The policy interconnections between national and state governments are also illustrated by recent tax cuts at the national level. These cuts have often exacerbated state and local budget shortfalls, forcing cuts in state and local government spending or tax increases./PPThis book is about the institutions and political forces that shape policy making and policy outcomes in state and local communities. To those of us who are students of American politics, states and their local government subdivisions are fascinating political laboratories that allow comparisons among different political systems and traditions. States vary in the powers given to governors, how their legislatures are structured, how judges are selected and reviewed, and how they operate in a host of policy areas, including how they impose taxes. The party system is much weaker in some regions of the country than in others. State legislatures in some of the smaller or rural states meet for just a few months a year, whereas in other states they meet all year. The importance of interest groups and the media varies from state to state and from city to city. Generalizations are sometimes difficult, yet we try in this book to summarize what political scientists know about state and local politics and government./PPState and local government and politics remain important not only to the residents of a particular state but to all Americans. A tax-cutting ballot initiative can spawn scores of similar votes in other states. And as we learned from welfare reform, states can be catalysts for change on the national level and then central to its implementation./PPThose who want better government in their communities and states will not achieve it b?Р (less)

ranging from the fanatics in Khomeini's Iran, ultra-conservative Republican parties in America, and Moslem terrorist organizations in the Middle East and Afghanistan As contrasted with other current books on terrorism that place the cause of terrorism in nebulous cultural concepts or tribal artifacts, I have written a psychosocial work that profiles the complete personality of this person and reveals how his Everyman commonness contains the telltale signs of his eventual destructiveness. My emphasis is on the attributes of a person who is drawn to a life of obedience and the social avenues that are available to express his singular personality including but not limited to acts of terrorism. brbr They are the most controversial people of our time; the most despised and the most revered. Their life is a paradox in that they create whirlwinds when they are not living in complete obscurity. As individuals they are the dullest, but as actors they are the most outrageous. They certainly have captured the prize for the most press coverage of any one group of individuals. Considering all the attention they have received and the accomplishments they have realized their most surprising characteristic may be their ordinariness. While ordinary, they are the time bombs in our society. They sit passively waiting to explode into our consciousness and in many cases change the course of history brbr The point of this book is that social actions do not occur in a personal vacuum. People's needs and wants fill them until they coalesce into a recognizable form which is the shape of a public group. The decision for social action originates under the skin; only later is it exhibited as a public p@-B? (õÃÿ¾Û€  (less)

English hamlet, which is followed by the town's women becoming mysteriously pregnant. The spawn of this occurrence are a dozen eerie, blond-headed children, who are either gifted, evil, or "the world's new people." A splendid outing, not least in the way it catches parental anxiety about this small new stranger in one's home. (It was remade by John Carpenter in 1995.) Children of the Damned follows up with a story about six more creepy kids, brought from all over the globe to huddle in a old church in London. An excellent opening half-hour gets bogged down in the movie's global-political ambitions (it's very much a cold war offering), but it has its share of shivery moments--the sight of the six youngsters striding down a London s...  (less)

WIDESCREEN (1.85:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Cast/Crew Interview(s), Filmographies, Interactive Menu, Making Of, Scene Access, Trailer(s), SYNOPSIS: Political unrest helps spawn and destroy a friendship between two schoolboys in this drama. In Chile in 1973, as the leadership of socialist president Salvador Allende was coming under fire from the nation's military leaders and the leaders of several powerful Western nations (including the United States), many in the country were inspired to address the issues of the vast gulf between Chile's rich and poor. Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran), one of the headmasters of an exclusive private school, decides to confront this matter by giving a handful of poor children a full scholarship. Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mate...  (less)