In politics, finding the dirt is a multimillion-dollar business.

It’s called opposition research—“oppo” to insiders. Few Americans are aware of its existence, yet oppo has become an integral part of the campaign process, hastening the implosion of countless office-seekers around the country.

For nearly two decades, former journalists Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian have been uncovering the buried truths about political candidates, from presidential appointees all the way down to local school-board hopefuls. We’re with Nobody is the eye-opening account of their life as opposition researchers—a remarkable adventure across the American political landscape and through the often seamy underbelly of U.S. politics. From doing battle with reluctant, sometimes purposefully misleading bureaucrats to arriving in an unmarked police car for a clandestine meeting on the New Jersey waterfront, We’re with Nobody offers readers a revealing slice of national and political life: a close-up look at today’s political process, the fallible men and women we often choose to represent us and the little-understood industry of trying to bring candidates’ weaknesses to light.

Jackhammered is a story of hope and redemption, told with candor by a man who had a complicated childhood, joined the Marines when he was 18, became a special agent of the FBI, and then a prosecuting attorney. In 1978, against all odds, Ed Bethune won a seat in the United States House of Representatives. His story is unlike any memoir you have ever read because it tells of a young life nearly lost, a love found, and a lifelong struggle to wash away troubles by living out dreams of adventure. His successes--in politics, in the courtroom defending the poorest of the poor, and as a high profile ethics lawyer for Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Tom DeLay--soothe his quest for identity. But it is not until he and his wife encounter a fearsome storm while trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a 31-foot sailboat that he solves the riddle that has haunted him all his life. For millions of young people, especially those who are dealing with shame or embarrassment of one kind or another, Jackhammered is a Godsend. The author tells of his childhood struggle with bedwetting. His story teaches us all to take heart and to live out our dreams … even those that may be a size too big.

Aristotle was a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings include philosophy, logic, rhetoric, government, biology and zoology. This treatise is one of the most influential texts on the history of political thought. By examining how societies are run from the simple household to large city-states the reader can gain insight into how groups are organized and governed. Aristotle discussed establishing a constitution and upholding it. Many of the ideas set forth by Aristotle hold true in our modern quest for a stable government

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.
 
His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

A groundbreaking work that identifies the real culprit behind one of the great economic crimes of our time— the growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of Americans and the richest of the rich. We all know that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few decades while most Americans haven’t. In fact, the exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the current economic crisis, even as the rest of Americans have continued to fall behind. Why do the “haveit- alls” have so much more? And how have they managed to restructure the economy to reap the lion’s share of the gains and shift the costs of their new economic playground downward, tearing new holes in the safety net and saddling all of us with increased debt and risk? Lots of so-called experts claim to have solved this great mystery, but no one has really gotten to the bottom of it—until now. In their lively and provocative Winner-Take-All Politics, renowned political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate convincingly that the usual suspects—foreign trade and financial globalization, technological changes in the workplace, increased education at the top—are largely innocent of the charges against them. Instead, they indict an unlikely suspect and take us on an entertaining tour of the mountain of evidence against the culprit. The guilty party is American politics. Runaway inequality and the present economic crisis reflect what government has done to aid the rich and what it has not done to safeguard the interests of the middle class. The winner-take-all economy is primarily a result of winner-take-all politics. In an innovative historical departure, Hacker and Pierson trace the rise of the winner-take-all economy back to the late 1970s when, under a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, a major transformation of American politics occurred. With big business and conservative ideologues organizing themselves to undo the regulations and progressive tax policies that had helped ensure a fair distribution of economic rewards, deregulation got under way, taxes were cut for the wealthiest, and business decisively defeated labor in Washington. And this transformation continued under Reagan and the Bushes as well as under Clinton, with both parties catering to the interests of those at the very top. Hacker and Pierson’s gripping narration of the epic battles waged during President Obama’s first two years in office reveals an unpleasant but catalyzing truth: winner-take-all politics, while under challenge, is still very much with us. Winner-Take-All Politics—part revelatory history, part political analysis, part intellectual journey— shows how a political system that traditionally has been responsive to the interests of the middle class has been hijacked by the superrich. In doing so, it not only changes how we think about American politics, but also points the way to rebuilding a democracy that serves the interests of the many rather than just those of the wealthy few.

Cam Kenyon has come home a different woman than the one that left. Always the sensible one, she's now a competent and respected psychologist. Now, if she could only apply that confidence to Noah Denton, her old high school crush, and the current candidate for District Attorney. It seems that not everything has changed.
When his political opponents resort to dirty politics, Cam can't stand idly by. Throwing her support behind Noah resurrects an old nemesis, though, and puts both her and Noah in danger.

Cam Kenyon has come home a different woman than the one that left. Always the sensible one, she's now a competent and respected psychologist. Now, if she could only apply that confidence to Noah Denton, her old high school crush, and the current candidate for District Attorney. It seems that not everything has changed.
When his political opponents resort to dirty politics, Cam can't stand idly by. Throwing her support behind Noah resurrects an old nemesis, though, and puts both her and Noah in danger.

Bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.

In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths.

Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.

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What would you do if you were sitting quietly in your living room when two mysterious strangers appeared from out of nowhere-and then told you they were 'ascended masters' who had come to reveal some shocking secrets of existence and teach you the miraculous powers of advanced forgiveness? Would you call the cops? Call a psychiatrist? Call out for pizza? When two such teachers appeared before Gary Renard in 1992, he chose to listen to them (and ask a lot of questions). The result is this startling book: an extraordinary record of 17 mind bending conversations that took place over nearly a decade, reorienting the author's life and giving the world an uncompromising introduction to a spiritual teaching destined to change human history.