A devastating inside look at the dark side of Congress as revealed by one of its own! No wonder Congressman X wants to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. His admissions are deeply disturbing. . . "Most of my colleagues are dishonest career politicians who revel in the power and special-interest money that's lavished upon them." "My main job is to keep my job, to get reelected. It takes precedence over everything." "Voters are incredibly ignorant and know little about our form of government and how it works." "It's far easier than you think to manipulate a nation of naive, self-absorbed sheep who crave instant gratification." "Fundraising is so time consuming I seldom read any bills I vote on. Like many of my colleagues, I don't know how the legislation will be implemented, or what it'll cost." "We spend money we don't have and blithely mortgage the future with a wink and a nod. Screw the next generation. It's about getting credit now, lookin' good for the upcoming election."
Gamers, Multiculturalists, and the Great Coming Apart is the first book to pull together the central features of the American society, character, and history of the global era and its immediate aftermath into a single, powerful, comprehensive, and coherent picture. Seamlessly interdisciplinary, it looks at all facets of recent American society and history as reflecting first the global liberal paradigm that reigned from 1965 until 2016, and then the incipient paradigms that have competed during the years of crisis since.It is the first book to pull together the central features of American society, character, and history since 1965 into a single comprehensive and coherent picture that dissents from key aspects of the long-dominant paradigm. Gamers, Multiculturalists, and the Great Coming Apart describes and extensively analyzes the gamers, the fascinating new upper class that has risen to dominance in this country as in most others during the last half century. It also analyzes the character and circumstances of the middle class, working class, and underclass, laying bare the profound, many-sided conflict between the gamers and the middle and working classes. It also examines the
About the Book In this memoir and bibliography, combined with philosophy and short stories, James (Jim) Linn has collected twelve years of quotes from others and how they spoke to him, his deep thoughts, some poetry, and thought-provoking memes. Linn also shares his observations about life and human nature. About the Author James (Jim) Linn played and managed softball teams, both men’s and co-ed, for forty-seven years. He now enjoys playing pickleball five days a week. In his free time, Linn likes to spend time with his family and friends, travel to Europe and different cities in the US, and learn new things.
An insider's account of the Republican election machine reveals the practices of libel, spin, and misrepresentation that have affected campaign outcomes throughout the past decade, and traces how the author landed in federal prison for fraud.
It has become impossible to resolve the many serious problems we face in America. My token efforts in this book details the issues as I see them. Whether you agree with me or not, at least give me the credit for devoting the last twenty years of my life trying to make sense out of it all and proposing solutions. I did not do it for financial gain but as an American who reveres our heritage and hopes we can find a way to pull together and once again be that shining city on the hill.
When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people’s representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan “experts,” an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court—the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language—he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas’s biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America’s future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.
Redneck Boy in the Promised Land is Ben Jones’s hilarious, uplifting life story of escaping the rail yards and finding success in the unlikeliest places. As a child, Jones called a dingy railroad shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing home. An unabashed Southern redneck from a "likker drinkin’, hell-raisin’" family, Jones grew up in the depressed railroad docks outside of Portsmouth, Virginia, and spent most of his days dreaming about where the tracks out of town could take him. That he would go on to become a beloved television icon on The Dukes of Hazzard and a firebrand two-term Congressman is a story that no one could have ever seen coming . . . least of all ol’ "Cooter" himself. Written with naked honesty and wry humor, Redneck Boy in the Promised Land is one good ol’ boy’s remarkable tale of falling flat on his face, picking himself up, and finding his way to the American dream-while fighting for civil rights, the plight of the working class, "real" Southern culture, and the rights of rednecks everywhere. From the Hardcover edition.
