(Part 2) Best us political science books according to redditors
We found 450 Reddit comments discussing the best us political science books. We ranked the 184 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
So, What are the qualifications of the guy in your video? Er, None. So, we're back at the same situation - to throw out what I put forward, you throw out your own evidence for the same reasons.
And he's not the expert. The guy in the video is John Woodman, and the Expert I cited is Jean-Claude Tremblay, a French-canadian graphic designer, instructor on Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe-certified expert.
And yes! Well spotted - John Woodman wrote a book. Specifically, a book on how the birther conspiracy is bullshit, that unlike your arguments, is well sourced, well referenced, and so far, has yet to be proven inaccurate by birthers like yourself, nor has it been criticized by any reputable source. Well, except in your own minds, I guess, but let's face it, some people will believe any stupid old thing.
So basically, the only "Weak" part is your reading comprehension skills.
Speaking of which, all you had this time were two classic Ad hominem attacks, and no further arguments. That reek of desperation you're smelling, I think you may want to check yourself for the stench, before accusing others. Be careful, though, you might faint from the strength of it.
But, Congratulations, you got ONE point correct I had my year wrong. The Birther conspiracy idiocy has been going since 2008, not 2009, mea culpa. The long form birth certificate theories that analyze it are from April 2011, yeah, because before that you'd have been screaming that it doesn't exist, the previous conspiracy theory that proved to be untrue. So, you've had Twelve months to come up with a coherent and well evidenced argument about the long-form certificate. Still not an argument in your favor, even with the shorter time-scale.
However, I grant you - I should have been much more specific, rather than just going "Birthers have been failing for a long time", rather than "Birthers have been failing on this particular point for twelve months." Again, Mea Culpa, I did make a mistake. But not one that really strengthens your birther nonsense, nor that weakens my position, so really a token victory, but in your position, I'd advise you take what petty, token victories you can get.
Charles Ortel is a member of the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, which recently published The Betrayal Papers. From the Amazon page:
>While the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal is a worldwide Islamic State (aka, Caliphate), it has established influence over the highest levels of American government.
Charles Ortel is a foaming whack job.
If you say so. But if you want to read an actual academic study on what lobbying can and can't accomplish, here's a good one for you:
https://smile.amazon.com/Lobbying-Policy-Change-Wins-Loses/dp/0226039455?sa-no-redirect=1
There are plenty of ways to start fixing these problems. Minimum wage increase, tax code reform, infrastructure investment, domestic manufacturing incentives, etc. The politicians know about these things, but won't implement them because of our campaign finance system. They are beholden to wealthy contributors funding their campaigns. Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig is a great explanation of how bad campaign finance law causes corruption that prevents us from solving any issues important to us.
There's apparently a Kindle Edition for $3
The truth is much more complicated than this 6 minute video lets on.
I highly recommend reading Lobbying and Policy Change by Baumgartner Et al.
The short and thick of it is that lobbying isn't just a money game. Entrenched interests beat all but the most massive sums of money backed by the most organized lobbying groups. Even when you can array the money, intellectual capital, and manhours towards an issue you want to change the issue is only partially reframed around 5% of the time. You can ban the money tomorrow and it is unlikely to solve our problems.
Some books I recommend! Best to immerse yourself in as much accounts to get a better picture of things
Muslim brotherhood has deep infiltration in our government, as explained extensively in the whistleblower book, See Something, Say Nothing. I believe Pakistan, Saudi, and Iran (Valerie Jarrett for example) agents all unify their mission through the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, MSA, etc.
This is probably why Wasserman-Schultz is also pushing the diversity angle as hard as she is too in the clip. Tommy Robinson did a great job explaining how radicals work hard to infiltrate police and prison positions to further their cause.
We need to wake up. Diversity should not include allowing subversive elements who want to destroy America. I don't care what your race is. McCarthy was right before - the Rosenberg's stole and distributed America's nuclear intellectual property and since then the blueprints for nuclear holocaust have been sold around the world. We are in deep shit if we don't end this now.
Well to start with, (I'd read this, and it was on the NYT best-seller list)[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400060346/ref=redir_mdp_mobile] I've been walking around all week wondering what the hell everyone is so worked up about. These programs were pretty well detailed in news media around the time of the Patriot act's original passage, I think a lot of people just weren't focused on the privacy implications at the time.
> What does this mean? So on average Asians have a higher income but some white guys can beat it?
... Households often contain more than one individual, dude. Asian households tend to have more working individuals hence the higher figures.
> Why do you make cops out to be the villain?
Never said anything of the sort. But there are many bigots who join the police force precisely because they relish the ability to lord it over those they don't like, and they operate with impunity. The good cops don't do enough to condemn and punish their bad apples, and this is not good for immigrants and minorities. In many communities the immigrants simply refuse to trust the police due to bad experiences, which presents a barrier to integration.
> I don't believe cops would treat most Asian ethnic groups all that differently than white people.
Never said that. I was talking about their treatment of blacks. For Arabs and South Asians, that treatment tends to come from the TSA and CBP rather than the cops though.
> If it were such a problem, why would so many non-white immigrants choose to come to the US in the first place? They could have picked Europe or Australia or Canada, but the highest demand is to go to the US.
They absolutely do go to those countries... Cities like Vancouver and Toronto in Canada are now less than 50% white, and arguably well integrated depending on your perspective. The US just has the largest population and thus the largest local communities that these immigrants can rely on for support.
You might want to read this book to get a better idea of what I'm talking about: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076H4ZNPQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 You will see that enormous amounts of people - many of whom don't even live in particularly diverse areas (i.e. > 95% white) hold absolutely irrational fears of "the other" and refuse to have anything to do with "the other".
Anyway, my original point was that present-day racism towards blacks is an indicator that it's not all rosy for immigrants. It's not about whether racism is keeping anyone "down", it's that if society can't fully accept an ethnic group that's been around since pre-Revolution times, it is unrealistic to expect them to fully accept other groups from foreign countries.
There are plenty of ways. This book goes into several of them The author points out that it seems that everybody in D.C. is in on this game, regardless of political affiliation.
First Past the Post
Proportional Representation
If interested, I recommend Gaming the Vote, by William Poundstone
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Contract-Jean-Jacques-Rousseau/dp/149617268X
https://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-Thomas-Hobbes/dp/1463649932
Don't worry, ex-Sheriff Joe "I Already Run a Concentration Camp" Arpaio did a totally legit, top to bottom investigation, and found all the proof they needed to show Soetoro was indeed born in Africa. And for $8.99 you can purchase the results yourself. Warning, they're so underwhelming even birthers didn't buy it, and their findings of this "new" investigation were basically a transcript of a 2-hour press conference that attention whore Arpaio had on the subject.
For a good analysis of various voting systems and their advantages/disadvantages, check out Gaming the Vote. The author comes to the conclusion that Range Voting is the best, which is something like giving each candidate a rating between 1 and 10.
My personal preference is Approval Voting just because it's so damn simple. It's easy for voters to understand, easy to count, and easy to implement either on paper or electronically. Although I would support almost any alternative to the current plurality voting which is basically the worst of all systems.
The book's a little old now but there's a great book called Get Out The Vote that shows the most effective way of reaching voters.
https://smile.amazon.com/Get-Out-Vote-Increase-Turnout/dp/081572568X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=get+out+the+vote&qid=1574258585&sr=8-1
Very good book on the matter.
It's not exactly what you asked for, but I learned something about recent North Korea - American relations from the memoirs of Don Gregg -- a.k.a. "Uncle Don", the uncle of former MTV VJ and slightly conspiratorial podcasting pioneer Adam Curry -- an ex-CIA agent who served as Ambassador to South Korea under George H.W. Bush.
Inflammatory my ass. Calling a spade a spade. We live in an inverted democracy and have a Congress comprised of two parties that have gotten by the last ten years by bribing down and selling up. In a word FUCK the two political parties that have committed treason against the Republic The moderates in those two parties are as eager as any of us to break the back of this corrupt system, and Electoral Reform is how we do it. From where I sit, calling a spade a spade is long over due, and I credit Theresa Amato with the first use of the term in the title of her book, GRAND ILLUSION: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595583947/ossnet-20) Other books you may have missed include Peter Peterson's RUNNING ON EMPTY: How the Democratic and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About it (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312424620/ossnet-20) and my own book, free online, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0971566151/ossnet-20).
The predominantly moderate members of these two parties are not to be confused with the parties themselves. It is the parties that I (and I believe OWS generally) despise, because like the banks and the corporations and the bureaucracy of the US Government, they represent institutionalized corruption. They do not work in the public interest, they work against the public interest.
In my experience as a national intelligence professional, when people try to lie or soft-shoe the truth, they inevitably end up harming the public interest. We have done that for decades on Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, on US sponsorship of dictators and crimes against humanity, and on electoral fraud that went exponential once we privatized vote counting and turned it over to digital devices that could be manipulated right up to the final alleged count.
Here's where we are at:
Until you get the truth on the table, no matter how ugly it is, you cannot deal with it. I deal in ugly truths, and the ugly truth we have to get a grip on today is that the two-party "system" is a corrupt rigged game at local, state, and national levels, and We the People should not tolerate this corrupt rigged system beyond 15 February 2012.
That's my final answer and I'm sticking to it.
>Interesting, I will look at the papers.
Lenz is a book, as a heads-up. This is the book. The others are papers.
>So they conclude: If the economy is bad, people are more likely to vote for the party which isn't the government at that moment. Did I understand this correctly?
Yep!
>Another comment stated (without any sources) that a difficult economic situation causes a shift to the extremes, you know anything about that?
I haven't seen anything on that. It may be true, but I wouldn't know.
>This is more a sociological question, so maybe you don't know, but does person which start earning less, change political preferences?
I'm going to assume you mean party choice in presidential elections when you talk about political preferences.
Yes...at least, that's what most people believe. Changes in real disposable income, according to Hibbs in "Bread and Peace Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections", is the "bread" portion of the title. Hibbs argues that changes in real disposable income were a significant portion of the vote shares for the incumbent party. In October 2008, Hibbs used the model of bread and peace in "Implications of the 'Bread and Peace' Model for the 2008 US Presidential Election" to predict that Republicans would get 48.2% of the two-party vote share. They got 46.3%. This doesn't mean he's wrong, but it does mean that bread and peace alone don't make for the total share. He addressed this in 2012 in "Obama's Reelection Prospects under “Bread and Peace” Voting in the 2012 US Presidential Election", noting that other factors influence elections. He said:
>Other factors of course influence presidential voting, potentially so dramatically that the systematic influence of Bread and Peace fundamentals may be overwhelmed. However, such events are transitory rather than persistent, they vary randomly from election to election, and they typically defy ex-ante objective measurement. The accounts by talking heads, and even analyses by thoughtful journalists and academic experts, are sometimes populated with stories revolving around election-specific idiosyncratic factors and fanciful ad-hoc variables whose true influence can be assessed scientifically only by statistical conditioning on persistent fundamentals.
>In 2008, Obama's race and McCain's age were prominent idiosyncratic factors, though in the end neither exerted perceptible net effect on the election outcome. Race will never again figure significantly in presidential politics, and that will be Obama's greatest positive legacy to democracy in America.4 In 2012 the main idiosyncratic issues appear to be gay marriage, immigration policy, Romney's religion and financial affairs, and the Affordable Care Act upheld on June 28, 2012 by the Supreme Court. On the personality dimension we have Romney's social awkwardness and distance by contrast to Obama's hip-cool. None of those factors played a role in earlier elections and all will have disappeared by 2016, and maybe even by Election Day 2012.
Still, he decided to use bread and peace to predict, in that October 2012 paper, that Obama would lose. However, he noted that other factors could push Obama's vote share as high as 52% easily. This is actually what Obama got. So while real disposable income and peace are not the only factors, there is definitely evidence that it matters in elections.
One thing to note is that people may not change their actual political preferences based on how the economy is doing. Voters are woefully ignorant of how tax policy works, how the economy works, and more. What Lenz argues that they actually do, is that they vote for those who they like, and then adopt their policy views. So if they dislike the incumbent party because of a bad economy (or because they are earning less), they are more likely to vote for the challenger. They may adopt the policy preferences of that challenger.
It's important to also note that there are some voters who likely never change their actual political preferences.
Numbers on how many and how this all works are unclear, because of the uncertainty and numerous factors that coalesce. But that hopefully helps.
Hi.
Seriously, I think this is the case.
So does this guy without coming out and blowing up bridges.
> If you are an experienced politician, you know that you never get too far ahead of the populace.
I would mostly agree in this particular case, but to be more precise, that's only true for those few issues where large numbers of people actually have crystallized opinions and care passionately about them -- like guns, gays, and abortion.
On most issues, though, people choose a candidate first and then just follow whatever policy positions that candidate supports.
That's sure what it looks like, and this new book, See Something, Say Nothing I think, explains at least partially why...I heard his interview the other day on the radio but have yet to order it.
> Did I say whether I doubt Obama is American?
Why is the birth certificate worthy of our attention unless we're entertaining the possibility Obama is not a US citizen?
> This only exists bc of 1991 book published by Obama that says he was born in Kenya
An erroneous promotional leaflet does not overrule a birth certificate. The author of that text confirms it was an error.
You said Obama is different because his father isn't American, and I'm refuted that. Exhibit A: Chester Arthur. You have no response to this. Okay.
> which is proven false when the 5 year investigation was meant to prove it real
If you're talking about Mike Zullo, he was convinced the birth certificate was a forgery 3 years ago. Oh, and 5 years ago he co-wrote a book claiming the birth certificate was a forgery. The earliest reference to Zullo I can find is from September 2011, when this investigation appears to have started. No one was saying at the outset, or any point inbetween I can find, that the investigation was intended to prove the birth certificate was real. It would be strange for that to be the goal of an investigation run out of the office a vocal opponent of the president and with longtime birther Jerome Corsi on the team, who has claimed Obama's birth certificate was a forgery since at least going back to 2009.
> This is fact, you cant debate fact.
Over the past 6+ years there's been several rounds of excited revelations that a birth certificate was forged, and they were debunked each time. Give this a few days and I'm sure it'll get tossed on the trash heap too.
It kind of seems like your understanding of how Congressional lobbying and interest group politics actually works comes from watching House of Cards and not actual research.
"Something that everyone already knows." If you're talking about private interests have a disproportionate influence on policy agenda or political outcomes, most data suggests that this has been massively overblown, and there is no correlation between money donated to the political sphere and the success of lobbying efforts. I recommend reading Lobbying and Policy Change by Baumgartner et al, its a fantastic piece of work that really helps explain the current state of Congressional lobbying.
Or read his book.
These books might illuminate the situation https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/0190215518/RMKYXO6Z660PM/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_1?ie=UTF8&cursor=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1576753190/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523259802&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=gangs+of+america&dpPl=1&dpID=51NUhDNA2XL&ref=plSrch
But it probably is a union hack think tank. I don't see why highlighting the partisan motivation of a group means I'm automatically backing another group.
I can post something more holistic if you want me to. Maybe someone will wander through the wasteland of this comment chain and learn something from it:
1.
> More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
2.
> Even putting aside the legal issue, though, the article does an effective job of calling into question the idea that think tanks operate in an environment of scholarly independence. Through good old-fashioned detective work, the authors trace $92 million in donations from 64 foreign governments to 28 think tanks. The real total, they say, “is certainly more” — and I would add that if the discussion were expanded to include money from foreign industries as well, the picture would become even more spectacular. Consider just one example: the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, a division started in 1983, thanks in part to what Heritage’s then-president Edwin Feulner, Jr. called “substantial support from the private sector in both Korea and Taiwan.” Internal records from the period show that Heritage executives made fundraising trips to Asia, accepted donations from trade associations like the Far Eastern Textile Group and the Federation of Korean Industries, and attended a private dinner party at the home of Korean Prime Minister Shin-yong Lho (who gave a speech at Heritage in 1986).
3.
> There are close to 1,800 think tanks in the United States that employ over 20,000 scholars and executives who are dedicated to independent analysis of the major policy challenges facing the country. They do this, day in and day out, to help policymakers and the public make informed decisions on a wide range of policy problems. Sure there are those advocacy-oriented think tanks that engage in opinion mongering and advocacy, but the vast majority of the think tanks in the United States are committed to producing evidence-based, policy-relevant research. Moreover, they are the envy of the world – and other countries are constantly trying to learn from the American experience. I know because I have been approached numerous times by foreign countries seeking advice on establishing and growing think tanks.
4.
> These days, Heritage has a different crusade. The foundation’s president, the confrontational former Senator Jim DeMint, spent the last month touring the country, drawing cheering crowds as he demanded that Republican politicians insist that Obamacare be defunded—and denouncing those who wouldn’t go along. “Republicans are afraid,” DeMint told NPR. “And if they are, they need to be replaced.” The foundation’s three-year-old activism arm, Heritage Action, spent half a million dollars on online ads targeting 100 Republican House members who didn’t sign on to the defund crusade (“Tell Representative Tom Cole to Stop Funding Obamacare”).
5.
> We found at least 49 people who have simultaneously worked as lobbyists for outside entities while serving as top staff, directors or trustees of 20 of the 25 most influential think tanks in the United States, as ranked by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
6.
> Corporate lobbyists are everywhere in Washington. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 represent business. The largest companies now have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them. How did American businesses become so invested in politics? And what does all their money buy? Drawing on extensive data and original interviews with corporate lobbyists, The Business of America is Lobbying provides a fascinating and detailed picture of what corporations do in Washington, why they do it, and why it matters. Since the 1970s, a wave of new government regulations and declining economic conditions has mobilized business leaders, and companies have developed new political capacities. Managers soon began to see public policy as an opportunity, not just a threat. Ever since, corporate lobbying has become more pervasive, more proactive, and more particularistic. Lee Drutman argues that lobbyists drove this development by helping managers see the importance of politics and how proactive and aggressive engagement could help companies' bottom lines. Politics is messy, unpredictable, and more competitive than ever, but the growth of lobbying has driven several important changes that have increased the power of business in American politics. And now, the costs of effective lobbying have risen to a level that only larger businesses can typically afford.
I'm not trying to sell anything, let alone trust.
Sarah Kendzior is well known there's a lot of her out there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Kendzior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LAMXS3rLS8
One quote: "Trump's goal was to redefine norms so that later it would be easy to redefine laws."
I will say her book of essays, not about Trump at all is a very good read:
https://www.amazon.com/View-Flyover-Country-Dispatches-Forgotten-ebook/dp/B076H4ZNPQ/
Don't trust me, check the reviews - when you're getting good reviews from NPR and The New York Post you're doing something right.
Read this.
Now you will understand everything. Why it works the way it does. Why most people have no idea what they are talking about. You'll know why Karl Rove is considered a genius. Politics will make sense. If you want to learn though you can learn it the right way. Or you can watch Jon Stewart and learn it the cheap BS stupid way. I'm serious too. Don't learn through videos.
Here is a short reading list that should give you the essentials:
Some of these will read like stories, others are more academic in nature. There is both Canadian and American material included. overall, you should get a pretty good impression of how political campaigns are planned and how they actually roll out.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Obama’s birth certificate is not fake. Fox News and the National Review spoke to experts who confirmed that the “layers” and “but the kerning” theories are not supported by the facts.
Once we get that settled we can discuss the difference between how BB guns are treated under the law and whether they present a threat of injury when you’re standing entirely behind a wood fence, the significance or lack thereof of the cop saying “I think he’s got a cap gun,” and other questions, including when citizens should be killed without due process.
Actually the videos on the bottom of the snopes page from John Woodman do address the issues brought up such as the kerning accusations. Also, his book, http://www.amazon.com/Barack-Obamas-Birth-Certificate-Fraud/dp/0983759251 does the same.
And about John Woodman, from the amazon page:
"In Is Barack Obama's Birth Certificate A Fraud? John Woodman, a computer professional and registered Republican, closely examines the evidence to find out which -- if any -- of these claims "hold water." From "layers" to "kerning" to the out-of-sequence birth certificate number and beyond, he honestly investigates more than 30 different theories concerning the certificate. He contests ideas, explains why we see the things we see -- and reveals new information about the certificate not previously revealed anywhere else."
^(The link "this" points to http://www.amazon.com/Political-Behavior-American-Electorate-Michael/dp/1452240442/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412215609&sr=8-1&keywords=political+behavior+of+the+american+electorate)
JK: As the resident young person on this AMA, I’m happy to take this question! There have been a number of field experiments explicitly looking at effective tactics in increasing youth voter turnout.
Generally speaking, the tactics that work to engage older voters also tend to be effective at engaging younger voters. Door-to-door canvassing, high-quality phone calls, direct mail, and text messages have all been proven to cost-effectively increase youth voter turnout. On the other hand, tactics that you think might work particularly well for young people, namely email and online advertisements, have generally been totally ineffective. Just because young people may live online does not mean the online world is the best place to engage them in politics. Instead, the old-fashioned tactics, such as door-to-door canvassing, tend to work much better. For a summary of this research, I highly recommend Don Green and Alan Gerber’s book [Get Out the Vote] (https://www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Vote-Increase-Turnout/dp/081572568X).
Another incredibly important piece in engaging young people is registering them to vote. Registering a young person gets them on the list of voters which opens them up to being contacted by campaigns. Voting tends to be habit-forming, so getting someone to register and vote when they turn 18 increases their likelihood to remain voters throughout their entire lives. Check out these two papers if you’re interested: (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12210/abstract) and (https://sites.duke.edu/hillygus/files/2014/07/Preregistration-10.22.14.pdf).
The amount spent on lobbying each year is 5 billion, if you estimate the undisclosed lobbying (current disclosure laws are pretty weak) as being about equal to disclosed expenses. (Which is a good estimate according to "The Business of America is Lobbying".) EVERY YEAR. And it's worth every penny.
Need pdfs: $5 per book => Paypal
LOGIC OF AMERICAN POLITICS, 8th ed by Samuel Kernell, link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1506358667/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=HUMAN GEOGRAPHY:LANDSCAPES OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES, 12th ed by Mark Bjelland, link: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Geography-Landscapes-Activities/dp/0078021464/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522905389&sr=1-1&keywords=human+geography+landscapes+of+human+activitieshttps://www.amazon.com/Worlds-History-Comparative-Reader-Since/dp/1319042082/ref=la_B001H6KFSI_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522905847&sr=1-1~~
Title: The Logic of American Politics (7th edition)
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Logic-American-Politics-Samuel-Kernell/dp/1506358667
need the pdf version of this book
for $3
Edit: changed from 8th edition to 7th edition
Edit2: I have purchased the pdf already from u/bookseller10
Along the same lines, and highlighting both finance issues and the difficulty of a third-party candidate getting anywhere, do you have an opinion on Theresa Amato's Grand Illusion?
I have a book you might enjoy
And it's only 6$
Ah... Charles Ortel: welcome back to /r/politics! Still waiting on those 40 bombshell reports that prove charity fraud - it's been quite some time since you announced that, eh?
Also, love the Fox News balance: the Clinton Foundation was removed from Charity Navigator because it could not be accurately scored.
From Charity Navigator:
>Our removal of The Clinton Foundation from our site is neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of this charity. We reserve the right to reinstate a rating for The Clinton Foundation as soon as we identify a rating methodology that appropriately captures its business model.
Meanwhile it's a top-rated for governance and transparency and rated with an 'A' by Charity Watch, with 88% going to its programs - not the bogus 10% figure that floats around in right-wing media, which ignores in-house work and only takes into account grants to other charities.
Anyway, bogus story pushed by a crackpot birther, did the rounds already, moving on...
edit: a bonus - here's some other work by this renowned financial analyst. He's a co-author in The Betrayal Papers!!, detailing "the incredible influence that the Muslim Brotherhood exerts over the Obama administration and on American policy foreign and domestic". Shit's too good...
[
>Aaron David Miller served as a State Department Middle East analyst, adviser and negotiator in Republican and Democratic Administrations and is the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.
>Richard Sokolsky is currently a non-resident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Office from 2005-2015 and served in the State Department in six administrations.
Ok, so how would we rate the job these guys have been doing in the State Department the last 20 years?
Good point. But given the way politicians shower their contributors with billions of dollars in government grants, why should what Romney does matter?
Edit: I made my post less focused on Obama, because the problem of political handouts is bipartisan.
> So as an IT person you never heard of Carnivore or ECHELON?
Sure, I absolutely did. I was a privacy activist in the nineties already. At first I read about echelon online. Eventually, I came across a book by Patrick Radden Keefe. I didn't need it to understand what it was; my expertise in IT facilitated that in combination with other research, but I certainly wanted to read this book and see what more I could learn. But like I said, I didn't learn about Echelon in 2005. As for Carnivore, I was angered by it, I understood what it was and followed reporting on it, but it didn't fascinate me as much as Echelon did.
Besides, privacy is such an incredibly wide topic, I wouldn't even know where to begin to cover it all. I'm talking electronic payments, camera surveillance, RFID, databases linked together, license plate scanning, compulsory biometric identification, spyware, rootkits, DRM, TCPA, online advertising, printers and the 'spy dot' affair, preventive frisking, social service and anti-fraud measures, data retention, internet surveillance at work, satellite imaging and drones, FLIR observation, Stingray, mobile phone triangulation and later GPS location, and so on.
> Hell back when Microsoft bought Skype and depeered it everyone said "it is so they can spy on you".
Yeah.
> Tice came out a decade before Snowden.
I know, I followed him closely. He didn't take with him the massive trove of documents though.
> People knew you just didn't listen.
I'm not sure what sort of frustration compelled you to fabricate this ridiculous accusation, especially since I described the exact opposite in the comment you replied to. I'll just chalk it up to the frustration we've all felt ringing the alarm and being ignored.
What I was talking about which exceeded what I knew, those things surprised everyone who matters in the industry. Bruce Schneier, the people at EFF, Tor developers like Jacob Applebaum, cryptographers, and so on and so forth. Name dropping Echelon and Carnivore doesn't mean you know what the fuck you're talking about. Just being real with you here.
Edit: add link
By the author:
> End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President: Aaron David Miller
>
> Miller argues that greatness in presidents is a much overrated virtue.
I skipped the article.