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Whistle Stopper - Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $9.99
Your Save: $ 14.96 ( 60% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Knopf
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.973
EAN: 9780307269669
ISBN: 0307269663
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2008-04-29
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-04-29
Studio: Knopf
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Right Is Wrong......
Comment: I have not even received this order yet! It is way overdue. I have responded to Amazon and the seller directly. I'm pissed. Someone please help. Thank you!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unartful Propaganda
Comment: Ms. Huffington offers a less than artful propaganda rant. Ms. Huffington's methods are thus: stack the deck and only enunciate facts that support her preconceived position, ignore the evidence if it disagrees with her position, ignore the question by attacking her opponent's credibility on something that is totally unrelated to the issue at hand, and if he is unable to come up with anything embarrassing to her opponent just ignorantly name call.
Ms. Huffington uses her blunt techniques in her discussion of global warming. She most of time attacks Congressional foes of the global warming hoax by spotlighting some perceived blemish to their records that is completely irrelevant. In other cases she can only shriek that certain Senators with one hundred times her intelligence and knowledge are 'dumb' or the 'dumbest Senator'. Oh puhlease.
Then there is Ms. Huffington on the issue at hand. She mentions that an island in the South Pacific is sinking. She does not mention that sea levels have not been rising much lately. In Stockholm Sweden records of sea levels go back to 800 AD. Researcher M. Ekman demonstrates the sea level change mostly ranges from -1.5 to 1.5 millimeters per year. Little has changed over the ages. And this interval includes the Medieval Warm Period when temperatures were several degrees above those now.
Ms. Huffington mentions melting glaciers in Alaska. But some recent glaciers are expanding instead of melting. And the melting of glaciers is caused by changing cloud cover, precipitation and ocean currents as much as temperature.
Ms. Huffington also suggests most scientists support the global warming hypothesis. She loudly enunciates the science is solved. She mentions three hundred presumed scientists presenting a report on the melting in Alaska. However she neglects the 31,000 scientists who signed a recent petition from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine disputing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. She also neglects the famous scientists featured in the Lawrence Solomon's book The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so who have refuted at least parts of the global warming hypothesis.
Neglected is that carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere in only a tenth of the proportion of the other socalled greenhouse gas, water vapor. Note that the effect of carbon dioxide on the reflection of infrared radiation back to earth follows the filter effect. What this filter effect means that an additional unit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reflect significantly fewer infrared rays than the same unit quantity of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. This effect can be demonstrated by windows filtering light. If the first window filters 33% of the original light, the second window will only filter 22.2% of the original light. Moreover carbon dioxide only reflects infrared rays in certain frequencies, most of which frequencies are already relected back to earth by the more prominent water vapor in the atmosphere.
In sum this book is not worth bothering with.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Read this while considering who to vote for in 2008
Comment: Title Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe
Author: Arianna Huffington
Rating ****
Tags politics, current affairs. republican party, george w. bush, john mccain
Huffington is the founder of one of the most widely read political blogs, The Huffington Post. She is a native of Greece, but has been an enthusiastic participant in politics in this country for many years. She started as a Republican, and one of the more interesting parts of Right Is Wrong is her discussion of why she was Republican and what changed her. She was a Republican because she believed in limited government, that private sources were the best remedies for society's ills. She was always concerned with issues of helping the poor, and thought that many Republicans were as well.
She left the Republican party after Newt Gingrich heard her ideas on helping the poor and said that they were the kind of ideas Republicans needed. It wasn't long before she realized that he was not actually interested in helping the poor but in the appearance of doing so. She also "...came to recognize that the task of overcoming poverty is too monumental to be achieved without the raw power of annual appropriations." (p. 9)
Since then, she says that many of her friends who are Republican have become bewildered by the direction of the Party. So the book is about how the fringe elements took over the GOP and hijacked its principles.
After a couple of chapters on the pitiful state of the media now (including an honor roll of the few journalists who were right, and reporting what they knew, in the run-up to the Iraq war (which fits well with the episode of Bill Moyer's Journal called "Buying the War"), Huffington goes into a litany of the insanities of the George W. Bush administration. She covers everything from a bad energy bill to the politicization of science to the Iraq war to the failure in Afghanistan, to torture, to immigration, to the recession, to the state of health care, to the end of the ban on assault weapons. It is sickening, but not all that new. Her main point for repeating all of this is to reinforce it in the public's mind in this crucial election, and to show how electing John McCain would be a continuation of Bush's failed policies. It seems that the policies and behavior of McCain since he decided to run for President this time have been a major disappointment to Huffington. She has known, worked with, and admired John McCain in the past, but lays out how his positions have changed to pander to the people who can make him President. Most tragic of all is his change of position on torture, from saying that one of the things that kept him going during his own torture was knowing that his country would not do anything of the sort, to his recent vote to not extend prohibitions on torture to the CIA.
It is an important book and an important message. Presidents don't always act in office as they promise on the campaign trail. George W. Bush is an example, he ran as a moderate in 2000 and then governed from somewhere right of the Neanderthals. But we can't take a chance on a McCain presidency for so many reasons, starting with the composition of the Supreme Court under a President McCain.
One of the interesting pieces to me in her discussion of the politicization of the Justice Department and the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys. Four of the eight fired were looking into corruption charges against Republicans. This is an interesting bit on Rove's involvement:
"Unraveling the cover-ups revealed that the the evidence trail on the firings went all the way to the White House. In an interview with MCClatchy newspapers, Alan Weh, chairman of the New Mexico Republican party, admitted that, in 2005, he asked a White Hose staffer who worked for Karl Rove for help in getting rid of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Weh, unhappy that Iglesias refused to rush a showy investigation of Democratic officials in time for the 2006 election, followed up directly with Rove in 2006.
According to Weh, his conversation with the Boy Genius went something like this:
Weh: is anything ever going to happen to that guy [Iglesias]?
Rove: He's gone." (p. 300)
The 2008 Presidential election is the most important in a generation. Arianna Huffington is doing what she can to see that citizens go into the voting booth knowing the stakes involved.
Publication Knopf (2008), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 400 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 0307269663 / 9780307269669
Customer Rating:
Summary: Like so many of the lunatic fringe reviewing this title...
Comment: I haven't read it either. I just figured that there should be some equally uninformed 5-star reviews to balance out the 1-star reviews filed by members of the very same lunatic fringe highlighted in Ms. Huffington's book title.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fascinating encapsulation the wrongnes of the right wingers' positions
Comment: I can never get enough of Arianna Huffington but this book kept me "in the Huff" for a week or so. She is entertaining as well as informative.
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Editorial Reviews:
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With her trademark passion, intelligence, and devastating wit, Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington tackles the issues that are crucial to this year’s presidential election and, even more so, to the fate of the country.
Huffington makes the case that America has been hijacked from within by a radical element—the “lunatic fringe” of the Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Despite holding views at odds with the majority of Americans, these zealots have given us an endless war in Iraq, a sputtering economy, a health care system on life support, a war on science and reason, and an immoral embrace of torture.
But they haven’t done it on their own: they have been enabled by a compliant media that act as if there is no such thing as truth and are more interested in cozying up to those in power than in holding them accountable, and by feckless Democrats who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into backing down again and again.
Both a withering indictment and a hopeful call to arms, Right Is Wrong is an explosive, boldly incisive work that will help set the national agenda.
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