Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children (Hardcover)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Denver Post columnist Harsanyi's libertarian opus makes the case that government meddling in private lives demands our full attention. Whether bureaucrats are banning trans fats, trying to reduce drinking or legislating where citizens can smoke, Harsanyi objects. Such regulation, he believes, insults a freeborn citizenry. As he puts it: the five most frightening words in the English language: something needs to be done. Aiming at predictable targets like New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he finds no meddler too insignificant to escape his contempt, including a Dublin, Calif., councilwoman who tried to further tighten the city's antismoking law. Harsanyi also trashes the religious right for trying to legislate morality. But the book would have benefited from more anecdotes and original reporting, instead of incessantly naming overzealous do-gooders. Moreover, Harsanyi barely considers business's role, as these dangerous do-gooders fight fast food and tobacco companies armed with hundreds of millions of marketing dollars. There's not much new, but fellow libertarians may enjoy getting carried away by the flood of Harsanyi's outrage. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Besieged by do-gooder legislators and activists pushing health, safety, or "family values," Americans have been subjected to bans on everything from trans fats to cookie-scented ads in bus shelters to happy hours. Harsanyi offers a catalog of rules imposed by "Twinkie fascists" and "playground despots" who are micromanaging all manner of bad habits and immorality that threaten to remove from citizens the right to choose how they live their lives. For example, he notes that the Centers for Disease Control has evolved from an agency concerned with infectious diseases to one concerned with overeating. Conceding that one person's idea of government intrusion is another's idea of prudent policy, Harsanyi stakes a claim on common sense as the judge. Laws against illicit drugs and prostitution are good for the public welfare; laws against smoking outdoors are intrusive. This is not just a rant against overzealous legislators but a thoughtful look at how the government is overreaching into everyday life and how Americans are quietly going along with it. An interesting look at freedom and personal responsibility. Bush, Vanessa

Barnett: Resetting the clock on Bush watch

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Sunday, January 6, 2008

The White House's recent policy reversals amount to a stunning repudiation of the first seven years of George W. Bush's presidency. Where allies were previously disrespected, now they're viewed as essential. Where diplomacy was eschewed, now it's pursued with vigor. No longer running the government from his base, George W. Bush finally tries to lead the entire nation.

Bush's political opponents detect weakness and regret and a last-ditch attempt to salvage legacy, while supporters point to a self-professed dissident leader extending a freedom agenda in his final months. Both perspectives hold much truth.

But, as someone who's worked extensively throughout the national security community across this administration, both inside and outside government, I am struck by how the world seems to be returning to its pre-9/11 correlation of forces, like a cosmic clock being reset. It's almost as if the sum total effect of the second Bush term will be to repair the damage caused by the first.

They say time heals all wounds. It similarly muddles all doctrines.

When Bush entered office, transnational terrorism seemed dangerous but manageable - an "over there" challenge. Fast forward to 2008, and tell me what's different, other than your approach to air travel. Yes, we now know that a 9/11 is eminently possible, and we're keenly aware of its likely engineers and where they reside. When they pull off the next one, probably in Europe, we'll collectively head to roughly the same spot to roust them out again.

Meanwhile, we'll make reasonable efforts to bolster networks, both here and there, but the world must go on. Terrorists monopolized America's attention for a while but nowhere else, either because others regions were used to such travails or because bigger things were happening.

At the beginning of 2001, we sensed that the Middle East was broken, with little chance of peace. Iraq and Iran were clearly dangerous, but both were considered manageable through a mix of economic and military efforts. No doubt we have far many more boots on the ground today, and our sacrifice in blood and treasure are alarmingly large, but back then the Persian Gulf was seen as something primarily left to the U.S. military to handle, and so it is again today.

Bush's pre-emptive war became Gen. David Petraeus' counter-insurgency becomes Central Command's enduring challenge, along with Afghanistan and - suddenly - Pakistan. If, in 2001, I described a Pentagon dreaming of brilliant, high-tech war with rising China but operationally engrossed by a messy, unstable, low-tech security landscape, today you'd find all the same bureaucratic tensions, exponentially expanded and increasingly fueled by a young generation of ground officers bristling for institutional reform.

The Bush administration entered office complaining that scant attention was being paid to the big pieces of international security, like Russia, China, Europe and India. Then 9/11, triggering a fit of unilateralist pique, pushed all those great-power concerns aside as we targeted failed states and rogue regimes.

Fast forward to 2008, and we're back to focusing on how those big pieces help us manage the little ones. It turns out that you better ask the neighbors before you start draining the swamp.

But no, this whole journey wasn't merely the result of George Bush's miseducation at the hands of his now-discredited foreign policy Vulcans. In certain instances, like global warming, the mountain came to Mohammad. If, in 2001, the smart money said the Kyoto Treaty was doomed because it excluded booming China and India, today's conventional wisdom admits the same. Thus, we now search for more sensibly comprehensive and sustainable strategies for dealing with this global issue.

Is it enough, in the end, for Bush's second administration to repair - for the most part - the damage to America's global standing created by his first?

Yes and no.

The reason I supported John Kerry in 2004 was because I felt the Bush team, while being more than up to the necessary task of resetting the rules in the wake of 9/11, was distinctly incapable of subsequently gaining much buy-in from the rest of the world. Generating such buy-in always involves trade-offs: Winning most means compromising some.

I remain convinced that a Kerry administration would have propelled America far faster toward that inevitable adjustment, the very same re-alignment the Bush White House finally undertakes today.

So what's been lost?

Merely time and opportunity, our two most precious assets.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

© 2007 Knoxville News Sentinel

Religion and Humane Global Governance (Hardcover)
by Richard Falk (Author) "The religious dimension of human experience has been generally excluded from the serious study and practice of governance for several centuries, especially in the West..." (more)
Key Phrases: humane global governance, tactical nonviolence, millennial challenge, United Nations, United States, Third World (more...)

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In this eloquent treatise on religion and globalization, Princeton University international law professor Falk has an agenda. He is even preachy in parts, but his message is one that cannot be ignored. Falk is concerned about an inhumane globalization that neglects human suffering and eschews the global public good. Thus he augments his earlier works (Human Rights Horizons, etc.) on questions of global governance by considering the potential role of religion therein. The prospects for a "humane global governance," he states clearly, depend on religious resources specifically, on whether the religious resurgences that have surprised so many in recent years can offer a socially and politically responsible globalization to counter the presently dominating inhumane form. In light of this, he calls for (and articulates) a "critical ethical ecumenism" and a "politically engaged spirituality." Falk grounds this call for religiously based activism and governance in a richly historical conversation about ethical values, relationships between religion and politics, and interrelationships among premodern, modern and postmodern political impulses. Notably, alongside his unabashed view of religion's central role in human global governance, Falk dedicates a full chapter to considering the history of secularism's variations (with a discussion of Turkey, Iran and India, in addition to U.S. and Western European contexts) and its potentialities in an era of globalization. Through a sophisticated and nuanced discussion, Falk's own position cannot be missed: religion contains the only basis for long-term planetary stewardship and humane global governance. Love him or leave him.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

William E. Connolly, author, Why I Am Not A Secularist
Richard Falk once again cuts through the dross to define some of the central issues of our day.

The Five Front War: The Better Way to Fight Global Jihad (Hardcover)
by Daniel Byman (Author)
Editorial Reviews
Review
"An impressively comprehensive analysis of one of the most formidable security challenges of our time. Its authoritative policy recommendations are as timely as they are compelling."--Bruce Hoffman, Senior Fellow, Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy
"Daniel Byman writes with the access and intimacy of an insider and the critical, dispassionate eye of an outsider. At a time when the sky does, indeed, appear to be falling, he offers us hopeful, realistic solutions for defeating terrorism. The Five Front War should be required reading for scholars, soldiers, and citizens searching for the way ahead."--Dana Priest, national security correspondent, The Washington Post

"Daniel Byman lays out a series of cogent, well argued strategies to prevail in the struggle against violent jihadists in The Five Front War that will be of considerable interest to policy makers, journalists, and the interested public alike. An important and well written addition to the field."--Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know

Book Description
A comprehensive look at the War on Terror and the best way to a safer future

Scholar Daniel Byman offers a new approach to fighting the war on terrorism. He convincingly argues that two of the main solutions to terrorism offered by politicians-military intervention and the democratization of the Arab world-shouldn't even be our top priorities. Instead, he presents a fresh way to face intelligence and law enforcement challenges ahead: conduct counterinsurgency operations, undermine al-Qaeda's ideology, selectively push for reforms, and build key lasting alliances.

Daniel Byman (Washington, DC) directs the Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and also served on the 9/11 Commission. He regularly writes about terrorism and the Middle East for the Washington Post, Slate, and other publications.

Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge Studies in International Relations) (Paperback)
by Robert O'Brien (Author), Anne Marie Goetz (Author), Jan Aart Scholte (Author), Marc Williams (Author) "In May 1998 a crowd swarmed through Geneva attacking McDonald's restaurants and vandalising expensive hotels as part of their protest against the World Trade Organization..." (more)
Key Phrases: World Bank, Executive Board, Bretton Woods (more...)
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====================================================Editorial Reviews
Review
"empirically rich" Foreign Affairs

"...[the book] usefully highlights the unresolved tensions between state-sponsored institutions and growing transnational civic activism." Foreign Affairs

"useful study...the analysis is refreshing...this book remains useful for scholars of social movements." The Georgetown Public Policy Review Fall 2001

Book Description
The contest to shape global governance is increasingly being conducted on a number of levels and among a diverse set of actors. This book argues that increasing engagement between international institutions and sectors of civil society is producing a new form of international organization. The authors study the relationship between the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organisation, and environmental, labor, and women's movements, providing a rich analysis of the institutional response to social movement pressure.