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Singer-songwriter, actor and author Steve Earle joins us for an extended interview on the popular uprisings in the Middle East, and the connection he sees between his antiwar and anti-death penalty activism. The Grammy Award winner also performs "John Walker’s Blues," a ballad he wrote from the perspective of the captured American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Egypt’s military took power after the popular uprising that ousted former president, Hosni Mubarak. Now it faces mounting criticism for widespread use of military trials against civilians. It has used the courts to convict more than 5,000 civilians since late January.

On Monday, people gathered at the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate in downtown Cairo to speak out against the military court system. Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous sent this video report.

Historian and author Adam Hochschild talks to Democracy Now! about his latest book, To End All Wars, and the comparison between pacifist struggles in World War I-era Britain to the U.S. during Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq today. We also discuss Hochschild’s earlier book, King Leopold’s Ghost, about the horrific colonial exploitation of present-day DRC by Belgium’s King Leopold and the U.S.-backed assassination of the Congo’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Democracy Now! hosts a conversation between Palestinian author Rula Jebreal and Egyptian journalist Issandr El Amrani about the continued uprisings in the Middle East and Arab attitudes toward the U.S. Jebreal talks about growing up in Haifa and her autobiographical novel Miral, and El Amrani discusses the effects of the "Arab Spring" on Israel.

Noam Chomsky is a Professor Emeritus at MIT, where he taught for over half a century. He is author of dozens of books. His most recent is Hopes and Prospects.

Watch Part I of this conversation

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN:Noam, you’re continuing your prescription, your advice that you would give to President Obama today.

When Academy Award-winning film director Michael Moore announced he would be making a documentary about the American healthcare system in 2004, it put the health insurance industry on high alert. One person who immediately went on the offensive was Wendell Potter, who at the time was the chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA. Last year, Potter became the industry’s most prominent whistleblower. We speak with him about his role in attacking Michael Moore, his film Sicko, and the movement for a single-payer healthcare system.