This Mini-Depression is causing a lot of pain, to be sure, but it will be over in a year or three. Yet what kind of economy will we have on the other side? Will we have a more just society?

From Mendel to Machiavelli.

Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel’s violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.

I would like to give birth to a new holiday tradition. Forget the Happy Hanukkah cards. How about a thank you note?

Joe Biden is never at a loss for words. Clearly this former stutterer is making up for lost time.

On reading in an Age of Depression.

Now in their seventeenth year, the P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize some of the nation’s stinkiest media performances.

Presenting six exciting selections of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

What the president-elect should be reading.

The Search for America’s New Top Right Wing Renaissance Man (Vote Now!)

Is Afghanistan the same as Vietnam? Of course, competent geographers would say no. But the United States is the United States.

Bodies pile up, jobs vanish, and Mexico’s “perfect dictatorship” positions itself for a comeback.

If adolescent craze Twilight is pushing an abstinence agenda, what’s wrong with that?

The only way to revive Main Street is to get America back on the course of rising median incomes.

Roosevelt’s Brain Trust vs Obama’s Brainiacs.

Bush is often portrayed as (and is, actually,) the governor who executed more people than any other governor in modern history. Because, like the Lord, the Bush giveth and he taketh away.

No amount of flowery rhetoric or claims of transcendent non-ideology should deter tough scrutiny.

How does Obama manage to fill the leadership vacuum created by a lame-duck president and a Treasury chief who has all but punted on coming up with any workable solution to the economic crisis?

It’s been 16 years since a Democrat moved into the White House. Now, the fog of memory and the spin of media are teaming up to explain that Barack Obama must hew to “the center” if he knows what’s good for his presidency.

When Megan Rye’s brother returned from his tour in Iraq with over two thousand photographs marked by his uncanny skill and observation, she began painting them. The result is a nearly photorealistic series of images so quietly powerful the viewer tends to tumble into them headfirst.

While in the U.S. the immigration issue has been buried under more “urgent” news, in Mexico U.S-bound Central American immigrants are facing a more dangerous trek than ever.

While John McCain descended to some sickening lows in the 2008 presidential race, his dysfunctional campaign was merely the retarded grandchild—and if we’re lucky, the last of the bloodline—of the godfather of Republican mudslinging, Lee Atwater.

If Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy.

The Treasury seems to have lost sight of its real client. It’s client is not the creditors, shareholders, or executives of any of these firms. Its sole client is the American people.

US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being exposed to toxic chemicals that pose serious health risks.

Will he build an open-source republic or a walled-garden of control?

Fiscal hawks and conservative supply siders notwithstanding, a major stimulus is in order. Government is the spender of last resort, and the nation is coming close to its last resort.

We must be realistic about an Obama presidency in order to avoid disappointment.

Barack Obama won the presidency after clearly saying that he wants to spread the wealth. Let’s make him do it.

From her vantage point as a credentialed press photographer, Ann Marsden’s camera cuts in close to the principle political players just as the familiar media images shown on television and printed in newspapers do; yet her photographs offer unfamiliar views of the candidates.

Voting against your interests. (Video)

With only hours left until the 2008 presidential election what do all the polls mean in terms of electoral votes?

While I hear many things that should assuage my fears about Tuesday, I am still nervous.

The next President and the Global War on Terror.

Reflections on canvassing in Northeast Philly.

People’s votes are entirely their own, to do with as they see fit. But the right to do something is distinct from the wisdom of doing it.

Moving a progressive agenda on Capitol Hill will require more than defeating Republicans. It will require electing strong progressives.

While we hear a lot about Bush’s job-approval ratings and the media focus on Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the record of his Global War on Terror has yet to be fully assessed.

Volunteers at the Center for Media and Democracy’s Election Protection Wiki continue to collect reports of ongoing voter suppression. It’s not pretty.

Banks are hording money to improve true balance sheets because of the off-balance sheet vehicles created over the past several years. Until Wall Street actually lends directly to Main Street the problems will continue.

Admitting that the United States is imperfect is not the same as being “Anti-American.”

Chris Hood, formerly of Diebold Voting Systems (makers of electronic voting machines), describes in a video interview the many problems of modern voting

From the New York Sun to Jerome Corsi’s Obama Nation, to the Washington Times, the lie about Obama that the right-wing media just won’t put to rest.

The “living beyond our means” argument, with its thinly-veiled suggestion of moral terpitude, is technically correct, but it does not take into account that since 2000 median family income has been dropping.

When speaking of Depression these days most news stories are focused on the economy and not people.

The $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is another example of trickle-down policy and while some were calling for a trickle-up approach, the news media stampeded Congress into approving the bailout.

Will January, 2009 repeat January 1993?

The comments this week of Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature have provoked great patriotic upswellings in the U.S., but there’s something to what he said.

Will economic meltdown, race, or regional loyalty be the trump card in Election 2008?

The McCain/Palin ticket will almost certainly benefit from the latest round of mud-slinging and racism, but they also stand to profit from overconfidence in voters in Obama’s ability to win.

The economic meltdown is hurting everyone. But if you’re an early baby boomer over the age of 55, you may be in particularly big trouble.

Wall Street’s comeback as the place Americans love to hate.

The Wall Street meltdown requires us to recognize markets as social creations — and to reinvent our politics accordingly.

As partisan finger-pointing takes place over the Bailout of All Bailouts being voted down, Robert Reich offers his prediction for what bill will be enacted.

In conceding that John McCain was correct on some issues in the first presidential debate, Barack Obama showed he takes those issues seriously enough to see them from all sides.

A story of death and infrastructure: When a car topples a building cops and neighbors alike do what they can to avoid thinking about what could be next.

As we bail out Wall Street, America can learn an economic lesson from Germany’s most successful beer.

To understand in personal, political and historic terms — what Katharine Gun did, how the British and American governments responded, and what the U.S. news media did and did not report — is to gain a clear-eyed picture of a military-industrial-media complex that plunged ahead with the invasion of Iraq shortly after her brave action of conscience.

The New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, called unemployed Americans to the civic colors in enormous numbers in truly tough times and helped do something we need again today: the rebuilding of crumbling American infrastructure.

Many of the average taxpayers being asked to take on Wall Street’s bad loans are the same people whose incomes are dropping. If Congress only pays attention to Wall Street, Wall Street’s bad debts will continue to rise.

The tale of two countries. Unfortunately they are both America.

Solely focusing on the presidential election can be dangerous. It was a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, after all, that allowed for The New Deal.

Why John McCain picked Sarah Palin, Carbon Queen.

What if a record could change the world? Would anyone be willing to listen to it?

The public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I’m getting screwed?

Members of Congress join the publishing industry in trying to lock up taxpayer-funded medical research.

Robert Reich continues the discussion of the bailouts of all bailouts, arguing that for any big financial institution that wants to clear its books the process should resemble chapter 11 under bankruptcy.

Talk yesterday about the Bailouts of All Bailouts eased market fears and generated a giant rally on the Street, but how realistic is it?

Wall Street and Washington: How the rules of the game have changed.

Eight people were killed and more than 100 injured Monday night when a pair of fragmentation grenades exploded during a crowded, Independence Day celebration in Morelia, capital of Michoacan state.

What ‘We the People’ really means: Having lost the political fights for strong banking regulation, we face a lose-lose scenario — massive bailouts or economic collapse.

The fundamental problem on Wall Street isn’t lack of capital. It’s lack of trust. Bailouts and subsidies won’t rebuild trust.

Remembering David Foster Wallace.

A new “time out” feature that kicks voters off of voting machines after 150 seconds of inactivity, record voter participation, and estimates of voter list density based on 2004 information rather than 2008, all add up to difficulty at the polls.

The Value of One, the Value of None: An anatomy of collateral damage in the Bush Era.

Absent from the fawning corporate media coverage of “The Daily Show” is evident self-awareness that the elaborate praise is a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing.

The billboard industry is pushing for new laws to prevent trees on public land from blocking billboards.

Rappers at the Take Back Labor Day Concert didn’t do enough to speak to the young people in the crowd.

Is the Maliki Government jumping off the American Ship of State?

Guernica’s former art and photography editor’s big show opens in NYC.

Because of the implicit government guarantee, Fannie and Freddie could take on even more risks and make even more money. Until now.

The politicizing of issues that, apparently, should be too human for politics.

The current Supreme Court may not quite be the Court that the Religious Right would like deciding a case having to do with decency issues, but it may be close enough.

The differences between Democrats and Republicans are even greater than the convention speeches are apt to indicate, and the effect of another Republican president cannot be downplayed.

Over 300 protesters, bystanders, media, and medics arrested at RNC. Two minors convicted of contempt, sentenced to 30 days in adult jail.

The Bush Administration falters in a geopolitical chess match.

Palin Pick for VP Makes McCain Panderer-in-Chief.

As Barack Obama lays out a bold plan for reforming the economy and redirecting foreign policy, John McCain offers plans and decisions that are anything but bold.

What is the benefit of unmasking a great artist?

The lack of relief to Burma and the rescue fantasy the Burmese people have endured for years.

Revisiting Nargis: How Burma’s regime and its connections to the rest of the world compound the country’s problems.

Montana beats back the privatization of a beloved phrase.

A new introduction to Chalmers Johnson’s 2005 piece on the destruction of Iraq’s heritage, ‘Smash of Civilizations.’

Robert Reich reminisces on his first “job” and the meaning of Labor Day.

As same-sex couples and their wedding parties cross borders and affirm marriages, Massachusetts and California will be exporting equality.

Some people still believe things about John McCain that stopped being true years ago. (My follow-up to Robert Reich’s blog post yesterday on Guernica.)

Those who are willing to do anything to achieve their ends will always have a tactical advantage over those who regard the means as ends in themselves.

Being a critical supporter of a candidate is neither a betrayal of the candidate nor a betrayal of principles.

“Girl Talk” courageously samples music without asking permission.

Part two of Andrew Bacevich’s series on “the American military crisis.”