Secret Service agents are like human surveillance cameras: They see everything that goes on behind the scenes involving the president, first lady, vice president, and their families. At the same time, they are a bulwark of democracy. If a president is assassinated, it nullifies democracy.
In a new chapter to the paperback edition of In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, I reveal that threats against President Obama have become so disturbing that a secret Presidential Threat Task Force has been created within the FBI to gather, track, and evaluate assassination threats that might be related to domestic or international terrorism.
The task force operates within the FBI’s National Security Branch. It consists of twenty representatives from pertinent agencies, including agents from the FBI and Secret Service and operatives from the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Department, as well as analysts.
The hardcover edition reported that threats against Obama rose by as much as 400 percent compared with when President Bush was in office. While threats fluctuate, the level continues to be high enough to call for the threat task force.
At the same time, the Secret Service, which let party crashers into the White House in November, has been spinelessly acceding to requests of the Obama administration officials for Secret Service protection in instances where there are no threats against them. No one outside of the government has heard of most of these officials, but they have one thing in common: They enjoy being chauffeured free of charge by the Secret Service.

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Hampton Sides - Ghost Soldiers, The Epic Account o f World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission (2002).jpg

The Bataan Death March was just the beginning of the woes American soldiers captured by the Japanese army in the Philippines had to endure. The survivors of the march faced not only their captors' regular brutality (having surrendered, they were considered to be less than honorable foes), but also a host of illnesses such as dysentery and malaria. For three years these "ghost soldiers" lived in misery, suffering terrible losses.
When Army Rangers among Douglas MacArthur's forces arrived in the Philippines, they hatched a daring plan to liberate their captured comrades, a mission that, if successful, would prove to be a tremendous morale booster at the front and at home. Led by a young officer named Henry Mucci (called "Little MacArthur" for his constant pipe as well as his brilliance as a strategist), a combined Ranger and Filipino guerrilla force penetrated far behind enemy lines, attacked Japanese forces guarding Allied prisoners at a jungle outpost called Cabanatuan, and shepherded hundreds of prisoners to safety, with an angry Japanese army in hot pursuit. Amazingly, they suffered only light casualties.
In Ghost Soldiers, journalist Hampton Sides recounts that daring rescue, once known to every American schoolchild but now long forgotten. A gifted storyteller, Sides packs his narrative with detailed descriptions of the principal actors on both sides of the struggle and with moments of danger and exhilaration. Thrilling from start to finish, his book celebrates the heroism of hundreds of warriors and brings renewed attention to one of the Rangers' finest hours.

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Gayle F. Wald - Shout, Sister, Shout!, The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (2007).jpg

USA Books - Gayle F. Wald - Shout, Sister, Shout, The Untold Story... Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe 2007.jpg

Long before “women in rock” became a media catchphrase, Rosetta Tharpe proved in spectacular fashion that women could rock. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915, she was gospel’s first superstar and the preeminent crossover figure of its “golden age” (1945–1965). Everyone who saw her perform said she could “make that guitar talk.”

Shout, Sister, Shout! is the first biography of this trailblazing performer who influenced scores of popular musicians, from Elvis Presley and Little Richard to Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt. An African American guitar virtuoso, Tharpe defied categorization. Blues singer, gospel singer, folk artist, and rock-and-roller, she “went electric” in the late 1930s, amazing northern and southern, U.S. and international, and white and black audiences with her charisma and skill. Ambitious and relentlessly public, Tharpe even staged her own wedding as a gospel concert—in a stadium holding 20,000 people!

Wald’s eye-opening biography, which draws on the memories of over 150 people who knew or worked with Tharpe, introduces us to this intriguing and forgotten musical heavyweight, forever altering our understanding of both women in rock and U.S. popular music.

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Gayle F. Wald - Shout, Sister, Shout!, The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (2007).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

Myka Carroll - New York City For Dummies (2010).jpg

From soaring skyscrapers to rumbling subways, power shopping to bargain-hunting, world-renowned restaurants to neighborhood pizzerias, majestic cathedrals to Times Square — New York has it all. Packed with info on must-see attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, plus the best shopping, dining, culture, and nightlife, this guide will have you saying, "I love New York"!

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Myka Carroll - New York City For Dummies (2010).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

Sam Wassonn - Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., Audrey Hepburn , Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Mode rn Woman (2008).jpg

USA Books - Sam Wassonn - Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., Audrey Hepburn, Br...st at Tiffanys, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman 2008.jpg

Wasson, who wrote on the career of writer-director Blake Edwards in A Splurch in the Kisser, tightens his focus for a closeup of Edwards's memorable Breakfast at Tiffany's, which received five Oscar nominations (with two wins). Interviewing Edwards and others, he skillfully interweaves key events during the making of this cinema classic. He begins (and ends) with Truman Capote, whose novel was initially regarded as unadaptable by the producers, since they hadn't the faintest idea how the hell they were going to take a novel with no second act, a nameless gay protagonist, a motiveless drama, and an unhappy ending and turn it into a Hollywood movie. The flow of Wasson's words carries the reader from pre-production to on-set feuds and conflicts, while also noting Hepburn's impact on fashion (Givenchy's little black dress), Hollywood glamour, sexual politics, and the new morality. Always stingy with praise, Capote dismissed the finished film as a mawkish valentine to New York City, but one feels he would have been entranced by Wasson's prismatic approach as he walks a perilous path between the analytic interpretation and the imaginative one. The result deserves Capote's nonfiction novel label. Recapturing an era, this evocative factual re-creation reads like carefully crafted fiction.

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Sam Wassonn - Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., Audrey Hepburn , Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Mode rn Woman (2008).epub

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Charles Edgley, Dennis Brissett - A Nation Of Medd lers (2000).jpg

There was a time when the phrase “It’s none of your business” meant something. Not anymore. A boorish and persistent army of meddlers, equipped with righteous indignation and a formidable array of theories and technologies, has made almost everyone’s business its own. Meddling in the lives of others is now the republic’s most visible obsession. From national crusades against bad habits such as drinking, smoking, and gambling to the efforts of a group in Woodbury, Minnesota, to create a fragrance-free work environment, Americans are meddling into each others lives as never before. Often masquerading as social concern or community involvement, the contemporary meddlers intervene in the name of most everything: health, safety, the commonweal, God, and “for the sake of the children.”Working within the symbolic interactionist tradition of cultural analysis and criticism, Charles Edgley and Dennis Brissett analyze this emergent phenomenon with insightful and provocative descriptions about how we came to be this way, why meddling is so appealing, and how meddling is packaged and marketed. Their conclusion offers wise and sometimes witty cautions about the proper relationship between the individual and society.

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Charles Edgley, Dennis Brissett - A Nation Of Medd lers (2000).pdf

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Laurence H. Shoup, William Minter - Imperial Brain Trust, The Council on Foreign Relations and Unite d States Foreign Policy (2004).jpg

USA Books - Laurence H. Shoup, William Minter - Imperial Brain Tru...reign Relations and United States Foreign Policy 2004.jpg

Shoup & Minter's devastating research on the planning behind the U.S. Empire is finally back in print 27 years after its 1977 publication by Monthly Review Press! The CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations, was formed by the international wing of U.S. capital after the League of Nations fell apart and inter-imperialist collaboration proved ineffective, leading to WWII. The farsighted few took measures to see that such a debacle did not recur. The CFR, the "imperial brain trust" of the title, carried out research concerning the optimal strategy for the U.S. in the war. They identified a minimum and maximum "Grand Area" that the U.S. needed to control, based on an assessment of factors including raw materials, and decided long before Pearl Harbor that the U.S. would need to control the Pacific Basin. War with Japan was the plan, with or without Pearl Harbor. Everything that happened in Europe was secondary to this consideration. The CFR Grand Area planning team was imported wholesale into FDR's State Department -- it became the State Department and directed the war strategy. So the U.S. was not in the war to defend itself, or to fight for Freedom, or to liberate anyone, cherished propaganda to the contrary. The goal was to seize as big a chunk of the globe as possible along with its raw materials and markets. This proved quite successful, of course, and with a few pesky holdouts that were encircled and attacked with variations on containment and rollback over the years, the U.S. Empire replaced the 19th century British Empire, with an unprecedented military reach and military bases everywhere. Since 1945 the sun has never set on the American Empire.

The name Noam Chomsky is much better known than Shoup & Minter, and Chomsky's analysis draws heavily on their groundbreaking research. The original source material from the CFR's study project is archived in the library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. It goes without saying that this book is just as timely as ever. For anyone still hypnotized by the sugar-coated lies about the reasons for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, thinking that we are the selfless Caped Crusaders for Justice, this book is the wakeup call. No, there is no Santa Claus, and no, the U.S. is not "doing God's will" when it continuously invades country after country. It is the most powerful Empire in history, currently taking action to secure control of the remaining and fast-diminishing reserves of OIL.

This is why, all the fulminations of lobotomized Republicans to the contrary, there is such strong bipartisan unity in U.S. foreign policy. The disagreements are all over tactics -- the basic imperial strategy is never in question, and any presidential candidate who does question it, whether from the Right (Buchanan) or the Left (McGovern, Dean) is preemptively defeated by the united efforts of the American ruling class. Of course there was that exception, JFK, and for that there are other methods...

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Laurence H. Shoup, William Minter - Imperial Brain Trust, The Council on Foreign Relations and Unite d States Foreign Policy (2004).pdf

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Leonard Benardo, Jennifer Weiss - Brooklyn by Name (2006).jpg

Fascinating morsels of Brooklyn history. . . . An entertaining, breezy compilation for the NYU Press, perfect for reading down at Coney, up on tar beach, or out on your shady front stoop this summer. . . . So if you wanna know how Dead Horse Bay, Sheepshead Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Smith St. Carroll Gardens, Junior's Restaurant, Green-Wood Cemetery, Gilmore Court or the Riegelmann Boardwalk got their names, grab a copy of Brooklyn by Name.

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Leonard Benardo, Jennifer Weiss - Brooklyn by Name (2006).pdf

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Louis A., Jr. Pérez - Cuba in the American Imagina tion, Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (2008).jpg

USA Books - Louis A., Jr. Prez - Cuba in the American Imagination, Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos 2008.jpg

For more than two hundred often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images—Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. One of the foremost historians of Cuba, Louis A. Pérez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island. Pérez analyzes the dominant images and their political effectiveness as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Pérez argues that metaphor was central to the U.S. imperial project as a way of transforming the pursuit of national self-interest into the lofty, disinterested purpose of moral duty. With particular focus on the pivotal eras of the war of 1898 and the 1959 Cuban revolution, Pérez demonstrates that these descriptions served the foreign policy interests of the United States. As charged and coded modes of persuasion and mediation, these images sanctioned and sustained the moral logic of U.S. power over Cuba. Pérez further argues that the metaphors in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba were subsequently projected over the world at large.

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Louis A., Jr. Pérez - Cuba in the American Imagina tion, Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (2008).pdf

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William Gilbert Cassard - Battleship Indiana and h er part in the Spanish-American War (1898).jpg

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William Gilbert Cassard - Battleship Indiana and h er part in the Spanish-American War (1898).pdf

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Charles Phillips, Alan Axelrod - Encyclopedia Of H istorical Treaties And Alliance (2005).jpg

"Encyclopedia of Historical Treaties and Alliances, Second Edition" presents extensive excerpts from the treaties of more than 420 international agreements in an elegantly accessible format. Divided into chronological chapters ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to the present, each chapter begins with a summary of the important trends and events in international relations of the era. Entries on specific agreements follow, with each containing the date of the document's signing, a list of signatory nations, the leading negotiators, and key terms. A narrative discussion outlines the historical context, identifies the essential positions of the signatories, and summarizes the document's significance. In addition to treaties that concluded wars, the book includes treaties on the environment, armaments, trade, human rights, scientific exploration, and many other concerns. The new edition of Encyclopedia of Historical Treaties and Alliances includes 20 new multilateral treaties and conventions, taking into account the transition in the orientation of U.S. foreign policy that was ushered in with the administration of George W. Bush. A new chapter called "International Threats, Global Opportunities" begins with a thematic and historical overview followed by nine new treaties. In addition, sources for all treaty documents have been added, making it easy to cite information. Accessible to all audiences, this up-to-date encyclopedia gives students, researchers, and teachers a clear idea of the changing political conditions throughout history.

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Irwin L. Morris - Votes, Money, And The Clinton Im peachment (2001).jpg

This is the first in-depth examination of politics of the Clinton impeachment. While popular press treatments of the impeachment focus on partisan animosity and ethical standards, Morris looks at the impact of local constituencies on impeachment. Though most legislators sided with their constituents on the issue of impeachment, a significant number (nearly all Republican) did not. Using the most recent work on the impact of money on elections, Morris investigates the financial dynamics of the Clinton impeachment and argues that the our current system of campaign finance enabled House Republicans to impeach the President and provided them with the means to retain their majority in the House. Morris also argues that money (and the ability to raise it) play a far more important role in the American political system than previously realized, often determining the winners and losers in the most important controversies and conflicts facing the nation.

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Irwin L. Morris - Votes, Money, And The Clinton Im peachment (2001).pdf

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Elise H. Ford - Frommer's Washington, D.C. 2011 (2 010).jpg

Table of Contents for Frommer's Washington, D.C. 2011

List of Maps.
1 THE BEST OF WASHINGTON, D.C.
2 WASHINGTON, D.C., IN DEPTH.
3 PLANNING YOUR TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C.
4 SUGGESTED WASHINGTON, D.C. ITINERARIES.
5 WHERE TO STAY.
6 WHERE TO DINE.
7 EXPLORING WASHINGTON, D.C.
8 SHOPPING.
9 WASHINGTON, D.C., AFTER DARK.
10 SIDE TRIPS FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.
11 FAST FACTS.
Index

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Elise H. Ford - Frommer's Washington, D.C. 2011 (2 010).pdf

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Margaret A. McCoy - Assessing the Effects of the G ulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Human Health, A Summary of the June 2010 Workshop (2010).jpg

USA Books - Margaret A. McCoy - Assessing the Effects of the Gulf ...Human Health, A Summary of the June 2010 Workshop 2010.jpg

From the origin of the leak, to the amount of oil released into the environment, to the spill's duration, the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill poses unique challenges to human health. The risks associated with extensive, prolonged use of dispersants, with oil fumes, and with particulate matter from controlled burns are also uncertain. There have been concerns about the extent to which hazards, such as physical and chemical exposures and social and economic disruptions, will impact the overall health of people who live and work near the area of the oil spill.
Although studies of previous oil spills provide some basis for identifying and mitigating the human health effects of these exposures, the existing data are insufficient to fully understand and predict the overall impact of hazards from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the health of workers, volunteers, residents, visitors, and special populations. Assessing the Effects of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Human Health identifies populations at increased risks for adverse health effects and explores effective communication strategies to convey health information to these at-risk populations. The book also discusses the need for appropriate surveillance systems to monitor the spill's potential short- and long-term health effects on affected communities and individuals.
Assessing the Effects of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Human Health is a useful resource that can help policy makers, public health officials, academics, community advocates, scientists, and members of the public collaborate to create a monitoring and surveillance system that results in "actionable" information and that identifies emerging health risks in specific populations.

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Margaret A. McCoy - Assessing the Effects of the G ulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Human Health, A Summary of the June 2010 Workshop (2010).pdf

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Genres in American Cinema - J. P. Telotte - Scienc e Fiction Film (2001).jpg

This study examines one of the most enduring and popular genres of Hollywood cinema, suggesting how the science fiction film reflects attitudes toward science, technology, and reason as they have evolved in American culture over the course of the 20th century. Telotte provides a survey of criticism and an overview of the history of the genre, from its earliest literary manifestations to the present. He offers in-depth readings of three key films;Robocop, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and THX 1138, each of which typifies a particular form of science fiction fantasy.

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