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A couple of weeks ago Will Bunch, our blogging friend from Philly and the proprietor of Attytood, visited with John Amato in L.A. for a bit while on the road promoting his new book, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.

Will has a rundown of the book's contents at Attytood, and provided an excerpt for Salon.

Of special note, I thought, was this bit about Grover Norquist's role in shaping the Reagan Legacy project:

One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.

I've just gotten my copy and started reading, but it's an important book -- especially if you want to have some arguments handy for dealing with your Reagan-loving brother-in-law ...

Happy National Library Week! And tomorrow is the bi-annual event known as Dewey's Read-a-Thon, where participants read for 1-24 hours.

Whatcha reading? And it's an open thread, too.

I'm proud to announce today the publication of my fourth book: The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, by PoliPoint Press.

The book is an outgrowth of the work I've done over the years at my old blog Orcinus, where the chief subject since the very first post has been the intersection of right-wing extremism and mainstream politics. Indeed, anyone who's read my work over the years -- especially those Koufax-winning series on fascism -- will recognize at least some of the prose contained herein.

It's also probably worth noting that the subject of eliminationism encompasses all three of my previous books as well: In God's Country was about the Patriot movement, which I describe there as proto-fascist; Death on the Fourth of July deals with one of the main manifestations of eliminationist violence -- namely, hate crimes; and Strawberry Days was about one of the worst episodes of officially sanctioned eliminationism in the country's history. So The Eliminationists represents a sharpening of the focus into a subject I think is going to preoccupy many of us shortly.

Indeed, as this past weekend's events have demonstrated, the need to discuss this issue has never been clearer or greater -- and it may become even more so over the coming weeks and months.

The book is currently available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. We're still waiting for the books to work their way through the distribution chain and reach people's local bookstores.

Because of that, we'll have a chat here hosted by Digby on May 2, by which time the book should be on store shelves. I'll also be chatting at Firedoglake on May 16, and some undetermined date at Daily Kos.

We're also planning to run pertinent excerpts from the book here at C&L in the coming week or so. And in the coming weeks, I'll be hosting a series of other journalists who are similarly concerned about the issues the book addresses in live chats here at C&L.

And I'm looking forward to every bit of it.

(You can also read Tristero's lovely review over at Digby's Hullabaloo.)

I'm ashamed to admit that I have an old boyfriend who is a Republican. Yes, it's horrifyingly true. A Hannity-watching, Limbaugh-listening, Rove-idolizing Dittohead. Need I say why we're no longer together? During Bush43's first term, he used to crow about the "Permanent Republican Majority" that Rove touted and that his mouthpieces in the media swore was happening. And even back then, I would laugh not only the hubris, but the complete ahistoric ignorance of that concept.

Anyone reciting the political history of United States of America would not be far off to do so to the tune of "Everything Old Is New Again." Our country was founded and has grown under an eternal tug of war between progressives and conservatives. A tug of war in which there have been times where the conservatives clearly had the advantage and others in which the progressives had the upper hand.

In his fascinating new book, The Progressive Revolution, Mike Lux chronicles those times where progressives have had the upper hand and have changed the country for the better. And these changes have not come smoothly or regularly, but in short bursts of time where great changes come after years of conservative opposition.

Lux has delineated five "big change" eras in our past, where progressives have brought change that has helped shape America for the better, usually stimulated by some catastrophic event:

1. The American Revolution, starting with Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Jefferson's Bill of Rights and the birth of the nation
2. The Reconstruction era and the aftermath of the Civil War, with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act
3. The turn of the 20th Century with Roosevelt's Anti-Trust Act, Food & Drug safety laws, and women's suffrage
4. The 1930s New Deal, with the establishment of Social Security and the Glass Steagall Banking Act
5. The 1960s with Civil Rights, the Voting Rights Act as well as environmental protection laws

Could we be on the precipice of another Big Change Moment? Certainly the last eight years under Bush could qualify for a catastrophic event that generates a big progressive push.

Mike Lux comes by his interest in progressive principles from years of experience in Washington. He is the President and CEO of Progressive Strategies, L.L.C., a political consulting firm he co-founded in 1999, focused on strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, PACs and progressive donors. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Political Action at People For the American Way (PFAW), and the PFAW Foundation, and served at the White House from January 1993 to mid-1995 as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. While at Progressive Strategies, in addition to serving on the board, Mike was also a co-founder of Americans United for Change, Center for Progressive Leadership, Grassroots Democrats, Progressive Majority, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and Women's Voices/Women Vote. He also played a role in helping launch the Center for American Progress and Air America. Mike also founded and currently chairs a number of new organizations and projects, including American Family Voices, the Progressive Donor Network, and BushRecall.org.

In November of 2008, Mike was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Team. In that role, he served as an advisor to the Office of Public Liaison on relationship with the progressive community and has helped shape the Office of Public Liaison based on his past experience working on the Clinton-Gore Transition, as well as in the White House.

And as completely clueless as I found Rove's hope of a permanent Republican majority, we cannot be likewise blinded to the reality that all too soon, the pendulum will swing away from progressives again. That is why progressives will and should always seek more movement while they have the chance...something with which I think Mike agrees.

So please join me in welcoming Mike to C&L and let's discuss The Progressive Revolution.

Per Amazon, here are their editors' choices for the top ten books of 2008:

1. The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
2. Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
3. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
4. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
5. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
6. The Likeness by Tana French
7. Serena by Ron Rash
8. So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger
9. The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon
10. The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Of the ten, Nixonland absolutely blew me away. I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough for political junkies like myself. I have The Dark Side by Jane Mayer on my desk, but haven't yet finished it. I'm almost done with Outliers: The Story of Success and like it very much.

I haven't read as many political books this year as I have in years past (I had to have a break from politics during this election year), but most of my fiction reading is catching up from past years--Wally Lamb, Anne Lamott, David Foster Wallace. Much of my current reading comes from introducing my kids to books. Together, we've been reading a lot of Neil Gaiman--his latest, The Graveyard Book is wonderful, Sherman Alexie and Jasper Fforde (whose surrealist literary works appear to be vying for the Douglas Adams title), however, I did love Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which was just lyrically beautiful.

But I'm eager now to add to my reading list, so tell me, what were your favorite books of this year?

Karl Rove is sending me emails now. I'm so happy.....

But this article represents how far Rove and Bush have fallen. Rove is writing an article in the WSJ trying to tell America that Bush actually likes to read books. How humiliating this column must have been for him to write:

With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. The competition can't catch up. And for the third year in a row, I'll triumph. In second place will be the president of the United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It's about books.

It all started on New Year's Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year's resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who'd gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, "I'm on my second. Where are you?" Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

By coincidence, we were both reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." The president jumped to a slim early lead and remained ahead until March, when I moved decisively in front. The competition soon spun out of control. We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book's pages -- its "Total Lateral Area."

We recommended volumes to each other (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biography; I suggested a book on Reconstruction's unhappy end). We discussed the books and wrote thank-you notes to some authors.

At year's end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he'd lost because he'd been busy as Leader of the Free World...read on.

Karl, no matter what silly-ass columns you write about Bush's Books, America still hates him and always will.

Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they're glad President Bush is going, with 23 percent indicating they'll miss him.

Matt Stoller adds:

I sort of understand Rove's strategy of insisting that George W. Bush is an intellectual heavyweight, even though he's obviously just a dolt that loves fart jokes. Rove enjoys tweaking liberals by preying on their insecurities, which he used to do when he was powerful and the Bush administration was taken seriously by insisting that they were effete eggheads out of touch with the real America. Only, now, there's nothing whatsoever admirable about the Bush Presidency and no one really believes Rove is a political genius, and so Rove is reduced to pretending that Bush is some sort of bookworm.

Rove is a disciple of the Lee Atwater school of smear politics and because of this, our country is suffering dearly. And if we believe this book-reading contest, well then, how many days of Bush's presidency were filled with him reading book after book (95 books in '06, 51 books in '07 and 40 books in '08) while our country is torturing people, fighting two wars, illegally wiretapping, and watching an economic meltdown of historic proportions?

I love to read too, but I think my job requirements are a little less stressful than being the president. Do you think his persistent book reading was a way to remain in a state of deep denial about the state of our nation? Will Rove's next column be about Bush's iPod?

Bowdlerizing in New Rochelle:

Students at New Rochelle School High School are going to find it difficult to complete their next assignment: comparing the film adaptation of "Girl, Interrupted" to the best-selling book. In the book, Kaysen recounts her confinement at a Massachussets mental hospital in the 1960's.

Pages from the middle of the book have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed "inappropriate" by school officials due to sexual content and strong language. Removed is a scene where the rebellious Lisa (played by Angela Jolie in the movie) encourages Susanna (played by Winona Ryder) to circumvent hospital rules against sexual intercourse by engaging in oral sex instead.
"The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students," said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, "since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing."

Sources at the school says that after receiving complaints from an as yet-to-be-identified person or group, the school district ordered students to return the book to the chairperson of the English department who then personally tore out pages 64 through 70 before returning the books to students. Ironically, news of the school censorship first broke during the same week as the school district's annual Literary Festival.

"Bowdlerizing is a particularly disturbing form of censorship since it not only suppresses specific content deemed 'objectionable,' but also does violence to the work by removing material that the author thought integral," said Joan Bertin, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. "It is a kind of literary fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience.

"

Seems to me that once again some winger complained and we have censorship as a result. Hey, they didn't like a portion of the book so just rip the pages out and be done with it. This is a "War on Christmas Literature." Why didn't they just burn the book? America should be outraged.

What I'm reading.

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

I'll be posting a bunch of books. With the election going on I haven't had a chance to post many. I'm juggling about a dozen of them right now...

(Guest blogged by NonnyMouse)

   It probably comes as no surprise to regular C&L readers to learn that I grew up in a liberal-minded household; although at the time, being a kid, I didn't especially realize just how liberal such attitudes were. Our house was filled with books, magazines and newspapers, everything from a revered set of encyclopedias (the Google of the 1960's) to stacks of ratty romance paperbacks. We had at least forty years worth of National Geographic magazines, from which I gleaned juicy facts for hundreds of school reports. I learned to read from Humpty-Dumpty magazines at the age of three and had read Ivanhoe by the time I was seven, although I have to admit I didn't understand much of it at the time.

It didn't matter. What mattered was that nothing... nothing... was off-limits in our house when it came to the written word. I read Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde and the complete works of Jonathan Swift, the back of cereal boxes, A Little Princess and Mein Kampf and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Black Beauty, Dr. Seuss and Archie comics, a huge box of pulp science-fiction novels from a garage sale, Jehovah's Witness Biblical tracts that got shoved in the letterbox, the perpetual Cherry Ames, Army Nurse novels my grandmother inevitably sent us every Christmas, every book ever written by Philip Wylie, several year's worth of a wonderful science magazine for teens to which my Aunt Ruth gave me a subscription (‘Build a Working Computer from Empty Matchboxes!), until the magazine went bust and folded. The written word, from high-brow to no-brow, was sacrosanct.

That liberal attitude toward the freedom of the written word was severely tested when at twelve I found a rather dog-eared paperback tucked behind some cans of paint in the garage - my father did a rather comical (and horrified) double-take when he found me lying on the sofa, legs dangling over one side, and puzzling over the nuances of what was an out-and-out hardcore pornographic novel. He nervously asked if I had any questions about what I was reading. ‘Do people really do this?' Um, sometimes. ‘Yuuuck! But you and Mom, you don't...?' Um, sometimes. ‘Double yuuuuuck!' Which probably did more to ease my dad's mind about my prepubescent proclivities than any euphemistic harangue on sex could ever have achieved. (My vast childhood reading habits also endowed me with this nifty erudite and comprehensive vocabulary, which comes in pretty handy now that I've grown up to be a published novelist).

So the idea that books, any book, should be banned - for any reason - is a complete anathema. Fahrenheit 451 is fiction. Censorship, unfortunately, is not.

Continue reading »

Click here to order a copy!

David Brock and Paul Waldman have put together an excellent new book called Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, which documents the incredibly positive and fawning coverage John McCain receives from the pundit class that litters our print and broadcast news services. Here's another title that would have worked just as well for me to describe the hero worship on display that permeates their ranks: "McCain's Media," because, well---that's exactly what they've become. My task will not be to boldly go where no man has gone before, but to take a minute and highlight Media Myth # 5 :

John McCain doesn't do things just because they're politically expedient.

Brock and Waldman perfectly illustrate this point quite convincingly in his most blatant and obvious offense to this narrative. His relationship with the religious right:

Continue reading »

We all helped Glenn's book reach #12  today when it was #212 yesterday.  Go Blogoshere. It would be great to push him into the Top Ten list. Jane makes an excellent point: "Nobody rips the right like Glenn Greenwald. Since there's no Richard Mellon Scaife to buy boxloads of books and force it onto the New York Times bestseller list, you can help do it the democratic way by buying the book."

Pre-order your copy today.

It would be great to move it into the top ten on Amazon. And I agree on this point all the way:

In a minimally rational world, a Republican presidential candidate like John McCain who has enabled all of that would have no chance. But -- in the absence of anything changing the way this works -- the establishment press will remove those considerations from its election coverage and the GOP's exploitation of bottom-feeding personality-based psychological, cultural and gender themes will predominate. In 2008, the GOP will dedicate itself single-mindedly to these same personality-based, manipulative electoral tactics because that is their only hope for winning.

There simply cannot be any greater priority than preventing a John McCain Presidency, one which would empower the same faction and continue the same policies that have been slowly though inexorably destroying this country, its institutions and political values. Understanding and neutralizing these tactics and the enabling media behavior is a prerequisite for preventing that...read on

Update: FDL makes a good point: Jane says:

The wingnut welfare queens have their books bought onto the New York Times bestseller list, and their ideas thus are able to penetrate much further than if they had to survive on their own merits. Please help us do the same for our team's very best, Glenn Greenwald -- without whose heroic efforts I have no doubt we'd have retroactive telecom immunity today.

David Brock and Paul Walderman have written a new book called: Free Ride: John McCain and the Media about the love the press has showered John McCain with. Grab a copy...

Joe Connelly emailed this article around yesterday:

McCain is allowed to dominate any and every issue on which he chooses to cross the aisle in Congress. He is omnipresent on Sunday talk shows.

Between 1997 and 2006, McCain had 135 appearances as a guest on "Meet the Press," "This Week" and "Face the Nation," far more than runner-up Joe Biden with 91. McCain was usually able to hold forth alone rather than sharing the stage.

The favorable press coverage has airbrushed McCain's temper and remarks that would get any other politician in trouble.

It was, after all, McCain who referred to Leisure World as "Seizure World." He once joked: "The nice thing about getting Alzheimer's is you get to hide your own Easter eggs."

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein

Men like Jonas Salk, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, these men thrive upon the continuance of segregation, violence, and disease. The purity they dost protest a need for, they dost feed upon. Thank You, Masked Man
Lenny Bruce

A divinely inspired work, Naomi Klein has tapped into the zeitgeist of modern day destruction capitalism. In 400-plus pages and extensive footnotes, she melts the myths surrounding the so-called global free market. Apparently, it is neither global, nor free and anything but a market. The Shock Doctrine, based on her historical research, and four years of boots-on-the-ground investigation by Klein, reveals the shocking truth that connects Pinochet’s Chile, the Falklands War, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Asian financial crisis and Hurricane Mitch all in terms of rapid fire corporate restructuring of these societies and their economies. Along the way, we go through Poland following communism, South Africa after apartheid, Sri Lanka recovering from the tsunami, Iraq after mission accomplished and New Orleans’ privatization post Katrina.

Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare. Help Jet Luxury Airlines of W. Palm Beach helps you avoid the next Katrina. : Actual ad pitch for Help Jet Luxury Airlines

The Shock Doctrine reads like an economic disaster film, Die Hard With a Calculator, if you will. Its antagonist is the late economist Milton Friedman and his gang of Chicago Boys, economic free marketeers trained by the University of Chicago to spread their gospel to an unreceptive and reluctant world.

Continue reading »

"Liberal fascism," I kid you not.

TRex reviews it also...I received a copy too and I'm so excited to read about how much Nazis and Liberals like to eat natural foods. Carry on....

Show him some love and pick up a copy....