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.

FISA Call to Action

Dear Friend:

The Senate will soon consider legislation addressing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). I emailed you about this issue recently responding to inaccuracies in the press about Democratic efforts to improve protection of civil liberties. I am writing you today to update you on the current state of the bill and to ask for your help.

About FISA

One critical question being considered in the Senate's FISA bill is whether to offer telecom companies retroactive immunity for any actions they undertook in the wireless surveillance program. The Bush Administration has claimed that this is necessary for national security reasons, but I am skeptical.

If the Administration was serious about arguing for this immunity, I suspect they would take steps to demonstrate to Congress the extent of this surveillance program and what role the phone companies played. Yet they have refused to share even this information with the House. Clearly, it is a bit much to ask for immunity from prosecution without explaining why it is necessary.

The chances are slim that you saw much news coverage of Human Rights Day when it blew past the media radar -- as usual -- on Dec. 10. Human rights may be touted as a treasured principle in the United States, but the assessed value in medialand is apt to fluctuate widely on the basis of double standards and narrow definitions.

Every political system, no matter how repressive or democratic, is able to amp up public outrage over real or imagined violations of human rights. News media can easily fixate on stories of faraway injustice and cruelty. But the lofty stances end up as posturing to the extent that a single standard is not applied.

When U.S.-allied governments torture political prisoners, the likelihood of U.S. media scrutiny is much lower than the probability of media righteousness against governments reviled by official Washington.

But what are "human rights" anyway? In the USA, we mostly think of them as freedom to speak, assemble, worship and express opinions. Of course those are crucial rights. Yet they hardly span the broad scope that's spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.