President Obama, Boehner meet on ‘fiscal cliff’

President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) met Sunday afternoon at the White House to continue discussions over how to avert the “fiscal cliff,” their first in-person gathering in nearly a month as the deadline to avert a massive tax hike is fast approaching.

Aides to Boehner confirmed the meeting took place, but declined to provide further details. “We’re not reading out details of the conversation, but the lines of communication remain open,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obama-boehner-meet-on-fiscal-cliff/2012/12/09/c3f38356-4248-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_print.html

House GOP calls off vote on Boehner’s ‘Plan B’By Lori Montgomery and Rosalind S. Helderman, Updated: Friday, December 21, 12:07 PM

The House called off a vote Thursday evening on House Speaker John A. Boehner’s plan to extend tax cuts on income up to $1 million — known as Plan B — because he could not muster enough votes from fellow Republicans to pass the measure.

“Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff,” a statement from Boehner’s office said. “The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the January 1 tax rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation’s crippling debt. The Senate must now act.”

The move leaves unclear the next step in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff set to hit the country’s economy on the first of the new year. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the House has adjourned until after Christmas.

The scheduled vote on the plan had been abruptly delayed earlier Thursday evening. Instead, top House Republicans convened a meeting in Boehner’s office, located just off the Rotunda, where the general public and lawmakers continue paying their respects to the late Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii).

That meeting ended around 8 p.m., with Boehner’s office reporting that the House did not take up the measure “because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cliff-standoff-boehner-works-to-wrangle-votes-for-plan-b-obama-threatens-veto/2012/12/20/d37cd8c6-4aa5-11e2-9a42-d1ce6d0ed278_print.html

Susceptible to satire
By Ruth Marcus, Wednesday, March 13, 10:09 AM

The item was too delicious to resist: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, he of the don’t-worry, be-happy approach to the federal deficit, had been forced to declare personal bankruptcy.

Except it wasn’t true. The tidbit was satire, from a Web site called the Daily Currant. The Currant’s “tell” was obvious to anyone who took introductory economics: Krugman, it said, had attempted, like a good Keynesian, to “spend his way out of debt,” after “racking up $84,000 in a single month . . . in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th-century English cloth” — a wink-wink reference to the classic examples of comparative advantage in international trade.

If a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, imagine what bloggers in pajamas can do. We journalists used to joke about tips that were too good to check. Now it’s items too good not to repost. And so Breitbart.com, a conservative Web site, fell for the Krugman item, crowing about how this Keynesian “thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.”

This is in part a cautionary tale about modern journalism — the Currant piece made its way to Breitbart via an Austrian magazine translation that was picked up by a financial blog and reposted on the Boston Globe’s Web site.

The more important caution, though, is what this susceptibility to satire — and it is a susceptibility that knows no ideological boundaries — illustrates about our collective failure to understand those whose points of view differ from our own.

In a world of siloed, self-selected information flow and knee-jerk willingness to attribute irredeemable stupidity and bad motives to opponents, the inclination to assume the worst is no surprise. Information — or pseudo-information — is trusted when it clicks neatly into our jigsaw puzzle of preconceptions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-paul-krugman-and-our-gullibility-for-satire/2013/03/12/a8073be2-8b4a-11e2-b63f-f53fb9f2fcb4_print.html