Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America by Bob Herbert

Most republicans will not like Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America. Many democrats won't either, as former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, points out many ways in which the elected leaders of our cities, states, and country (of either party) have failed the public by looking after their own interests and that of special interests. He does this through telling stories about the lives of citizens.

Here are issues that Herbert examines in Losing Our Way:

The infrastructure of highways, bridges, rails, electrical grid, etc. is crumbling as elected officials will not raise taxes to pay for the needed work. The short-sightedness of fearing that taxpayers will vote officials out of office for raising taxes is that the projects would create jobs and leave the country better able to support its industry. Everyone would benefit, but our governments large and small are unwilling to invest in the future.

Most educational testing has weakened education, as schools teach to the tests instead of offering broadly-based lessons that teach children to think and prepare them for the future. Magnet schools have often been ineffective, and they fail to bring together the haves and have-nots. Educational corporations lobby for increased testing and against teachers having a say in curriculum. Rupert Murdoch is the big winner in what is often labelled "school reform."

All the wars we have fought since the Vietnam War (including Vietnam) have been against own interest and have destabilized many nations. Many died for no good purpose - a very dangerous thing to say in our for-us-or-against-us culture. Our economy has been drained for useless foreign action that only benefits arms manufacturers and Wall Street.

Wall Street is also behind the increasing gulf between earnings of workers and stock holders. Jobs are eliminated and wages kept low so the rich may reap more and more of the profits. As a result, more and more full time workers go farther and farther into debt, bringing the economy down.

That is just a taste of what Bob Herbert has to say.

When did the country lose its way? Herbert points to President Lyndon Johnson's increasing the troops sent to Vietnam, and he adds Ronald Reagan's campaign to deregulate many industries, especially weakening banking and finance rules.

Bob Herbert thinks that the trend of the last 50 years can be reversed. He points to the success of grass roots action of the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements. He urges people to get involved at the bottom to take back the country from special interests.

Herbert, Bob. Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America. Doubleday, 2014. 283p. ISBN 9780385528238.

Books on Tape, 2014. 8 compact discs. Approx. 10 1/2 hours. ISBN 9780804193573.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

Ideology has always trumped precedence in the rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States, according to Jeffrey Toobin in The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. The law does not change and necessitate new decisions. What changes are the judges. To get the decisions you want, you need to put your judges on the bench.

Toobin is a story teller with a great subject, nine people who are appointed to the highest court for life. If there is a hero to the story, it is Sandra Day O'Connor, who is appointed as first woman on the court by President Ronald Reagan. She is a lifelong moderate Republican, an Arizona friend of William Renquist, whom she eclipses in power. As the swing vote during much of her tenure, she is the most influential of justices. She always seeks to find the will of the American public's political center, not a strict interpretation of law. Her biggest mistake is her vote in Bush v. Gore. She discovers that Bush has no concern for the rule of law and the political center. His power comes from the extreme right, whom she abhors. Her traditional Republican Party has ceased to exist, and she blames Bush.

In telling the story, Toobin sprinkles the serious matter with some amusing details. I never knew that justices get to decorate their offices with paintings and sculpture from the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art. David Souter eats an apple and a cup of yogurt every day for lunch. Clarence Thomas got through an entire term without asking any questions.

A key point that Toobin makes is that the Bush administration has put more effort into focusing on the political viewpoints of its appointments that any previous administration. There is no pretense that recent appointments will weigh the merits of cases. There is to be no straying from the right wing position. Now neither reasoning nor public opinion really matter.

Readers will learn much about all the justices appointed in the past forty five years. Toobin seems to admire most of them. The Nine would be a great discussion book. There are bound to be readers who disagree.

Toobin, Jeffrey. The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Doubleday, 2007. ISBN 0385516401

The Weeding of Compassionate Conservatism

Nancy at my library recently left a couple of dozen books about politics and government on the weeding cart for us to consider. Among the many that it was easy to withdraw from our collection because they were obviously dated and no longer being read was Compassionate Conservatism by Marvin Olasky with a foreward by George W. Bush. I remembered this as a book that was hot during the 2000 presidential campaign. It was reported that it contained the principles that guided Mr. Bush as governor of Texas and that he would use as president if elected. According to Nancy's notes, the book, which we acquired in 2000, was not borrowed from our library until 2003 and had not been borrowed ever again. So, it had just one circ in seven years. It should be easy to withdraw based on local non-performance.

However, I hesitated to dump it. Wasn't it supposed to be an important book in our continuing political debate? Was it a fluke that it did so poorly at my library?

I checked the records on the SWAN database, which is shared by almost eighty libraries. Eleven libraries currently own the book. I have no way of knowing if others have already withdrawn it. Of the eleven copies, two have been borrowed in 2007 and one went out in 2006. Our is next in line as most recently borrowed. The other seven have not been out since 2000, 2001, or 2002. Only one copy, the one held by the largest library of the eleven, has as many as eleven circs. Most have four or fewer circs. Most of the larger libraries in our system do not currently own the book. I suspect these libraries have already tossed it. It seems it would be easy to do likewise.

I love to weed books, but still, I hesitated. I wondered whether I would be throwing out an important bit of history if I weeded the book. On the other hand, I feared I would just be cluttering the shelves with another dead book if I kept it.

I started to actually read the book and my answer became obvious. Compassionate Conservatism is really just a follow up to The Tragedy of American Compassion by Olasky, which was published in 1992. The Tragedy of American Compassion is the book that had the endorsement of conservative politicians. Compassionate Conservatism reports on Olasky's visits to states and cities where the principles were being applied in the late 1990s. It seems incidental and includes what are now old statistics in need of being revised.

There are still ten more copies of this book in the system should we need it.

We are freeing seven eighths of an inch on our shelves.