A poetry project goes on summer vacation, Obama changes his mind on military commissions, a Columbia Professor says there is no genocide in Darfur, and more.

Is this a fair use of freedom of speech? Or just obnoxious? Is Donald a war criminal?

Don’t be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it’s quickly rising health-care costs and a system that is inefficient and wasteful.

Stewart demonstrates the hypocrisy of right-wing torture apologias, criticizing Wanda Sykes

Marcy Winograd’s race to unseat Jane Harman in California’s 36th District in 2010 reflects — and is likely to help nurture — a growing maturity among progressives around the country who are tired of merely complaining about centrist Democrats in Congress.

As part of the “Tough Times” series he has been doing on America in meltdown mode for TomDispatch.com, Nick Turse ventured into the world of domestic abuse recently and discovered what tough times can really mean for some women.

Guernica Fiction featured in Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2009.

The outcome of the “stress tests” will be that the banks needing extra capital will get it from the Treasury. The Treasury will simply swap debt for equity – turning what the banks owe the government into shares of stock in the banks. The question becomes, what type of shareholders should the public become?

Seventy-five years after the start of the New Deal, and nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, the need for basic change on behalf of social justice and ecology is clear.

In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a new world order is emerging — with its center gravitating towards China. As the world melts down, China grows.

On May 2, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, Guernica co-presented an event honoring Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer and environmental activist hanged by a Nigerian military court for trumped up charges.

The clash of justifications for property rights in ancient works of art.

Guernica is proud to cosponsor this night of remembrance at PEN World Voices Festival on Saturday, May 2 with Ken Wiwa, Richard North Patterson, readings by Steve Connell and Sekou, and moderated by Okey Ndibe.

There is no reason taxpayers should pay billions more to GM when they are laying off workers. The purpose of any auto bailout is to help American auto workers keep their jobs, not save an auto industry that’s a tiny fragment of what it was before.

The University of Chicago professor and leading image theorist on stereotypes, the presidential campaign, and the legacy of the “war on terror.”

The University of Chicago professor and leading image theorist on stereotypes, the presidential campaign, and the legacy of the “war on terror.”

Attempts at apolitical cultural events have been thwarted by deep-rooted and distinctly anti-modern undercurrents in the town of Jenin.

So far Obama has found a workable balance, requiring increasingly fancy footwork, and some rebalancing will be needed. The central question for the next 100 days is how deftly he finds new footing.

How safe do you actually want to be?

Rejecting Obama iconography and demonology is necessary for a healthy progressive movement. We won’t get far by trying to leapfrog the actual political conditions of the country. Our task is to change them.

Republicans seem hell bent on becoming a tiny, whacky minority. Obama should stop trying to court them and fast-track health care.

How the economic stimulus plan could open the way for a commons-based society.

Zionism was not simply a response to worldwide anti-Semitism. The earliest Zionists were caught up in the colonialist and nationalist ideology of their day.

U.S. PIRG report documents the sell-off of public highways and construction of private toll roads.

Tim Geithner believes that the economy will be rescued when banks lend again, but most people are already carrying too much debt and don’t want to borrow more money. As he prepares to return to Congress for what will be, if he even gets it, the last money Congress will give the administration, he needs to focus on stimulus rather than bailout.

Mixed messages from Washington could lead to catastrophe in Iran.

President Obama has begun urging Americans to refinance their homes so they can save money and start spending again, and the nation’s biggest banks are claiming their operations are profitable this year. But, this is only because of the flood of money the Fed put into the economy, not because we’ve reached the beginning of the end.

A journalist and foreign correspondent reflects on his time spent in Sierra Leone as, this week, three of that country’s war criminals were sentenced to long prison terms for multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A recent New York Times article told of research being done on the possibility of erasing certain memories. While the research scientists are just scratching the surface in this field, American media outlets have been at it for a long time.

As you sit in that movie theater in May watching the latest installment in the Terminator series, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings.

Democracy has almost always preceded the creation of a large middle class.

We the editors regret any implication, in our blog that ran last Wednesday, that Choruss hoped to break or circumvent the law.

The hedge fund managers who raked in billions last year wouldn’t have done nearly as well had taxpayers not bailed out Wall Street to begin with. Now, these are exactly the sort of investors Tim Geithner is trying to lure in to buy troubled assets from banks, with an extraordinary offer financed by you and me and other taxpayers.

Obama’s insistence on increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan will fracture his base inside the Democratic Party. If he insists on leading a party of war, there will be those within the party who organize to transform it into the party for peace.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

At Guernica we love hearing what you, the reader, think about the essays, interviews, stories, and poetry we publish. Here, Frank Williams, of Industries of Africa, responds to our recent interview with African author and economist Dambisa Moyo.

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workfo

“Straight” portraiture is one of humanity’s oldest art forms, with the first known example made 27,000 years ago on a cave wall in France. But in spite of its long history, portraiture is one of the most difficult art forms to “get right.” The photographs of Pierre Toutain-Dorbec, like the paintings centuries before by Diego de Velazquez, do just that.

Guernica is proud to be collaborating with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to bring you this night of readings from Sapphire, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jessica Hagedorn, and more.

It’s time to change names, switch analogies.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

Is it time to re-think Western aid to Africa?

Last week, some members of Congress sent President Obama a letter that urged him to “reconsider” his order deploying 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The list of signers was tragically short.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

With a whimper, not a bang…the old neighborhood empties.

The shock is not the greed, inequity and political complicity, but seeing it so starkly.

With the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan struggling on the battlefield against a resilient insurgency and opium poppy cultivation on the rise it has been suggested that the United States should import the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics model currently being employed in Colombia to Afghanistan. This stance fails to recognize gross violations of human rights, a massive refugee crisis and record levels of opium poppy cultivation, which have occurred as a result of Plan Colombia.

Before it can clean up Wall Street or do much of anything else, the Administration has to clean up the way it’s been trying to clean up Wall Street.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared?

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

Many Palestinians and Israelis sense a gloomy déjà vu while Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister of a rightist, nationalist Israeli government.

Looking at the small picture Obamanomics can seem conservative. However, when you look at how it reverses the economic philosophy that has dominated America for over 25 years, it becomes something quite different.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

Two Wikileaks-related senior human rights activists have been assassinated.

The struggle to feed America’s nouveau needy.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

Guernica’s March issue is just a click away. Mark Dowie, the Indian 9/11 meets the Indian Katrina, Islamic art, with an update, and more.

Alejandro Zambra’s novella Bonsai is a book that seems to come about almost accidentally through its telling.

Afghan faces, predators, reapers, terrorist stars, Roman conquerors, imperial graveyards, and other oddities of the truncated American century.

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative”, details the “story” NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.

Poet and essayist Bill Holm dies at 65.

Dynamic debit cards not rebate checks or tax cuts the answer to quick capital injection into the economy.

Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur has recommended the sacking of Kenya’s Attorney General and the Police Commissioner over hundreds of extra-judicial killings.

It’s a little too soon for a Post-Feminist World.

In his first speech to Congress, the new president threw down a 90-month-old gauntlet, reaffirming the notion that committing to war halfway around the world will make Americans safer.

Does Obama’s goal to cut the budget deficit in half by 2012 make sense in regards to the economic challenge we face now?

A narrative for hard times.

A smattering of news from Guernica’s anonymous newshound.

Countering conservative claptrap.

Trained as a painter, photographer Rio Branco renders subject and color inseparable.

What does economic “recovery” mean on an extreme weather planet?

Instead of rewarding executives of insolvent banks that would otherwise fail, we should be helping insolvent families for whom failure spells disaster.

A confidential NATO report issued last month reveals that civilian deaths from the war in Afghanistan have increased by 46% over the past year.

Although investigations into the hyper-violent 22-day war should be done, Israel, along with all states and non-state belligerents, must go further and review the weapons they use and how they use them.

A round-up of news from the week.

The new Fallujah up close and still in ruins.

Web collective makes public thousands of Congressional Research Service reports.

The tab may be close to $2 trillion. But what, exactly is the plan? We still don’t know.

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.

Whistling past the Afghan graveyard, where empires go to die.

A smattering of news from other places to get your news.

We have seen and heard it proved again and again that, as retired Army general William Odom put it in 2002, “Terrorism is not an enemy…It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war.” And still, as we speak, the deployment orders for more troops to Afghanistan are going through the channels.

Those who support the stimulus as a desperate measure to arrest the downward plunge in the business cycle might be called cyclists. Others, including me, see the stimulus as the first step toward addressing deep structural flaws in the economy. We are the structuralists.

A smattering of news from other places to get your news.

Since 1997 — though the very word evokes faded images of Frederick Douglas, the Underground Railroad, and overloaded ships arriving from Africa — slavery has been making headlines and drawing sharp rebukes from farm worker advocate groups and others in Florida.

How one purchase can make a difference instead of encouraging the same consumption for consumption’s sake that has helped create our current problems.

The former president says that Hamas has honored its agreements with him and that during the ceasefire there were no major rocket attacks, until Israel attacked Gaza.

Last week — and 44 years ago — there were many reasons to celebrate the inauguration of a president after the defeat of a right-wing Republican opponent. But in the midst of numerous delightful fragrances in the air, a bad political odor is apt to be almost ineffable.

As a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Ari Folman took part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and was on duty in Beirut during the notorious massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Tom Engelhardt brings us an excerpt from his new graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir.

In a time like this, when tempers are riding high and many Americans are close to panic about their jobs and finances, you have a special responsibility to consider the accuracy of what you say and the consequences of inflammatory and erroneous statements.

If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of the losing sectors of the economy should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second — before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill — let’s hear it.

Tearing up Washington’s Middle East playbook: the unexpected opportunities the Gazan disaster opens for a new American policy in the Middle East in the Obama era.

In one last act of disregard for the law, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentences of two Border Patrol agents, and in so doing disrespected the federal jurors who convicted them.

An early draft of the recent White House release of “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record” has recently been uncovered.

While it’s too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, certain aspects are reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Progressives need to do more than vent their disappointment. They need to be involved.

With his exhibition, Greek photographer George Poutachidis shows us refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, driven out of their native countries awaiting a chance to get to Europe, a continent run by governments who do not want them.

What should be done with the next $350 billion of taxpayer bailout money?

Why does everyone wear kid gloves when dealing with the C.I.A.?

Searching does not always lead to finding.