[piasa]

The White House and Congress were close to reaching a deal Monday to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis that threatens the fragile US economic recovery.

A lie. There is no recovery. Should be:

The White House and Congress may be close to reaching a deal Monday to resolve the fiscal cliff situation that allegedly threatens the mythical US economic recovery.

[Vanders9]

That kind of depends on what you class as "a recovery". As this is from a UK paper, they are probably basing it on the recent modest improvement in US unemployment rates.

Whether there is a fragile recovery, or none at all, is a matter of interpretation. The real lie is this idea that they "may be close to reaching a deal". They aren't. There is no deal. You can tell that by the way the dems are drawing up the battleground for the upcoming "blame game" next year. The socialists game plan will be to equate "lack of deal" to "economic collapse", and make out it is the evil greedy intransigent republicans who are to blame for not being prepared to compromise to get a deal and thereby causing the crash. In fact there is going to be a crash anyway, due to their own faulty economic policies over the past four years, but Joe Public has a short memory. It's going to be frighteningly easy to blame the GOP for the upcoming economic gloom. The way is being prepped by the MSM now.