In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed—endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more—are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraints—enforced by congressional committees, government lawyers, courts, and the media—that have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable.These constraints are the key to understanding why Obama continued the Bush counterterrorism program, and in this light, the events of the last decade should be seen as a victory, not a failure, of American constitutional government. We have actually preserved the framers’ original idea of a balanced constitution, despite the vast increase in presidential power made necessary by this age of permanent emergency.

    tax reform, the interested citizen is forced to choose between misleading sound bites and academic treatises. Taxing Ourselves bridges the gap between the two by presenting in clear non-technical language the key issues in U.S. tax reform: who should pay taxes, how taxes affect the economy and whether to reform or replace the current tax system. The authors discuss various alternative proposals in detail, including the flat tax and the sales tax, but they are not advocates for any of them; instead, they provide readers with the knowledge and the tools - including an informative overview of the U.S. tax system and an invaluable voter's guide to the tax policy debate - to make their own informed choices about how American citizens should tax themselves. The third edition of this popular guide has been extensively revised and updated to cover all changes in U.S. tax laws through to May 2003 and to reflect the most recent research and relevant data. It also provides new or expanded treatment of issues in the current debate, including tax cuts and whether they stimulate the economy, savings incentives, double taxation of corporate income, the estate tax, c

     Over the last three decades, Michiko Kakutani has been thinking and writing about the demise of objective truth in popular culture, academia, and contemporary politics. In The Death of Truth, she connects the dots to reveal the slow march of untruth up to our present moment, when Red State and Blue State America have little common ground, proven science is once more up for debate, and all opinions are held to be equally valid. (And, more often than not, rudely declared online.) The wisdom of the crowd has diminished the power of research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the "facts" that best confirm our biases.With wit, erudition, and remarkable insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.

    In the first volume of his autobiography The Best I Could (first published in 2008), Subhas Anandan covered many sensational cases, such as those of Anthony Ler, Took Leng How and Ah Long San, and espoused his views on the mandatory death sentence and police entrapment. In this second volume It’s Easy to Cry, this foremost champion of pro bono work moves away from depicting gruesome murders and delves instead into the emotions behind the crimes. He writes about cases where deep and complex emotions are displayed, like the mother who lied and pleaded guilty to save her son. He also shares his thoughts on the many people, including Singapore’s Chief Justices and Attorney-Generals, who have affected him in one way of the other. It is also a searing and honest account of his life, career and friendships — dictated to his wife in 2014 while undergoing kidney dialysis.

    Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz provide an authoritative guide to impeachment's past and a bold argument about its proper role today. In an era of expansive presidential power and intense partisanship, we must rethink impeachment for the twenty-first century.Of impeachments, one Constitutional Convention delegate declared, "A good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one will be kept in fear of them." To End a Presidency is an essential book for all Americans seeking to understand how this crucial but fearsome power should be exercised.

    Using case histories, personal experiences and his own inviting writing and teaching style, Preet Bharara shows the thought process we need to best achieve truth and justice in our daily lives and within our society.Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws in the system and in human nature.     The book is divided into four sections: Inquiry, Accusation, Judgment and Punishment. He shows why each step of this process is crucial to the legal system, but he also shows how we all need to think about each stage of the process to achieve truth and justice in our daily lives.     Bharara uses anecdotes and case histories from his legal career--the successes as well as the failures--to illustrate the realities of the legal system, and the consequences of taking action (and in some cases, not taking action, which can be just as essential when trying to achieve a just result).      Much of what Bharara discusses is inspiring--it gives us hope that rational and objective fact-based thinking, combined with compassion, can truly lead us on a path toward truth and justice. Some of what he writes about will be controversial and cause much discussion. Ultimately, it is a thought-provoking, entertaining book about the need to find the humanity in our legal system--and in our society.

    Trump.The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged—one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP—and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period—can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How did a party once obsessed with national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive?Loaded with explosive original reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among many others—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.

    Supreme Court. During Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, a narrow conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down several key elements of the New Deal legislation. In February 1937, Roosevelt retaliated with an audacious plan to expand the Court—to subdue the conservative justices by outnumbering them with liberals. The ensuing fight was a firestorm that engulfed the White House, the Court, Congress, and the country. Although the Court would remain at nine justices, the confrontation transformed the political and constitutional landscape, saving the New Deal and bringing the nation into the modern world. But it also dealt FDR the biggest setback of his political life and split the Democratic party, thus laying the foundation for a future era of Republican dominance. This brilliant work of political and judicial history unfolds like a thriller, with wonderful characters and unexpected twists. It uses new evidence to make clear that understanding the fight is essential to understanding the personality and presidency of FDR—and America at a crossroads in its history. 16 pages of photos.

    Floyd Abrams, a noted lawyer and award-winning legal scholar specializing in First Amendment issues, examines the degree to which American law protects free speech more often, more intensely, and more controversially than is the case anywhere else in the world, including democratic nations such as Canada and England. In this lively, powerful, and provocative work, the author addresses legal issues from the adoption of the Bill of Rights through recent cases such as Citizens United. He also examines the repeated conflicts between claims of free speech and those of national security occasioned by the publication of classified material such as was contained in the Pentagon Papers and was made public by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.

    

    You are wasting your time.In a world of fake news, deep-fakes, manipulated feeds of information and divisive social-media agendas, it's easy to believe that our time is the most challenging in human history. It's just not true.It is a time of extraordinary opportunity. But only if you have the right mindset. Fear of the future breeds inaction and leads to strategic paralysis. We put off decisions until we can have certainty. We look for signals. We wait. And while we do that, the world moves on around us.Problem-solvers thrive in chaotic and uncertain times because they act to change their future. Winners recognise that in a world of growing uncertainty, you need to resort to actions on things you can control.And the only things over which you have absolute control are your attitude and your mindset. These, in turn, determine the actions you will take and that will define your future.A robust mindset is the one common characteristic Bruce Whitfield has identified in two decades of interrogating how South Africa's billionaires and start-up mavericks think differently. They are not naive Pollyannas. They don't ignore risk or hope that problems will go away. They constantly measure, manage, consider and weigh up opportunities in a tumultuous sea of uncertainty and find ways around obstacles.If, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller suggests, the stories we tell affect economic outcomes, then we need to tell different stories amidst the noise and haste of a rapidly evolving world.

    It’s the dream of a country where, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can live with dignity, provide for your family, prosper, and give your children a better life. It’s also the uniting principle that a country that strives for greatness must also take care of its most vulnerable in times of hardship and need. But right now the American Dream is an illusion. Tens of millions of willing workers can’t find jobs. Millions of homeowners have lost their homes to foreclosure and millions more are underwater. Instead of investing in our shared future, politicians are giving tax breaks to the rich and then slashing vital services families depend on. Rather than expanding protections for the middle class during these difficult economic times, workers rights are being gutted and public unions are under siege. But a new movement - Rebuild the Dream — is rising all across America. It’s a movement that is growing stronger by the day, and will continue to gain momentum until regular Americans can find jobs, afford to go to college, retire with dignity, and secure a future for their children and their communities.It was born among the teachers, students, firefighters and nurses of Wisconsin who took over their Capitol to stop Governor Walker’s power grab. Now it’s spreading as millions of other Americans–inspired by the events in Madison, Wisconsin–stand up to say “No” to right-wing attacks on the middle class. Van Jones – bestselling author, former Green Jobs Czar to President Obama, and human rights pioneer – is channeling this new wave of energy. Rebuild The Dream – part memoir, part manifesto – forms the core of this exciting movement. Rather than casting today’s political battles as familiar fights between liberals and conservatives, or even as a tug of war between Wall Street and Main Street, Jones presents the conflict in more dire terms: cheap patriotism versus deep patriotism. At stake: the survival of the American Dream itself.Outraged by the escalating attacks on America’s middle class and working families, Rebuild the Dream issues a bold defense of the progressive values that made the 20th Century an American Century. Rejecting the fashionable mantra of cut-backs and austerity, Jones makes the case for public policies and investments that will create 10 million, good-paying American jobs. Along the way, he argues that the 21st Century can be the Second American Century, if the deep patriots stay true to the American ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” And perhaps most surprisingly – Jones extracts powerful insights from the success of the tea party movement.In Rebuild the Dream, Jones spells out how a renewed movement, grounded in tough-minded American idealism, can once again inspire millions to come together and offer real solutions to America’s toughest problems.

    In the tradition of Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States, Peter Irons chronicles the decisions that have influenced virtually every aspect of our society, from the debates over judicial power to controversial rulings in the past regarding slavery, racial segregation, and abortion, as well as more current cases about school prayer, the Bush/Gore election results, and "enemy combatants." To understand key issues facing the supreme court and the current battle for the court's ideological makeup, there is no better guide than Peter Irons. This revised and updated edition includes a foreword by Howard Zinn.

    The debate was sparked by the 1979 publication of Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Relations, which systematized realism as a coherent, deductive theory. This volume provides a unique summary of current thinking on neorealism. Ideal for course use, it presents key portions of Waltz's book along with the most significant critical evaluations of the topic by other leading scholars.Neorealism's supporters stress how much we can learn by focusing rigorously on the level of the international system, particularly by examining the effects of the distribution of power among states. Critics point out what they feel are neorealism's shortcomings: continuing ambiguities in the concepts of power and balance of power, the importance of internal determinants of foreign policy, difficulties of neorealist theory accounting for change, and what some regard as its tendency to ignore both history and the material conditions on which any international system rests. These issues are not merely of abstract interest, but relate to fundamental values as well as to the question of how humanity can survive in today's nuclear world.Neorealism and Its Critics addresses these and other vital questions in its critiques of the theory, and of Waltz's book in particular. Featuring contributions by John Ruggie, Robert Cox, Richard Ashley, and Robert Gilpin, with an introductory essay by Keohane and a concluding chapter by Waltz, this book is essential reading for both students and scholars as an up-to-date assessment of neorealism.

    Instead, one of the babies was stillborn -- and the other just barely clinging to life. The Sabias loved Little Tony and never considered putting him in a home. But caring for their son would exhaust them, emotionally, physically, and financially, and put a nearly lethal strain on their marriage. It was only when Donna, at the local playground, met another mother -- who suggested suing -- that the Sabias saw some hope for relief.This is the riveting true story of one family's journey into the maelstrom of a malpractice lawsuit -- and the attorneys, doctors, insurance carriers, and countless other players in the seven-year struggle toward resolution. It is at once a heartrending tale of human sorrow -- and, in the words of The San Francisco Chronicle, "a disturbing biopsy of a system in serious need of overhaul."