Note: I'm the author of a book about Obama, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.

Jerome Corsi's book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, has instantly soared to the top of the bestseller lists. But its popularity is in inverse proportion to its quality. This is one of the worst political books ever written. Corsi piles distortion upon innuendo to create a gigantic heap of right-wing garbage, with a seemingly endless parade of basic factual errors running through the text like rats. Corsi's book is an embarrassment to the craft of journalism, and any of the conservatives who have praised and promoted it should feel humiliated at how bad it truly is. The Obama campaign just came out with a critique of Corsi's book; it includes some of the many examples which I found independently and detail below.

Blue Man in a Red State: Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer and the New Western Populism
By Greg Lemon, Foreword by former U.S. Rep. Pat Williams
Two Dot, Guilford, CT: June 2008
160 pages, $22.95

Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland
By Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair
AK Press, Oakland, CA: September 2008

Three new battleground state have opened up in this year's election: Nevada, Colorado, and Montana causing pundits and prognosticators every where to question the long-standing convention wisdom of the Republican lock on rural America. These two new books shed a little bit of light on the resurgence of populism in the mountain west, reflecting two opposing views of the movement: one from the inside, and one from the outside. (Note: Red State Rebels deals with all of rural America, not just the mountain west. In this review, I'm going to look just at the section pertaining to the northern Rockies, and will write a subsequent review of the entire book.)

Up until last month, Schweitzer's biographer Greg Lemon has been my editor at New West, on online magazine focusing on the interior west. A former political and environmental reporter, Lemon followed Schweitzer around for the better part of a year working on this biography, despite that fact that Schweitzer was rather dubious about the whole prospect. "I don't know who you think's going to by this thing," Schweitzer told him. Nonetheless, through dogged determination, Lemon got his story.

His occasional frustration in getting there periodically peeps through, and is something to which I can relate. Last fall I scheduled an interview with Schweitzer, expecting to have 45 minutes or an hour with the Governor to talk about how the West was shaping up in 2008. Three hours, and a personal tour of the state capitol, later, I'd heard about Montana's most famous stray dog, pine bark beetles, sagebrush, carbon sequestration, his family's immigrant roots, and the last few weeks of th Tester campaign. The man can dodge a question like nobody's business, and you don't even really notice it's been dodged until you go back to the transcript. But the getting there is fascinating and always entertaining.

Lemon's book provides an excellent sketch of the career of this unlikely Montanan, from his family's ranch near Geyser, to a Catholic high school in Colorado, to Libya and Saudi Arabia, where he headed up some experimental and innovative agricultural programs, and learned more about the middle east than arguably any other governor in the country--and understanding that has made him a vociferous opponent of the Iraq War. What drove Schweitzer to politics isn't entirely clear, His emergence from nowhere to seriously challenge Senator Conrad Burns in 2000 still has some Montanans baffled, but after that solid run, his taking the governor's seat in 2004 seemed to surprise few.

The book is most instructive, in my opinion, for political watchers and hopeful Democrats looking to the west for clues on how to turn this region Blue when Lemon gets down to the populist part of his portrait of Montana and the Governor. While Lemon is still focusing on the well-established paradigm of Gods, guns, and gays, he doesn't notice that Schweitzer has managed to put that stuff by the wayside with significant success. What's driving Schweitzer's political will is a deep-seated conviction to the common good.

"I'm always thinking. I like growing business; that's exciting. I like developing energy.... But how does it affect the last and the least? What can we do to make it better for those people who probably never will get to the front of the line? How can we make their lives better? How can we pull them along? How can we make them the most they can be? how can we make them build their self-esteem and self-respect? What more can we do?"

Out of that conviction comes a focus not on the distractions and the distinctions of politics that have been forced on us by the conventional wisdom--"wisdom" that far too many Democratic politicians have been willing to buy into for the past two decades. Lemon nails, almost unconsciously it seems, the heart of Schweitzer's success in Montana and a potential road map for Democratic politicians who are willing to heed it:

Middle-class families want someone who understands they have to work to jobs to raise a family while still trying to find some money to put aside in a retirement plan. And someday, if they're lucky, they would like to give their children money for college and maybe even a down payment on their first home. At a Democratic rally in D.C. in 2006, Schweitzer said, "Democrats will win elections when they figure out how to talk to those families."

These families don't want the government intruding in their lives, but they want good roads, good schools, social security, and health care. They don't mind paying taxes if the taxes are fair. They don't often think about the environment, but when they do, they think about how it would be nice to make it cleaner. They want the price of gas to go down and wouldn't mind buying an affordable hybrid car. They go to church but don't want people telling them what to believe. They get uncomfortable talking about abortion and gay marriage, and though they're important issues, they sure are tired of people arguing about them. They want the basic liberties of free speech and gun ownership, even if they don't hunt or carry a gun.

That's a pretty good summation of your basic Montana voter, and minus the gun issue (it really is different out here), I'd argue it's not too far off in describing the majority of Americans. Schweitzer has been able to bypass getting hung up on the label Republicans would impose on a Democrat by dismissing most of the hot-button issues and focusing on a strong populist agenda, one that includes a strong civil libertarian component.

Schweitzer's most likely Achilles heel is also the project closest to his heart: tapping Montana's vast coal fields in a visionary--though as of yet completely out-of-reach--coal-to-liquids program. Schweitzer's relentless push for this program, despite the fact that sequestration technology hasn't been developed, industry hasn't yet committed, and after a decade of drought, there's no water to do it, has been frustrating and disturbing to many Montana progressives I've talked to.

Which leads me to Red State Rebels, a series of essays compiled and edited by Jeffrey St. Clair, co-editor of CounterPunch, and Joshua Frank (the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Re-elect George W. Bush).The mountain west essays in this volume focus almost entirely on the triumph of industry and developers over the common good in the northern Rockies, and the complicity of Democrats and national environmental groups in many of these decision. Schweitzer would do well to read St. Clair's essay, "Something about Butte" every time the coal companies come knocking.

Butte has gone from being the richest hill on earth to the world's most expensive reclamation project and the nation's biggest Superfund site. The only good paying jobs in town these days go to the supervisors of those charged with cleaning up the mess and to the medical technicians who routinely test the blood of Butte's children for arsenic and lead....

It's the oldest story in the West: privatize the profits, socialize the costs, the risks and the fallout. And then hightail it out of town.

Whether it's logging in Idaho, mining in Montana, drilling in Wyoming, or developing mini-Beverly Hills monster developments in Colorado, the grassroots environmentalists and just regular citizens profiled in Red State Rebels are becoming increasingly disillusioned with their governments, with their erstwhile allies the Democrats, and with the national big environmental groups, who have been all too willing to sacrifice one goal in hopes of gaining compromise in another. The essays chronicle the efforts of individuals and groups involved in the fight, too many of whom have abandoned the Democrats, summed up by an ethic quoted in the book from noted environmentalist David R. Brower:

"Every time I've compromised, I've lost. When I held firm I won. The problem with too many environmentalists today is that they are trying to write the compromise instead of letting those we pay to compromise do it. They think they get power by taking people to lunch or being taken to lunch, when in reality they are only being taken."

The outsider perspective provided in all of these essays is a critical one to heed for would-be (and existing) Democratic politicians in the West.It's at its heart a populist fight--the people and the land over the corporations and the developers who've had way too much weight on their side of the scale in the last 20 years. There's tremendous energy and anger out there in the middle, and it's growing faster in the West than just about anywhere else, fueled largely by the wasting of the last, best places we have.

As St. Clairs says, "In the West, we may at last witness, to paraphrase William Kittredge, a politics that is worthy of the landscape."

Fire-Breathing Liberal: How I Learned to Survive (and Thrive) in the Contact Sport of Congress
By  Robert Wexler
St Martin's Press
New York: June 2008
264 pages, $25.95

For a Congressman who's only served in the House for a decade and a half, Robert Wexler of Florida has performed quite the feat, managing to find himself at Ground Zero for not one, but two, of the most divisive issues in America's recent political history -- Bill Clinton's impeachment trial and the Florida 2000 recount. The former occurred during his first term, when he unexpectedly found himself as one of Clinton's most passionate on-air defenders. And in-depth involvement with the 2000 recount was foisted upon him by geography and history--the counties at the heart of the controversy were those he represented.

And as Fire-Breathing Liberal shows, Wexler managed to keep a level head and sense of humor throughout it all. His tales-from-the-trenches biography juggles his appealing mix of idealism and realism, explanation and anecdote, in just the right amount. What's delivered is an insider account of politics with an appealing, self-deprecating and entertaining twist. Consider Wexler's description of a portion of his childhood that many a political geek can identify with:

Norman and I would play a game titled Mr. President. Other kids were playing All-Star Baseball or Electric Football. We played Mr. President for hours at a time, five days a week. I grew up believing this was the most phenomenal game ever devised, which in many ways describes me. The object of the game was to win the presidential election. How many nine-year-olds knew that New York State had 43 electoral votes? Norman and I did. That fact might well sum up my childhood.

This kind of lovable, earnest dorkishness seems to be a Wexler trademark; indeed, it's part of what made Stephen Colbert's infamous set-up of Wexler, getting him to admit on-air to cocaine use and frequenting prostitutes, so terribly funny. He freely admits to being loud, passionate, intense and--lucky for us--a big, big fan of the netroots, the grassroots and our allies. His condemnation of the absurd deicison of Democrats voting to disavow the MoveOn Petraeus ad is refreshing and direct:

Many Democrats voted for the resolution [against MoveOn] to distance themselves from MoveOn and the substance of the newspaper advertisement. Just imagine the furor that would have resulted had we proposed a resolution to censure the right-wing Christian Coalition or Pat Robertson for one of their more outrageous proclamations, such as blaming 9/11 on homsexuals. I voted against the resolution, but unfortunately many of my colleagues did not, and it passed. It was not our proudest day.

As the title of this book indicates, Wexler joins the emerging grassroots in being unapologetic about liberals and liberalism, and given his outspokenness, it makes sense that as a first-term Congressman, he found himself the go-to man for media quotes in defense of President Clinton during the impeachment process. His common sense insistence that the private mistakes involved did not qualify as "high crimes and misdemeanors" seems obvious in retrospect, but at a time when many, many Democrats were scattering and harumphing, Wexler stood firm and found himself thrust into the limelight because so few voices in defense could be found. His own astonishment at his very public role shines through in Fire-Breathing Liberal; even years later, he's still preserved a "gee whiz" awe at his role and subsequent prominence. His accounts of conversations with President Clinton late at night are worth the price of the book. His singularly unimpressed and level-headed wife at one point answers the phone and tells the president her husband can't come to the phone because he's doing dishes.

These moments of ordinary/extraordinary are sprinkled throughout the work. Wexler takes the time to walk readers through his growing enchantment with foreign affairs, particularly fostering ties with Turkey, and how he believes the importance of internationalism affects us all deeply. Clearly, he's had practice explaining his interests to his constituents. His district is largely elderly, strongly Democratic and heavily Jewish. He details the condo meetings, Rotary Club banquets, school auditorium meetings--the nitty gritty of retail politics--with a fondness that seems difficult to feign. The feisty give-and-take between representative and the represented is warming to the populist-leaning heart.

Perhaps he earned his true stripes with his local base when he went to bat during the nightmare of the 2000 recount. Since Palm Beach County was home of the "butterfly ballot" debacle, Wexler ended up being the ad hoc coordinator of state, federal and judicial news and complaints, being a tireless, insistent advocate for every one of his residents' votes to be counted. Even at a distance of eight years, his anger over the election still bursts off the page:

Every politician learns how to lose as well as win--and as a Democrat I had a lot of practice losing. Through most of my career I'd tried to salvage what was possible, stand up for my constituents, and use the influence I had as a member of Congress in areas where partisanship played less of a role, such as foreign relations and constituent services, where I could do some good. But this Supreme Court ruling infuriated me. I was just outraged by it. Like many of my constituents, I feel it is a wound that will never completely heal.

What made both the Clinton impeachment and the unjust awarding of the presidency to Bush even more difficult for Wexler to swallow down the line was the refusal of the Democrats to consider investigations and impeachment against the current president as it became more and more apparent that serious constitutional (and criminal) violations were continuing to be perpetuated by the administration, unobstructed by the Democratic-majority Congress. As a result, Wexler's was one of the few voices continuing to assert the unpopular view that impeachment was not just a viable option, it was the only honorable one in light of the legacy we were possibly leaving open for Congressional hands-off precedents down the road:

Certainly there were legitimate arguments made against these proceedings. Many people reasoned that we'd been through this gut-wrenching process with President Clinton and it had ripped apart the nation. I responded by suggesting that the worst possible legacy of the Clinton impeachment would be to discourage future Congresses from examining valid allegations of constitutional violations against members of the executive branch. Should that happen, the tragedy of Clinton's impeachment would be compounded.

This really is a blast of a book to read; getting the behind-the-scenes lowdown on maneuvering legislation through committees, hitting the campaign trail vicariously with a gifted and passionate pol ... these are experiences political junkies should lap up in big doses. The writing is bright and lively, more conversational than professorial, and chapters are short and focused, easy to digest in small chunks or multiple sittings, since many can stand alone without a long narrative to follow. As you read, too, keep in mind that Wexler's name has been floated as a possible candidate to take on Mel Martinez for his Senate seat in 2010 (and a July poll showed him in a dead heat with the incumbent). Imagine what it would be like to have a U.S. senator from Florida proudly proclaiming;

If Republicans govern from the right and Democrats govern from the middle, when does the left get to govern? As a progressive, I fear my party has become more docile in the majority than we were in the minority.

Note: I'm the author of the book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.

David Freddoso's new book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate is a badly-written hatchet job, full of errors and distortions and smears. The author, who works for the right-wing National Review and published his book with Regnery (which printed Unfit for Command, one of the Swiftboating attacks on John Kerry in 2004), simply fails to prove his key assertions, preferring to rely upon a bunch of false attacks, McCarthyist-style denunciations of Obama's associations, and extreme conservative attacks on abortion rights, all of it padded with lengthy digressions on topics unrelated to Obama and his record.

Dreaming Up America
By Russell Banks
Seven Stories Press
New York: June 2008
144 pages, $21.95

There are unavoidable, direct links between economics and culture, especially when we're talking about those aspects of culture that are expensive to produce—films, public music, theater—or to own, like paintings and sculpture.

**

It's a kind of madness to think that you can always improve your life, financially, economically, generation after generation, with each generation succeeding further, and not recognize that this is simply an impossibility, one that ultimately, inevitably, like any Ponzi scheme, will lead to failure. And the economic demands and expectations that back this distorted dream are always going to be in conflict with the ideals of democracy. They demand and expect one person to trample on another. This conflicts with the democratic ideals in our sacred documents and in our hearts.

For a slim book, Dreaming Up America packs a hell of a wallop.

The work began in another medium, as narration for a documentary by French filmmaker Jean-Michel Meurice in which acclaimed novelist Russell Banks was asked, in his words, to "play talking heads in a film he was making for the French television channel, Arte. The film ... was to be about American history as told by American cinema--from The Birth of a Nation to Blackhawk Down." Once he was given the hours of recorded interviews to review, he realized he had the makings of a book in hand, and here we have it.

Interestingly, it's impossible to detect without Banks'  introductory explanation that the book sprung from an examination of popular culture. Small references to very American movies are made here and there, but no more than would be usual in any work looking at America's society and politics. In fact, Dreaming Up America seems far more about American character, and the historical events that led to the nation's individualistic, isolationist, can-do, religious persona, than it is about culture--or film--at all.

Banks opens the work by looking at the beginning of America, at the diverse countries that were racing to claim the land and, more importantly, the three dominant ideas that sprung from the original divergent national cultures that were competing for dominance on the newly discovered (by Europeans, at least) continent. He suggests that there is no single dominant note for "the American Dream," but rather a threefold pitch: the salvational aspect of the Puritan settlers who wanted to found a City on the Hill, the get-rich-easy streak represented by Cortez's and Pizarro's search for the City of Gold, and Ponce De Leon's quest to find the Fountain of Youth.

We can think of there being three braided strands, or perhaps three mutually reinforcing dreams: one is of a place where a sinner can become virtuous, free from the decadence of the secular cosmopolitanism of old Europe; another is of a place where a poor man can become wealthy; and a third is of a place where a person can be born again.

The three together are much more powerful than any one of them alone. And they are there at the inception, at the very beginning of colonial America....

From this premise, Banks spreads out to look at how these three strains have shaped our history, how they have, as he says, "braided" themselves together, but also how they've competed, and when, and where. And he looks at how their sometimes competitive demands cancel each other out, creating an at-times schizoid American face--and foreign policy--to the rest of the world. He observes, for example:

American objections to and mistrust of international organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations are connected to the fact that in our minds we already have all the partnership we need through our special relationship with God.

Yet as a nation, we have (or claim to have) an inherent impulse to "spread democracy"--an undertaking Banks clearly perceives as a ruse for citizen rubes, with capitalism driving that particular goodwill engine. And while the average American citizen may currently buy into the sacrificial "spreading for democracy" theme, Europeans, he claims, have a much more realistic sense of what America is all about and have learned to be skeptical and wary of our ways.

The turmoil and brutality that erupted in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and the urban riots—that whole sequence of events altered the European perception of America in a significant way. Where before we had looked to them like the golden child, we now began to take on a somewhat different appearance. The United States now looked like a bully, out of control, violent, angry, short-sighted. No longer were we the brilliant innocent.

In Banks' view, one of the main reasons Americans themselves seem so unaware of their country's contradictions is a basic blissful ignorance about our own violent history. The American Revolution, he says, has been sanitized; in the first years after the war for independence, that conflict was indeed realistically perceived as a brutal, bloody wrenching-away and a violent beginning. However, the French Revolution's beheadings in the following decade dominated the international imagination afterwards, and in the century after that, the horrors of our own Civil War blotted out from our national consciousness this country's brutal birth. Today, Banks asserts, Americans are more inclined to think of the Founding Fathers less as warriors than as savvy political activists, huddling in taverns debating the rights of man, or meeting in Philadelphia to craft the Constitution. We overlook our violent founding at our peril, for it haunts us still, echoing down the centuries--subliminally, which makes it that much more uncontrollable.

This leads to a stark and unhealthy blend of Christianity, Capitalism and Civilization (appropriately capitalized when used together, as Banks does often) that comes out sometimes in a sort of cannibalism; when we don't have any native tribes to wipe out or Middle East countries to invade we will turn like wolves on our own, often the weakest of our own, and the results can be appalling. Turning our youngest into consumers (there's the capital "C" Capitalism at work), he maintains, is a disgusting form of colonization.

] It's a very dangerous situation. We've colonized our own children. Having run out of people on the planet to colonize, run out of people who can't distinguish between beads and trinkets and something of value, having found ourselves no longer able to swap some beads and axes for Manhattan Island, we've ended up colonizing our own children. We're now engaged in a process of auto-colonization. The old sow is eating its own farrow.

And worse, there's no end in sight because of our willful fetishization of our country. Banks points to one of the most disturbing collective psychological disturbances displayed by the official face of America to the world --the dark side of his triumvirate of God, cash and eternal youth -- the confusion of self and nation, of religious devotion to country confounded with patriotism, a brew that makes up one of the weirdest traits of American character:

I regard nationalism as a kind of secular religion, a substitute religion, where the state itself and one's identity as a citizen of the state takes on a religious intensity and passion. I suppose there is a lack that's highlighted by that identification. It has behind it the notion that one's identity as an American is some kind of ultimate definition of oneself and, therefore, without it one has no identify of one's own. One's citizenship isn't merely one's group identity, it's one essential identity.

Nationalism can do that to you. It can strip you of your individuality. And in periods of strong, nationalistic fervor in the United States, it has taken on a stubbornly religious quality.

Despite America's dark side, which is explored at length in this work, Banks also emphasizes throughout the nation's energy, innocence, determination and optimism. Indeed, in the end, he himself expresses a cautious optimism that we can regain our senses and become a force for good in a way that we only dream of now:

...I begin by recognizing that the way this country was formed, and the way it is still coming into being, is a powerful, combustible combination of energies. We would do well to recognize that we haven't yet finished making ourselves, and that we can still take mindful control of that process. Our American history is taking us somewhere. We just don't know where yet.

Dreaming Up America is a powerful, powerful work, but I recommend it with a word of caution to fans of Banks' fiction: this book is nothing like his novels, which I've always considered meticulously crafted and almost perfectly (if depressingly) shaped. This reads very much as an oral musing, completely unlike his other work, and at first this can be disconcerting if a reader comes to this (as I did) expecting to read this as a master wordsmith's first foray into a new non-fiction form. I suspect there's very little editing beyond taking out verbal fits and starts and ummms, and the book's genesis as narration to a documentary is quite apparent throughout. Once this expectation for polished prose is set aside, readers can get on with the absorption of the ideas and it's well worth the read. However, I will admit, on closing, that I would welcome a set of well-considered non-fiction essays from such an author and hope to see such a volume in the future.

The Obama Nation, by 'Swiftboat coauthor Jerome Corsi, is hitting bookstores tomorrow.  I've been browsing through an advance copy, and thought I would offer up a sneak peek.

My primary impression is that this book is no Swiftboat.  Instead, it seems to have all the firepower of a leaky old rowboat.  It is truly a strange book, investing much of its argument in psycho-babble analysis of Obama's father, rehashing the same old 'scandals' that blew up and quickly fizzled out during the primaries, and stretching for some almost laughable scare tactics (did you know Obama's invoking the idea of change is nothing more than code for "the redistribution of income that Saul Alinsky ad in mind when he advocated using 'Change' as a radical socialist call to action.")

Publication date was originally set for August 5th, but was moved up.  I suspect the reason is that more and more of Corsi's assertions are going out of date every day.

Join me below the fold for more...

This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books, New York: 2008
256 pages, $24.00

In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s, the ground was shifting under our feet, recarving the American landscape. The peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

Barbara Ehrenreich has spent her career writing about the niches of that narrow ledge where the shrinking middle class clings, and in the past few years, the accelerated narrowing of that ledge--and the terror it's creating in the American population--has become something of her own specialized beat. As the acclaimed author of Nickle and Dimed, an account of her attempt to live on minimum wage in different parts of America, she has earned her stripes in talking about working class and populist issues.

In this latest collection of essays, she once again travels the hard-times road, with special attention to health care and civil liberties issues, giving voice to a befuddlement at how we seem to keep finding ourselves in worsening conditions each time she takes to the writing task. She casts her knowledgeable eye on a wider landscape than usual, pulling in observations on foreign policy and America's place in the world, the acquiescence of its hard-pressed population in economic hardship, the loss of privacy and all the other issues of concern to observant progressives.

But two areas of importance clearly stand out for her in this collection. One is women's issues, and the second is the role the religious right has played in pushing this country into the mean, low place where we find ourselves now. One of the most astute essays focuses on the gradual erosion of the public sphere and its accompanying loss of the collective sense of responsibility for the least among us; she points out that the transfer of public funds to private religious institutions nearly guarantees in the long run the ineffectiveness of government intervention in the poverty cycle, thus conveniently reinforcing a favorite conservative claim:

Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services, not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services, but they stand to gain public money by doing so .... The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.

Ehrenreich's gift for humor and acerbic hyperbole is on display throughout as well, skewering the hypocrisy of the right--particularly adherents of the religious right--on their lack of logic. For example, she takes on the challenge of following the twisted reasoning on the dangers of homosexual marriage and winds up in a place where we can all be pretty certain the fundamentalists almost certainly do not want to be:

The logic is clear. Since the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas (in 2003) that antisodomy laws are unconstitutional, it's been legal for gays to have sex. Add to that a ban on gay marriage and you will create a special class of people--gays and lesbians--who are free to have all the sex they want, as long as it's outside of marriage.

This is bound to lead to grumbling among the heterosexual population, even a certain amount of gay envy. Heterosexuals will start saying: "How come we're supposed to get married if we want to have sex? How come homosexuals get all the breaks?"

By far the most complex and thoughtful essay in the book, however, is reserved for one of the areas to which Ehrenreich has paid particularly deep attention over her writing career: feminism. She has built up a reputation and quality of work in women's issues that few public intellectuals can rival, and as such, she's been able to follow closely most of the inside-out twists and turns that the expanded definitions of choice and equality have implied. Some of the most contentious areas in women's issues have focused on whether women's influence in the public realm will bring about more connection, more diplomacy, more reliance on reason and less on violence and militarism. The hope in many feminist circles has long been that inclusion of more women in the public sphere would balance out some of the disturbing qualities long associated with the masculine. This hope, at least for Ehrenriech, was clearly dashed with the emergence of Abu Ghraib torture and photos, and the role played by some of the female soldiers there. And the sometimes automatic assumption of overlap between all human rights and women's rights come in for some honest and painful examination in this book:

In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman--a promotion, a college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the military--is by its very nature a victory for all of humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle--the struggle for gender equality--when in face we have many more.

The struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.

Ehrenreich's staunch dedication to progressive causes and their examination--and often their brutal re-examination--places her in a class with very few peers in the liberal movement. Her willingness to think out loud, to explore, to continue to push to find new implications in current events has never been displayed to better advantage than it is in This Land Is Their Land, and with decades of wisdom and writing experience behind her, she still manages to surprise and delight with each new book. Her latest collection is a keeper, and is highly recommended.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Jeff Sharlet
Harper Collins
454 pp. $25.95

It’s one thing to say that a particular wing of modern conservatism seems a little fascist; it’s another thing to prove it unequivocally.

Jeff Sharlet’s The Family is about what is undeniably the most powerful and bizarre quasi-religious movement you’ve never heard of.  This is made evident near the beginning of the book, when Sharlet gives us a scene featuring Doug Coe, the group’s leader.  Coe is chatting with (or rather, instructing) Congressman Todd Tiahrt (R, Kansas):

Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)
By Jared Bernstein
Berrett Koehler
San Francisco: 2008
225 pages; $26.95

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker
By Steven Greenhouse
Knopf
New York: 2008.
384 pages; $25.95

This year's polite term for the economic situation of so many Americans appears to be "squeeze," if the titles of these two books are any guide. Despite the similar terminology and theme, though, they provide very different types of account of the American economy, and even more so different levels of explanations for why what's going on is going on and what forces might be responsible.

Jared Bernstein has written an economics book for the general reader. Crunch is organized for the most part into two-to-three-page answers to laypeople's questions such as "What's it going to take for large-scale health reform to occur?" and "Seems like we're forever blowing bubbles. What is an economic bubble, why are they bad, and can they be avoided?" Answers explain basic economic principles, often critiquing dominant beliefs in the field of economics -- revealing unacknowledged ideological slants in economic analyses generally delivered as fact. The book therefore delivers a number of lessons, including the basic factual answers to questions, this critique of the field of economics, and an accompanying discussion of how the nation's economy is shaped by power relations. Bernstein's book is a valuable resource, accessibly written (if anything, I sometimes found the jocular asides and humorous tangents a bit overdone) and organized to provide the reader with concise talking points on the issues.

Where Bernstein seeks to explain the economy, with an eye to its macro-level organization and the immediate effects of that upon individuals, Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze is descriptive, shying away from such attempts at broader analysis or explanation.

The Greenhouse book is depressing in two ways. One is a credit to its author; the other is not. The reporting is fine-grained and moving, telling the stories of dozens of American workers who have been "squeezed" -— abused, underpaid, overworked, downsized, and degraded. The reporting work is extraordinary; these are stories that everyone should know by heart until the revulsion that knowledge stirs banishes any more such realities from this nation. The success of Greenhouse’s reporting makes reading the book a miserable experience. What’s been done to American workers over the past few decades is appalling.

As stellar as the reporting involved is, and as complete a picture of the day-to-day indignities and oppressions of many American workplaces as it provides, ultimately Greenhouse’s failure to confront the implications of his reporting is nearly as depressing as the stories he tells. He opens the book with this question:

Not long after I began peering inside the nation’s workplaces as labor correspondent for the New York Times, I was taken aback by what I often found there—squalid treatment, humbling indignities, relentless penny-pinching. The United States may see itself as the City on the Hill, but many of its citizens labor in dismal swamps. Why, I kept asking myself, are there so many unseemly, even shocking things taking place inside the workplaces of the world’s richest nation?

And then, for hundreds of pages, he refuses to provide a direct answer it is more than clear he knows.

Time and time again Greenhouse painstakingly details how a major corporate employer lays off productive workers so that financial analysts will tell shareholders to be happy, how orders go down through the ranks for regional managers to squeeze individual store managers, who pass that squeeze down to cashiers and stockroom workers in the form of hours illegally deleted from timesheets, forced time off the clock so that a worker won’t be eligible for overtime, harassment and intimidation for any of a hundred petty reasons that will make a worker’s life miserable for the sake of a few cents more profit for the corporation. And time and time again, Greenhouse backs off of connecting the dots he has so painstakingly mapped.

In 9 of 10 stories he recounts, human misery is something attributable to corporate policy and corporate greed. It is not an accident, it is not a subject of regret. It is intentionally, rigorously inflicted, with wanton disregard for the law and for any sense of a morality based in anything but money.  

Yet in this book Greenhouse will not step back and admit he knows it. Though throughout the book, the searing indignities and vicious abuses come at the hands of employers, when it comes time to draw conclusions, to suggest what could be done to improve the lot of America’s workers, his most strongly-phrased suggestions are directed at unions. Oh, he suggests more extensive and effective government regulation, and universal healthcare, but in a world in which "the typical CEO earns 369 times as much as the average worker, up from 131 times in 1993 and 36 times in 1976," it is union leaders whose salaries Congress should take action to limit. Having clearly shown that it is corporations that most need to change their practices to improve the lot of American workers, Greenhouse is unwilling to suggest that they be confronted in any meaningful way.

In other words, this is a book written by a reporter beholden to traditional media notions of objectivity and neutrality. The facts have a liberal bias, so the analysis has to correct for that. It is a sad commentary on reporting that a book written by someone who has, in his role as labor reporter at the New York Times, been one of the most important sources of information on work and workers in this country.

Reading Greenhouse left me desperate to read something that took these questions on, not just detailing the effects of inequality but analyzing it as something actively produced. Bernstein's book provided some measure of that, but precisely its accessible, convenient organization into brief, focused discussions of particular questions makes it more difficult to extract the overarching narratives contained within. For that, Bernstein's earlier book All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy might provide a more straightforward account, as does Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift.

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.