Here’s the news:

Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

Judging from the article and eight years of the administration, it seems fairly clear that Dick Cheney never came to terms with a little something called “public relations.”  Indeed, I don’t know why the former Vice President never grasped the reality that you can’t get much legislation passed with your approval ratings mired in the low 30’s.  Then again, in order to get legislation passed you also have to actually believe Congress has a role in governing this nation.  Dick Cheney’s interpretation of an imperial presidency doesn’t really square with an active legislative branch.

Cheney’s take-no-prisoners attitude was not only awful from a political standpoint, it also trampled upon our Constitution and threatened our national security.  From openly embracing torture to creating secret detention centers to misleading this nation into war to warrantless wiretaps, Cheney’s view of the Vice Presidency was basically a carte blanche invitation to do almost anything he wanted.

Part of me feels sympathy for George Bush.  Bush let Cheney take advantage of his position as President of the United States and, in large part because of Cheney’s influence and policies, America turned on Bush.  Now because Bush dared to break with Cheney, the former Vice President sounds like he is going to write a tell-all.  That said, my sympathy is quickly obliterated when I remind myself that Bush made the decision to put Cheney in office and made the mistake of putting far too much stock in his advice.

Perhaps what is even more interesting is what Republicans will do once this book is released.  Whose side will they choose?  Cheney always seemed a bit more popular with the blowhard right (Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, etc.) while Bush was meant to appease the base.  I can’t wait to see the headline on The Weekly Standard – “if only we’d listened more to Dick Cheney.”  There might be some interesting damage control coming from the Bush team.  Will Cheney be discarded as a “disgruntled former employee“?

Ultimately I suspect much of this is buzz from Cheney’s publisher designed to gin up interest in the book.  We obviously won’t know the full details until it’s released.  In the meantime, we do know Cheney was upset that Bush didn’t pardon Libby and that Cheney and Bush don’t talk terribly often.  Perhaps the former Vice President will use this final act to set the record straight.

With the Da Vinci Code follow-up Angels and Demons being released in a few weeks, Brown has taken advantage of the spike in media attention to finally announce his long-awaited new novel.

After a six year hiatus, Brown will unveil The Lost Symbol in September, featuing Indiana Jones clone Robert Langdon solving some sort of historical mystery – likely involving the Freemasons and…a lost symbol.

Much has been rumored about this project, and some have spent the last few years preemptively explaining the unreleased novel’s historical truths and fallacies. Needless to say after The Da Vinci Code’s success, this is one of the most anticipated novels ever released. Random House is publishing 5 million first-run copies – one of the largest orders in history.

Will it be any good? Who knows. But as much dumber as I am for having read Brown’s other novels, I’ll still be in line for this one.

The Observer reports that Meghan McCain has just signed a six figure book deal with Hyperion, following an auction with several publishing houses.

While the subject of McCain’s book is unknown, the Observer speculates that it could have to do with issues she’s been writing and discussing recently, such as the future of the modern GOP.

I don’t think the future of the GOP will be found in the manuscript of a 24 year old, former Kerry supporter who has only been a Republican since February 2008 and launches the most vague criticism of the party (i.e. be socially liberal).

But hey, like, totally best of luck!

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency

Obama is killing McCain in newspaper and magazine endorsements.  Whereas Kerry beat Bush 213 to 205 in endorsements, Obama is beating McCain 231 to 102.

The book deals with two overarching points. One deals with the primary cause for the angst of the middle class and the other details the road back to the New Deal. Krugman argues that the collapse of organized labor has contributed substantially to the rising inequality that exists today. According to the author, unions not only get better benefits and wages for their members, they also increase wages and benefits for non-unionized workforces. Thanks to those union driven efforts we had a long postwar boom from 1945 to 1973 and created a middle class America from the ruins of the Great Depression. Krugman goes on to argue that, when the GOP took over, the party and big business were able to break labor. Such a collapse allows hedge fund managers and corporate executives to make millions and millions while blue-collar workers are finding it tougher and tougher to get by.

The other major point of the book is that any attempt to rectify the inequalities created by the weakened labor movement must begin with the creation of a universal healthcare system. Krugman isn’t one to mince words on this front. He doesn’t want any joint private-public plan. He wants a single payer Medicare-for-all system. While such a system would require a massive tax increase for high paying Americans (not a problem he writes as the top income tax rate in Eisenhower’s day was 91%, far from the corresponding 35% of the W era), it would also cost money for middle income Americans as well. Krugman believes that this would be revenue neutral for most families and businesses as money that was once spent on insurance premiums would now simply go to the government to finance this new all inclusive Medicare system.

Krugman is a brilliant man – an award winning economist, educated at Yale and MIT – and writes about serious issues that deserve serious proposals and analyses. This only compounds the poor quality of The Conscience of a Liberal. A New York Times columnist should be able to hit a higher literary standard than this. It’s hard to endorse Krugman’s policy proposals given their lack of intellectual and quantitative foundation. The weakening of the middle class, the rising costs of health care and the increasing inequality that is growing the gap between the haves and have-nots are all issues that need to be addressed. The Conscience of a Liberal does not address those issues in the manner they require; instead the reader is treated to partisan treatise on how Republicans make terrorists and black men into monsters to justify the GOP’s cold heartedness towards the poor.

TR’s energy and life make him seem almost superhuman. Its hard to imagine an individual such as this ever inhabiting the White House. The man spent large swaths of his presidency eating and exercising. Morris provides many anecdotes about the adventures of TR. My favorite was how he would drag along members of his administration for hikes and swims – often times forcing them through mud, rain and wilderness. Despite his athletic prowess I can’t imagine Bush asking his staff to join him skinny dipping in Virginia.

Morris’ book isn’t flawless. He gets wrapped up in certain events of Roosevelt’s presidency while skirting over others. The reader is presented entire chapters on gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela, Panama and Morocco while getting comparatively very little on the insurrection in the Philippines. I would have liked to read more about trust-busting – one of the seminal achievements of TR’s tenure.

All criticisms aside this is a must-read biography for any fan of American history. This is Morris’ second book in a trilogy on the 26th President.

A Harvard educated lawyer and CNN legal analyst Toobin is no stranger to law and its intricacies. Even with this potentially aloof background he’s able to make this book into something of a page turner. All of the great cases that have come before SCOTUS in the last decade (Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Bush v. Gore, Grutter v. Bollinger) are laid out accessibly. The internal machinations of the court from how other justices are able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat to their own personal opinions of one another are well documented. The book’s insight in this regard is outstanding.

Special attention is paid to the rise of religious right in the Republican Party and its effect on the selection of judges. Conservatives, according to Toobin, have politicized the court and sought to use it as a weapon with which to advance their agenda. Jay Sekulow is played up as some type of demi-god within the Christian right. Liberals on the other hand lack the organizational muscle of such groups as The Federalist Society and The American Center for Law and Justice. A fascinating example of this is given in the controversy surrounding the nomination of Harriett Miers. The White House’s greatest fear was never finding a nominee able to get past the Senate Democrats; they were far more worried about pleasing conservatives who would accept nothing less than a full-fledged originalist.

This isn’t an objective book. Toobin’s opinions of the justices and their ideologies are quiet plain. He regards Thomas as a throwback, a radical seeking to return the country to the late 19^th century. He seems to revere Sandra Day O’Connor, not only for her outsized influence on the court as the “moderate”, but also because of her intense efforts to strike a “middle ground.” While such attempts to reach decisions that reflect a majority view of the public may be popular their intellectual foundations rest more with personal opinion than with the actual text of the law. This isn’t a negative reflection on Toobin’s work; it is merely an acknowledgement that he is coming at this with his own opinions and biases. Don’t charge into this expecting to get a journalistic reading of recent SCOTUS history.

Despite the author’s subjective view anyone seeking a concise and easy read about the last decade of American jurisprudence and the politics that have shaped it would do well to read this book.

It is against this backdrop that Dinesh D’Souza has produced his most recent book, What’s So Great About Christianity. In it, D’Souza engages atheists on their own ground, firmly, deliberately, and clearly making the rational case for religion in general and Christianity in particular. Making the rational case for God is an enormous and complicated undertaking, but D’Souza proves to be more than up to the task. Since the argument covers some 200-odd pages, I won’t try to attempt to summarize it in a handful of paragraphs. However, readers will find that while the topic is tremendous in scope, the logic of the argument is simple and unavoidable. For example, all reasonable people agree that every event has a cause. Given that modern astronomy confirms that the universe was created at a finite point in time, before which neither space nor time existed, the inception of the universe therefore implies the existence of an immaterial and eternal Creator.

A much-needed rejoinder to the recent spate of prominent atheist books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, What’s So Great About Christianity explodes the logical fallacies that prop up the modern atheist’s worldview. Believers and open-minded skeptics alike will find it a challenging read that is highly accessible, enlightening, and convincing.

Most people never actually satisfy this longing. Perhaps we buy a country home or make an effort to spend more of our free time outdoors, but it’s rare to pack up and simply adopt a new life. Indeed, it’s practically unheard of for someone to have such a drive to re-connect with nature that they would completely abandon human society.

But Christopher McCandless did. McCandless came from a prosperous, stable family from the outskirts of Washington, DC. He earned a degree from Emory University, one of the more prestigious institutions of higher education in the South. At age 22, he seemed to be largely as successful as any parent could hope for in a child that age. So what drove him to give away his $25,000 in savings, abandon his family without a trace, embark on a Western odyssey, and end up dying alone in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan bush two years later?

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer attempts to shed some light on this impossibly difficult question. When the fascinating story of McCandless’ life and death initially broke in Outside magazine (in an article penned by Krakauer), many Alaskans chalked McCandless’ death by starvation up to a combination of remarkable ignorance and reckless, romantic idealism. Some even claimed he had a death wish. After all, McCandless had deliberately embarked on his journey without provisions and equipment any Alaskan would consider absolutely essential.

Krakauer doesn’t attempt to refute these claims by romanticizing McCandless’ life, but he also disputes the notion that McCandless was in over his head and essentially got what he had coming. Indeed, McCandless had always been a strong-willed character. The heavy influence of the writings of Thoreau and London probably gave him an overly romantic view of what life in the Alaskan bush would be like.

However, McCandless fared quite well for himself for some time. Using an abandoned bus near the Sushana River as his “base camp,” he managed to kill enough game and dig up enough wild plants to keep himself relatively healthy and fit through most of the summer of 1992. It’s likely that McCandless’ experience in the bush provided him with the spiritual nourishment had been looking for; McCandless attempted to hike back to civilization toward the end of the summer. It’s also likely that McCandless would have lived to tell his tale if not for a couple of instances of misfortune.

Finding the now-swollen Teklanika River blocking the path he had used on his way in earlier in the summer, McCandless decided to wait a month before making another attempt to return human society. This would allow the glaciers that feed the Teklanika to begin to freeze up again, slowing the current and reducing the depth of the river. McCandless, of course, never made it out. After accidentally ingesting toxic potato seeds, he slowly starved to death, unable to absorb nutrition from his food and too weak to hike what was, ironically, the relatively short distance to civilization.

Since then, McCandless been a fascinating figure in the minds of many – romanticized by some, condemned by others. By drawing comparisons to his own life, Krakauer shows that McCandless was neither woefully ignorant of the conditions he was facing, nor someone whose life and unnecessary death should be idealized by others.