It's still possible that the 'fiscal cliff' with its automatic?tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts can be avoided. But the clock is ticking toward Jan.1, and most lawmakers are pessimistic.
President Barack Obama speaks about the fiscal cliff in the briefing room of the White House Friday before leaving for Hawaii to spend Christmas with his family.
Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS
EnlargeThe New Year may be more than a week off, but realistically Congress and the White House have less than that as the clock ticks toward the ?fiscal cliff? with its automatic tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts that could throw an already-weakened economy into a tailspin.
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On the Sunday before Christmas, lawmakers worried and postured, with a few ? very few ? expressing just a bit of optimism that anything would be done in time.
"We can do better and we should do better," Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad said on ?Fox News Sunday.? "I would hope that we would have one last attempt here to do what everyone knows needs to be done: which is a larger plan that really does stabilize the debt and gets us moving in the right direction.?
For now, says Sen. Conrad (who?s retiring), Speaker John Boehner and the White House should ?split the difference? on the most recent offers from both sides, resulting in $1.45 trillion in spending cuts and $1.15 in revenue for a combination of $2.6 trillion.
?You couple that with the $1.1 trillion that?s already been done [in the Budget Control Act] and you?re at $3.7 trillion,? he said.
Recommended:?'Fiscal cliff' 101: 5 basic questions answered
That leaves a lot of heavy lifting, Conrad concedes: ?Is it perfect? No. Is it everything we?d hoped for? No. Does it match what Bowles-Simpson did? No.?
The general mood Sunday was well expressed by another senator about to retire, Joseph Lieberman.
"It's the first time that I feel it's more likely we'll go over the cliff than not,"?Sen. Lieberman said on CNN?s ?State of the Union.? "If we allow that to happen it will be the most colossal consequential act of congressional irresponsibility in a long time, maybe ever in American history because of the impact it'll have on almost every American.?
Joining Conrad on Fox News, Sen. Jon Barrasso, (R) of Wyoming, said tumbling off the fiscal cliff is inevitable.
?I believe the president is eager to go over the cliff for political purposes,? he said. ?He senses a victory at the bottom of the cliff.?
Obama already has scaled back his ambitions for a sweeping budget bargain. Before leaving the capital on Friday, he called for a limited measure that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts for most people and stave off federal spending cuts. The president also urged Congress to extend jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed that would otherwise be cut off for 2 million people at the end of the year.
But reverting to higher tax rates for even the wealthiest Americans remains a show-stopper for many tea party Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Judging by the latest twists in the drama ? including House Speaker John Boehner?s inability to get his own party behind his ?Plan B? ? plus public opinion polls showing Obama with a much better job rating than Boehner and the GOP seen as mostly to blame, Obama in fact may be more inclined to hang tough.
?The truth of the matter is, if we do fall off the cliff after the president is inaugurated, he?ll come back, propose just what he proposed ? and we?ll end up adopting it,? said Sen. Johnny Isakson, (R) of Georgia on Fox News. ?Why not go ahead and act now??
Why not, indeed said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, also speaking on Fox News.
"It is time to get back to the table," said the Minnesota Democrat. "And I hope if anyone sees these representatives from the House in line shopping or getting their Christmas turkey, they wish them a merry Christmas, they're civil, and then say go back to the table, not your own table, the table in Washington."
This report includes material from the Associated Press.
Recommended:?'Fiscal cliff' 101: 5 basic questions answered
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Fig.1. A newspaper article announcing the capture of the second specimen of coelacanth (this time in the coastal waters of the Comoros-islands), fourteen years after the first discovery.
Fig.2. The fossil coelacanth species Macropoma speclosum (REUSS), from? the Cretaceous of Kochovice, Czech Republic.
I have so many options to stream movies online now (Netflix, Amazon, etc) that it's hard for me to figure out if a movie is available. How do you recommend I find a movie I want to watch that I can stream online? 
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You're not always going to know exactly what you want to watch though. Sometimes it's great to just flick through a selection of movies like you would in the video store, and while the algorithms Netflix uses to show you movies you might be interested in is great, they're also restricting and don't show you a large collection of movies. Other services, like Amazon, don't have big recommendation engines at all.
The International 3D Society & 3D@Home Consortium announced that it will present DreamWorks Animation with its 2013 Sir Charles Wheatstone Award for advocacy, technology and professional education.
Chrome/Firefox/Safari: Forwarding emails straight into Evernote, or managing meeting notes directly in Evernote is great. But if you're also using Gmail and Calendar for a lot of your tasks then the integration isn't perfect. Everbot is a browser extension that adds a few useful features to both Google apps to integrate them more with Evernote. 
When people think of consumer VoIP services, the first name to come to mind for many is Skype. But while Microsoft’s recent acquisition begins to explore a new role as a social advertising network, the world’s number-two VoIP provider, Rebtel, is hoping to gain some new ground. The Stockholm-based company, which has been in operation since 2006, today is announcing that it has passed 20 million active users, with 2012 revenues of $80 million and projected turnover of $100 million for 2013. It has also seen a 250% increase in app downloads and paying users since 2011, with overall users growing currently at a rate of 500,000 each month. The business of over-the-top telephony services is a hot space right now, with companies like Whatsapp nabbing business away from carriers by becoming users’ default mobile messaging service.?As of August 2012 Whatsapp was delivering 10 billion messages per day. And as we’ve said in the past, we’ve heard that its been an?acquisition target for Facebook. Rebtel very much fits into that mold by offering a more cost-effective way of making calls on mobile devices, with a particular emphasis on long-distance calls that can cost a fortune otherwise if made via a mobile network.?”Our average users are consumers with a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants among them,”?Bernstr?m notes, so many of them will want to be calling family abroad. And while we don’t know whether Skype is profitable today (it wasn’t when Microsoft bought it), Rebtel’s CEO?Andreas Bernstr?m tells me that his company is, and has been for the past two years. That’s one reason why Rebtel has yet to raise more money since picking up a Series A round of $20 million from Index Ventures and Benchmark the year it was founded. “We have $10 million in the bank today,” he tells me. That strategy may change in the future, as Rebtel gears up for further expansion. Earlier this month, it announced a new line of business as a white-label VoIP provider, releasing an SDK so that developers can incorporate Rebtel’s VoIP service into their apps. Rebtel is primarily targeting mobile developers with the service, because that is where Rebtel itself focuses most of its business, with apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone (in addition to PCs). As a point of comparison, although Skype makes a big point of?how popular its mobile apps are, Bernstr?m says that about 90%
There's plenty of stuff you can print for free so you don't have to pay for it, and wrapping paper is one of them. Whether you design it yourself or pick up some awesome designs online, it's a pretty easy way to save money and give awesome, custom-wrapped gifts this holiday. 