While we've long known that the strategies of terrorism rely heavily on media coverage of attacks, Selling Fear is the first detailed look at the role played by media in counterterrorism--and the ways that, in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration manipulated coverage to maintain a climate of fear.

Drawing on in-depth analysis of counterterrorism in the years after 9/11--including the issuance of terror alerts and the decision to invade Iraq--the authors present a compelling case that the Bush administration hyped fear, while obscuring civil liberties abuses and concrete issues of preparedness. The media, meanwhile, largely abdicated its watchdog role, choosing to amplify the administration's message while downplaying issues that might have called the administration's statements and strategies into question. The book extends through Hurricane Katrina, and the more skeptical coverage that followed, then the first year of the Obama administration, when an increasingly partisan political environment presented the media, and the public, with new problems of reporting and interpretation.

Selling Fear is a hard-hitting analysis of the intertwined failures of government and media--and their costs to our nation.

From the start, the Supreme Court and the press have had a contentious relationship. Yet they are interdependent, needing each other to communicate the important work of the Court to the general public. Both could do better. The Court needs to provide greater, easier access for the news media, especially permitting television coverage of oral arguments, as two-thirds of the state supreme courts do. The news media should require law training for Supreme Court reporters and insist that Court stories convey the justices' reasoning for their decisions, rather than settling for easier, reaction stories.

In this strikingly original work, Paul W. Kahn rethinks the meaning of political theology. In a text innovative in both form and substance, he describes an American political theology as a secular inquiry into ultimate meanings sustaining our faith in the popular sovereign.

Kahn works out his view through an engagement with Carl Schmitt's 1922 classic, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. He forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary. The result is a contemporary political theology. As in Schmitt's work, sovereignty remains central, yet Kahn shows how popular sovereignty creates an ethos of sacrifice in the modern state. Turning to law, Kahn demonstrates how the line between exception and judicial decision is not as sharp as Schmitt led us to believe. He reminds readers that American political life begins with the revolutionary willingness to sacrifice and that both sacrifice and law continue to ground the American political imagination. Kahn offers a political theology that has at its center the practice of freedom realized in political decisions, legal judgments, and finally in philosophical inquiry itself.

As humans continue to encroach on wildlands, quality and quantity of wildlife habitat decreases before our eyes. A housing development here, a shopping mall there, a few more trees cut here, another road put in there, each of these diminishes available habitat. Unless the cumulative effects of multiple simultaneous development projects are recognized and incorporated at the beginning of project development, we will continue to see wildlife habitat disappear at unprecedented rates.

Without a conscious knowledge of what is happening around us, we will not be able to incorporate an effective land ethic, and natural resources will be the ultimate loser. Cumulative Effects in Wildlife Management brings to light the crucial connections between human expansion and habitat destruction for those managers and practitioners charged with protecting wildlife in the face of changing landscapes.

Step by step, this book shatters the myth that important environmental energy debates in the United States have been driven by forces too complex for the average American to comprehend. Although made up of a number of contributions, Robert McMonagle's book makes sense of the underlying political and societal forces driving contemporary environmental energy debates including the critical case of whether to drill for energy sources at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.

This book aims to answer two questions by examining four case studies of the policy-making process: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; drilling on public lands in the Western United States and in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico; along with a proposal to develop a commercial wind farm off the Massachusetts coast. First, what political and societal forces have shaped modern, contentious environmental energy debates in the United States? Second, what do the findings reveal about the way in which environmental energy policies are made, about our institutions of government, and about the influences of the public versus elites in making policy? McMonagle finds that partisan voting in Congress is a critical factor in policy shifts, especially when symbols are used to define policy issues. Further, public opinion and the print media remain important factors in defining issues leading to legislative policy victories.

In political opinion surveys from the 1950s through the 1970s, African Americans were consistently among the most liberal groups in the United States and were much further to the left than white Americans on most issues. Starting in the 1980s, black public opinion began to move to the center, and this trend has deepened since. Why is this the case? Katherine Tate contends that black political incorporation has made black politics and public opinion more moderate over time. Black leaders now have greater opportunity to participate in mainstream politics, and blacks look to elected officials rather than activists for political leadership. Based on solid analysis of public opinion data from the 1970s to the present, Tate examines how black opinions on welfare, affirmative action, crime control, school vouchers, civil rights for other minorities, immigration, the environment, and U.S. foreign policy have changed.

Katherine Tate is a professor of political science and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Black Faces in the Mirror and From Protest to Politics.

Although some people refer to Iowa as "flyover country," presidential candidates and political reporters in the national press corps have no difficulty locating the state every four years at the beginning of presidential primary season.

When Iowa Democrats pushed forward their precinct caucuses in 1972, the Iowa caucuses became the first presidential nominating event in the nation. Politicos soon realized the impact of Iowa's new status and, along with the national media, promoted the caucuses with a vengeance. The Iowa Precinct Caucuses chronicles how the caucuses began, how they changed, and starting in 1972 how they became fodder for and manipulated by the mass media. Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J. Goldford argue that the media have given a value to the Iowa caucuses completely out of proportion to the reality of their purpose and procedural methods. In fact, the nationally reported "results" are contrived by the Iowa parties to portray a distorted picture of the process. As presidential primaries have grown in the media spotlight and superseded the parties' conventions, Iowa has become a political proving ground for the confident, the hopeful, and the relatively unknown, but at what cost to the country?

The third edition of this classic book has been updated to include the elections of 2000, which saw the first winner of the Iowa caucuses to reach the White House since 1976; of 2004 and the roller-coaster fortunes of Howard Dean and John Kerry; and of 2008 and the unlikely emergence of Barack Obama as a presidential contender.

Rethinking the Headlines is a book about some of the most important and contentious issues of American law. On crime and punishment: What is the goal of the criminal law and courts, and how should that goal be implemented in practice? On divorce: Divorce is not only a personal choice, it is a social dynamic. What does that mean? On separation of church and state: Limited church and limited state. On the roots of the law: Natural law and the Declaration of Independence.

More people than ever are taking a look at libertarianism. But what does that mean? Attorney and law professor Jacob H. Huebert explains in Libertarianism Today, an engaging introduction to the libertarian movement's ideas and people.

The book starts with the basic libertarian idea that people should be free to do whatever they want as long as they don't harm anyone else. Then the book examines what that means for a wide range of contemporary issues, including the economy, health care, guns, drugs, online file-sharing, and more.

Libertarianism Today also introduces the people who are advancing these ideas, from maverick Congressman Ron Paul to the Austrian economists who predicted the 2008 financial crisis to the lawyers who are fighting for freedom in the courts.

This book shows how, even as it's getting more mainstream attention than ever, today's libertarian movement has only become more starkly opposed to the status quo--and why more people than ever are considering this genuine alternative.

The U.S. corporate income tax--and in particular the double taxation of corporate income--has long been one of the most criticized and stubbornly persistent aspects of the federal revenue system. Unlike in most other industrialized countries, corporate income is taxed twice, first at the entity level and again at the shareholder level when distributed as a dividend. The conventional wisdom has been that this double taxation was part of the system's original design more than a century ago and has survived despite withering opposition from business interests. In both cases, history tells another tale. Double taxation as we know it today did not appear until several decades after the corporate income tax was first adopted. Moreover, it was embraced by corporate representatives at the outset and in subsequent years businesses have been far more ambivalent about its existence than is popularly assumed. From Sword to Shield: The Transformation of the Corporate Income Tax, 1861 to Present is the first historical account of the evolution of the corporate income tax in America. Bank explains the origins of corporate income tax and the political, economic, and social forces that transformed it from a sword against evasion of the individual income tax to a shield against government and shareholder interference with the management of corporate funds.