Category: Government

Includes all federal and state and local government forms and what they are up to or have done historically.

Give Us the Ballot by Ari Berman

book jacketGive Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman (2015)

This is a decent history of how African Americans struggled to get the vote in reality, including coverage of the Jim Crow era. But the real meat of the book starts about page 236 when the whole Shelby disaster gutting the Civil Rights Act began.

It is especially bitter to be writing this today. Today, April 7, 2017, was the day the Supreme Court was killed by Mitch McConnell and his cronies by changing the rules to get the judge, Neil Gorsuch (forever will be Gorsuck to me)  that ruled against women’s access to contraception in the disastrous Hobby Lobby decision [rest in hell Scalia] on the freaking Supreme Court. His opinion was based on the absurd belief that WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH RIGHTS were subordinate to the religious delusions of employers. His claim was based on the notion that ANYTHING that allowed women employees to have access to birth control made the “religious” employers “complicit” in allowing women to have bodily autonomy and not be forced to become pregnant and subsequently be forced to give birth.

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Dark Money by Jane Mayer

She has a video interview about Dark Money on YouTube.Radical Right

dark moneyDark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right has been getting a lot of attention, quiet rightly since it discusses the now infamous Libertarian/Bircher Koch brothers and their billions and billions and billions and, by God, you peons deserve NOTHING! NOTHING, DAMN YOU TAKERS! EAT SHIT AND DIE! Though then I’m not sure how they would have enough workers to destroy the environment to increase their wealth JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN beyond 86 billion dollars.

 

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

book jacket plain white with gold bulletsHow Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks (2016)

Considering the United States seemingly has been at war somewhere, declared or not, for my entire life, despite protests in the Sixties to the contrary, this book provides multiple perspectives on the business of perpetual war.

The author worked in prominent Pentagon capacities and provides real intimate details of what it was like to live in that particular bubble.

Those two years were strange, almost surreal in their intensity. For me — a law professor and journalist brought up in a family of left-wing anti-war activists — working for the Pentagon was like conducting anthropological fieldwork in some exotic and unpredictable foreign tribe. (p. 6)

I saw her on Book TV talking about this book and knew that it was going to be special because, as it is described on the cover flap, “it is by turns a memoir, a work of journalism, and a scholarly exploration of history, anthropology, and law.”

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