Rudolph Giuliani

In a media age, wars are waged not only with bombs and planes but also with video and sound bites. War of Words is an incisive report from the linguistic battlefields, probing the tales told about 9/11 to show how Americans created consensus in the face of terror. Capturing the campaigns for America's hearts, minds, wallets and votes, Silberstein traces the key cultural conflicts that surfaced after the attacks and beyond:* the attacks on critical intellectuals for their perceived 'blame America first' attitude* the symbiotic relationship between terrorists and the media* (mis)representations of Al Qaeda and the Taliban used to justify military action* the commercialisation of 9/11* news as 'entertainment' when covering tragic events.Now featuring a new chapter on the Second Anniversary and Beyond, including: the war in Iraq, the backlash against former 'heroes' and accusations of presidential mendacity.A perceptive and disturbing account, War of Words reveals the role of the media in manufacturing events and illuminates the shifting sands of American collective identity in the post 9/11 world.

Fred Siegel tells an incredible story about the fate of America's most influential cities: New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. Standing as metaphors for America's urban life because of their stature as nerve centres of the nation, these three cities -- once celebrated for their excitement and creativity as well as their ability to incorporate immigrants and solve the nation's problems -- were all caught up in the social policies born in the '60s and '70s and, as a consequence, faltered badly in dealing with the politics of race and the quality of their residents' lives in the '80s and '90s. Each of Siegel's three urban portraits shows the desperate remedies undertaken by cities searching for a lifeline back to the future whose promise they once seemed to embody. In a narrative that acknowledges the large historical forces that have remade the face of America over the last three decades, but insists that social policies are not merely foregone conclusions waiting to happen, Siegel holds up a mirror to our urban nature and tells us much about the way we live now.

Recognizing that the quality of governance is a crucial factor in the overall development of a country, experts on government ethics and law enforcement examine the principles that need to be applied to create more effective and efficient governments. While focusing on the approaches adopted by the City of New York, case studies from around the world are also given.

New York City's municipal government is the largest and most complex in the nation, perhaps in the world. Its annual operating budget is now a staggering $29 billion a year, plus it has a capital budget of $4 billion more. The city and its various agencies employ approximately 360,000 full-time workers. The Office of the Mayor alone employs some 1,600 people (and spends some $135 million). And the Police Department boasts a small army of over 25,000 officers, with a budget of $1.5 billion. Anyone wanting to make sense of an organization this vast needs an excellent guide. In Power Failure, Charles Brecher and Raymond Horton provide a complete guidebook to the political workings of New York City. Ranging from 1960 to the present, the authors explore in depth the political machinery behind City Hall, from electoral politics to budgetary policy to the delivery of city services. They examine the operation of the Office of the Mayor and the City Council, covering everything from the number of members and their annual salaries (Council Members receive $55,000 per year, the Council President $105,000) to the mayoral races of John V. Lindsay, Abraham Beame, and Edward I. Koch. Much of this encyclopedic work focuses on New York's ever-present financial woes, including the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, when the City had an unaudited deficit of over a billion dollars and the public credit markets closed their doors. They examine the repeated failure of collective bargaining to set wage policy before the annual operating budget is set (which undermines the integrity of the budgetary process), and they look at the main source of revenue, the property tax (homeowners pay 84 cents per hundred dollars of market value, commercial property owners pay $4.31, a politically motivated imbalance which the authors find economically harmful and grossly unfair to renters and businesses). Finally, they examine service delivery and discover, not surprisingly, that the highest local taxes in the nation are not spent efficiently. The authors offer detailed looks at the uniformed services (police, fire, sanitation, corrections), the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Health and Hospitals Corporation (which operates the country's largest municipal hospital system), revealing which departments are run well and which are not. For New York City residents, this is an essential volume for understanding City Hall. Indeed, anyone baffled by big city government--whether you live in New York or in any major metropolis--will find in this volume a wealth of information on how to run a city well, and how to run it into the ground.

This volume is a compilation of the U.S. federal special prosecutor/independent counsel investigations spanning the complete twenty-one year tenure from 1978-1999 of the independent counsel statute. The entries include individuals who have served as investigators; those who have been targets of investigations; all attorney generals who have called for appointment of special prosecutors; all presidents during whose terms of office such prosecutors served; and all legal cases that served to argue for or against the constitutionality of the independent counsel statute. These historical precedents are traced from Ulysses Grant's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the St. Louis Whiskey Scandal in 1875. More contemporary cases include Watergate, precipitated by Richard Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" dismissal of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973; Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's Iran-Contra Investigation; and Special Prosecutor Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation of the Clintons and,the ensuing permutations which brought individuals like Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky to prominence and also brought the statute calling for such investigations into constitutional debate.

Eyes on City Hall is a close-up look at the paranoid, frenzied, oppressive, and exhilarating world of modern political campaigns. Mandery offers a behind-the-scenes look at political campaigns in the television era. This day-to-day account of the 1997 New York City mayoral race takes us to the real battleground of modern politics. Sometimes cynical, often mirthful, and always honest, Eyes on City Hall will forever change your view of political campaigns.