Susan Fuller – författare

Looking back at history, Americans have begun to realize that things were a lot better a long time ago. Men worked all day, raised large families, and didn’t expect others to pay for their health care. Their wives stayed at home and cooked, cleaned, and made themselves look pretty, just as our gracious Creator intended. The children of these decent parents did what they were told, spoke only when spoken to, and didn’t pierce their body parts. They understood it was thier parents’ right and obligation to administer spankings. Well, praise the government: Decency is back!The USA DECENCY ACT was passed this year by an overwhelming majority. Its basic tenets seek to bring us back to a world where: •Men are men•Women are women•Men and women are certainly not descended from apes•Lunch is not free•Nudity belongs at home...in the bedroom...in the darkBy abiding by the rules in this manual, the Department of Homeland Decency will soon have everyone marching proudly backwards to the future! *This manual has been reviewed and approved for general distribution by an unqualified political appointee. As there never seems to be enough time to root out and document the seemingly endless variety of the inappropriate and the profane, we invite you to report any indecent behaviors we may have neglected to legislate to the appropriate authorities, namely us. Do not discuss your comments with others before submitting them to our official address, which, for reasons of national security, we are unable to publish in this document or any government directory or website. For now all such commentary may be submitted to www.homelanddecency.com, where comments will be processed and forwarded to our secure database. We apologize for our illusiveness. All communications with us, once submitted, should be promptly forgotten. If you need to refer to previous communications with our offices, please don’t. All communications become the property of the Department and cannot be returned or acknowledged in any way. In fact we reserve the right to deny receiving them at all, unless they contain material of a salacious or improper nature. In which case, they will be forwarded to our research and prosecution division where your name and your remarks will be entered into our database and cross-referenced with all other questionable statements made throughout history.From the Trade Paperback edition.

This book is in essence concerned with the quest for rationality in decision-making, and is founded on the premise that improvements in the machinery of decision-making can actually lead to better decisions. The numerous initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s established specifically to foster greater policy coordination (notably the Central Policy Review Staff or 'Think Tank') had, by the beginning of the 1980s, fallen foul of an altogether changed political climate, in which policy formation was increasingly determined by the pressures of the marketplace, rather than by the pursuit of rationally-determined consensual goals. Paradoxically, however, this process has led, in turn, to renewed interest in the possibilities of interdepartmental policy coordination, at both centre and periphery, and in Joint Approaches to Social Policy the authors seek to provide a clear understanding of what the reality, rather than the rhetoric, of policy coordination actually entails. They endeavour to familiarise policy-makers at all levels with the basic conceptual tools necessary for successful policy coordination.