George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation
Author: George Washington
Copied out by hand as a young man aspiring to the status of Gentleman, George Washington's 110 rules were based on a set of rules composed by French Jesuits in 1595. The first English edition of these rules was available in Francis Hawkins' Youths Behavior, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men, which appeared in 1640, and it is from work that Washington seems to have copied. The rules as Washington wrote them out are a simplified version of this text. However much he may have simplified them, these precepts had a strong influence on Washington, who aimed to always live by them. The rules focus on self-respect and respect for others through details of etiquette. The rules offer pointers on such issues as how to dress, walk, eat in public, and address one's superiors.
Go to: Active Directory For Dummies or Photoshop Lightroom Workbook
Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice after 9/11
Author: Eric Lichtblau
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush and his top advisors declared that the struggle against terrorism would be nothing less than a war–a new kind of war that would require new tactics, new tools, and a new mind-set. Bush’s Law is the unprecedented account of how the Bush administration employed its “war on terror” to mask the most radical remaking of American justice in generations.
On orders from the highest levels of the administration, counterterrorism officials at the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA were asked to play roles they had never played before. But with that unprecedented power, administration officials butted up against–or disregarded altogether–the legal restrictions meant to safeguard Americans’ rights, as they gave legal sanction to covert programs and secret interrogation tactics, a swept up thousands of suspects in the drift net.
Eric Lichtblau, who has covered the Justice Department and national security issues for the duration of the Bush administration, details not only the development of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program–initiated by the vice president’s office in the weeks after 9/11–but also the intense pressure that the White House brought to bear on The New York Times to thwart his story on the program.
Bush’s Law is an unparalleled and authoritative investigative report on the hidden internal struggles over secret programs and policies that tore at the constitutional fabric of the country and, ultimately, brought down an attorney general.
The New York Times Book Review - Jeff Stein
Get it out of your head that Bush's Law is another high-minded, high-umbrage, A.C.L.U.-channeled eulogy to the United States Constitution, which died on the table at the hands of Bush administration surgeons. No, it's Stephen King country, a collection of horror stories every bit as mouth-drying and finger-curling as Kathy Bates's taking the lumber to James Caan in "Misery"…Lichtblau relates such tales of heroes and villains, survivors and victims…with great verve and passion. One imagines he was motivated in part by the rude indignities he himself was subjected to by administration officials enraged by his exposes of their wrongdoing in the pages of The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Well, here are their deserts, and they are just.
The New York Times - Jeffrey Rosen
It is a gripping account of Mr. Lichtblau's efforts to expose various forms of secret surveillance and the Bush administration's Nixonian efforts to retaliate against him and other critics: All the President's Men for an age of terror. But this book offers much more than a journalist's well-earned victory lap. Mr. Lichtblau also documents, with scrupulous detail, the broader costs of the Bush administration's excesses for innocent victims and for the rule of law…At a time when the press's role in American democracy is being hotly contested, this book provides an inspiring example of reporters doing what they do best: checking claims of unlimited governmental power and protecting the public's right to know.
The Washington Post - Benjamin Wittes
Lichtblau's account of the Times's deliberations over the NSA story is detailed and interesting, and his report of the vigor with which the administration attempted to quash the story—the repeated meetings he and his editors had with numerous top-level administration officials, including one the publisher and executive editor of the newspaper had with Bush himself—is illuminating. Lichtblau also offers fascinating accounts of battles within the administration, some previously well-known, others less so. And he gives a lengthy catalogue of apparently innocent people harmed by the administration's new policies; these stories will give pause even to hardened supporters of strong antiterrorism policies.
Kirkus Reviews
Evenhanded study of justice blindfolded by "a broad, omnipotent reading of the president's wartime authority."There is some chicken and some egg in the question of why and how America embarked on the war on terror: Was Bush intent on going to war precisely in order to expand that authority, or did the authority necessarily expand to cover the comprehensive engagement of that war? Helen Thomas, the near-legendary correspondent and gadfly, has suggested the former, observing that she had never seen anyone so determined to go to war. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Lichtblau-who was the Los Angeles Times Justice Department reporter at the time of 9/11-seems less sure. However, his account of executive power begins with a stern warning-as it happens, from the chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time-that the Constitution prohibits much of the domestic program of the Bush administration, which for its part had been arguing from even before 9/11 that individual liberties, the Bill of Rights and other such legal provisions were mere niceties, disposable in the fight against the homeland's enemies. The press fell into line, Lichtblau observes, burying important stories about the law writ large, on drugs and inner-city violence and other concerns, in the interest of secrecy. One story that was so buried, he charges, concerned the "unusual arrangements that the Secret Service had made allowing one of President Bush's underage daughters-Jenna Bush, then nineteen-to make a bar-hopping trip south of the border"-and that less than a week before she was to appear in court in Texas on a charge of underage drinking. That was a trivial operation compared to othersengineered by the administration, from the Valerie Plame affair to illegal wiretapping and financial investigations to the "324-page legislative grab bag" that was the Patriot Act, all of which Lichtblau visits in careful detail, recording the administration's relentless protests that making any such efforts public was tantamount to working for al-Qaeda. Even conservative legislators, Lichtblau writes in closing, now reject that sham excuse. A sobering, saddening but altogether excellent book of legal reportage. Agent: Ron Goldfarb/Goldfarb & Associates
No comments:
Post a Comment