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Can a nationalist found an empire? The United States of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in the name of democracy, though any representative Iraqi government would have to oppose a foreign occupation. Russia under Vladimir Putin tries to impose its will on Ukraine in the name of national self-determination, denying that Ukrainians are a separate people. The Chinese regime modernizes Tibet while expressing its own sense of national superiority. All of these are imperial policies by essentially nationalist regimes, and all of them spread nationalism around the world. Ukrainian national identity is ever more distinct. Tibetan protests spread from towns...

LOS ANGELES - Dave Freeman, co-author of "100 Things to Do Before You Die," a travel guide and ode to odd adventures that inspired readers and imitators, died after hitting his head in a fall at his home. He was 47. Freeman died Aug. 17 after the fall at his Venice home, his father, Roy Freeman, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. An advertising agency executive, Freeman co-wrote the 1999 book subtitled "Travel Events You Just Can't Miss" with Neil Teplica. It was based on the Web site whatsgoingon.com, which the pair ran together from 1996 to 2001. "This...

... Next, Harrison looks at definitions of fascism. The phenomenon is not confined to the political Right, since the USSR was as fascist as the Third Reich. Nor is it absent in the Third World. The inability to distinguish between people and their leaders is a fallacy often made by patronising Western intellectuals. As for the [racist Arabs'] accusation that Israel is a "racist, apartheid" state, the author argues that it is instead a nearly textbook example of a multicultural society. There are Black Israelis and Arab Jews and anyone can convert to Judaism. In Israel the holy places and...

A US publisher has cancelled the publication of a novel about the youngest wife of the Muslim prophet Mohammed amid a growing controversy over the book. The Jewel of Medina, a debut novel by journalist Sherry Jones about Mohammed's child bride A'isha had been due for release in the US last week. But publisher Random House released her from the contract amid the controversy and her agent said Jones was now looking for a publisher in another country to pick up the rights. "Random House made the decision to cancel its US publication of the novel The Jewel of Medina...

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years. Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are...

Protestors Dog Pelosi on Her LA Book Tour at American Jewish University August 12, 2008 by Marcy Winograd –Nancy Pelosi thanked her host, American Jewish University, proclaimed her support for Israel as a Jewish state, and then talked about the importance of women owning their power – this from the woman who upon assuming her role as Speaker of the House declared impeachment off the table, thus immediately surrendering her power to hold the Bush administration accountable for war crimes.Midway through Pelosi’s somewhat surreal Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters book chat in Los Angeles, Peter Thottam —...

Barack Obama may have quelled a self-described political "firestorm" by quitting Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial "black liberation" church, but the bombastic pastor is preparing to set off a bomb in the homestretch of the Democratic candidate's campaign.

In a presidential campaign season that has set many firsts, we are about to experience a new 'first' from Presidential hopeful Barack Obama. In an article published by Politico, sources have learned that on September 9th, Crown Publishing will release Barack Obama's 3rd book, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise". The release of the book will be unlike any other in modern history as it will represent the first time that Presidential Candidate has released a book while in the heat of a political campaign. I have wondered for months what Obama would do...

As we reported earlier this week, Jerome Corsi's, The Obama Nation marked it's debut this morning on the top of the New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List. Although the list represented the extent of the Times acknowledgement of the book. The New York times in it's trademark fashion celebrated the arrival of The Obama Nation by reviewing an array of books that represent their patented radicalized-left and anti-American views. Among their featured book reviews for the American Public to enjoy were...

A handsome new book by Amy Goldman jump-started memories of my family saving seeds from our beloved yellow oxheart tomatoes through fall and winter for spring planting. This was our heirloom tomato, although we did not think of it as such. In reading Miss Goldman's "The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table" (Bloomsbury), I learned that one woman, who was involved with preserving a strain her ancestors had brought when they emigrated from Germany, still puts sugar on her sliced tomatoes. I remember my grandmother doing this, although she also added a few drops of vinegar on the slices of...

Amazon.com is still up to their "review cleansing" on Pelosi's book! I was just reading the newest reviews which was at 42 and as I flipped the page, 11 ONE STAR reviews just vanished into thin air! It went from 42 down to 31 as of THIS minute. That means they've purged close to 300 one star reviews that I've seen erased. I probably missed another 200 or 300 that got wiped when I wasn't looking 99% of the time!

I don't know how to classify this as far as being "newsworthy" but it's certainly interesting how Left Coast companies and individuals are acting in regards to the debacle Nancy Pelosi's book has become from a sales standpoint and PR disaster. Amazon.com has deleted hundreds of posts and reviews and caused numerous "Amazon Prime" cancellations due to their heavy handed censorship of their buying community. Now I've read the consumer reviews of this book on and off since Friday and while obviously many didn't read the book, just like the Ann Coulter "reviews", the anti-Ann reviews remain while those critical...

TODAY'S PROGRAM August 3, 2008 Rep. Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House Watch on C-SPAN at 8pm/11pm ET ABOUT Q&A C-SPAN's New Interview Series Every Sunday night on Q&A, we introduce you to interesting people who are making things happen in politics, the media, education, and science & technology in hour-long conversations about their lives and their work. The show airs at 8pm ET on C-SPAN each week, every week of the year. But if you miss a program, you can catch up on previously aired shows on this web site. Either stream the video at any time convenient to...

California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the first woman speaker of the House, will promote her upcoming book, “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters” in three television appearances Monday: NBC’s “Today”, ABC’s “The View” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Something to watch for: will the ladies of the “The View” be able to keep it clean? During a 2007 Pelosi appearance on the program, Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg fawned over Paul Pelosi, the speaker’s husband, who was sitting in the audience. The banter between the two hosts got a bit bawdy with the well-mannered Pelosi.

Jerome Corsi's expose The Obama Nation jumped to the #1 slot in most book sales charts yeterday during it's first day of release destroying competition in non-fiction and political book sales. Scrupulously sourced with more than 600 footnotes, The Obama Nation is the result of that research. By tracing... ...Meanwhile rumours circulated online of readers visiting local bookstores such as Barnes & Noble only to find that the book was no where to be found. In certain stores, Obama supportive employees are apparently... Meanwhile purchases of Nancy Pelosi's newest release continued to plummet as she maintains her low, low, low...

<p>"If you are wondering why this book has a 1-star rating, it is because of FReeRepublic.com and Drudgereport.com are having their right wing minions bomb the site by giving 1-star reviews without even reading the book! "</p> <p>Well fellow Freepers, I have finally been caught. After reading a few insipid chapters at the library, I posted a well-deserved 1-star rating. Pelosi's whole book can be summed up in: "me me me me me me, look what I did, it's Bush's fault, and Capitalism sucks!".</p>

Is anyone familiar with Maybury's Books on Economics and history. I will be using them along with other texts in homeschooling this year. His libertarian perspective made me think twice, especially as he contrasted the current US with the Roman Empire.

PELOSI BOOK BOMB: FIRST FEMALE SPEAKER CHARTS #899 ON AMAZON SALES...

If Barack Obama is the most admired black man in America right now, it may be no exaggeration to say that John McWhorter is a candidate for the unpopularity prize. Which is an odd thing to say about a courteous academic from the arcane realm of linguistics. Yet by venturing onto the mean streets of hiphop with a dispassionate critique of a multimillion-dollar industry, he risks becoming a target of drive-by shootings by enraged academics, book reviewers and bloggers. McWhorter is not all that surprised that critics have given him a pummelling. He lets out a sigh of resignation: “By...

As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971. As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case. So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit. But if he thought that, he would have been...

I was drinking at a bar the other night with an ex-Marine named Patrick. We were talking about music while getting our asses kicked at darts by a girl who looked a hell of a lot like Sarah Chalke from Scrubs (she’s the blonde one who’s really hot, but in an über-dorky way). Patrick spent some time in Iraq before being honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, and now he’s in college, studying sound engineering and growing his hair out. His goal is to become a roadie. “All I want to do is make the music I love even better,”...

Two white people walk into a bar, a badly lit Culver City saloon called the Backstage whose interior design could be summed up as one pool table, a no-frills photo booth and some scattered neon. Blondie and the Rolling Stones belt out of the stereo, $3 Newcastle comes on tap and sticky laminated menus offer up garlic fries, chili cheese fries and buffalo wings. In other words, welcome to No. 148 of 150 things white people like: dive bars. "If you want to say I was planning that far ahead, that's great," said Christian Lander, resident white person behind the...

Wars of Ideas and THE War of Ideas Authored by Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II. Added June 12, 2008 Type: Monograph 62 Pages   Cost: Free The author discusses several types of wars of ideas in an effort to achieve a better understanding of what wars of ideas are. That knowledge, in turn, can help inform strategy. It is important to note, for instance, that because ideas are interpreted subjectively, it is not likely that opposing parties will "win" each other over by means of an ideational campaign alone. Hence, physical events, whether intended or incidental, typically play determining...

America’s longing for an empire has a long history NEARLY 50 years ago, when William Appleman Williams, one of the 20th century’s most important historians of diplomacy, drew attention to America’s persistent search for an empire, he was denounced for being pro-communist. To challenge deeply held beliefs about American innocence was shocking enough. To contradict cold-war propaganda was worse. Recently, however, such ideological conformism has been disappearing. It has become acceptable to speak of empire, both among those who defend American foreign policy and those who condemn it. “If people want to say we’re an imperial power—fine,” says William Kristol,...

Several years ago my husband borrowed a Shania Twain CD from the library. When my then 5-year-old daughter saw me roll my eyes at the barely dressed singer's provocative poses on the liner notes, she was smitten. She played the CD over and over, tossing her hair and wiggling her hips in imitation of those photos, oblivious to the innuendo but aware that she was doing something daring and rebellious. What, I thought, am I going to do when she's 13? Reading The Lolita Effect five years later, I wonder why that episode even stands out in my memory. To...

**This thread has been relaunched, so we can spread the word about this book.** Link to original thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2033075/posts Link to buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/Bathsheba-Deadline-Original-Novel/dp/0595470793/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213839458&sr=1-1 LEFTISTS WANT TO SUPPRESS THIS BOOK by John Cassell Paraphrasing one of Western culture's more infamous 19th Century authors There is a Spirit abroad in the land...neither president nor prime minister...neither pope nor parliament can exorcise it... In its face, the great civilizations of the Western World cower, for they can prevail not against it... ...like the California education official that forces Christian and Jewish children to take Moslem names and bow down on prayer...

Book to 'dish dirt' on Obama From correspondents in Washington June 24, 2008 05:30am Article from: Agence France-Presse THE same publisher who helped to sink John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign plans a follow-up effort to dish dirt on this year's Democratic hopeful, Barack Obama. The Case Against Barack Obama by conservative journalist David Freddoso will offer an alternative to the media's "whitewashed" view of the Illinois senator, Regnery Publishing president Marjory Ross told Politico.com overnight. Ms Ross said the book was due out on August 4 - the same month in 2004 that he published Unfit for Command, a scathing...

What is Casanova's biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story, just as no one setting out to describe his extraordinarily restless life could have read, travelled or written more than Casanova, or thought more about the business of living than he did, or lived as bravely or as excessively. The Histoire, which Casanova wrote at the end of his days when he was working as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, details with such wit, candour and style his...

LEFTISTS WANT TO SUPPRESS THIS BOOK by John Cassell Paraphrasing one of Western culture's more infamous 19th Century authors There is a Spirit abroad in the land...neither president nor prime minister...neither pope nor parliament can exorcise it... In its face, the great civilizations of the Western World cower, for they can prevail not against it... ...like the California education official that forces Christian and Jewish children to take Moslem names and bow down on prayer rugs... ...like the UK Minister of Education who sees to it that British children do not know of the Holocaust...because it offends people who were...

As the twig is bent, so bends the bough. For the Nazis it was important to educate little children in performing the supreme gesture of submission to Adolf Hitler's "Thousand-Year Reich." German sociologist Tilman Allert cites a postmistress who chided two little girls, come to mail a letter, for greeting her with "guten tag." Instruction improving on correction, she led them outside to practice the "heil Hitler" along with the arm lift. To perfect the lift, one kindergarten teacher had the children elevate their right hands to loop their lunch bags over her raised arm. A fairy-tale illustration shows the...

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was often depicted as hostile to the Scots (or 'Scotch', as he insisted on calling them). Yet, as he would sometimes remark, he had a long association with Scotland and its people. He was brought up in Northumberland, only 20 miles or so from the border. As a boy he had been cared for by a Scots nanny, before attending a preparatory school in Dunbar. After an interval, he married a Scots wife, and together they bought a home near Melrose, where he lived during the university vacations for almost 30 years....

Tuesday, 3 June 2008 Book review: Slavery within the Islamic world - the forbidden truth (L’ esclavage en Terre d’Islam: un tabou bien gardé) Now this looks interesting. A review by Elie Smith, an African journalist living and working in Paris, of the latest  book by Malek Chebal  - L’ esclavage en Terre d’Islam: un tabou bien gardé which he translates as Slavery within the Islamic world -- the forbidden truth. I have taken the review from the website African Path but it is also features on his own blog. The book itself is in French but this particular review is...

In 2005, President Bush articulated a national strategy for Iraq that hinged on successfully advising Iraqi security forces. "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," he said. The critical piece of this strategy was the adviser capability itself. Although the military's special operations community had long nurtured the capability to conduct "foreign internal defense," the Army and Marine Corps had largely marginalized this capability by the time of the Iraq war, disdaining it in favor of conventional combat operations. To achieve the president's vision for Iraq, the Army and Marines would need to build this capability from scratch, tearing...

For more than 40 years, author Tom Wolfe has challenged the way Americans look at themselves. His unconventional style of mixing literary techniques with factual reporting became known as the "new journalism." His novels include the bestsellers "Bonfire of The Vanities," "A Man in Full," and "I Am Charlotte Simmons." TCS contributor Ben Wattenberg sat down with Tom Wolfe in New York following a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Derriere Garde, a loosely organized group of artists and composers working to rediscover and reinvent traditional forms and techniques. The full video of this interview can...

Now that it's June, it's officially summer reading time. Those who have the luxury curl up by the beach engrossed in the latest faddish novel. This summer, publisher W.W. Norton is pushing "The Garden of Last Days," by Andre Dubus III, an Oprah Book Club fave. The book sympathizes with the 9/11 terrorists. As I've written before, Dubus' "House of Sand and Fog"--an Oprah selection--was a hideously anti-American tale, where the Americans are losers and evil-doers, and Iranian Muslim immigrants are the good, hard-working people, done wrong and caused to lose everything including their lives, thanks to these loser and...

In my opinion, Scott McClellan was one of the worst White House press secretaries ever. He was often short with reporters and refused to say anything about anything that was not in his talking points. He did not seem to know what role the White House press corps played in the functioning of the government. When McClellan did not want to answer a question, he would “refer” you to other agencies or to the vice president's office. In fact, McClellan had three standard evasive practices. One was the referral, which he learned from his predecessor Ari Fleischer. The second was...

Here’s how you sell a book. It’s easy. First, get a job in the administration of George W. Bush. You have to keep it for awhile – I mean, certainly more than a week or two – so you can claim some degree of credibility. Then get out of Dodge (getting fired for being ineffectual is not a problem), turn around and write a book that parrots everything Bush’s critics say about him. Welcome to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not even hard. The mainstream media and the Democrats pretty much write the book for...

Unique Book Dedicated to Trial against Templars on Display in Sofia 30 May 2008, Friday A copy of the unique book dedicated to the trial against templars, issued by Secret Vatican City archive, was presented Friday in Sofia's National Archeological Museum. Photo by Yuliana Nikolova (Sofia Photo Agency) The unique book dedicated to the trial against templars issued by Secret Vatican City archive was presented Friday in Sofia's National Archeological Museum. The publication, called "Processus Conta Templarios", is an expensive limited edition of the proceedings of the 1307-1312 papal trial of the mysterious medieval crusading order of warrior-monks who were...

May 30, 2008Berkeley, CaliforniaThis week ex-Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's tell-all book "What Happened" was released to huge fanfare. Scooter came over Wednesday morning with a copy and breathlessly exclaimed this was his "ticket to the easy life." Sometimes Scooter gets like this when he's had too many Mountain Dews for breakfast. When he finally calmed down, he explained that the whole country was talking about this book and it was selling like Love Lube at a Gay Pride parade.It took me a bit to finally understand that Scooter wasn't excited about the dirt this book dished on Chimpy McHitler, but rather the...

The former Bush administration pitchman making explosive election-year charges about how the White House handled the Valerie Plame case and built the case for invading Iraq said Thursday that he went to Washington to change it and became “disillusioned” when he realized he was just a pawn in the never-ending political game.

BOISE - Outgoing Sen. Larry Craig revealed tonight that he is writing a book. In a live interview on NewsChannel 7 Tuesday night – Craig, 62 - told Dee Sarton that he is in the process of writing a book on energy - that will also talk about his time in Congress – and the events of the past year. "There will be a bit of what's happened in the last year, and the way it evolved,� Craig said. “I think that's important for Idaho and those outside Idaho who are interested to know." He hopes the book will be...

Is Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind “The Bin Ladens,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world’s most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls “the kingdom’s Halliburton.” Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family’s wealth. So you would assume they would react with unmixed horror to a radical son, like the duchess in the Noël Coward song: You could have...

The success of the surge in Iraq was entirely predictable; so too are the tough times ahead. Should we choose to stay in that war-torn land, our professional military will face new and horrible challenges from the enemy, adjust and achieve new successes that will force the terrorists to changes their tactics again. We will defeat those too. So the process will continue, as Iraq moves in fits and starts toward its own version of democratic governance that, with our ongoing assistance, will be tolerably stable. That has been the pattern from the beginning in Iraq, where our fighting men...

A few days ago I had an opportunity to discuss the pithy but engagingly written book War and Decision with its author, Douglas Feith. The book is lengthy -- with endnotes it runs to 653 pages -- but has the virtue the other books about the internal processes on the Iraq war decision-making lack. It is well-detailed and superbly documented rather than the on-the-fly and off-the top-of-the-head self-serving and extensively reviewed accounts written by the other authors. Feith's version of events is drawn from memos, briefings and his personal contemporaneous notes which, to the extent that they've been declassified, you...

Michael has posted the first chapter of his book online in PDF. You can download a copy at the link.

We hear much from Michelle Obama about how unfair life can be for her and by extension all black people. Speaking of unfairness, Robert Stacy McCain has a complaint of his own. How on earth did Barack Obama merit the kind of treatment he got from the publishing world when he was still a law student? Writers of the world, UNITE! We are being oppressed, and it's people like Obama, his agent and his publishers who are oppressing us. A 28-year-old law student gets written up in the newspapers, then gets a call from a literary agent? She calls him?...

That’s because it’s a country striving for normality, whose normal aspects rarely make their way into media reports that highlight violence, mayhem, and failure. On TV, Iraq looks like a nation of masked, gun-toting fanatics, but in person, one finds friendliness, solidarity, and reasonableness amid the chaos. “Just because Iraqis have ‘Allahu Akbar’ on their flag,” Yon writes, “doesn’t mean they’re going to blow up the World Trade Center any more than ‘In God We Trust’ means we’re going to attack Communist China.” “Iraq does not hate America,” he insists. “If they hated us, I’d be urging an immediate troop...

When Heidi Holland welcomed Robert Mugabe to her home over 30 years ago, she “had never had a black man to dinner before.” Such was not an uncommon state of affairs among whites living in what was then Rhodesia, a rebel British colony—the “Jewel of Africa”—that had declared independence from the British Commonwealth rather than accept majority rule. Meeting with Mugabe, an exiled guerrilla leader fighting the minority white regime, could have meant a long jail sentence for Holland if the authorities had learned of it. Indeed, Holland, who today runs a Johannesburg guesthouse popular among journalists visiting the region...

There are children's books that explain our digestive system, and others that explore grief and jealousy. These important works help kids to understand complex truths and difficult emotions, and also pooping. But there has always been a gulf in this field of literature, a topic unexplored. No longer. Now, at long last, we finally have a book written for the confused children of mommies who abruptly come home one day with huge fake boobs. My Beautiful Mommy, written by a Florida plastic surgeon who fancies himself a leading expert in breast implants (closest known rival: Charlie Sheen), chronicles the inspiring...

Michael Yon is one of those unusual Americans who emerge in wartime to do the jobs that need to be done. The job he is doing is covering combat in Iraq at the gritty, confusing and valiant level of close combat, and doing so with honesty, passion and professional expertise. His new book, "Moment of Truth in Iraq," testifies to that. Yon isn't World War II's Ernie Pyle, he's the Global War on Terror's Michael Yon. This is a different war with a very different media environment. Yon "self-embedded" with U.S. combat units in 2005 -- paying his own way...