Operation Bald Eagle is a new spy fiction book from author Kyle Bell. It tells the thrilling story of a CIA agent investigating a potential cyber-attack on U.S. soil. The book begins with a Chinese businessman attempting to purchase an American technology company with sensitive government contracts. An exciting car chase that leads them to the Golden Gate Bridge ends with their target dead and few leads to go on. All is not as it seems, though, as Ethan Clark will soon find out.
Who is Ethan Clark?
Ethan Clark is a middle-aged veteran of the CIA. He’s tough around the edges, sarcastic; some would even call him an asshole. His decades of experience have led to doubts about the role that America plays in the world. Things are not black and white. He sees the world in shades of gray.
Why should I care?
Fans of spy novels, movies and video games will find that Operation Bald Eagle draws inspiration from familiar franchises. While Ethan Clark is in many ways an anti-Bond hero, Operation Bald Eagle’s larger-than-life villains will challenge even the most memorable bad guys in the Bond universe. Operation Bald Eagle goes back to the roots of the spy genre and makes it relevant to a 21st century world.
Where can I buy?
Operation Bald Eagle is available at multiple online retailers for $3.99 including Amazon, Smashwords and Kobo. Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore and Sony will soon follow. See the links below!
The official launch of Operation Bald Eagle was January 23 to coincide with Chinese New Year. Now we have a press release to spread the exciting news to the world!
Operation Bald Eagle Commences with E-Book Launch
An exciting new spy novel questions corporate power and the vulnerability of America’s infrastructure to cyber-attack
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
South Bend, Indiana -January, 25, 2012 – Operation Bald Eagle has launched on Amazon.com and Smashwords for $3.99 with Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore and Kobo to follow in the weeks to come. A paperback version will be released later in 2012.
Agent Ethan Clark faces one of his most daunting challenges yet in this spy thriller that sends the CIA veteran from San Francisco to Taiwan. The Chinese attempt to acquire a highly valued American technology company with sensitive U.S. government contracts. Intelligence suggests that a possible cyber-attack is in the works, but all is not as it seems.
“Operation Bald Eagle is a story of resolve in the face of adversity,” said author Kyle W. Bell. “The world of Ethan Clark is dominated by overwhelming corporate power and government corruption. Politics gets in the way of the job. Fortunately, people with good intentions still work on behalf of the American public – even when everything seems hopeless.”
Kyle W. Bell holds a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Indiana University South Bend. He calls South Bend his home where he was born and raised. He has always been an avid writer. At the age of twenty-three, he likes to think that his youth gives him the freedom to write openly and refrain from being overly cynical.
Kyle’s main interests include writing, reading books, keeping tabs on the news, watching sports and being with both friends and family. In 2003, he founded the video game news and review website Game Freaks 365. His interest in politics drove him to create KyleBell.com in 2007, a political blog meant to generate ideas and debate on policy, as well as current events.
He is the recipient of the Indiana Black Expo’s Martin Luther King Junior Award. It was won in an essay contest in 2002 writing about the perils of racial profiling in the wake of 9/11. The following year he was awarded with the Presidential Award for excellence in education. In 2011 his writing on sports development appeared in Indiana University South Bend’s Undergraduate Research Journal.
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Feel free to send an e-mail to kwb at kylebell dot com if you are interested in a review copy for your website, newspaper or blog. Available formats include PDF, Kindle, ePub and more. I am also available for interview upon request.
After a moderately tame primary season things are starting to heat up. Newt Gingrich decided to not go negative in Iowa after being nuked with vicious ads from Mitt Romney paid for with secret donors. The result was a stunning reversal of fortunes. Within a matter of weeks Gingrich plummeted from first in the polls to a decidedly weak fourth place finish. Take a look at one of the ads that Gingrich was running before Iowa:
This next ad is running in South Carolina after Gingrich lost in Iowa and New Hampshire:
Of course Gingrich’s ad is softball compared to what George W. Bush did to John McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 Republican primary. McCain was accused of fathering an illegitimate black child and it cost him big time. The Arizona senator lost by 11 points after having pulled off a major New Hampshire upset. Can Gingrich manage to derail Newt with similar negative attack ads? The tightening polls certainly indicate that he could. Of course this time, unlike with McCain, Romney will deserve the verbal beating on television.
The full-blown corporate takeover of our democracy is well underway. The recently completed Iowa caucuses show the new reality quite clearly where Super PACs outspent actual candidates by a 2-to-1 margin. Following the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the Supreme Court held that corporations and wealthy individuals can spend unlimited sums of anonymous money in elections as long as it is not directly coordinated by campaigns. What has happened instead is that people sympathetic to a given candidate left those campaigns to form super PACs on behalf of the candidate. As the Washington Post reports:
Super PACs have outspent Republican candidates by more than 2 to 1 in Iowa and other early primary states this election cycle, according to data from the Federal Election Commission and Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks ad spending. The gulf is even wider when the picture is broadened to include other independent groups, many of which already haves spots on the air in Colorado, Ohio and states that are likely to be key battlegrounds in November.
The clearest beneficiary of the onslaught has been former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who was able to fend off a last-minute surge by former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) with the help of more than $4 million in advertising from Restore Our Future, a super PAC staffed by former Romney advisers. Romney’s campaign spent relatively little ad money in Iowa.
Democracy is for sale. The only real winner? Large corporations looking to legally bribe politicians (or punish them for voting the “wrong” way).
President Obama signed into a law that will allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens that are merely suspected of terrorism. It was quietly signed into law while millions of Americans were celebrating the New Year’s holiday with little fanfare and equally minimal media coverage. A few principled Democrats have come out in opposition to the indefinite detention language, including the likes of Diane Feinstein and Al Franken. The liberal lawyer, law professor and legal analyst on MSNBC, Jonathan Turley, added his voice to what is probably the most critical piece yet:
Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.
The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not “support our troops” by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The “American way of life” is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.
Obama is not going to indefinitely detain American citizens, at least abusively to target political opponents. However, could you imagine this kind of power in the hands of a man like Richard Nixon? Obama will only be in office for – at the most – five more years. Do Democrats mean to say that they trust this kind of power with a Republican president? Would they be defending George W. Bush if he had signed this into law? The hypocrisy is astounding. Signing this bill is the single biggest mistake of President Obama’s career.
Indiana’s Republican Governor Mitch Daniels says that a top priority for the upcoming 2012 legislative session will be a right-to-work bill that would cripple unions and lower wages by making dues voluntary. “When Indiana gets a chance to compete for new business, we win two-thirds of the time,” Daniels told a South Bend reporter. “Unfortunately a quarter to half the time, we don’t get to the table because business is only interested in a state with this protection. We just need to have those shots on goal because we know we’ll capture more than our fair share if we do.”
The facts are not on his side. Right-to-work states like South Carolina have a considerably higher unemployment rate than Indiana (10.5% vs. 9%) and their workers have lower wages. Daniels should get his talking points straight before he makes false and misleading claims about the jobs situation in Indiana. Unions are not the problem, Indiana Republicans’ willingness to sacrifice wages and workplace safety is the problem.
Daniels goes on to claim that, “I’d be completely opposed to this if it affected the right to organize. But every right-to-work state has unions and some of them have a higher percentage of union members than Indiana does. I’d be completely against anything that reduced the right to organize. This is only about whether you have to pay the dues or don’t.”
I’ll give the governor credit, he knows how to weasel out of his positions – at least rhetorically – even while still maintaining them. The bill has nothing to do with jobs and everything to do with killing unions. Right-to-work is a way to drain a union’s resources. If you can benefit from a union and not have to pay for it then who would offer up their dues? It’s called free-riding. For a party that would love to see all resistance to corporate power crushed, right-to-work makes a good deal of sense.
The final U.S. troops have left Iraq as of Sunday, December 18, marking the end of the nearly nine year old conflict. More than 4,500 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq in addition to the more than 30,000 wounded. Over 100,000 Iraqis died by some estimates. In all, 1.5 million Americans served on the ground in Iraq. At the height of the war some 239,000 troops were stationed across 500 bases with another 135,000 contractors working in the country.
The withdrawal doesn’t mean that the U.S. presence has ended. As CNN points out: “The United States will still maintain a presence in Iraq: hundreds of nonmilitary personnel, including 1,700 diplomats, law enforcement officers, and economic, agricultural and other experts, according to the State Department. In addition, 5,000 security contractors will protect Americans and another 4,500 contractors will serve in other roles.”
The U.S. embassy in Iraq is the largest in the world despite the two countries having little in common culturally or economically. They don’t even share a border. Why we need over 11,000 people to man an embassy is anyone’s guess (I think you can surmise why we are still there), but should a civil war occur, a lot of Americans will be in harm’s way. It is almost begging for another Iran hostage crisis to happen.
The Sanctuary Movement: How Broken Immigration Policies Affect Cities is currently the top selling Immigration Law book at Amazon. The Sanctuary Movement is a book about the broken immigration system in the United States where cities have had to respond to the failings of the federal government with practical and sometimes controversial solutions. Sanctuary cities have been created to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation. The book examines the relationship between the federal government, sanctuary cities and their undocumented citizens. You can buy The Sanctuary Movement at Amazon.com for only $2.99.
Casual political observers are probably not aware, but the race for selecting a Republican nominee is in its final stages. While the Iowa caucuses are now only three weeks away, the candidates realistically have only about ten more days left to campaign. That’s because by December 24 – Christmas Eve – most Americans will tune out presidential politics and news in general to focus on family time. The holiday lull will likely continue into the New Year a week later.
With polls showing that Newt Gingrich is now the prohibitive national favorite, as well as the leader in Iowa, South Carolina, Florida and numerous other states with the notable exception of New Hampshire, these final ten days could very well decide who will be the Republican nominee. Mitt’s hands-off approach to Iowa could be his downfall. It worked when his ascendant rivals imploded within a few weeks of taking their leads: Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain.
There is no indication from last weekend’s debate that Gingrich’s momentum is slowing down. Unlike the others Gingrich is a gritty political veteran. If anything Romney took the most damage with his $10,000 bet challenge to Rick Perry – acting as if it were chump change (and it is for a man worth nearly $200 million) – following up with a testy exchange on Monday with a Vietnam War veteran over his opposition to gay marriage. Gingrich is in the driver’s seat and time is running out for Mitt Romney.
