Against All Enemies by Richard Clark

Againsbook cover showing W, Cheney, and Rumsfeldt All Enemies” by Richard Clark.

The shock an horror from reading this book has not faded. Things were worse than I ever knew back during Bush the First and subsequently. This is a MUST READ BOOK.

The [Bush] administration has squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda….A new al Qaeda has emerged and is growing stronger, in part because of our own actions and inactions. It is in many ways a tougher opponent than the original threat we faced before September 11, and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safe from that threat. (from Goodreads and I think jacket text)

book cover of GW Bush and CheneyOn Goodreads another excellent book popped up in the recommendations that I read that I will have to add in this blog (have to recheck out from library) : Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John Dean (yes that John Dean of Nixon fame)

320.520973 Dewey Decimal Stacks

imageI had fun in the library stacks yesterday picking up hard copy of an excellent book for the appendices and footnotes (I listened to it on cd). It was “Conservatives without Conscience“ by John Dean, and I checked out of few adjacent books. My post on it is here.

Amusing to find it next to “Funding Fathers: The unsung heroes of the conservative movement.” The conservatives are so convinced of the rightness of their belief system that they name names of who we can hold accountable for the misery of the poor.

Injustices by Ian Millhiser

book cover featuring large gavelInjustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted

I knew this was a book I wanted to read after seeing the author and Jon Stewart talk about it on The Daily Show. It exceeds my expectations in detail (lots of footnotes to love) and excellent flowing prose. Though I often kept reading because the text moved along like any good story, I found myself stopping to look up more information about people or events discussed on the Internet

Finally I just started putting bookmarks for passages to return to for rereading. A sentence on page 72 struck me in particular: “the states were, in the words of the Founding Fathers, “separately incompetent” to address the problem of children in the workplace.”

Continue reading Injustices by Ian Millhiser

Injustices by Ian Millhiser

book cover featuring large gavelInjustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted

I knew this was a book I wanted to read after seeing the author and Jon Stewart talk about it on The Daily Show. It exceeds my expectations in detail (lots of footnotes to love) and excellent flowing prose. Though I often kept reading because the text moved along like any good story, I found myself stopping to look up more information about people or events discussed on the Internet

Finally I just started putting bookmarks for passages to return to for rereading. A sentence on page 72 struck me in particular: “the states were, in the words of the Founding Fathers, “separately incompetent” to address the problem of children in the workplace.”

Continue reading Injustices by Ian Millhiser