The people of the northern Italian city of Vicenza, with help from activists around Italy, the rest of Europe, and even in the United States, are continuing to block the proposed construction of a new U.S. military base on their soil. When a company laid underground fiber-optic cables at the site of the proposed base, activists fill a junction box with cement. When another company tried to begin the work of removing World War II era U.S. bombs from the site, activists camped out in the cold for three days and nights while allies in Florence and a small town near Naples conducted simultaneous protests in front of the company's offices. The company backed off and has suspended the work. And a small town outside Vicenza has now refused to allow the United States to construct a residential village for troops.

Recently, Italy's foreign minister assured Condoleezza Rice, and Italy's president assured George W. Bush - not for the first time - that the base will be built. And the U.S. Congress, unbeknownst to the American people, has approved the funding. But there is a reason for these repeated public assertions that everything is on track. It isn't.

Ever since Hillary Clinton supported the reckless Kyl-Lieberman Iran bill, her Democratic competitors have been blasting her for her stand, and rightly so. By defining Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, a core branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization, the bill put the U.S. Senate on record as vindicating the Bush-Cheney line that Iranian proxies are part of a global conspiracy, linking Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hamas, Hezbollah, and any other enemy the administration wants to conjure up. It made a US attack on Iran just that much more possible and confirmed that she learned little from her earlier Iraq war vote. 

But what none of the candidates challenging her have done, as far as I can tell, is use the most succinct and damning description of the vote's implications that's been expressed, when Senator James Webb called it "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream." "It could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war," Webb concluded, a description that goes to the heart of the issue, with words likely to stick in the minds of the voters. But the other candidates have to publicly quote them, and so far they haven't.

AMY GOODMAN: The House is set to vote tomorrow on the $500 billion 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill. Unveiled on Sunday, the measure covers budgets for all cabinet departments except the Pentagon. It’s expected to pass both houses of Congress this week.



Hidden in the bill is a major energy package that would boost government financing for the nuclear industry. It would provide loan guarantees of up to $25 billion for new nuclear reactors. A massive grassroots campaign forced these taxpayer-financed loans out of the national energy bill earlier this month, but last week Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico slipped them back into the budget vote.

Ahmad Al-Akhras is the Vice Chair of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.   His parents were forced out of Palestine at a very young age.  He still believes in justice and the right for self determination.  He serves on the Columbus Community Relations Commission and the Ohio Affiliate of the ACLU.  Dr. Al-Akhras resides in Columbus, Ohio and can be reached at ahmad@alakhras.org

On the 60th anniversary of the UN partition plan, President Bush invited the conflicting parties of the Middle East to Annapolis, Maryland.  It seems that President Bush wanted to have a legacy for being a broker of a long-awaited peace deal between the Palestinians and Israelis.  It looks like nothing is coming out of this meeting.  However, it may turn out as a nice photo op for everybody involved. 

America’s suicide bombers don’t use bombs and don’t seem to have a cause larger than their own angst, but they’re as lethal as any misguided political fanatic and they beg a question as urgent as any the human race has faced.

Yet it’s the same old — indeed, Paleolithic — question we’ve always faced. Are we the hunter or are we the prey? Or are we something else, some preposterous and divine mixture of the two, holy terrors, flawed creators who keep failing to get it right? As Immanuel Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

Even the glory that is the 21st century U.S. of A. is a construction of crooked timber, psychologically and spiritually speaking, at least, and a sad kid named Robert Hawkins, a “lost puppy” (so a friend’s mother described him), gave the umpteenth demonstration of this fact at an Omaha shopping mall last week.