By James Montague, New York Times, Dec. 19/20, 2012

[....] “The fans were coming, sprinting after the match,” Fathi, 28, recalled last week. “I knew they hated me and all the players. All the players ran. I didn’t know what was happening outside. But something was happening outside. After this they killed the boys. Not the men, the boys.”

As Fathi and his teammates took refuge from the Masry supporters in a changing room, one of the darkest incidents in soccer history was unfolding in the nearby bleachers.

Within the hour, more than 70 Ahly fans — all of them young men, many of them members of the club’s fan group, the Ultras Ahlawy — lay dead [....]

It was the bloodiest single day in Egypt in the wake of the ouster 22 months ago of President Hosni Mubarak, who ruled for nearly three decades. There were widespread accusations that the military-led government that had replaced Mubarak allowed the violence to escalate to justify its powers and undermine the revolution.

In the aftermath, the soccer league’s season was immediately canceled. Play has yet to resume and some clubs are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. But Fathi and his teammates have somehow endured and continue to play on . The team dedicated itself to taking part in the most prestigious competition that remained — the tough African Champions League — and vowed to honor those who died by winning it.

And it did.[....]

I urge all to read this in it's entirety.  Be aware of how much worse this debacle could get!

POLITICO - Op-Ed  Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Lost among the fiscal cliff debates on marginal tax rates and the sequester is a bipartisan package of important tax cuts that the House and the Senate should take up and pass immediately, regardless of whether Democrats and Republicans can reach a larger compromise.

I refer to a package of tax cuts passed earlier this year by the Senate Finance Committee, commonly referred to as the “tax extenders package,” which I feel has not received the attention it deserves as a major component of the fiscal cliff.....

First, tax extenders are much less contentious than the other end-of-year problems we must resolve; the package has bipartisan support. In August, the Senate Finance Committee approved the measure by a large margin, with “yes” votes from six Republicans, including the panel’s ranking member, and all 13 Democrats.........

The third reason we should immediately pass the tax extenders package is that waiting could force the IRS to delay the tax filing season by 10 weeks or more for millions of Americans. This is because the bill extends many provisions that expired at the end of 2011, and they need to be extended for 2012 before people file their tax returns in January. After Congress acts — if it acts — the IRS needs weeks to finalize tax forms and instruction books and to program its computers to process the returns.

The IRS tells us the alternative minimum tax patch would cause the biggest delay, because of the number of tax credits and deductions that interact with the AMT. In 2010, when Congress waited until December to patch the AMT, 10 million taxpayers had to delay their filings the next year. In 2007, after another eleventh-hour patch, 13 million tax filings were delayed.

Both the patches in 2007 and 2010 were enacted in December. If we don’t patch the AMT until January, the consequences will be more severe. This would be a disaster for the middle class.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/dont-tie-tax-extenders-bill-to-fiscal-cliff-85260_Page2.html#ixzz2FVPtNayA

 Boehner: President not where Boehner wants him to be...yet. Will Obama call his bluff?

NYT: WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders struggled on Tuesday night to rally their colleagues around a backup measure to ease the sting of a looming fiscal crisis by allowing tax rates to rise only on incomes over $1 million.  The plan would leave in place across-the-board spending cuts to military and domestic programs that Republicans have been warning could have dire consequences, especially to national defense. Speaker John A. Boehner unveiled what he dubbed “Plan B” less than 24 hours after President Obama offered a more comprehensive deal that would raise tax rates on incomes over $400,000 and, over 10 years, produce $1.2 trillion in tax increases and cut $930 billion in spending.

Mr. Boehner pledged to continue negotiating on a broad deficit-reduction deal but called the president’s plan unbalanced and insufficient.

“What we’ve offered meets the definition of a balanced approach, but the president is not there yet,” Mr. Boehner said Tuesday.

PPP released it's polling from Michigan yesterday.  Rick Snyder dropped 28 points since the last pole the weekend before elections.  Gee...I wonder why?

By Priscillia Gilman, Guest Op-Ed, New York Times, Dec 17/18, 2012

[....] It began as insinuation, but quickly flowered into outright declaration.

[....] In the wake of coverage like this, I worry, in line with concerns raised by the author Susan Cain in her groundbreaking book on introverts, “Quiet”: will shy, socially inhibited students be looked at with increasing suspicion as potentially dangerous? Will a quiet, reserved, thoughtful child be pegged as having antisocial personality disorder? Will children with autism or mental illness be shunned even more than they already are?

This country needs to develop a better understanding of the complexities of various conditions and respect for the profound individuality of its children. We need to emphasize that being introverted doesn’t mean one has a developmental disorder, that a developmental disorder is not the same thing as a mental illness, and that most mental illnesses do not increase a person’s tendency toward outward-directed violence [....]

Editor's Bio note: Priscilla Gilman is the author of “The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy.”

Also see:

Comment by Anonymous on Orion's post, the parent of a son diagnosed with Aspberger's on bullying and its possible consequences

USA Today, Dec. 13/14, 2012

Cooperating with investigators is one way people charged with federal crimes can escape tough prison sentences. This map shows the percentage of federal convictions from 2006 to 2011 where sentences were reduced in exchange for "substantial assistance" (SA), according to a USA TODAY investigation.

[....]

The extent of cooperation in the federal court is often secret, in part because judges routinely seal court records that could reveal who provided information to the government and what they got in return. To figure out how often prosecutors agreed to reduced sentences in exchange for information, USA TODAY analyzed data on 545,000 criminal cases from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which tracks the complicated array of considerations that goes into every federal prison sentence. USA TODAY used those anonymous records, ranging from 2006-2011, to determine how many defendants actually had their sentences reduced. [....]

A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 18, 2012

ANALYSIS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion.

The demographic study – based on analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers – finds 2.2 billion Christians (32% of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%) and 14 million Jews (0.2%) around the world as of 2010. In addition, more than 400 million people (6%) practice various folk or traditional religions, including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions. An estimated 58 million people – slightly less than 1% of the global population – belong to other religions, including the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism, to mention just a few.¹  At the same time, the new study by the Pew Forum also finds that roughly one-in-six people around the globe (1.1 billion, or 16%) have no religious affiliation. This makes the unaffiliated the third-largest religious group worldwide, behind Christians and Muslims, and about equal in size to the world’s Catholic population. Surveys indicate that many of the unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs (such as belief in God or a universal spirit) [.....]

By Juliet Macur and Nate Schweber, New York Times/Sports, Dec 16/17, 2012 (8-page investigative report)

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio [....]

The case is not the first time a high school football team has been entangled in accusations of sexual assault. But the situation in Steubenville has another layer to it that separates it from many others: It is a sexual assault accusation in the age of social media, when teenagers are capturing much of their lives on their camera phones — even repugnant, possibly criminal behavior, as they did in Steubenville in August — and then posting it on the Web, like a graphic, public diary.

Within days of the possible sexual assault, an online personality who often blogs about crime zeroed in on those public comments and photographs and injected herself into the story, complicating it and igniting ire in the community. She posted the information on her site and wrote online that the police and town officials were giving the football players special treatment.

The city’s police chief begged for witnesses to come forward, but received little response. In time, the county prosecutor and the judge in charge of handling crimes by juveniles recused themselves from the case because they had ties to the football team [....]

Opensecrets.org has a list of all the current politicians that have received campaign funds.  You might like to see who in your state is on their dole. Include them in you list of people to send letters to.  What gets to me is how a few thousand bucks can buy their vote.  This is all about selling weapons and making profit.   

I just found this at Think Progress.

An 18 year-old was planning to be a mass murderer; he was going to somehow get his classmates into the school auditorium and shoot everybody.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons.

First, there is no 'connection' to what happened in CT since the plan was being made at what I perceive to be the same time period as the murderer in CT.

Second, I perceive a 'pattern in thought' going on here.

There are other considerations of course.

I mean I think from everything I have read that it is almost against the law not to own a firearm in Oklahoma. And there are more stringent anti-gun laws in CT.

I would bet that on one level or another there are other attempts at massacres that have been abated one way or another and we just do not hear about them.

I dunno.

This just caught my eye.

By Dominic Evans in Beirut, Reuters, Dec. 15, 2012

Iran's army chief of staff warned NATO on Saturday that stationing Patriot anti-missile batteries on Turkey's border with Syria was setting the stage for world war.

General Hassan Firouzabadi, whose country has been a staunch supporter of President Bashar al-Assad throughout the 21-month uprising against his rule, called on the Western military alliance to reverse its decision to deploy the defense system.

"Each one of these Patriots is a black mark on the world map, and is meant to cause a world war," Firouzabadi said, according to the Iranian Students' News Agency. "They are making plans for a world war and this is very dangerous for the future of humanity and for the future of Europe itself."

Despite the warning, Firouzabadi did not threaten any action against Turkey in his speech to senior commanders at the National Defence University in Tehran. "We are Turkey's friend and we want security for Turkey," he said [....]

Also see:

Panetta Orders Deployment of U.S. Antimissile Units in Turkey
By Thom Shanker and Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, Dec. 14/15, 2012

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta signed an official deployment order on Friday to send 400 American military personnel and two Patriot air defense batteries to Turkey as its tensions intensify with neighboring Syria, where government forces have increasingly resorted to aerial attacks, including the use of ballistic missiles, to fight a spreading insurgency.

The American batteries will be part of a broader push to strengthen Turkey’s defenses that will include the deployment of four other Patriot batteries — two from Germany and two from the Netherlands. Each battery contains multiple rounds of guided missiles that can intercept and destroy other missiles and hostile aircraft flying at high speeds.

Mr. Panetta’s deployment order, the result of NATO discussions last week, represents the most direct American military action so far to help contain the Syrian conflict and minimize its risk of spilling across the 550-mile border with Turkey, a NATO member that is housing more than 100,000 Syrian refugees and providing aid to the Syrian rebels [....]