personal finance books

• Colbert King:
  

  
  

  Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father's Day. So I'd like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

  
  
  

  Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.

  
  
  

  Now let's turn to Obama's foremost critics: Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Newton Leroy Gingrich and Sarah Palin.
  

  
  

  
  




• Eighty-five percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. It's expected, both by employers and society as a whole.
  
  
  

  
  

  In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home.

  
  
  

  Swedish mothers still take more time off with children — almost four times as much. And some who thought they wanted their men to help raise baby now find themselves coveting more time at home.

  
  
  

  But laws reserving at least two months of the generously paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers — a quota that could well double after the September election — have set off profound social change.
  

  
  

  
  




• In 2002, a telecommunications engineer with dual Canadian/Syrian citizenship was seized from JFK airport, held in solitary confinement for two weeks without adequate access to an attorney, then sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. Then, he was released back to Canada. Jeralyn explains that although the Supreme Court denied cert in his civil lawsuit against U.S. officials, at least someone official is investigating. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.



• Blackwater is awarded a new contract -- under another name, of course -- to guard U.S. consulates in Afghanistan. --Susan Gardner




• Republicans just can't help revealing their unhinged extremism, and no matter how many times they later backtrack, they are what they are.
  
  
  

  
  

  The Republican nominee for a northern New Mexico congressional seat suggested during a radio interview that the United States could place land mines along the Mexican border to secure the international boundary.

  
  
  

  Asked Monday to clarify, Tom Mullins emphasized that he does not advocate doing so.
  

  
  

  
  

  He was just making conversation. Or something.




• Dahlia Lithwick:
  
  
  

  
  

  Almost two weeks ago, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave the commencement speech at Harvard, a speech that's been variously described by some of my favorite legal writers as a denunciation of "originalism," a defense of "living constitutionalism," and a suggestion that "judicial activism" is a game both liberals and conservatives can play. But the striking aspect of Souter's remarkable speech is that it rejected virtually all of these easy ideological labels and addressed itself to two much simpler questions: Is the meaning of the Constitution clear? And is the task of divining that meaning easy? These incisive questions themselves beg an even more pressing constitutional question: Why must justices first leave the bench before they can speak seriously about the importance of the court?
  

  
  

  
  




• Science Daily:
  
  
  

  
  

  Advances in high-yield agriculture over the latter part of the 20th century have prevented massive amounts of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere -- the equivalent of 590 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide -- according to a new study led by two Stanford Earth scientists.
  

  
  

  
  




• Andrew Lawler, in Science Magazine:
  
  
  

  
  

  After decades of taboo and controversy, Pacific Rim archaeologists are finding new evidence that Polynesians reached South America before Europeans did, voyaging across the world's largest ocean around 1200 C.E.
  

  
  

  
  




• Cynthia Tucker's reaction to President Obama's energy speech was concise and pointed.



• Diego Valle makes a comprehensive analysis of the Drug War in Mexico. Suffice to say that the present strategy isn't working. If you don't have a lot of time, just scroll down to his conclusions.



• Europe's recession might bring down Germany's Merkel government, and is leading to a rise in xenophobia and racism.



• Markos linked this, last week, but it deserves an encore. After taking apart the canard that Social Security is going broke, digby ends with this gem:
  
  
  

  
  

  Any deficit scold who doesn't put reducing health care costs at the very top of the agenda is just a demagogic crank doing the dirty work for the aristocratic overlords.
  

  
  

  
  




• Defense Secretary Robert Gates claims Iran could launch hundreds of missiles into Europe. At least he didn't claim it could be done in 45 minutes.



• Pretend you're surprised:
  
  
  

  
  

  Recent setbacks in Afghanistan have intensified debate over the wisdom of the Obama administration's plan to begin withdrawing U.S. military forces next summer and highlighted reservations among military commanders over a rigid timeline.

  
  
  

  At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees U.S. forces in the Mideast and Afghanistan, offered "qualified" support for President Obama's plan to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011.
  

  
  

  
  

  You have to admire the logic. The worse things get, the longer we have to stay.

I recently reviewed Gary Rivlin's important new book, Broke USA, for the Huffington Post. Thus, I was stunned when I noticed that the book had been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

I wondered if the reviewer, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and I had read the same book.

f you go by her philosophy, payday lenders and other members of the "poverty industry" are upstanding entrepreneurs, performing a service for society!

She waits until the second to last paragraph to "mention" that payday lenders are providing this wonderful service at "something like a 300% to 400% interest rate."

Ms. Mangu-Ward makes a historic comparison of those in the "poverty industry" with loan sharks of a different era. I'm not sure that Mangu-Ward, a Yale University graduate, has ever met a loan shark. I have.

As I note in my book Son of a Son of a Gambler, loan sharks and gamblers populated my hometowns of Covington and Newport in Northern Kentucky.

Although the sharks were aggressive in their collections policies, any loan shark who charged 400% would have soon been floating in the Ohio River.

I also doubt that many loan sharks were ever touted for their entrepreneurial acumen in the Wall Street Journal.

The sad thing is that the Wall Street Journal would allow such a slanted and biased reviewer to write a review for their newspaper.

She leaps to conclusions that show a lack of research, especially for a graduate of an Ivy League school.

For example, she said that Rivlin brings "a level of financial illiteracy and disdain for entrepreneurs that is somewhat surprising in a man who once covered Silicon Valley for the New York Times."

If Mangu-Ward had done her homework, she would have read Rivlin's books, The Plot to Get Bill Gates and The Godfather of Silicon Valley. The first book shows Rivlin's tremendous empathy with the featured entrepreneur and the second shows some keen insights into how businesses truly operate.

Anyway, Broke USA is not about entrepreneurism. It's about the poverty industry and how loan sharking has become legalized.

Rivlin devotes much of his book to efforts in North Carolina and other states to offer payday loans at a more reasonable interest rate. He notes how the United States armed services put a 36% cap on any payday loans made to military personnel.

None of that important information made it into a "review" that in the author's mind puts payday lenders in the same category as Mother Teresa: Doing good for the poor.

I don't remember Mother Teresa charging 400% interest rates.

Despite what the Wall Street Journal says, Broke USA is an even-handed look at the poverty industry.

A little even-handedness would have gone a long way in the Wall Street Journal's review.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704629804575325840351124892.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-mcnay/wall-street-and-legalized_b_596986.html

Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC is an award-winning financial columnist and Huffington Post Contributor.

You can read more about Don at www.donmcnay.com

McNay has Master's Degrees from Vanderbilt and the American College and is in the Hall of Distinguished Alumni of Eastern Kentucky University.

McNay has written two books. Most recent is Son of a Son of a Gambler: Winners, Losers and What to Do When You Win The Lottery

McNay is a lifetime member of the Million Dollar Round Table and has four professional designations in the financial services field.

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A lot of us discount the cliché "that education s is life long process." However it's absolutely critical for us to keep growing and learning after we get out of high school and college. Imagine how someone who studied computers in the 1960's would be if they didn't upgrade their skill set! We are gaining new and more advantage technology every year, and it's affecting every field of business. We have to be able to improve ourselves. This just doesn't go for our career though; we should strive to learn more about our family, our health, and our finances every year. The average millionaire reads a non fiction book a month; maybe you should consider reading one now and then! Here are three great personal finance books that you should read before 2007 is up.

To start out, there's a good chance that if you read personal finance books every now and then, you've already read the Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley. The book describes how millionaires control their financial life, as opposed to how the average person controls their financial life. You may not have read his follow up, The Millionaire Mind. Stanley's new book about finance discusses the qualities of millionaires and how they got to where they are today. Hopefully you will be able to adopt some of the characteristics in the book to help you ensure a more successful financial future.

Of course it's just as important to know what not to do when it comes to personal finance, and that's precisely why I suggest that you read "Why We Want You To Be Rich" by Donald Trump & Robert Kiyosaki. In this book they are propagating the same financial ideas which lead them and their businesses to severe financial hardship. Some of Trump's businesses have filed bankruptcy and Kiyosaki himself filed bankruptcy! These are two people you should not be taking personal finance advice from. They do not factor risk into the equation of personal finance which gets them into severe financial trouble. You should read this book so you can understand the follies of their advice and others who spread around similar information.

Another new book on the scene which you should definitely read is "Get Clark Smart" by radio host Clark Howard. The book bills it self out to be the "ultimate guide to getting rich", unfortunately it's a bit misnamed. It doesn't have a whole lot of secrets to become rich, but it does provide a lot of unique insight which will allow you to be wise and sound with your personal finances.





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