January 25, 2010 | The Nation

In the Magazine

January 25, 2010

Cover: Cover design by Gene Case & Stephen Kling/Avenging Angels

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Alexander Cockburn on R. Crumb's Genesis, Stuart Klawans on Avatar and Calvin Trillin on a lesson for airline security screeners.

Articles

Organizing for America marks the first time a political party has deployed a permanent field program to advance a policy agenda between elections.

Crises like the Haiti earthquake serve as reminders of why refugee treatment must be part of immigration reform.

Day 1 of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission didn't find any good answers to the causes of the financial crisis--but don't give up on the commission yet.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission sent a strong message by putting Wall Street titans under oath, but answers about the financial crisis proved evasive.

Washington more often suffocates than satisfies our dreams, and this may prove to be the twenty-third season's unwavering dramatic thread.

In a closed legal proceeding, Judge Manual Real grants bail to the
Homies Unidos founder.

One of the stars of the widely acclaimed Iraq war film The Hurt Locker has claimed that the filmmakers hired the mercenary firm Blackwater. The producer says they were mercenaries, but not Blackwater.

The secret war that lies behind the CIA's recent intelligence disaster in Afghanistan.

German prosecutors have launched an investigation into
allegations that a Blackwater-led CIA team conducted a clandestine
operation in Hamburg after 9/11 aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to Al Qaeda.

The Blackwater guards are charged with killing two Afghan civilians in May 2009.

A portrait of a can-do nation turning into a can't-do one.

Activists are figuring out what went wrong at the climate summit and what to do next.

Palestine's Islamic movement has subtly changed its uncompromising posture on Israel.

Forceful outside intervention is the only alternative to an unstable and dangerous status quo.

The patriotic case for government action.

Blackwater will pay families of dead Iraqis $100,000 each, and says it is "pleased" with the outcome.

Letters


Ho-Hum Sports, Hi-Ho Zirin!

Columbus, Ohio

Editorials

A federal judge has dismissed all charges against the five Blackwater operatives accused of gunning down fourteen innocent Iraqis in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007.

Remembering poet Dennis Brutus and anti-globalization activist Tim Costello.

The Washington Post has run a "news" article about deficit reduction produced by The Fiscal Times, an outfit backed by Social Security demonizer Pete Peterson.

The attempted airliner attack on Christmas Day demonstrates that the best antidote to terrorism is not military action but good intelligence, police work and appropriate security measures.

David Levine, who died on December 29 at 83, was best known for his brilliant, biting, crosshatched caricatures of literary and political figures, which until his vision gave out had appeared reg

Reviews

Film

James Cameron's Avatar, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and more.

Book

In Evelio Rosero's The Armies, war is like the Law in Kafka: cruel, implacable and coldly divine.

Book

In the fiction of Sylvia Townsend Warner, historical change is accidental and almost imperceptible, but for all that no less decisive.

Columns

TruthDig

In the great American tradition of finding foreign scapegoats for our problems, the hunt is on to somehow hold China responsible for the misery that Wall Street financiers inflicted upon the world.

Music

Feminist highs and lows of the first decade of the 2000s.

If a conclusive disrespecting of Genesis was required, wouldn't you think R. Crumb was the man for the job?

Crossword


ACROSS

 1 Not the campfires watched, by Rebel pickets. (8,6)