Daily Briefing - Thursday, July 29, 2010

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Jennifer McCoy is the director of the Carter Center's Americas Program and a political science professor at Georgia State University. She currently directs the Carter Center's Friends of the Inter-American Democratic Charter group and previously directed the Carter Center's project on Mediation and Monitoring in Venezuela from 2002-2004. She directed election monitoring projects for The Carter Center in Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico, Venezuela, Jamaica, and Peru, and has participated in election delegations to Indonesia, Haiti, Suriname, and Guyana. Dr. McCoy has spent time in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Uruguay as a Fullbright fellow. She has also edited or contributed to several books on the topic of Venezualen democracy most recently The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela.

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist, who has been with the Los Angeles Times for more than 25 years. In that time he has worked as a financial columnist, political writer, technology writer, and foreign correspondent serving in Africa and Russia. Mr. Hiltzik received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. He is the author of the book Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, published to widespread critical acclaim in 1999. His forthcoming book, The Colossus, is a history of the greatest Depression-era public works project, Hoover Dam. He is currently working on his fifth book, a narrative history of the New Deal.

Roger Morris holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, served in the United States Foreign Service, on the White House Staff, and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books on American politics, including Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America. His study on national security policy, Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: New Vision for a New World, co-authored with Steven Schmidt, was published by the Green Institute in 2005.

He is completing Between the Graves—based on thousands of previously secret documents, a history of U.S.-Afghan relations and American policy and covert intervention in South Asia and the Middle East over the past half century, to be published by Alfred Knopf in 2010 with a major excerpt in Harper’s. He is also at work for Knopf on Kindred Rivals: America, Russia and Their Failed Ideals, a comparative history of the inner politics of the United States and Soviet Russia, and a major reinterpretation of their competition and its impact on the 21st-century.