors, between the two of them involved intimately with a wide variety of campaigns, still manage to walk that thin line between idealism and pragmatism that we all try to straddle. They document the nitty gritty of working a netroots campaign, trying to get a voice inside tightly structured operations, fighting for a larger voice in the top-down, old-fashioned hierarchy of traditional campaigns. Yet they also manage to retain enough objectivity to realize the netroots, citizen-based-only model is not the entire answer to political intractability, and that a pro-am approach is best. And the problem of integration of bottoms-up forces with professional strategists is one of the primary focuses of the book, as it happens.

With the Draft Clark movement, they say, we witnessed what happens when the people-powered aspect is completely shut out once the candidate commits and puts himself in the hands of the "experienced." The Draft Clark movement was remarkable for its early energy and astounding accomplishments, yet the citizen army that evolved around it was completely dismissed once the whole deal became real, respectable and "serious."

In contrast, the Draft Webb movement (spearheaded by Feld, who amazingly quit a long-term career to throw his lot in with the campaign), did a better job--though still far from perfect-- in channeling the energy and commitment of its passionate volunteers. This relationship between traditional politicking and the new brand associated with the rise of the modern people-powered movement is tracked and revisited repeatedly in Netroots Rising in all the various instances the authors address.

The work also excels in its conscientious reportorial standards. The opinions and experiences of Feld and Wilcox alone would be worth hearing, but what pushes the book into "must read" territory for the practical progressive is their interviewing prowess with all manner of people associated with both the netroots and traditional campaigns. Volunteers who'd never dreamt of activism tell their own tales of political awakening alongside political professionals, like Glen Maxey of Texas, state legislator and long-time activist. Both the Clark and Dean campaigns, of course, were hothouses for early grassroots and netroots activism, with lineages reaching deep into the current blogosphere, and many familiar names pop up with spot-on observations: Jerome Armstrong, Matt Stoller, Markos and a host of others. Even operatives from the "other side" are interviewed, like Jon Henke, the unfortunate soul in charge of George Allen's online campaign who faced the infamous onslaught of the Virginia liberal blogosphere in the wake of "macaca." The diverse opinions and experience the authors sought out really lend a richness to this book that would have been lacking otherwise.

Further, the writers' total immersion in the culture and aims of the netroots allows them to articulate its passions in a way that outsiders covering the phenomenon simply fail to do (as evidenced in the succinct blockquoted bit that opens this review). Both strategically and linguistically, they roll out sentence after sentence, chapter after chapter, that perfectly captures the ethos of what the netroots is committed to accomplishing: the tactic of inflicting "forced errors" on a weak opponent, of leading the traditional media to a story and making it drink, of tapping unexpected talents wherever they may arise and connecting them to the larger progressive infrastructure.

Above all, the book is handbook of practicality—and it doesn’t end at giving you tips on what works, but actively illustrates success with examples and explanations so that the reasoning behind it is apparent ... and more readily replicable.

Most importantly to the future of the modern progressive movement, Feld and Wilcox are able to objectively examine what goes right and what goes wrong when professional staff, grassroots volunteers and netroots enthusiasts come together. It's a new frontier, one fraught with possibilities for failure, jealousy and misunderstanding, but these two netroots veterans manage to keep a level-headed balance between realistic expectations and inspirational goals. While they consistently take pride in the success of their wired part of the movement, they recognize that in order to fulfill its full potential, an integration between institutionalized politics and people-powered movements must occur, and that blogs--in all their gradations of variety, activism and different shades of serving as media--are still in an exciting phase of evolution. Their authorial insights are invaluable, thought-provoking and constructive.

Netroots Rising is a tour de force--comprehensive and interesting, full of character, personality, passion and commitment--not unlike the actual movement its authors are documenting, a concrete resistance to "mass media passivity" that cannot be more strongly recommended.

This week we’re trying something a little different since we’ve fallen behind on reviewing: a grab bag of three different books (by chance from academic presses). Susan reviews Credit and Blame by Charles Tilly and Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond by David Runciman; Laura reviews Blogwars: The New Political Battleground by David Perlmutter.

And in keeping with the free-for-all format, let’s make this a truly communal experiment: Please feel free to include in comments mini-reviews of books you think might be of interest to the community.

Let’s venture beneath the fold ...

I first heard of Jill Bolte Taylor, a Neuroanatomist, earlier this year after a presentation she gave at TED. TED is an invite only conference that is hard to explain. But lets just say people from all over the world are doing some of the most amazing shit you can imagine in dozens of different disciplines, and many are brought here to speak.

During her presentation, which literally brought down the house she said at one point:

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, "Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?"

And the story is just getting started at this point. In four hours she'd forget how to talk, walk, eat, even who she was. It took eight years to recover ..... this is her story.

I just returned from a book signing event for "Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan's Bank" and had the opportunity to hear the author, Robert D. Auerbach, speak about the ridiculous lack of oversight at the Federal Reserve.  He spoke about the efforts of the late, great Henry B. Gonzalez, then Chairman of the House Banking Committee, to bring the activities of the Fed into greater transparency and accountability.  The event was sponsored by the Henry B. Gonzalez Foundation and was attended by Henry B. Gonzalez's son, Charlie Gonzalez, who is currently US Congressman from TX-20.
More...

I first heard of Jill Bolte Taylor, a Neuroanatomist, earlier this year after a presentation she gave at TED. TED is an invite only conference that is hard to explain. But lets just say people from all over the world are doing some of the most amazing sh*t you can imagine in dozens of different disciplines, and many are brought here to speak.

During her presentation, which literally brought down the house she said at one point:

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, "Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?"

And the story is just getting started at this point. In four hours she'd forget how to talk, walk, eat, even who she was. It took eight years to recover ..... this is her story.

As a member of Hillary Clinton's Council of Civic Leaders and the author of three novels, I have for many months resisted the urge to read either of Senator Obama’s books, particularly the first, "Dreams from My Father," the memoir written before he became a political candidate. Why?  Fifteen years ago, on the eve of publication of my second novel, an editor of mine at Dutton, responding to my momentary expression of self doubt, kindly reassured me that I was a "real writer."  I think I worried I would find in Senator Obama someone to whom the "real writer" in me could actually relate, someone who understands what it takes to search one’s own soul honestly, carefully, and accurately, and put that search on the page.  

A senior Hillary advisor assured me this morning, in response to my plea that the Senator withdraw, that they were "winding down" and that Mrs. Clinton would whole heartedly support Obama.  And I have discovered on the eve of this historic day in finally reading the book that Barack Obama is not only a "real writer," but someone who by breadth and depth and force of his personality and background, and by brilliance, honesty, clear thinking, and sheer talent, has rendered my past support of Senator Clinton, an admirable person in many respects, irrelevant.

This is a short review of David Hursh's High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning.  Hursh's book is important because it achieves three important aims: 1) to detail how the personal and the political intertwine at the level of schools and schooling, 2) to show how standards-based reform is based on an economic agenda, namely neoliberalism, and 3) to show that alternatives to neoliberal schooling are possible in all respects and that such alternatives can be created by politically-organized parents and teachers.

(crossposted at Docudharma)

It is understood that slavery and violence are both symptoms of a larger structural presence of inequality.  Based on this understanding, slavery and violence are both examples of tools of victimization.  What allows us to victimize others is our ability to think less of those we victimize, and to separate ourselves from those we victimize (Iadicola & Shupe, 2003).  Iadicola and Shupe discuss inequality as a social construction based on differences; these differences are physical, racial, cultural, intellectual, and psychological.  Further, the social construction of these differences manifests through systems of access to more subliminal social constructions such as political monopolies, rights, and privileges.  To the extent that we live and abide by a social order derived from the structure of these social constructions, we are institutionalizing their inequalities.

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
By Matthew Yglesias
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hoboken, NJ: 2008
272 pages, $25.95

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are the central event of the contemporary politics of national security, and the sense that traditional internationalism is somehow inadequate to the challenges in this area has been the crux of its eclipse.

Nevertheless, this perception, no matter how widely held, is essentially false.

...

Liberals seek reciprocal reductions in national sovereignty wherein every nation commits to abide by certain standards in the fields of human rights, proliferation, environmental protection, and so on. An isolationist would let each country go its own way. The Bush model, in contrast to these, but in echo of the imperialist tradition, seeks an asymmetrical sovereignty wherein the United States is unencumbered by rules, while seeking to impose them on others.

Somewhere between the two extremes of Ron Paul/Charles Lindbergh brand of isolationism and the neoconservative dream of militant American imperialism lies the sweet spot of responsible engagement with the world, and blogger wunderkind Matthew Yglesias sets out to find it and define it in Heads in the Sand. While the subtitle faults both political parties for screwing up the journey to that magical foreign policy mecca, the book itself is forward-looking, more addressed to recently empowered (and future empowered) Democrats, even as it takes the obligatory swipes at the disasters of Republican foreign policy over the past eight years. Been there, done that ... the author moves us on to examining why the opposition party has refused to be oppositional and why, exactly, it has failed to advance a strong argument for what Yglesias calls "liberal internationalism"--the credo that served America well for decades before 9/11 came along and everyone in power seemed to lose their minds, their perspective and their sense of history.

Yglesias traces the lineage of modern-day liberal internationalism from its father, Woodrow Wilson, down through the ages to today, with a long stop at Truman--for Truman, it seems, is often the lodestone that the neocons point to when they claim to be the true heirs to America's role of leadership in the world. While it's true that Truman's willingness to drop the bomb lends itself well to the fever dreams of Perle & Company quite conveniently, there was a lot more than a big, big bomb and decisiveness to Truman's actions. Yglesias rightly argues that lifting actions out of the contexts of their times is a poor way to use any sort of guide at all, and that America's most enlightened presidents have managed to keep the nation safe. After all,  even before "terrorism" got its sleek new creds and name as the bogeyman of the new century, it's been hanging around in the form of non-state actors "terrorizing" states and their agents for a couple of centuries. Somehow, we managed to muddle along with a wide-angle view of the world and scads more respect from other countries without resorting, as Yglesias notes, to a one-trick-pony paranoia:

Extraordinary Rendition refers to the apprehension (kidnapping) and extrajudicial transfer of suspected "terrorists" from foreign countries to third party countries where they are tortured for information. The practice is usually carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This is allowed to happen through secret treaty agreements between executive branches of foreign governments.  Extraordinary Rendition is controversial because of its association with torture, a Jus Cogens violation of Human Rights.  The Bush Administration publicly denies having engaged in torture while evidence and the lack of transparency in US foreign/war policy suggests otherwise.  

Some Things We Should Know About Modern Slavery:

According to Kevin Bales, author of 'Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy', "slavery" is defined as the complete control of a person through violence or the threat of violence for [Economic Exploitation], a situation in which the enslaved person is paid nothing beyond basic subsistence, and cannot walk away.

A "slaveholder" refers to the "new slavery" wherein one manages a person as a slave without getting caught.  A "slave owner" refers to "colonial slavery" wherein one owned a slave in the legal sense before the abolition of slavery.  The term that best describes new slavery is "slaveholder" because of the illegalization of slavery pursuant to Jus Cogens and other abolitionist reform efforts.

For the past few evenings I have been reading a book of fiction that held me horribly transfixed with the pathos and poetry that are the essence of our human selves and our potential.   About halfway through the book I found I could only take small portions of it at a time.  Perhaps I felt it so poignantly given my perception of where our own world has been tilting of late.    I don’t know.   But it was one hell of a read that compelled and repulsed simultaneously as it flowed into me.   It revealed the best and the worst we humans are capable of being...and yet somehow, someway, hope is born out of a hopeless situation.

The Lizard Cage
By Karen Connelly
Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Copyright 2005

The setting is a jail in Burma, the Cage.  An all male cast predominates.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
By Kevin Phillips
Viking,  New York, 2008
256 pages
$25.95

Money is "bad," in the historical sense, when a leading world economic power passing its zenith—before the United States, think Hapsburg Spain, the maritime Dutch Republic (when New York was New Amsterdam), and imperial Britain just before World War I—lets itself luxuriate in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing, or transporting things. Doing so has marked each nation's global decline. To institutionalize the dominance of minimally regulated finance at this stage of U.S. history is a bad idea.

...

... prior eminence of the United States in petroleum matters has left not only an outdated infrastructure but a spectrum of disabilities, unwarranted smugness, vested interests, and booby traps. These range from currency vulnerabilities and lack of a serious national energy strategy to apparent policy inertia in Washington, where many officeholders seem unable to understand how much has changed for the United States over the last decade.

...

Let me underscore: except tangentially, this book is not about elections. It is about the insecurity of America's future as the leading world economic power, given a debt-gorged and negligent financial sector, and the vulnerability caused by the nation's expensive dependence on imported oil.

Kevin Phillips, author of bestsellers  American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury and American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, turns his full attention to the economy in his latest book, and the news he brings is—not to surprise you or anything—bad.

Bad Money looks at the big picture, the thinking and policies behind what Atrios has come to label so endearingly Big Shitpile, the meltdown of the mortgage industry. Phillips adds to the pile by drawing in the entire financial sector for examination and the explosion of poorly understood "financial vehicles" that make up the get-rich-quick schemes that the captains of industry (particularly the financial industry) have been pushing for the past few years. He takes a lap or two around the oil crisis and ties it altogether in a neat, albeit depressing, package.

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
By Larry M. Bartels
Princeton University Press
Princeton, NJ: 2008
328 pages
$29.95

... American beliefs about inequality are profoundly political in their origins and implications. Well-informed conservatives and liberals differ markedly, not only in their normative assessments of increasing inequality, as one might expect, but also in their perceptions of the causes, extent, and consequences of inequality. This is not simply a matter of people with different values drawing different conclusions from a set of agreed-upon facts. Analysts of public opinion in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that the facts themselves are very much subject to ideological dispute. For their part, political actors in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that careful logical arguments running from factual premises to policy conclusions are unlikely to persuade people who are ideologically motivated to distort or deny the facts. While it is certainly true, as Jennifer Hoschschild has argued, that "Where You Stand Depends on What You See," it is equally true that what you see depends in significant part on where you stand.

A challenge to conventional wisdom--including, specifically, many strains of liberal conventional wisdom--Unequal Democracy is a flat-out wonkfest of statistics, charts, tables and (thankfully) Larry Bartels' patient hand-holding and explanations of the mass of data that points to the undeniable realities of class in our society and how that affects our political system.

And as most readers at Daily Kos could probably guess, news is not good on the class front, in many cases in unanticipated ways. Just a few of the conventional wisdom-busters Bartels discusses in Unequal Democracy include:

1. Americans hate the estate tax, and they did long before the right wing changed it to the "death tax."

2. Politics matters. A lot. There is a huge difference between Republican and Democratic policies that affect the pocketbooks of middle-class and working-class Americans.

3. Contrary to popular belief, working-class whites (outside of the South) have not deserted the Democratic Party--affluent whites have.

4. Economic issues still vastly outweigh cultural/social issues when it comes time to cast a vote.

5. To the extent that social issues have increased in importance, it is only so for the affluent white voter, not the working class.

6. Gaps between the classes are at least equal to--and often exceeding--those found in Europe.

7. The more informed the voter, the more pessimistic he or she is.

8. Low-information conservatives and low-information liberals are virtually indistinguishable in their beliefs; high-information ideologues of both stripes differ greatly.

9. Self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ more in perception about America's economic opportunity than the actual rich and actual poor do.