White House Says It Has No New Fiscal Cliff Plan

The White House said today it has no plans to offer new proposals to avoid the fiscal cliff which looms over the country's economy just five days from now, but will meet Friday with Congressional leaders in a last ditch effort to forge a deal.

Republicans and Democrats made no conciliatory gestures in public today, despite the urgency.

The White House said President Obama would meet Friday with Democratic and Republican leaders. But a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said the Republican "will continue to stress that the House has already passed legislation to avert the entire fiscal cliff and now the Senate must act."

The White House announced the meeting after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the budget situation "a mess" and urged the president to present a fresh proposal.

"I told the president I would be happy to look at whatever he proposes, but the truth is we're coming up against a hard deadline here, and as I said, this is a conversation we should have had months ago," McConnell said of his phone call with Obama Wednesday night.

McConnell added, "Republicans aren't about to write a blank check for anything Senate Democrats put forward just because we find ourselves at the edge of the cliff."

"That having been said, we'll see what the president has to propose," the Republican Senate leader said.

But a senior White House official told ABC News, "There is no White House bill."

That statement, however, may have wiggle room. Earlier today White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "I don't have any meetings to announce," but a short time later, Friday's meeting was made public.

It's unclear if the two sides are playing a game of political chicken or whether the administration is braced for the fiscal cliff.

Earlier today, fiscal cliff, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lashed out at Republicans in a scathing speech that targeted House Republicans and particularly Boehner.

Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

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Reid, D-Nev., spoke on the floor of the Senate as the president returned to Washington early from an Hawaiian vacation in what appears to be a dwindling hope for a deal.

The House of Representatives will meet for legislative business Sunday evening, leaving the door cracked open ever so slightly to the possibility of a last-minute agreement.

But on a conference call with Republican House members Thursday afternoon, Boehner kept to the Republican hard line that if the Senate wants a deal it should amend bills already passed by the House.

That was the exact opposite of what Reid said in the morning, that Republicans should accept a bill passed by Democratic led Senate.

Related: What the average American should know about capital gains and the fiscal cliff.

"We are here in Washington working while the members of the House of Representatives are out watching movies and watching their kids play soccer and basketball and doing all kinds of things. They should be here," Reid said. "I can't imagine their consciences."

House Republicans have balked at a White House deal to raise taxes on couples earning more than $250,000 and even rejected Boehner's proposal that would limit the tax increases to people earning more than $1 million.

"It's obvious what's going on," Reid said while referring to Boehner. "He's waiting until Jan. 3 to get reelected to speaker because he has so many people over there that won't follow what he wants. John Boehner seems to care more about keeping his speakership than keeping the nation on a firm financial footing."

Related: Starbucks enters fiscal cliff fray.

Reid said the House is "being operated with a dictatorship of the speaker" and suggested today that the Republicans should agree to accept the original Senate bill pass in July. Reid's comments, however, made it clear he did not expect that to happen.

"It looks like" the nation will go over the fiscal cliff in just five days, he declared.

"It's not too late for the speaker to take up the Senate-passed bill, but that time is even winding down," Reid said. "So I say to the speaker, take the escape hatch that we've left you. Put the economic fate of the nation ahead of your own fate as Speaker of the House."

Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel reacted to Reid's tirade in an email, writing, "Senator Reid should talk less and legislate more. The House has already passed legislation to avoid the entire fiscal cliff. Senate Democrats have not."

Boehner has said it is now up to the Senate to come up with a deal.

Obama, who landed in Washington late this morning, made a round of calls over the last 24 hours to Reid, Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Related: Obama pushes fiscal cliff resolution.

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The forgotten victims of gun violence

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, center, and other area officials call for stronger gun regulations at a news conference last week.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• While America was mourning Newtown victims, guns were claiming lives elsewhere in U.S.


• Authors: Media focus on mass shootings, but continuing violence also needs coverage


• They say inner cities suffer an epidemic of gun killings, and young are particularly vulnerable


• Authors: There is a day-by-day slaughter of children that must be stopped

Editor's note: Bassam Gergi is studying for a master's degree in comparative government at St. Antony's College, Oxford, where he is also a Dahrendorf Scholar. Ali Breland studies philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

(CNN) -- On the Sunday after the Newtown massacre, President Barack Obama traveled to Connecticut to comfort the grieving community. As the president offered what he could to the town, other American communities, in less visible ways, were grappling with their own menace of violence.

In Camden, New Jersey -- a city that has already suffered 65 violent deaths in 2012 , surpassing the previous record of 58 violent deaths set in 1995 -- 50 people turned out, some bearing white crosses, to mourn a homeless woman known affectionately as the "cat lady" who was stabbed to death (50 of the deaths so far this year resulted from gunshot wounds.)

Bassam Gergi

In Philadelphia, on the same Sunday, city leaders came together at a roundtable to discuss their own epidemic of gun violence; the year-to-date total of homicides is 322. Last year, 324 were killed. Of those victims, 154 were 25 or younger. A councilman at the roundtable asked, "How come as a city we're not in an outrage? How come we're not approaching this from a crisis standpoint?"

Ali Breland

The concerns go beyond Philadelphia. In the week following the Newtown massacre, there were at least a dozen gun homicides in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore and St. Louis alone. In a year of highly publicized mass shootings, inner-city neighborhoods that are plagued by gun violence have continued to be neglected and ignored.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, large metropolitan areas account for more than two-thirds of deaths by gun violence each year, with inner cities most affected. The majority of the victims are young, ranging in age from their early teens to mid-20s, and black.

To track these violent deaths, many communities and media organizations have set up agonizing online trackers -- homicide watches or interactive maps -- that show each subsequent victim as just another data point. These maps are representative of a set of issues far larger than the nameless dots suggest.

In the immediate aftermath of Newtown, as politicians and public figures across America grapple with the horrible truths of gun violence, far less visible from the national spotlight is the steady stream of inner-city victims.

Illegal firearms confiscated in a weapons bust in New York's East Harlem is on display at an October news conference.

The media is fixated, and with justification, on the string of high-profile massacres that have rocked the nation in Aurora, Colorado; Tucson, Arizona; Virginia Tech; and now in Newtown. Yet in many of America's neighborhoods most affected by the calamity of gun violence, there is a warranted exasperation -- residents are tired, tired of the ubiquity of guns, tired of fearing for their children's safety, tired of being forgotten.

Critiquing a narrow media focus doesn't deny the horrible, tragic nature of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School; mass shootings, however, make up only a small fraction of America's shockingly high level of gun crime.

In his study "American Homicide," Randolph Roth showed that while the overall risk of being murdered is higher in America than it is in any other first-world democracy, homicide rates vary drastically among groups.

According to Roth, if current trends are maintained, one out of every 158 white males born today will be murdered, but for nonwhite males it is likely one of every 27 born today will be murdered.

The stark difference in these racial trends can be traced to the high levels of racial segregation in America's cities, which have created a spatial barrier between poor inner-city youths of color and more mainstream America -- a barrier that is often responsible for the lack of media and political attention paid to inner-city problems.

Many experts claim that actually it is the spectacular nature of mass shootings that naturally magnifies media coverage and explains the resonance of these tragedies to the broader public. Inner-city violence on its own, however, does not suffer from a lack of awful, spectacular violence and calamity. In fact, the gruesome nature of violence in inner cities has contributed to widespread social desensitization to gun violence. How then do we explain the differing public responses?

An indicator of the difference of attention levels lies in the tone of the public rhetoric in the wake of mass shootings: "This was supposed to be a safe community," and "This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen here."

These statements imply that in America's leafy-green small towns and suburbs, gun violence is a shocking travesty; it strikes against America's perception of what is acceptable. In contrast, gun violence in the American metropolis has been normalized, and the public and media display a passive indifference toward the lives of inner-city youths.

This normalization of inner-city violence is due in part, to the isolation and segregation of America's ghettos from wider America, but it is also due to a sense that the victims of inner-city violence are responsible for their own condition.

As Robert Sampson, a professor at Harvard University, has highlighted, the gun violence in American cities is born out of neighborhood characteristics such as poverty, racial segregation and lack of economic opportunity. This shortened explanation for the high levels of inner-city violence has often been mistaken to imply that it is the direct choice of inner-city residents to remain either in poverty or in their segregated community that leads to their victimization.

In reality, the victims of inner-city gun violence are the victims of a dual tragedy. The first is that the poverty and segregation, which play a crucial role in spurring the downward cycle of crime, are the result of social arrangements predicated on longstanding oppression and prejudice.

Through a complex mix of violence, institutional arrangements and exploitation, black Americans were pressured into ghettos, which are the hotbeds of contemporary gun violence. Their inability to escape their conditions is not a choice but rather the byproduct of continued structural discrimination. Slowing the tide of inner-city deaths through gun control is therefore a modern-day civil rights issue.

If the refusal of America's national politicians to move on gun control before Newtown represents a political failure and a paucity of American will, then the disregard for the lives of inner-city youths stricken by gun violence on a daily basis is an illustration of the limits of American compassion.

The slaughter of young children en masse should be a moment of reckoning for any society, but there is a day-by-day, child-by-child slaughter occurring in America that has gone on too long and is yet to be reckoned with.

If Newtown should teach us anything, it is that all of us in America share this same short moment of life, and that we all seek to ensure safety, security and prosperity for our children.

As Vice President Joe Biden and the presidential task force meet to negotiate about what new gun laws to recommend, they must look to Sandy Hook Elementary and beyond. We need to protect the children of Newtown from the threat of future gun violence, but the children of Chicago and Camden and Detroit deserve the same long-term security.

We may not be able to ensure absolute security for America's children, but through smarter policy America can surely save more of its children from gun violence.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.

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China's working adults still depend on parents for economic support

SHANGHAI: The growing number of young adults living off their parents is sparking concern in China.

A study found that 30 per cent of working-age adults still depend on their parents for economic support.

Experts worry this trend could become more pronounced with the second generation of children under the country's one-child policy.

From pre-natal education, toddler care, pre-school, all the way to university and then a job - it seems parents in China want to be involved in their children's lives all the way.

That's the trend experts have observed since the first generation of single children. But it's something the children don't quite welcome.

According to a survey by the China Research Centre on Ageing, 77 per cent of respondents felt parents intervene too much in their children's decisions.

Jennifer Feng, PR Director of 51Job, said: "I see that Chinese parents are increasingly domineering. So children in China often don't really know what they like because (be it schools or jobs) it wasn't their choice from the start."

And when it comes to the second generation of children born under the one-child policy, the parental influence is often so great, some can even rely on the older generation for their livelihood.

Wang Fei, father of a three-year-old boy, said: "For a Shanghainese child whose grandparents are also living in Shanghai, by the time he grows up and if he marries another single child, the couple may inherit three or four sets of apartments. They can live comfortably just by collecting rent."

Zhou Haiwang, Deputy Director of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences at the Institute of Population and Development Studies, said: "The tradition in China's society is still a one-way model of raising children, which means the older folks look after their children and even their grandchildren. The notion of living frugally and saving money hasn't changed among the elderly, and they will provide for their children in all aspects that they can, including material and physical help."

But it's not enough to merely provide resources to feed a child for life. Against the backdrop of three decades of phenomenal economic growth, experts say it's time for families which have created a comfortable lifestyle, to think about how they want to develop their next generation's survival skills.

Gordon Gu, Director of Shanghai Fesc Psychological Assistance Centre, said: "As the ancient Chinese saying goes, "wealth never lasts more than three generations". The consequence of parents' over-protection is a child who is good-for-nothing. That is the worst scenario."

Experts say when parents prepare too wide a safety net for their children, the kids will have a greater tendency to fall back on it - a thinking some parents encourage.

Gordon Gu added: "When they (parents) succeed, they naturally do not want their children to go through the same hardship they experienced again. They even tell their children not to be afraid at work. They may say, "If the company fires you or if it's difficult, just quit. Why do you have to work? We can provide everything for you.""

But analysts say this mentality encourages over-dependence on parents, and children risk losing their AQ or adversity quotient - the ability to thrive in adversity.

In the last of the five-part series on Friday, Channel NewsAsia looks at the changing behaviour of China's young generation in the workforce and how companies are coming up with fresh measures to retain this young talent.

- CNA/de

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Former President Bush in ICU

Updated 6:40 p.m. ET

A "stubborn" fever that kept former President George H.W. Bush in a hospital over Christmas has gotten worse, and doctors have put him on a liquids-only diet, his spokesman said Wednesday, describing Bush's condition as guarded to CBS News.

Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston, had said earlier in the day that the fever had gone away, but he later corrected himself.

"It's an elevated fever, so it's actually gone up in the last day or two," McGrath told The Associated Press. "It's a stubborn fever that won't go away."

"Following a series of setbacks including a persistent fever, President Bush was admitted to the intensive care unit at Methodist Hospital on Sunday where he remains in guarded condition," McGrath said in an emailed statement. "Doctors at Methodist continue to be cautiously optimistic about the current course of treatment. The President is alert and conversing with medical staff, and is surrounded by family."

Doctors at Methodist Hospital in Houston have run tests and are treating the fever with Tylenol, but they still haven't nailed down a cause, McGrath said. Doctors also have put Bush on a liquid diet, though McGrath could not say why.

The bronchitis-like cough that initially brought Bush to the hospital on Nov. 23 has improved, McGrath said. The 88-year-old is now coughing about once a day, he said.

Bush was visited on Christmas by his wife, Barbara, his son, Neil, and Neil's wife, Maria, and a grandson, McGrath said. Bush's daughter, Dorothy, will arrive Wednesday in Houston from Bethesda, Md. The 41st president has also been visited twice by his sons, George W. Bush, the 43rd president, and Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.

Bush and his wife live in Houston during the winter and spend their summers at a home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The former president was a naval aviator in World War II - at one point the youngest in the Navy - and was shot down over the Pacific. He achieved notoriety in retirement for skydiving on at least three of his birthdays since leaving the White House in 1992.

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Okla. Senator Could Prevent Gun Control Changes

If there's one person most likely to keep new gun-control measures from passing Congress swiftly, it's Sen. Tom Coburn.

Conservatives revere the Oklahoma Republican for his fiscal hawkishness and regular reports on government waste. But he's also a staunch gun-rights advocate, and he's shown a willingness to obstruct even popular legislation, something in the Senate that a single member can easily accomplish.

That mixture could make Coburn the biggest threat to quick passage of new gun-control laws in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shooting that has prompted even pro-gun NRA-member lawmakers like Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to endorse a new look at how access to the most powerful weapons can be limited.

Coburn's office did not respond to multiple requests to discuss the current push for gun legislation. But given his record, it's hard to imagine Coburn agreeing to a major, new proposal without some fuss.

The last time Congress considered a major gun law -- one with broad support -- Coburn held it up, proving that the details of gun control are sticky when a conservative senator raises unpopular objections, especially a senator who's joked that it's too bad he can't carry a gun on the Senate floor.

After the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, Congress heard similar pleadings for new gun limits, some of them similarly to those being heard now. When it came to light that Seung-Hui Cho, the mentally disturbed 23-year-old who opened fire on campus, passed a background check despite mental-health records indicating he was a suicide threat, a push began to include such records in determining whether a person should be able to buy a gun.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., a longtime gun-control advocate whose husband was killed in a mass shooting on the Long Island Rail Road in 1996, introduced a widely supported bill to do just that. The NRA backed her National Instant Check System Improvement Amendments Act of 2007.

But Coburn didn't. The senator blocked action on the bill, citing concerns over patient privacy, limited gun access for veterans, and the cost of updating the background-check system,

In blocking that bill, Coburn pointed to a government study noting that 140,000 veterans had been referred to the background-check registry since 1998 without their knowledge.

"I am certainly understanding of the fact that some veterans could be debilitated to the point that such cataloguing is necessary, but we should ensure this process does not entangle the vast majority of our combat veterans who simply seek to readjust to normal life at the conclusion of their tours. I am troubled by the prospect of veterans refusing necessary treatment and the benefits they are entitled to. As I'm sure you would agree we cannot allow any stigma to be associated with mental healthcare or treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury," Coburn wrote to acting Veterans Secretary Gordon Mansfield.

Coburn succeeded in changing the legislation, negotiating a set of tweaks that shaved $100 million over five years, made it easier for prohibited gun owners to restore their gun rights by petitioning the government, and notifying veterans that if they abdicated control of their finances they would be added to the gun database. The bill passed and President Bush signed it in January 2008.

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KKH to implement all recommendations by committee in baby mix-up case

SINGAPORE: A review committee has come up with 15 recommendations to prevent another baby mix-up at KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH).

Two newborn babies were wrongly discharged to their mothers in an incident in November.

The measures involve tightening processes regarding identification of newborns, ward operations, the discharge process, and implementing new technology.

There will be two staff involved in the tagging and re-tagging of babies at all times. Parents will verify the baby's particulars.

The way a baby is tagged will be refined to ensure that the tag does not drop off easily.

There will also be proper documentation for tracking the movement of babies in and out of the nursery.

At a media conference on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer of KKH Professor Kenneth Kwek said the hospital has accepted all the recommendations made by the four-member committee, and they will be implemented by the end of next month.

Most of the recommendations made had already been acted on and implemented within a week of the incident.

The hospital will act on the remaining recommendations by the end of January.

Professor Kwek also said 17 people involved in the incident have been taken to task.

Three staff nurses directly involved in the mix-up have received disciplinary action. They received written warnings, were suspended from work for a week with no pay, and have been taken out of clinical duties for at least three months.

They will be closely supervised and their performance reviewed for at least six months.

Fourteen ward staff involved also received warnings or counselling.

Professor Kwek said the hospital extended an offer of compensation to the parents over and beyond the cost of their stay, but would not give further details.

The committee noted that the mix-up was triggered when the babies were placed in wrong cots. This resulted in a wrong identification tag being applied to one baby.

KKH earlier said the incident came to light when one of the parents noticed that the baby taken home wore an identification tag belonging to another mother.

The hospital suspected that checks were not carried out properly when the baby was being discharged. The other baby was with the wrong parents for about 10 hours.

- CNA/de

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Top celebs

updated 9:20 AM EST, Thu December 20, 2012

CNN readers' favorites: Celebrity women

No. 10: Sandra Bullock

No. 9: Angelina Jolie

No. 8: Katy Perry

No. 7: Taylor Swift

No. 6: Sofia Vergara

No. 5: Carrie Underwood

No. 4: Jennifer Lawrence

No. 3: Jennifer Aniston

No. 2: Adele

No. 1: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge

CNN readers' favorites: Celebrity men

No. 10: Justin Timberlake

No. 9: Jeremy Renner

No. 8: Brad Pitt

No. 7: Ryan Gosling

No. 6: Adam Levine

No. 5: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

No. 4: Ben Affleck

No. 3: Channing Tatum

No. 2: Johnny Depp

No. 1: Daniel Craig

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Obama cuts Hawaii trip short to address "fiscal cliff"

KAILUA, Hawaii President Barack Obama is cutting short his traditional Christmas holiday in Hawaii to return to Washington as lawmakers consider how to prevent the economy from going over the so-called fiscal cliff, the White House said Tuesday.

Obama will fly back to the nation's capital Wednesday night, just five days after arriving in Hawaii, White House officials said. In the past, the president's end-of-the-year holiday in his native state has stretched into the new year.

Congress is expected to return to Washington on Thursday. Automatic budget cuts and tax increases are set to begin in January. So far, the president and congressional Republicans have been unable to reach agreement on any alternatives.

Play Video

Seven days 'til the "fiscal cliff"

9 Photos

The Obamas in Hawaii

CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes reported earlier Tuesday that the president will likely put pressure on Congress to pass a Democratic plan being drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

"There still have been no conversations between Democrats and Republicans Tuesday on how to avert the fiscal cliff," Cordes reported from Hawaii. "That's a sure sign that Reid is working on crafting legislation on his own, which he'd essentially dare Republicans in the House and Senate to pass just before the deadline."

Cordes notes that Reid's bill would likely extend the Bush-era tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 a year. It may also include enough short-term spending cuts to temporarily offset, for about six to eight months, the across-the-board spending cuts set to go into effect on January 1, 2013.

Lawmakers have expressed little but pessimism for the prospect of an agreement coming before Jan. 1. On Sunday, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said she expects any action in the waning days of the year to be "a patch because in four days we can't solve everything."

The Obamas were spending the holiday at a rented home near Honolulu. On Christmas Day, the president and first lady Michelle Obama visited with Marines to express thanks for their service.

"One of my favorite things is always coming to base on Christmas Day just to meet you and say thank you," the president said. He called being commander in chief his greatest honor as president.

Obama took photos with individual service members and their families.

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Winter Storms Spawn Tornadoes Across South

A nasty Christmastime storm system spawned blizzard conditions in some states and at least 15 reported tornadoes in the South, damaging homes, taking out power lines and dangerously snarling holiday travel.

Severe weather swept across the United States during the Christmas holiday, bringing tornadoes and intense thunderstorms to the Gulf Coast, while dumping heavy snow and freezing rain on the Southern Plains.

At least 15 tornadoes were reported today from Texas to Alabama, putting this storm system potentially on track to be one of the largest Christmas day tornado outbreaks on record.

One large tornado was reported in Mobile, Ala., where there are about 19,000 customers without power and 23,429 statewide, according to Alabama Power. Kerry Burns, a Mobile resident originally from Boston, said the storm "sounded like a freight train."

Some buildings in the area, including some churches and a local high school, were reportedly damaged. Ray Uballe, another Mobile resident, said his dad was shaken up.

"He was in his apartment," Uballe said. "He said it sounded like an airplane and then the door flung open and then there was just debris flying."

Douglas Mark Nix, president of the Infirmary Health System, said one of their Mobile hospitals lost power and sustained damage. There were no early reports of injuries to staff or patients.

"We are operating now on generator power," he said. "We do not have substantial damage but we do have a number of windows out and we have some ceiling tiles down, throughout the facility at the main hospital.

"We can run for at least two weeks but I saw power crews out all over the city so I fully expect power to be restored within the next day or so," Nix added.

Melinda Martinez/The Daily Town Talk/AP Photo

Winter Weather Causes Holiday Travel Problems Watch Video

At least eight states were issued blizzard warnings today, as the storms made highways dangerously slick heading into one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Oklahoma got about 7 inches of snow all over the state making for treacherous road conditions. ABC News affiliate KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City said the weather was being blamed for a 21-vehicle wreck on Interstate 40, but no one was seriously injured.

Ice accumulation in Arkansas bent trees and power lines, leaving at least 50,000 customers across the state without power. About 10 inches of snow fell on Fayetteville, Ark.

The storms, which first wreaked havoc on the West Coast before moving east, are being blamed for at least one death in Texas.

Investigators in the Houston area told ABC state KTRK-TV in Houston that a young man was trying to move a downed tree that was blocking the roadway when another one snapped and fell on top of him. He was later pronounced dead at a hopsital.

The last time a number of tornadoes hit the Gulf Coast area around Christmas Day was in 2009, when 22 tornadoes struck on Christmas Eve morning, National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro told ABC News over email.

The deadliest Christmastime tornado outbreak on record was Dec. 24 to 26, 1982, when 29 tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi killed three people and injured 32.

The last killer tornado around Christmas, Vaccaro said, was a Christmas Eve EF4 in Tennessee in 1988, which killed one person and injured seven. EF4 tornadoes can produce winds up to 200 mph.

No official word yet on the strength of the string of tornadoes reported today.

While some were preparing for a Christmas feast, others were hunkered down.

More than 180 flights nationwide were canceled by midday, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.com. More than half were canceled by American Airlines and its regional affiliate, American Eagle.

The storm system is expected to continue east into Georgia and the Carolinas Wednesday and could potentially spawn more tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service.

ABC News' Matt Gutman, Max Golembo and ABC News Radio contributed to this report.

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Six political lessons of 2012

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Julian Zelizer: 2012 was a year of bitter domestic battles, turbulence overseas


• He says the weakness of GOP, renewed strength of liberalism were apparent


• Zelizer says the year also highlighted the influence of new immigrants in America


• Zelizer: Year ended with a tragic reminder about need to act on gun control

Editor's note: Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and of the new book "Governing America."

(CNN) -- 2012 has been a tumultuous year in American politics. With the presidential election capping off the year, Americans have witnessed a series of bitter domestic battles and turbulent events overseas. As the year closes out, it is worth thinking about some of the most important lessons that politicians and voters can learn from this year as they prepare for 2013.

Here are six:

The Republican brand name is in trouble: The GOP took a drubbing in 2012. To be sure, Mitt Romney ran a problematic campaign. His inability to connect with voters and a number of embarrassing gaffes hurt the chances for Republicans to succeed.

Julian Zelizer

Just as important to the outcome was the party that Romney represented. Voters are not happy with the GOP. Public approval for the party has been extremely low. Congressional Republicans have helped to bring down the party name with their inability to compromise.

Recent polls show that if the nation goes off the fiscal cliff, the Republicans would be blamed. According to a survey by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, 65 percent of people asked for a short word or phrase to describe the GOP came up with something negative. The Republican Party was also the lowest-rated political institution.

The exit polls in November showed that the GOP is out of step with the electorate on a number of big issues, including immigration and gay marriage. If Republicans don't undertake some serious reforms and offer fresh voices, all the new messaging in the world won't help them as the competition starts for 2016.

Opinion: Madness in the air in Washington

America has grown more liberal on cultural and social issues: The election results confirmed what polls have been showing for some time. If the 1960s was a battle over conservative "traditional family values" and liberal ideals of social relations, liberals eventually won. Throughout the year, polls showed, for example, that the public was becoming more tolerant of gay marriage and civil unions. Americans support the view that gay sex should be legal by a margin of 2-1, compared to 1977 when the public was split.

In the election, same-sex marriage was approved in three states, voters in Wisconsin sent to office the first openly gay senator, and two states approved of referendums to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Americans are accepting of social diversity, and expect that the pluralism of the electorate will be reflected by the composition of elected officials in Washington.

While there are some conservative voices who lament these changes and warn of a nation that is veering toward Sodom, a majority are more than comfortable that some of the taboos and social restrictions of earlier eras are fading and that we live in a nation which is more tolerant than ever before. These social and cultural changes will certainly raise more questions about restrictive practices and policies that remain in place while creating pressure for new kinds of leaders who are responsive to these changes.

The Middle East remains a tinderbox: In the years that followed Barack Obama's election, there was some hope that the Middle East could become a calmer region. When revolutions brought down some of the most notorious dictators in the region, many Americans cheered as the fervor for democracy seemed to be riding high.

But events in 2012 threw some cold water on those hopes. The Muslim Brotherhood won control of the Egyptian government. In Syria, the government brutally cracked down on opponents, reaching the point in December where Obama's administration has started to talk about the possibility of the al-Assad regime using chemical weapons, though the severity of the threat is unclear. The battles between Palestinians and Israel raged with rockets being fired into Tel Aviv and Israelis bombing targets in Gaza.

Although national attention is focused on domestic policy, it is clear that the Middle East has the capacity to command national attention at any moment and remains as explosive as ever.

Our infrastructure needs repair: Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast in November, leaving millions of Americans on the East Coast without power and with damaged property. Soon after the hurricane hit, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made an important point. The infrastructure of our cities is outdated and needs to be revamped so that it can withstand current weather patterns. Speaking of the need for levees in New York, Cuomo said: "It is something we're going to have to start thinking about ... The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations."

Regardless of whether Congress takes action on the issue of climate change, in the short term cities and suburbs must do more work to curtail the kind of damage wreaked by these storms and to mitigate the costs of recovery -- building underground power lines, increasing resources for emergency responders, building state-of-the-art water systems, and constructing effective barriers to block water from flooding.

The new immigrants are a powerful political and social force: As was the case in the turn of the twentieth century when Eastern and Southern Europeans came into this county, massive waves of immigration are remaking the social fabric of the nation. Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans and other new portions of the electorate who have been coming into the country since the reform of immigration laws in 1965 are coming to represent a bigger and bigger portion of the electorate.

Not only are their numbers growing as a voting bloc, but they are more organized and active than ever before, both on election day as well as in policy making.

Soon after the election, The New York Times reported that 600 members of United We Dream, a network of younger immigrants who don't have their papers, met for three days to plan how to lobby for a bill that would enable 11 million illegal immigrants to become legal. One of the leaders, Christina Jimenez, explained: "We have an unprecedented opportunity to engage our parents, our cousins, our abuelitos in this fight." They have both parties scrambling as Democrats are working to fulfill the promises that brought these voters to their side in November, while some Republicans are desperate to dampen the influence of hardline anti-immigration activists in their party.

We need to do something about guns. The year ended with a horrific shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut. When a 20-year-old went on a rampage apparently using guns that had been legally purchased by his mother, the world watched with horror. Several prominent conservative advocates of gun rights, including former congressman and television host Joseph Scarborough as well as Sen. Joe Manchin, made statements indicating that the time has come to impose stricter controls and regulations on the purchase of weapons. "I don't know anybody in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault file," Manchin said.

Over the next few weeks, there will certainly be a big debate about what caused this shooting. People from different perspectives will highlight different issues but making it more difficult for people to get their hands on certain kinds of weapons, while not a cure-all, can only diminish the chances of this happening again.

There are many more lessons but these six stand out. After the trauma of the past week, let's hope the new year starts off with better days.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Julian Zelizer.

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