The United States would veto a Palestinian declaration of statehood in the United Nations Security Council, U.S. senators visiting Israel said Monday.Senator Joseph Lieberman (CT), an independent, said "an essentially unilateral" declaration of statehood was the one thing that would not move the stalled peace process forward."I hope and presume that the United States would veto such a move if it ever came to the Security Council," Lieberman said. The only way to end the Middle East conflict was an agreement reached through bilateral negotiations, he added.The Palestinians should "give the new government of Israel an opportunity at the negotiating table," he said.

These congressional felons assumed membership in the biggest-of-all-members-only clubs provided a get-out-of-jail-free card. They believed they could get away with bribery and extortion because politicians have been getting away with them legally for years.

Unemployed Americans Should Hunker Down for More Job Losses. .... Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

A psychiatrist who tried to prevent Fort Hood-style violence among Marines about to "lose it" instead loses his job.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which purports to be “the voice of business,” is run by a Republican money machine. As the nation’s largest lobbying shop, the Chamber is spending millions of dollars from its corporate members against President Obama’s progressive agenda of health care, energy, and financial reform. The Chamber claims that the “board’s membership is as diverse as the nation’s business community itself,” but this is false. A Wonk Room analysis of federal election contribution data compiled by the LittleSis project has found that the Chamber’s 116-member board of directors has given more than six times as much money to Republican candidates and committees ($4,741,747) as it has to Democrats ($778,282), with $1,074,697 flowing to corporate political action committees

"Tucked into a grimy building in Guangzhou, a small band of Chinese master carvers chip away at ivory tusks with chisels, fashioning them into the sorts of intricate carvings once prized by the Chinese emperors. A passion for ornaments such as these is what helped decimate African and Asian elephant populations until the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) banned the ivory trade two decades ago, in 1989. Today, China's economic rise, along with a seemingly insatiable appetite for status symbols among its nouveaux-riches, has spurred the demand for African ivory."

"The omnibus legislation drew unanimous committee approval. But Senator Coburn objected to quick floor passage, demanding that the five-year, $3.7 billion cost be offset with immediate budget cuts. The senator’s argument rings hollow in the face of veterans’ suffering and the world of deficit budgeting brought on by his party’s tax cuts and zealous war investments."

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992Drug makers say they have valid business reasons for the price increases. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years.

The Barack Obama administration and the US Congress are now trying to address the fundamental issue of TBTF, generally acknowledged as a key contributing factor to the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Yet, government bailout programs for big financial institutions have resulted in banks becoming even bigger than before the crisis. Apparently, the administration’s solution to "too big to fail" is to make banks bigger. JP Morgan Chase is reportedly holding more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in the US. The four biggest super banks (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank) now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards in the US. Since the financial crisis, these four super banks are each allowed to hold more than 10% of the nation's deposits, having been exempted from a longstanding rule barring such market dominance. In several metropolitan regions, these new super banks are now permitted to take market share beyond what the Department of Justice's anti-trust guidelines previously allowed. The American banking system is now one of a handful of large global trading companies pretending to be banks, taking huge profits from high-risk proprietary trades with government-backed money, instead of one of a network of small conservative local institutions serving their domicile communities merely as intermediaries of money through local deposits for nominal fees.

"The insurgency does not have the capability to defeat U.S. forces or depose Afghanistan's central government, and…U.S. forces do not the ability to vanquish the insurgency." While the purported goal of the war is denying al-Qaeda a sanctuary, according to U.S. intelligence the organization has fewer than 100 fighters in the country. And further, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, pledges that his organization will not interfere with Afghanistan's neighbors or the West, which suggests that the insurgents have been learning about diplomacy as well. The Afghanistan War can only be solved by sitting all the parties down and working out a political settlement. Since the Taliban have already made a seven-point peace proposal, that hardly seems an insurmountable task. Anything else is a dangerous illusion.

The ongoing absolutism in Congress in trying to prevent women--or at least poor women--from obtaining abortions is one of the more shameful spectacles in America. The sanctimonious Blue Dog Democrats and the Republicans, who almost unanimously opposed any right to abortion, present two basic arguments. One is that abortion is murder, and therefore must be illegal, or, in more nuanced form, they say that they or their constituents oppose abortion and therefore it is wrong to have their tax money paying for the procedure. Of course, for most of those who argue that abortion is murder, there is a towering hypocrisy in the fact that with rare exceptions, those who argue this view also support capital punishment, which is also murder.

David Corn stops Republican revisionism dead in its tracks.

If you hire a lawyer, the chances are you won't be sentenced to death in Houston. University of Denver Criminologist Scott Phillips reviewed 504 capital indictments over three decades in Harris County, Texas, and found that defendants who hired lawyers for the entire trial were never sentenced to death -- and were more likely to be acquitted. The results of his study, published over the summer in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, are truly stunning. Since nearly all defendants facing the death penalty in Harris County were poor, Phillips argues that his results further demonstrate the arbitrariness of capital punishment.

Private investors are not turning to agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty. They want profit, pure and simple. And the world has changed in ways that now make it possible to make big money from farmland. From the investors’ perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up and providing a solid basis for returns on investment for those who control the necessary resource base. And that resource base, particularly land and water, is under stress as never before. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, so-called alternative investments, such as infrastructure or farmland, are all the rage. Farmland itself is touted as providing a hedge against inflation. And because its value doesn't go up and down in sync with other assets like gold or currencies, it allows investors to successfully diversify their portfolios.

Media commentary on the upcoming 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has raised concern that state secrets may be divulged, including details about how the Bush administration used torture to extract evidence about al-Qaeda. But what the Fawning Corporate Media (or FCM) have so far neglected is the likelihood that the testimony will be so public that they will have to break their studied silence about why Sheikh Mohammed and his associates say they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11. For reasons that are painfully obvious, the FCM have done their best to ignore or bury the role that Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has played in motivating the 9/11 attacks and other anti-Western terrorism.

"Evidence was growing this weekend that babies born in the Iraqi city of Fallujah – scene in 2004 of one of the few set-piece battles of the invasion – are exhibiting high rates of mortality and birth defects. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The campaigners believe that either white phosphorus or depleted uranium is a major, if not only, cause of the birth defects."

"Palestinian leaders from President Mahmoud Abbas down have alarmed Israeli ministers by swinging their weight behind a planned effort to secure UN backing for a unilaterally declared independent state in the West Bank and Gaza. In an innovative strategy which would not depend on the success of currently stalled negotiations with Israel, the leaders are preparing a push to secure formal UN Security Council support for a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders as a crucial first step towards the formation of a state."

Before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in March 2003, their oil companies were shut out of oil-production contracts being negotiated by the government of Saddam Hussein. Today, more than six years of war later, Saddam is gone, and the U.S. and British oil companies are not only in on the oil contracts, they have managed to sweeten the terms. If the negotiations proceed on their current path, foreign companies will produce the vast majority of Iraq’s oil. How much control they will exert, and who will reap the greatest benefits (and endure the steepest costs) is yet to be determined.

Blaming pirates and other desperate people for our problems is a distraction we cannot afford if we truly want to find a solution to the crises confronting us. These incidents are symptoms of our failed economic model. They are to our society the equivalent of a heart attack to an individual. We send in Navy Seals to rescue the hostages, as we would hire doctors to perform a coronary artery bypass. But it is essential to admit that both are reactions to an underlying problem. The patient needs to address the reasons his or her heart failed in the first place, such as smoking, diet, and lack of exercise. The same is true for piracy and all forms of terrorism.

If there was any doubt that Senate Republicans are eager to drag their heels when it comes to health care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) removed it on Sunday. The Kentucky Republican, during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," demanded that the Senate take, at the very least, six weeks to deliberate legislation once it is sent to the floor for amendments.