Search results for ""encounter books,usa""

This book is a lively intellectual history of a small circle of thinkers, especially, but not solely, Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, who challenged the "mainstream" liberal consensus of political science and history about how the American Founding should be understood. Along the way they changed the course of the conservative movement and had a significant impact on shaping contemporary political debates from constitutional interpretation, civil rights, to the corruption of government today. Most importantly, these thinkers explain the deep reasons for patriotism, why we should love America not simply because it is our country, but because it is a free and just country.

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In this book, Peter J. Wallison argues that the administrative agencies of the executive branch have gradually taken over the legislative role of Congress, resulting in what many call the administrative state. The judiciary bears the major responsibility for this development because it has failed to carry out its primary constitutional responsibility: to enforce the constitutional separation of powers by ensuring that the elected branches of government—the legislative and the executive—remain independent and separate from one another. Since 1937, and especially with the Chevron deference adopted by the Supreme Court in 1984, the judiciary has abandoned this role. It has allowed Congress to delegate lawmaking authorities to the administrative agencies of the executive branch and given these agencies great latitude in interpreting their statutory authorities. Unelected officials of the administrative state have thus been enabled to make decisions for the American people that, in a democracy, should only be made by Congress. The consequences have been grave: unnecessary regulation has imposed major costs on the U.S. economy, the constitutional separation of powers has been compromised, and unabated agency rulemaking has created a significant threat that Americans will one day question the legitimacy of their own government. To address these concerns, Wallison argues that the courts must return to the role the Framers expected them to fulfill.

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New medicines in the pipeline can extend lives, save money, and even help prevent disease before symptoms appear – if we don’t discourage their innovators and investors by trying to lower drug prices artificially. Unlocking Precision Medicine explores the environment necessary for creation of these health care game-changers, and explains how the marketplace can effectively make them more affordable to all without killing the golden goose.

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This book is a lively intellectual history of a small circle of thinkers, especially, but not solely, Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, who challenged the "mainstream" liberal consensus of political science and history about how the American Founding should be understood. Along the way they changed the course of the conservative movement and had a significant impact on shaping contemporary political debates from constitutional interpretation, civil rights, to the corruption of government today. Most importantly, these thinkers explain the deep reasons for patriotism--why we should love America not just because it is our country, but because it is a free and just country.

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John V. Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City in 1965. But that year's mayoral campaign will forever be known as the Buckley campaign. "As a candidate," Joseph Alsop conceded, "Buckley was cleverer and livelier than either of his rivals." And Murray Kempton concluded that "The process which coarsens every other man who enters it has only refined Mr. Buckley." The Unmaking of a Mayor is a time capsule of the political atmosphere of America in the spring of 1965, diagnosing the multitude of ills that plagued New York and other major cities: crime, narcotics, transportation, racial bias, mismanagement, taxes, and the problems of housing, police, and education. Buckley's nimble dissection of these issues constitutes an excellent primer of conservative thought. A good pathologist, Buckley shows that the diseases afflicting New York City in 1965 were by no means of a unique strain, and compared them with issues that beset the country at large. Buckley offers a prescient vision of the Republican Party and America's two-party system that will be of particular interest to today's conservatives. The Unmaking of a Mayor ends with a wistful glance at what might have been in 1965--and what might yet be.

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If there has been a unifying theme of Barack Obama's presidency, it is the inexorable growth of the administrative state. Its expansion has followed a pattern: First, expand federal powers beyond their constitutional limits. Second, delegate those powers to agencies and away from elected politicians in Congress. Third, insulate civil servants from politics and accountability. Since its introduction in American life by Woodrow Wilson in the 20th Century, the administrative state's has steadily undermined democratic self-government, reduced the sphere of individual liberty, and burdened the free market and economic growth. In Liberty's Nemesis, Dean Reuter and John Yoo collect the brightest political minds in the country to expose this explosive, unchecked growth of power in government agencies ranging from health care to climate change, financial markets to immigration, and more. Many Americans have rightly shared the Founders' fear of excessive lawmaking, but Liberty's Nemesis is the first book to explain why the concentration of power in administrative agencies in particular is the greatest -- and most overlooked -- threat to our liberties today. If we fail to curb it, our constitutional republic might easily devolve into something akin to the statist governments of Europe. President Obama's ongoing efforts to encourage just such a devolution, and the problems his administration faces as a consequence, present a critical opportunity to defend the original vision of the Constitution.

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In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein provides a lively, scholarly account of how the Obama administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. Lawless documents how President Barack Obama has presided over one constitutional debacle after another--Obamacare; unauthorized wars in the Middle East; attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights; and many more. Violating his own promises to respect the Constitution's separation of powers, Obama brazenly ignores Congress when it won't rubber-stamp his initiatives. "We can't wait," he intones when amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memo legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, as if Congress doing its job as a coequal branch of government somehow permits the president to rule like a dictator, free from the Constitution's checks and balances. President Obama has also presided over the bold and rampant lawlessness of his underlings. Harry Truman famously said, "The buck stops here." When confronted with allegations that his administration's actions are illegal, Obama responds, "So sue me." Lawless shows how President Obama has betrayed not only the Constitution but also his own stated principles. In the process, he has done serious and potentially permanent damage to our constitutional system. As America swings into election season, it will have to grapple with finding a president who can repair Obama's lawless legacy.

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What is social justice? For Friedrich Hayek, it was a mirage--a meaningless, ideological, incoherent, vacuous cliche. He believed the term should be avoided, abandoned, and allowed to die a natural death. For its proponents, social justice is a catchall term that can be used to justify any progressive-sounding government program. It endures because it venerates its champions and brands its opponents as supporters of social injustice, and thus as enemies of humankind. As an ideological marker, social justice always works best when it is not too sharply defined. In Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is, Michael Novak and Paul Adams seek to clarify the true meaning of social justice and to rescue it from its ideological captors. In examining figures ranging from Antonio Rosmini, Abraham Lincoln, and Hayek, to Popes Leo XIII, John Paul II, and Francis, the authors reveal that social justice is not a synonym for "progressive" government as we have come to believe. Rather, it is a virtue rooted in Catholic social teaching and developed as an alternative to the unchecked power of the state. Almost all social workers see themselves as progressives, not conservatives. Yet many of their "best practices" aim to empower families and local communities. They stress not individual or state, but the vast social space between them. Left and right surprisingly meet. In this surprising reintroduction of its original intention, social justice represents an immensely powerful virtue for nurturing personal responsibility and building the human communities that can counter the widespread surrender to an ever-growing state.

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Open Immigration: Yea by Alex Nowrasteh Extensive immigration restrictions are an attempt by the U.S. government to centrally manage the demographics, labor market, and culture of the United States instead of letting those facets of our society develop naturally -- as they have throughout most of history. Many objections have been raised against a return to America's traditional free-immigration policy, but they are without merit and ignore immigration's tremendous benefits. In this Broadside, Alex Nowrasteh explains how a policy of open immigration is consistent with America's founding principles, the ideals of a free society, and the foundation of a free-market economy. Immigration restrictions should be based on protecting the life, liberty, and private property of Americans from those who are most likely to infringe upon them. A freer immigration system would not only be economically beneficial to the United States, but it would also be consistent with American values. Open Immigration: Nay by Mark Krikorian Immigration has always been an important part of America's story. Over the past century, however, the United States has seen drastic changes -- in government spending, the economy, technology, security, and assimilation -- and the needs of the nation have changed. Mass immigration is no longer compatible with those needs. In this Broadside, Mark Krikorian argues that the federal immigration program needs to adjust to the realities of modern America by scaling back the number of newcomers who are allowed to settle in the country. While this doesn't mean zero immigration, it does mean that we must evaluate and permit only the most compelling cases. What worked in the past will not work today, and our immigration policies must change in response to new circumstances.

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Are we on the cusp of detente with Iran? Conventional wisdom certainly seems to believe so. In the aftermath of the interim nuclear deal struck in November 2013 between the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 powers (the United States, France, England, Russia, China and Germany), hopes are now running high for a historic reconciliation between Iran's clerical regime and the West. Yet there is ample reason for skepticism that the United States and Europe can truly curb Iran's nuclear ambitions by diplomatic means. Moreover, the current focus on Iran's nuclear program not he part of the Western governments is deeply dangerous, because it fails to recognize--let alone address--Iran's other international activities, or its foreign policy ambitions. Those objectives reveals Ilan Berman, are global in scope, and they are growing. Iran's Deadly Ambition explains how America's retraction from the Middle East has created significant breathing room for an Iranian regime that not long ago was on the political ropes. Economically, the Islamic Republic is "out of the box" that was erected over the past decade-and-a-half by Western sanctions, thanks to the "interim" nuclear deal. As a result, Iran's leaders are again thinking big about their country and its place in the world. America faces stark choices: to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions and global activities, or to accept and accommodate the region's newest hegemon, with all that that portends for American security and the safety of its allies.

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For decades, the U.S. invested ever-growing fortunes into its antiquated K-12 education system in exchange for steadily worse outcomes. At the same time, Americans spent more than they could afford on higher education, driven by the kind of cheap credit that fueled the housing crisis. The graduates of these systems were left unprepared for a global economy, unable to find jobs, and on the hook for student loans they could never repay. Economist Herb Stein famously said that something that can't go on forever, won't. In the case of American education, it couldn't--and it didn't. In The Education Apocalypse, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains how American education as we knew it collapsed -- and how we can all benefit from unprecedented power and freedom in the aftermath. From the advent of online education to the rebirth of forgotten alternatives like apprenticeships, Reynolds shows students, parents, and educators how--beyond merely surviving the fallout--they can rethink and rebuild American education from the ground up.

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The Nixon Effect examines the 37th president's political legacy in broad-ranging ways that make clear, for the first time, the breadth and duration of his influence on American political life. The book argues that Nixon is the key political figure in postwar American politics in multiple ways, some barely acknowledged until now. His legacy includes a generational shift in the ideological orientations of both the Republican and Democratic parties; the Nixon influence, both intentional and unintentional, was to push both parties further out to their ideological poles. So stark was Nixon's influence on party identities that it shaped the hardened partisan polarization in Washington today and the evolution of what has come to be called Red and Blue America. Stemming in part from this, and also from Nixon's scorched-earth political warfare and eventually his Watergate scandal, we have also seen the evolution of politics as war, where adversaries and ideological opponents are seen as evil or unpatriotic. Finally, Nixon's pioneering tactics--from the identification of the Silent Majority to the Southern Strategy, from "triangulating" between both parties and claiming the political center to launching the culture war with attacks on "elites" in media, academia, and the courts--have shaped political communications and strategy ever since. Other books have argued for Nixon's importance, but Douglas E. Schoen's is the first to take into account the full range of this fascinating man's influence. While not discounting Nixon's many misdeeds, Schoen treats his presidency and its importance with the seriousness--and evenhandedness--that the subject deserves.

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Blood of Tyrants reveals the surprising details of our Founding Fathers' approach to government and this history's impact on today. Delving into forgotten--and often lurid--facts of the Revolutionary War, Logan Beirne focuses on the nation's first commander in chief, George Washington, as he shaped the very meaning of the United States Constitution in the heat of battle. Key episodes of the Revolution illustrate how the Founders dealt with thorny wartime issues: How do we protect citizens' rights when the nation is struggling to defend itself? Who decides war strategy? When should we use military tribunals instead of civilian trials? Should we inflict harsh treatment on enemy captives if it means saving American lives? Beirne finds evidence in previously unexplored documents such as General Washington's letters debating the use of torture, an eyewitness account of the military tribunal that executed a British prisoner, Founders' letters warning against government debt, and communications pointing to a power struggle between Washington and the Continental Congress. Vivid stories from the Revolution set the stage for Washington's pivotal role in the drafting of the Constitution. The Founders saw the first American commander in chief as the template for all future presidents: a leader who would fiercely defend Americans' rights and liberties against all forms of aggression. Pulling the reader directly into dramatic scenes from history, Blood of Tyrants fills a void in our understanding of the presidency and our ingenious Founders' pragmatic approach to issues we still face today.

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Like an eagle, American colonists ascended from the gulley of British dependence to the position of sovereign world power in a period of merely two centuries. Seizing territory in Canada and representation in Britain; expelling the French, and even their British forefathers, American leaders George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson paved their nation's way to independence. With the first buds of public relation techniques--of communication, dramatization, and propaganda--America flourished into a vision of freedom, of enterprise, and of unalienable human rights. In Flight of the Eagle, Conrad Black provides a perspective on American history that is unprecedented. Through his analysis of the strategic development of the United States from 1754-1992, Black describes nine "phases" of the strategic rise of the nation, in which it progressed through grave challenges, civil and foreign wars, and secured a place for itself under the title of "Superpower." Black discredits prevailing notions that our unrivaled status is the product of good geography, demographics, and good luck. Instead, he reveals and analyzes the specific strategic decisions of great statesmen through the ages that transformed the world as we know it and established America's place in it.

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The United States is a nation in crisis. While Washington's ability to address our most pressing challenges has been rendered nearly impotent by ongoing partisan warfare, we face an array of foreign-policy crises for which we seem increasingly unprepared. Among these, none is more formidable than the unprecedented partnership developing between Russia and China, suspicious neighbors for centuries and fellow Communist antagonists during the Cold War. The two longtime foes have drawn increasingly close together because of a confluence of geostrategic, political, and economic interests--all of which have a common theme of diminishing, subverting, or displacing American power. While America's influence around the world recedes--in its military and diplomatic power, in its political leverage, in its economic might, and, perhaps most dangerously, in the power and appeal of its ideas--Russia and China have seen their influence increase. From their support for rogue regimes such as those in Iran, North Korea, and Syria to their military and nuclear buildups to their aggressive use of cyber warfare and intelligence theft, Moscow and Beijing are playing the game for keeps. Meanwhile America, pledged to "leading from behind," no longer does much leading at all. In The Russia-China Axis, Douglas E. Schoen and Melik Kaylan systematically chronicle the growing threat from the Russian-Chinese Axis, and they argue that only a rebirth of American global leadership can counter the corrosive impact of this antidemocratic alliance, which may soon threaten the peace and security of the world.

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James Piereson examines the bizarre aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination: Why in the years after the assassination did the American Left become preoccupied with conspiratorial thinking? How and why was Kennedy transformed in death into a liberal icon and a martyr for civil rights? In what way was the assassination linked to the collapse of mid-century liberalism, a doctrine which until 1963 was the reigning philosophy of the nation?

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This Broadside will look at the changes that can be made to halt the full implementation of the law over the next few years, including repealing parts of the act that are unpopular with members of both parties. These parts are the medical device tax, IPAB, the new 3.8 percent tax on unearned income, to name a few. Also covered will be potential reforms to Medicare and Medicaid, two major entitlement programs that, if not reformed to ensure sustainability for those who really need these programs, will be bankrupt by 2024. There are a number of important lawsuits that will come before the courts this year on issues such as the exchanges, employer and individual mandates, and the contraception mandate. These will be highlighted and their potential impact on the law will be discussed. Finally, there is the issue of defunding the Medicaid expansion and the federal tax subsidies which, unless changed, will add tremendously to the cost of health care in this country. With the current fiscal crisis, these programs must be scaled back. Like welfare reform, the battle to bring about meaningful health care reform is a long-term fight. We must not give up. The election of 2016 will be very important for the future direction of health care. A reform plan will be offered. If Obamacare is not repealed and replaced, the U.S. will be on the road to a single-payer, "Medicare for All" system such as exists in Canada. We, too, will face long waiting lists, rationed care, and a lack of access to the latest technology and treatments. Examples will be given. America will be on the "Road to Serfdom" and there will be no off-ramp.

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America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders-and each other? In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, "can't run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you." These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture. Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history-they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty. With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we've politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher's pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug. How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver's seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.

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In the Age of Obama, the ugly charge of racism is more prevalent than ever. Why? Because telling the truth about racial profiling, crime, the social fallout of single parent homes, and the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice would mean facing up to the soul-destroying pathologies of urban black culture. Instead, black leaders and their guilty white allies focus tirelessly on historic oppression and the supposed need for more government aid, and demonize those who challenge their shopworn views as--what else?--racist. In Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race (formerly No Matter What ...They'll Call This Book Racist), Harry Stein attacks the rigid prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about race, not to offend or shock (though they certainly will) but to provoke the serious thinking that liberal enforcers have until now rendered impossible. Stein examines the ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sown division, corruption, and resentment in this country. He pays special attention to the stifling falsehood that it is racism that continues to mire millions of underclass blacks in physical and spiritual poverty. By far the greater problem, says Stein, is the culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape. For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half century, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. All of us--and especially black people--for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.

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The first fundamental truth about the "Arab Spring" is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced. Is this self-perception based on objective truth? Does it reflect an accurate construction of Islam? It is over these questions that American officials and Western intellectuals obsess. Yet the questions are irrelevant. This is not a matter of right or wrong, of some posture or policy whose subtle tweaking or outright reversal would change the facts on the ground. This is simply, starkly, the way it is. Every human heart does not yearn for freedom. In the Islam of the Middle East, "freedom" means something very nearly the opposite of what the concept connotes to Westerners -- it is the freedom that lies in total submission to Allah and His law. That law, sharia, is diametrically opposed to core components of freedom as understood in the West -- beginning with the very idea that man is free to make law for himself, irrespective of what Allah has ordained. It is thus delusional to believe, as the West's Arab Spring fable insists, that the region teems with Jamal al-Madisons holding aloft the lamp of liberty. Do such revolutionary reformers exist? Of course they do ...but in numbers barely enough to weave a fictional cover story. When push came to shove -- and worse -- the reformers were overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of Islamic supremacism, the dynamic, consequential mass movement that beckons endless winter. That is the real story of the Arab Spring -- that, and the Pandora's Box that opens when an American administration aligns with that movement, whose stated goal is to destroy America.

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American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going "on strike." They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this "man-child" phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them? As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren't dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.

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The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after fifteen years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie. He sets up camp in a tent city built in downtown Beirut by anti-Syrian dissidents, is bullied and menaced by Hezbollah's supposedly friendly "media relations" department, crouches under fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border during the six-week war in 2006, witnesses an Israeli ground invasion from behind a line of Merkava tanks, sneaks into Hezbollah's postwar rubblescape without authorization, and is attacked in Beirut by militiamen who enforce obedience to the "resistance" at the point of a gun. From the Cedar Revolution that ousted the occupying Syrian military regime in 2005 to the devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 to Hezbollah's slow-motion but violent assault on Lebanon's elected government and capital, Totten's account is both personal and comprehensive. He simplifies the bewildering complexity of the Middle East; gains access to major regional players as well as to the man on the street; and personally witnesses most of the events he describes. The Road to Fatima Gate should be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, Iran's expansionist foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, asymmetric warfare, and terrorism in the aftermath of September 11.

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Saturday People, Sunday People is a unique portrait of Israel as seen through the eyes of a Christian who came for a visit and has stayed on for more than six years. Long fascinated by a land that has become an abstraction centering on international conflicts of epic proportions, Lela Gilbert arrived in Israel on a personal pilgrimage in August 2006--in the midst of a raging war. What she found was a vibrant country, enlivened by warm-hearted, lively people of great intelligence and decency. Saturday People, Sunday People tells the story of the real Israel and of real Israelis--ordinary and extraordinary--and the energetic rhythm of their lives, even during times of tragedy and terror. The book interweaves a memoir of Gilbert's experiences with Israel's people and places, alongside a rich account of past and present events that continue to shape the lives of Israelis and the world beyond their borders. As she watched events unfold in the Middle East, Gilbert witnessed how the simplest facts turned into lies, from denial of the existence of a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem to the characterization of Israel's defensive border fence as "Apartheid." Then Gilbert learned of a story that had all but vanished into history: the persecution and pogroms that drove more than 850,000 Jews from Muslim lands between 1948 and 1970--the "Forgotten Refugees." Their experience is now repeating itself among Christian communities in those same Muslim countries. This cruel pattern embodies the Islamist slogan calling for the elimination of "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people."

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"We're becoming like Europe." This expression captures many Americans' sense that something has changed in American economic life since the Great Recession's onset in 2008: that an economy once characterized by commitments to economic liberty, rule of law, limited government, and personal responsibility has drifted in a distinctly "European" direction. Americans see, across the Atlantic, European economies faltering under enormous debt; overburdened welfare states; governments controlling close to fifty percent of the economy; high taxation; heavily regulated labor markets; aging populations; and large numbers of public-sector workers. They also see a European political class seemingly unable--and, in some cases, unwilling--to implement economic reform, and seemingly more concerned with preserving its own privileges. Looking at their own society, Americans are increasingly asking themselves: "Is this our future?" In Becoming Europe, Samuel Gregg examines economic culture--the values and institutions that inform our economic priorities--to explain how European economic life has drifted in the direction of what Alexis de Tocqueville called "soft despotism," and the ways in which similar trends are manifesting themselves in the United States. America, Gregg argues, is not yet Europe; the good news is that economic decline need not be its future. The path to recovery lies in the distinctiveness of American economic culture. Yet there are ominous signs that some of the cultural foundations of America's historically unparalleled economic success are being corroded in ways that are not easily reversible--and the European experience should serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

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President Obama has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented centralization of education policy under the guise of promoting educational innovation, accountability, and improved student achievement. In reality, Obama's new national standards, curricula, and testing -- in addition to huge spending commitments by the federal government -- shift the policymaking power from individuals and communities to the federal bureaucracy. In this Broadside, Lance Izumi examines Obama's education policies and shows us why Americans must protect and promote the power of individuals, especially parents, to control children's education. We should look to the revolutionary school-choice and parental-empowerment laws passed by key states and other nations such as Canada. While Obama is pushing American education in the wrong direction, we can steer it back to local control.

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America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders--and each other? In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, "can't run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you." These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture. Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history--they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty. With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we've politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher's pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug. How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver's seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.

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While Americans focus on terrorism, a more insidious Islamist threat to our way of life lurks. It is the agenda of sharia, Islama (TM)s authoritarian legal and political system. The global Islamist movement aims, in the words of the international Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy the West by sabotaging it from within. Its principal strategy is not mass-murder but the exploitation of Western freedoms and the insinuation of sharia principles into Western legal systems. Because those principles are hostile to our core liberties - indeed, hostile even to the bedrock premise that people are free to govern themselves as they see fit - shariaa (TM)s advance gradually undermines our culture. The sharia agenda has found a friend in the Obama administration, which has embraced its vanguard, including the Brotherhood and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. President Obama is actively abetting the Islamist platform: promoting sharia in his foreign policy, easing enforcement of laws that stop Islamic "charitiesa from diverting funds to jihadist terror, and even sponsoring a United Nations resolution that - under the guise of insulating Islam from criticism - would stifle First Amendment rights.

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The real threat to the United States is not terrorism. The real threat is the sophisticated forces of Islamism, which have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security, but to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy--freedom and individual liberty. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy provides a harrowing account of how the global Islamist movement's jihad involves far more than terrorist attacks, and how it has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep. McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who convicted the notorious "Blind Sheikh" and other jihadists for waging a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In his national bestseller, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter 2008), he explored government's conscious avoidance of the terrorist threat, which made the nation vulnerable to mass-murder attacks. In The Grand Jihad, he exposes a more insidious peril: government's active concealment of the Islamist ideology that unabashedly vows to "conquer America." With the help of witting and unwitting accomplices in and out of government, Islamism doesn't merely fuel terrorism but spawns America-hating Islamic enclaves in our midst and gradually foists Islam's repressive law, sharia, on American life. The revolutionary doctrine has made common cause with an ascendant Left that also seeks radical transformation of our constitutional order. The prognosis for liberty could not be more dire.

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The International Criminal Court claims authority over Americans for actions that the United States does not define as "crimes." In short, the Twenty-First Century is witnessing an epic struggle between the forces of global governance and American constitutional democracy. Transnational progressives and transnational pragmatists in the UN, EU, post-modern states of Europe, NGOs, corporations, prominent foundations, and most importantly, in America's leading elites, seek to establish "global governance." Further, they understand that in order to achieve global governance, American sovereignty must be subordinated to the "global rule of law." The U.S. Constitution must incorporate "evolving norms of international law." Sovereignty or Submission examines this process with crystalline clarity and alerts the American public to the danger ahead. Global governance seeks legitimacy not in democracy, but in a partisan interpretation of human rights. It would shift power from democracies (U.S., Israel, India) to post-democratic authorities, such as the judges of the International Criminal Court. Global governance is a new political form (a rival to liberal democracy), that is already a significant actor on the world stage. America faces serious challenges from radical Islam and a rising China. Simultaneously, it faces a third challenge (global governance) that is internal to the democratic world; is non-violent; but nonetheless threatens constitutional self-government. Although it seems unlikely that the utopian goals of the globalists could be fully achieved, if they continue to obtain a wide spread influence over mainstream elite opinion, they could disable and disarm democratic self-government at home and abroad. The result would be the slow suicide of American liberal democracy. Whichever side prevails, the existential conflict?global governance versus American sovereignty (and democratic self-government in general) will be at the heart of world politics as far as the eye can see.

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Barack Obama has made it clear that he thinks the world would be a better and more peaceful place if the United States were too weak to affect the course of events. Obama, along with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has slashed missile defense, dramatically reduced investment in future military technologies, and broken promises to our allies. In addition, Obama is transforming our military into a politically correct force that no one will want to join. In this incisive Broadside, Jed Babbin analyzes Obama's military strategy and shows how he has pursued a consistent course of action that defines him and his overriding objective -- to reduce America from a superpower to a paper tiger. These are not the policies of a president who wants America to be strong, safe, and secure. But they are the policies that define Barack Obama. ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES: a new series of critical pamphlets from Encounter Books. Uniting an 18th-century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit (think The Federalist Papers, Common Sense) with 21st-century technology and channels of distribution, Encounter Broadsides offer indispensable ammunition for intelligent debate on the critical issues of our time. Written with passion by some of our most authoritative authors, Encounter Broadsides make the case for liberty and the institutions of democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.

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The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after fifteen years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie. He sets up camp in a tent city built in downtown Beirut by anti-Syrian dissidents, is bullied and menaced by Hezbollah's supposedly friendly "media relations" department, crouches under fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border during the six-week war in 2006, witnesses an Israeli ground invasion from behind a line of Merkava tanks, sneaks into Hezbollah's post-war rubblescape without authorization, and is attacked in Beirut by militiamen who enforce obedience to the "resistance" at the point of a gun. From the "Cedar Revolution" that ousted the occupying Syrian military regime in 2005, to the devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, and to Hezbollah's slow-motion but violent assault on Lebanon's elected government and capital, Totten's account is both personal and comprehensive. He simplifies the bewildering complexity of the Middle East, has access to major regional players as well as to the man on the street, and personally witnesses most of the events he describes. The Road to Fatima Gate should be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, Iran's expansionist foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, asymmetric warfare, and terrorism in the aftermath of September 11.

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Rich Trzupek has spent over 25 years engaged in combat with the environmental movement on the front lines, helping America's industrial sector defend itself against the increasingly aggressive tactics that environmental advocacy groups and their allies in the Environmental Protection Agency employ. In Regulators Gone Wild Trzupek lays out the inside story that describes the way the green/big government alliance has combined to stifle American productivity and hamstring American innovation, not by design, but as the inevitable consequence of pursuing a utopian vision of environmental purity that can never, ever be realized. As a respected scientist and consultant, Rich Trzupek has been employed by some of America's largest corporations and by some of its smallest, most innovative entrepreneurs. Those experiences have provided him with a unique perspective. While many of his colleagues in the industrial consulting community only consider the short-term profit opportunities that an overly aggressive EPA provides them, Trzupek takes a longer view. If the EPA continues to hamstring America's ability to create wealth, everyone loses. When it comes to today's environmental issues, most of the public's attention is focused on the issue of "climate change" and initiatives to reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. As a climate change skeptic, Trzupek argues against these measures, but he sees the rise of this issue as another inevitable step in a progression that spans four decades during which the green movement has continually sought new ways to control industry and the EPA has always happily obliged them. Attempts to restrict America's use of cheap, plentiful coal and stop oil exploration are just the latest examples of regulators gone wild.

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Wages of Appeasement explores the reasons why a powerful state gives in to aggressors. It tells the story of three historical examples of appeasement: the greek city-states of the fourth century b.c., which lost their freedom to Philip II of Macedon; England in the twenties and thirties, and the failure to stop Germany's aggression that led to World War II; and America's current war against Islamic jihad and the 30-year failure to counter Iran's attacks on the U.S. The inherent weaknesses of democracies and their bad habit of pursuing short-term interests at the expense of long-term security play a role in appeasement. But more important are the bad ideas people indulge, from idealized views of human nature to utopian notions like pacifism or disarmament. But especially important is the notion that diplomatic engagement and international institutions like the u.n. can resolve conflict and deter an aggressor----the delusion currently driving the Obama foreign policy in the middle east. Wages of Appeasement combines narrative history and cultural analysis to show how ideas can have dangerous and deadly consequences.

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Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, conservatism possessed a vibrancy that resulted from spirited intellectual inquiry and open debate. However, in the years leading up to the 2008 elections, this energy seemed to fade. It was as if the conservative movement became less concerned with ideas and more concerned with the preservation of political power. In Conservatism Redefined, Patrick Garry examines how Conservatives dug themselves into this hole, and how they can climb out. However, unlike many conservative pundits, Garry does not propose a simple, -rediscover our roots- credo. Instead, Conservatism Redefined reexamines and renews conservative ideology, explaining how the classical ideals of conservatism can be employed in new ways to address the concerns of citizens across the ethnic, generational, and economic spectrum. Conservatism in America is currently mired in its worst crisis since the 1960s. To be sure, the crisis accompanied the declining public opinion of the Bush presidency and the resurgence of liberalism and large, aggressive government in a time of crisis. But, as Patrick Garry explains, this does not mean that conservatism has been defeated as an ideology, it means it must be redefined.

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In Europe's Ghost, Michael Radu reveals that Europe's identity crisis does not lie in past or present racism or in a variety of largely invented or anachronistic crimes, but in the self-inflicted renunciation of national traditions in favor of multiculturalism. In fact, most European elites see jihadism as nothing but a peculiar form of criminality, due to the social and economic problems inside Europe, rather than what it is: a peculiar form of warfare rooted in cultural developments imported from the Muslim world. The truth, Radu offers, is that most Muslims in most European countries see themselves as visitors, rather than as citizens of Europe. Thus, the British media's outcry over the phenomenon of British-born Muslim terrorists murdering "fellow Britons" is dangerously misplaced.

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Robust financial markets support capitalism, they don't imperil it. But in 2008, Washington policymakers were compelled to replace private risk-takers in the financial system with government capital so that money and credit flows wouldn't stop, precipitating a depression. Washington's actions weren't the start of government distortions in the financial industry, Nicole Gelinas writes, but the natural result of 25 years' worth of such distortions. In the early eighties, modern finance began to escape reasonable regulations, including the most important regulation of all, that of the marketplace. The government gradually adopted a "too big to fail" policy for the largest or most complex financial companies, saving lenders to failing firms from losses. As a result, these companies became impervious to the vital market discipline that the threat of loss provides. Adding to the problem, Wall Street created financial instruments that escaped other reasonable limits, including gentle constraints on speculative borrowing and requirements for the disclosure of important facts. The financial industry eventually posed an untenable risk to the economy -- a risk that culminated in the trillions of dollars' worth of government bailouts and guarantees that Washington scrambled starting in late 2008. Even as banks and markets seem to heal, lenders to financial companies continue to understand that the government would protect them in the future if necessary. This implicit guarantee harms economic growth, because it forces good companies to compete against bad. History and recent events make clear what Washington must do. First, policymakers must reintroduce market discipline to the financial world. They can do so by re-creating a credible, consistent way in which big financial companies can fail, with lenders taking their warranted losses. Second, policymakers can reapply prudent financial regulations so that markets, and the economy, can better withstand inevitable excesses of optimism and pessimism. Sensible regulations have worked well in the past and can work well again. As Gelinas explains in this richly detailed book, adequate regulation of financial firms and markets is a prerequisite for free-market capitalism -- not a barrier to it.

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Don't Tread on Me is Carol Gould's journey through the astonishing world of British and European anti-Americanism. From Yanks being spat on, to other acts, the level of US-bashing has evolved into something more than just Bush-hatred. Wrapped in the anti-American fever sweeping Europe and Britain is fierce resentment of the 'Zionist lobby' in the United States and a deep loathing of America's support for Israel.

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This timely and fast-paced book by celebrated Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri examines the history of the Khomeinist movement in Iran to show how it is genetically programmed for war. It will also show how Khomeinsim can be defeated, enabling Iran to close the chapter of the revolution and return to the global mainstream. This book is mandatory for anyone concerned about the future of Iran, terrorism, and the prospects for middle east peace.

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Blacklisting Myself details Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Roger L. Simon's odyssey from financier of the Black Panther Breakfast Program to darling of the political right. In this tale of Hollywood radical chic run amuck, Simon relates his adventures with Richard Pryor, Warren Beatty, Woody Allen and real-life Hollywood KGB officers. Among the topics covered along the way: the new blacklist for conservatives in tinseltown and how new media will destroy Hollywood as we know it.

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The Next Founders brings to light the stories of seven remarkable people, six Arabs and an Iranian. Five are men; two, women. Four are Sunnis, two are Shiites, and the seventh is mixed. Their lives revolve around a sense of mission, and while the angles from which they attack it are varied, this mission is the same for all seven--to make their countries more free and democratic.

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From his impoverished childhood in segregated pre-war Louisiana to his audience with Bill Clinton at the White House, Ward Connerly's panoramic book spans a civil rights story that's making headlines from coast to coast. Since 1995, when Connerly first burst onto the American scene as the University of California Regent who forced the nation's largest public university to become color blind in its admissions policies, Connerly has led a national campaign to end race preference. In 1996, he passed Proposition 209 in California and two years later he led I-200, an identical measure, to victory in Washington state. He is now battling Governor Jeb Bush in Florida as he attempts to put a Florida Civil Rights Initiative on the ballot there. A personal book that gives the inside story of Connerly's battle against race preferences, Creating Equal names names and tells it like it is. It is destined to provoke debate from the dining room table to the halls of Congress. Connerly's encounters with the great and near great ranging from Jesse Jackson and Al Gore to Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch illuminate this book that has been praised by writers such as Shelby Steele. Illustrated with family and political photographs.

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Why the Democrats are Blue argues that secular, educated elites, using a commission created at the 1968 convention in Chicago and later chaired by Senator George McGovern, took the Democratic Party away from working class and religious Democrats. This quiet revolution helps explain why six of the last nine Democratic presidential candidates have lost.

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No domestic policy issue more angers or galvanizes the public than the controversy over eminent domain-the taking of private property for public use. The stakes in this always controversial procedure have been dramatically raised in recent years as eminent domain has been used to fund private development. As the notorious Kelo case in New London, CT demonstrated last year. The practice of using eminent domain to enrich municipalities is an incendiary issue. Veteran journalist, Carla Main, takes a hard look at this practice and delivers an incisive expose that is sure to be widely read and hotly debated.

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