Download Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy (Institutions of American Democracy)

Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy (Institutions of American Democracy)

In Losing the News, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones offers a probing look at the epochal changes sweeping the media, changes which are eroding the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy.
At a time of dazzling technological innovation, Jones says that what stands to be lost is the fact-based reporting that serves as a watchdog over government, holds the powerful accountable, and gives citizens what they need. In a tumultuous new media era, with cutthroat competition and panic over profits, the commitment of the traditional news media to serious news is fading. Indeed, as digital technology shatters the old economic model, the news media is making a painful passage that is taking a toll on journalistic values and standards. Journalistic objectivity and ethics are under assault, as is the bastion of the First Amendment. Jones characterizes himself not as a pessimist about news, but a realist. The breathtaking possibilities that the web offers are undeniable, but at what cost? Pundits and talk show hosts have persuaded Americans that the crisis in news is bias and partisanship. Not so, says Jones. The real crisis is the erosion of the iron core of news, something that hurts Republicans and Democrats alike.
Losing the News depicts an unsettling situation in which the American birthright of fact-based, reported news is in danger. But it is also a call to arms to fight to keep the core of news intact.

Praise for the hardcover:

"Thoughtful."
--New York Times Book Review

"An impassioned call to action to preserve the best of traditional newspaper journalism."
--The San Francisco Chronicle

"Must reading for all Americans who care about our country's present and future. Analysis, commentary, scholarship and excellent writing, with a strong, easy-to-follow narrative about why you should care, makes this a candidate for one of the best books of the year."
--Dan Rather

• ISBN13: 9780199754144
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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Download Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View

Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View

The Supreme Court is one of the most extraordinary institutions in our system of government. Charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution, the nine unelected justices of the Court have the awesome power to strike down laws enacted by our elected representatives. Why does the public accept the Court’s decisions as legitimate and follow them, even when those decisions are highly unpopular? What must the Court do to maintain the public’s faith? How can the Court help make our democracy work? These are the questions that Justice Stephen Breyer tackles in this groundbreaking book.

Today we assume that when the Court rules, the public will obey. But Breyer declares that we cannot take the public’s confidence in the Court for granted. He reminds us that at various moments in our history, the Court’s decisions were disobeyed or ignored. And through investigations of past cases, concerning the Cherokee Indians, slavery, and Brown v. Board of Education, he brilliantly captures the steps—and the missteps—the Court took on the road to establishing its legitimacy as the guardian of the Constitution.

Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution’s text or to the eighteenth-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circumstances—an approach that will best demonstrate to the public that the Constitution continues to serve us well. The Court, he believes, must also respect the roles that other actors—such as the president, Congress, administrative agencies, and the states—play in our democracy, and he emphasizes the Court’s obligation to build cooperative relationships with them.

Finally, Justice Breyer examines the Court’s recent decisions concerning the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, contrasting these decisions with rulings concerning the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He uses these cases to show how the Court can promote workable government by respecting the roles of other constitutional actors without compromising constitutional principles.

Making Our Democracy Work is a tour de force of history and philosophy, offering an original approach to interpreting the Constitution that judges, lawyers, and scholars will look to for many years to come. And it further establishes Justice Breyer as one of the Court’s greatest intellectuals and a leading legal voice of our time.

• ISBN13: 9780307269911
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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Download Working for Yourself: Law & Taxes for Independent Contractors, Freelancers & Consultants

Working for Yourself: Law & Taxes for Independent Contractors, Freelancers & Consultants

Whether you're an independent contractor, freelancer, or consultant, it all adds up to the same thing: you need to be more aware of laws and taxes than the average person.

Fortunately, Working for Yourself provides all the information you need to stay on top of it all. An independent contractor himself, author Attorney Stephen Fishman shows you everything you need to know to:

*meet business start-up requirements *set up home or outside offices *comply with strict IRS rules *establish sound business relationships *avoid unfair contracts *draft good agreements *get paid in full and on time

The 5th edition now provides information on leasing space for work, Health Savings Accounts and solo 401(k) plans. It also examines how to choose a business name, deal with audits, take a home office deduction -- and much more.

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Patent It Yourself, 13th Edition Reviews

Patent It Yourself, 13th Edition

The world's bestselling guide to patenting your creation! Have a world-class idea? Ready to protect your invention from copycats? Then turn to the best resource available -- Patent It Yourself. Attorney David Pressman takes you through the entire patent process, providing scrupulously updated information and clear instructions to help you determine if you can patent your invention, understand patent law, evaluate the commercial potential of your idea, perform your own patent search, file a provisional patent application, prepare a formal patent application, conduct a patent search online, understand basic patent law, complete all forms required by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, file your application, modify your invention after filing. The book also includes important legal forms to help you preserve your rights when showing or selling your invention: nondisclosure agreement, patent assignment, prototype-maker agreement, joint-ownership agreement, and more. The 12th edition is completely revised with updated case law and patent regulations, updated filing information and new application examples. (20090101)Say that you've come up with a really nifty idea for a gizmo that would improve the lives of every human being on Earth and probably turn you into a gadzillionaire, too! Before you get too far into the fantasy, you need this extremely detailed and comprehensive guide to the process of getting a patent. This is not a small book, but it contains everything you need to know, including a lot of things you probably don't KNOW you need to know. Very detailed, with examples of forms you'll need, addresses and marketing advice, this is the complete guide you'll need to navigate this complex process from square one to gadzillionaire-ness!

• Patent it Yourself: By Patent Attorney David Pressman.
• Conduct Patent Searches.
• File Patent Applications.
• Protect your inventions.

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Download Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle

In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes.

And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.

 

Arc of Justice is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

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Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge Reviews

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

The rise of the "information society" offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? In this book, Cass R. Sunstein develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives.

In an age of information overload, it is easy to fall back on our own prejudices and insulate ourselves with comforting opinions that reaffirm our core beliefs. Crowds quickly become mobs. The justification for the Iraq war, the collapse of Enron, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia--all of these resulted from decisions made by leaders and groups trapped in "information cocoons," shielded from information at odds with their preconceptions. How can leaders and ordinary people challenge insular decision making and gain access to the sum of human knowledge?

Stunning new ways to share and aggregate information, many Internet-based, are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. Through a ceaseless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, wikis, covering everything from politics and business plans to sports and science fiction subcultures, amass--and refine--information. Open-source software enables large numbers of people to participate in technological development. Prediction markets aggregate information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer manufacturers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about product launches and office openings. Sunstein shows how people can assimilate aggregated information without succumbing to the dangers of the herd mentality--and when and why the new aggregation techniques are so astoundingly accurate.

In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together might well provide the best path to infotopia.

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Download Understanding Criminal Law

Understanding Criminal Law

This comprehensive and clearly written Understanding treatise is frequently cited by scholars and courts in their analysis of substantive criminal law. Understanding Criminal Law is designed to be taught in conjunction with any casebook. The topics covered are those most often raised in criminal law casebooks, and coverage of these subjects is meant to complement professors' classroom discussions. The text focuses on the basic elements of, and defenses to, specific crimes such as homicide, rape, and theft, group criminality, and inchoate liability. Understanding Criminal Law also covers theories of punishment, sources of the criminal law, and overarching principles such as legality and proportionality. The common law is emphasized with extensive comparisons to the Model Penal Code and thoughtful examination of the underpinnings of the utilitarian philosophies of substantive criminal law. The text of Understanding Criminal Law encourages students to consider the approach these philosophies would take to a particular matter under discussion, thus providing an excellent learning tool for gaining a firm understanding of how our criminal justice system works.

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The Umbrella of Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradiction of U.S. Policy (Open Media Pamphlet) Reviews

The Umbrella of Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradiction of U.S. Policy (Open Media Pamphlet)

Chomsky observes the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a''Path to a Better World,'' while chronicling how far off the trail the United States is with respect to actual political practice and conduct. Analysing the contradictions of U.S. power while illustrating the real progress won by sustained popular struggle, Chomsky cuts through official political rhetoric to examine how the United States not only violates the UD, but at times uses it as a weapon to weild against designated enemiesThe United States government often invokes a moral imperative to honor human rights as justification for its foreign-policy decisions. But, according to Noam Chomsky, America's actual track record falls far short of the principles iterated in 1948's Universal Declaration of Human Rights--the accepted international standard. This slim but passionate volume lists case after case in which the United States has provided aid to grossly abusive regimes--among which Chomsky includes Israel and Indonesia--and examples of how the American government seeks to limit the human rights of its own citizens. With equal criticism for Democrat and Republican administrations, The Umbrella of U.S. Power refuses to remain silent about "the things it 'wouldn't do' to mention" as it works to expose the contradictions between what government leaders tell their people and what they actually do. --Ron Hogan

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Download School Law and the Public Schools: A Practical Guide for Educational Leaders (5th Edition) (Allyn & Bacon Educational Leadership)

School Law and the Public Schools: A Practical Guide for Educational Leaders (5th Edition) (Allyn & Bacon Educational Leadership)

School Law and the Public Schools is a practical, easy to read, comprehensive guide to the legal issues facing public schools in the U.S. today. An essential reference for all teachers, educational leaders, and policymakers at all levels, the book is organized and written in a style that is accessible to all, even those with little or no knowledge of the legal issues in education.

Download School Law and the Public Schools: A Practical Guide for Educational Leaders (5th Edition) (Allyn & Bacon Educational Leadership) Here

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