Every protest movement has its slogan: Tax the rich, we are the 99%. The striking oil workers in Kazakhstan, though, put it a bit more bluntly: “Don’t Shoot the People.”

The statement of stark desperation and defiance was displayed by protesters in the western Kazakh city of Aktau on Monday. Hundreds of them gathered to defend their labor rights and confronted a hail of bullets.

The New York Times reported, “The authorities have put the death toll from those clashes at 14, though witnesses and human rights workers have said the number of dead could be many times higher. Scores more have reportedly been injured.”

Mitt Romney, who hasn’t had a job in years because America won’t hire him, doesn’t want to subject himself to a credit check as a condition of maybe finally landing a job.

The pre-trial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, concluded with the government revealing in its closing argument for the first time the enemy, which they believe Manning’s actions aided: the terrorists.

So here’s a wild end-of-the-year situation: Charlie White, the Secretary of State of Indiana, has been ruled ineligible to serve by a judge in Marion County. White has been battling charges that he was illegally registered to vote at the wrong address. In other words, he would be the most high-profile perpetrator of voter fraud in recent US history.

What’s more, the judge ruled that the second-place finisher in the 2010 Indiana Secretary of State’s race, Democrat Vop Osili, should be made the Secretary of State.

There’s still the larger issue of a one-year agreement. The conference committee may not meet until the House and Senate return to Washington in late January, giving them just a few weeks to come to an agreement. Typically conference committees with this kind of high profile end up getting decided in back rooms by the party leadership anyway. So the conference committee thing is largely a dodge so Republicans can say they got something in this exchange. They really didn’t. They politically gave in to the Democratic demand.

Minnesota’s gay community, in the person of John Medeiros, has officially apologized to Amy Koch, Republican state senator and former Majority Leader in the Minnesota state senate, for causing her to ruin her own marriage by straying with a staffer widely rumored by insiders to be Michael Brodkorb.

The official position of Robert Khuzami, the Chief of Enforcement of the SEC, is laid out in a brief asking Judge Rakoff to stay his stinging rejection of the weakling settlement with Citigroup last week pending appeal. The public will suffer because the SEC will have to devote its meager resources to trying a case, so they can’t do other great stuff, like investigate insider trading (57 cases this year, big deal) and ignore dozens of other cookie cutter cases just like the ones they settle for beans.

Now that the media has lost interest in the occupations, the hard work begins. Do whatever you can to support your local occupy encampment through the winter.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who negotiated the two-month stopgap bill on the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doctor’s fix that passed the Senate with 89 votes, ended his silence on the House GOP actions on the bill, by saying that they should go ahead and pass the stopgap. This further isolates John Boehner and House Republicans.

The Pfc. Bradley Manning Article 32 hearing came to an end this morning as the defense and prosecution presented closing arguments.