For all the vibrancy of Taiwanese politics and the high performance of Taiwan’s economy, the island is something of an embarrassment to the international community. Taiwan looks like a state. It acts like a state. But only two dozen other countries recognize Taiwan as a state

When the Bush administration tried earlier to push through a comprehensive immigration reform bill, anti-immigrant groups unleashed a grassroots protest over the proposed amnesty measures and helped to defeat the bill. Last week, the Senate refused to consider a bill that would have allowed the children of undocumented workers to apply for citizenship if they met certain criteria.

For many Americans, — 3,834 U.S. soldiers dead, 27,753 wounded — quantify the tragedy of Iraq. It’s all about us: our invasion, our occupation, our losses.

The anti-sweatshop campaigns, the protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the mobilizations against free-trade agreements have all been an education in the global economy that is rarely found in the classroom.

I pray for the day when the scales fall from our leaders’ eyes, they expiate their political sins, and Washington is wholly transfigured.

War grabs the headlines, and anti-war art grabs our attention. They do so with some of the same tools: guns, bombs, and body counts. Does the visual jujitsu of anti-war art expose the horrors of violence or inadvertently reinforce our collective fascination with bloodletting?

According to the compromise proposal of UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari, the international community was to grant “supervised independence” to Kosovo, the largely Albanian enclave in southern Serbia. This compromise plan provided Kosovo with its own constitution,its own national anthem, and perhaps most symbolically, its own flag.

Name the country in the Middle East that is most anti-American. Egypt? Palestine? Lebanon? Try again. Try instead our key NATO ally, the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, and one of the countries in line for membership in the European Union.

Just as American consumers have guzzled down more and more glucose drip, U.S. executives have also taken a bigger and bigger gulp out of the overall income stream.

With the policymakers who have steered our country in the wrong direction absent from Washington, now is the time for YOU to start making US foreign policy.