The ADP report is seen as a preview of tomorrow's number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Sectorwise, jobs in "financial activities" climbed by 14,000 and construction jobs jumped by 39,000, potentially a sign that the housing market is recovering.

On the downside, 187,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector while only 28,000 were what ADP categorizes as "goods producing." Manufacturing positions fell by 11,000. This is relevant because, in very general terms, manufacturing jobs tend to pay better than those in the service sector.

Medium-sized businesses accounted for 102,000 jobs with large companies adding 87,000 and small businesses adding 25,000.

This is a strong improvement over November's ADP report which showed an increase of 148,000 jobs revised up from 118,000.

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“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself.”

The harsh exchange just a few steps from the Oval Office — which Boehner later bragged about to fellow Republicans ...

I love those blushing em dashes, as if the four-letter word itself would scandalize Politico's hard-bitten audience.

Years ago Vice President Dick Cheney expressed himself similarly, addressing Sen. Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt.). While the remark made it into the press, it's fair to take Cheney at his word. The veep later congratulated himself for his bravado.

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The Daily News:

So what happened to Hannity?

The going wisdom is that viewers who basked in his preelection anti-Obama rhetoric tuned him out when they were stunned to wake up on Nov. 7 and discover that the President had won a second term — a scenario that Hannity had all but promised could never happen.

Before the election, Hannity was riding high in the ratings and topped thought leaders on the right, like Dick Morris, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan and talk radio bulldog Mark Levin, who predicted Obama would lose in a landslide.

Hannity performed even worse in the "money-demo" of viewers aged 25-54. More than half of them deserted his show.

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After climbing in the first three quarters of this year, the Dow dropped in the fourth quarter for the firt time since 2008. Despite ongoing concerns over the fiscal cliff, the Dow climbed 166 points today, its best ever showing on New Years Eve. The broader S&P 500 index had its best New Year's Eve since 1974.

WSJ:

The S&P 500 and [technology heavy] Nasdaq both rose for the eighth year in the past 10, after slipping last year. The S&P stands 111% above its 2009 low, and the Nasdaq is 138% above its.

These astounding gains show that the great recession was a once in a lifetime buying opportunity for those who still had faith in the markets (or money to invest).

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Following  weeks of hysteria, numerous news outlets are reporting that the House of Representatives may nDATEot even vote on a fiscal cliff deal before the tax hikes and spending cuts take effect at midnight tonight.

Here's CNN's take:

The reason is partly about process, but the benefit is political.

House GOP sources said the main reason the House is not likely to vote before the deadline is because the deal is not yet done, and it still has to go through the Senate–which takes time.

GOP leaders prefer to vote in broad daylight, sources said, instead of in the middle of the night.

"There is no difference in voting at 2 a.m. than tomorrow at 4 p.m.," one of the GOP sources said.

GOP sources admitted there is an added benefit to the Senate's delay: taxes would already be up, so lawmakers could argue that they are voting for tax cuts, as opposed to tax increases.

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Employees in Rhode Island will see the biggest gains as the state voted to raise the minimum 35 cents per hour to $7.75. This translates into a bump of about $510 per year for the average worker. Nine other state minimums are climbing automatically as the result of laws that peg the minimum wage to increases in the cost of living.

CNN:

An estimated 855,000 workers will be directly affected by the wage changes, while another 140,000 are projected to be indirectly affected by the changes as employers readjust their pay scales to accommodate the new minimum, according to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

The new hourly rates will range between $7.35 in Missouri and $9.19 in Washington state, which has the highest minimum wage in the nation.

Workers may not notice much of a change in their paychecks, though, if lawmakers do not extend the payroll tax cut first enacted in 2010. Without the tax cut in place, workers would pay 6.2% instead of 4.2% -- an amount that could wipe out most of the wage boost.

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Speaking before an appreciative audience his tart speech lightly mocked Congress and emphasized that any deal would include tax hikes on the rich and some types of spending cuts.

Watch (The speech begins at the 49 minute mark.):

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First, there's what might be called the windy cliff. In 1992 the government created a production tax credit to incentivize the use of clean, domestic wind power.  The subsidy is a 2.2 cent credit per kilowatt hour of energy produced over ten years, amounting to about $1 million per large turbine. Since the initial credit was enacted, it has been renewed seven times and has been allowed to expire three times.

The tax credit expires for the fourth time at midnight tonight. That's too bad for fans of clean, domestic power since this tax credit works. It has been in place since 2004 and U.S. wind generating capacity increased almost six-fold between 2006 and 2011 and now accounts for about three percent of electricity generation nationwide.

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After 20 children were killed with legally purchased guns in the Newtown massacre, Morgan must have questioned this country's laws. In response someone started a petition at the White House's "We the People" site demanding that Morgan be deported "for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens." In 10 days the petition has accumulated more than 96,000 signatures, far more than the 25,000 needed to guarantee a White House response.

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The social gaming company skyrocketed into the collective brainspace with addictive fare like the simulation "FarmVille" and "Words with Friends." But the public markets haven't been kind to the company. Its ongoing restructuring effort involves cutting more than 100 jobs, closing offices and eliminating more than a dozen of its titles.

TechCrunch wrote that, "Investors feared it had become bloated, free virality on Facebook had been curtailed, competitors were proliferating, and the shift of Facebook users to mobile from Zynga’s stronghold on the desktop canvas would break the company."Zynga went public in December 2011 at $10 per share. On Monday morning it was trading at $2.37. It has not traded above $4 since July.

Games shut down this month include "PetVille," "Mafia Wars 2," "FishVille," "Vampire Wars," and "Treasure Isle."

TechCrunch:

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Amid a spate of Washington bashing, the president said Senate leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are working on a bipartisan deal to pass the Senate. If the Senators cannot accomplish this, the president said he has asked Reid to push for an up or down vote on a bill that would not raise taxes on middle-class families and would extend unemployment benefits.

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The last bill would have prohibited any "magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition" except for any "attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition." Large-capacity magazines were used in the Aurora and Newtown massacres.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has also promised to introduce an assault weapons ban when the new Congress convenes. That bill is modeled on the federal ban, which expired in 2004. Both new bills would not outlaw the possession of banned equipment that is already in circulation. Senator Feinstein has cited a Department of Justice study that the ban reduced gun deaths by 6.7 percent.

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The fish recall is for "Cold smoked salmon in 12-ounce twin packs – which are vacuum-sealed with a cardboard sleeve – and 1.25-pound bundles under the brand 'Paramount Reserve.'” So far no illnesses have been reported according to Wal-Mart. The recall is an escalation of an earlier recall.

A Miami subsidiary of Multiexport Foods Inc. produced the fish in conjunction with Tampa Bay Fisheries.

According to the paper, "The listeria monocytogenes bacteria – which can cause fatal infections in the elderly, the young and those with weak immune systems and lead to fever, nausea and diarrhea in other victims – was discovered during a standard lab test on a shipment of the salmon that hadn’t been distributed to stores, according to Wal-Mart."

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The scaled-back offer Obama plans to make to Republican congressional leaders includes renewing George W. Bush-era tax cuts for middle-class earners, most likely for those making $400,000 and below, according to a Senate aide close to the talks. Both aides spoke on condition of anonymity.

The plan would extend unemployment insurance benefits set to expire at the end of the year, prevent a cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors and head off an expansion of the alternative minimum tax, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The plan would delay or replace part of scheduled federal spending cuts, most likely the defense portion, the aide said.

The article quotes Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) saying yesterday that he anticipated a deal but is not optimistic about its prospects. “It’s feeling very much like an optical meeting, not a substantive meeting,” he said.

For the Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) still favors a deal that would raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000.

Meanwhile, John Harwood of CNBC tweets from the other side:

[embedtweet id="284688535846518784"]

In other words, this could go on indefinitely.

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The process has been criticized for being inefficient and for appealing to a limited demographic of young urbanites with twee taste and too much time. Even so, it's undeniable that crowdfunding works. Fortune magazine reports that crowdfunders raised $2.8 billion this year.

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Why has it been in the world of information technology and, secondarily, biomedicine that venture capitalists have been successful? In brief: Only in these sectors did the state invest at sufficient scale in scientific research and in its translation to working technology. In over 40 years as a working venture capitalist, I learned that my colleagues and I and the entrepreneurs whom we backed were all dancing on a platform constructed by the federal government.

Let's focus on information and communications technology. National funding of the basic research that enabled the IT revolution was overwhelmingly provided by the Defense Department. The Soviet threat, crystallized in the years after 1945 and amplified by the Korean War in 1950 and the launch of Sputnik in 1957, was the context for the U.S. military's massive commitment to renewing its wartime role as the principal financier of technical research and the principal customer for the products that generated.

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The Daily Dot speculates, probably correctly, that the top two answers, "Facebook" and "Wiki" owe their popularity more to clumsy computer users than genuine curiosity. The rest of the list, though, can be read as a guide to the things people want to know about that they don't want others to know they want to know about. Except maybe Google.

1) Facebook

2) Wiki

3) Deaths in 2012

4) "One Direction"

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Eklof was a part-time minister at a church in Louisville, Ky., in 2004 when the state voted to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Eklof responded by announcing that he wouldn’t perform marriages until same sex couples could wed.

“I had really looked at this as a free speech issue as much as a human rights issue,” he told Salon. It was a violation of the “First Amendment guarantee to religious expression...It would be the equivalent of someone coming into my restaurant and saying you can no longer serve blacks.”

Eklof's stance cost him his job as a video producer for the Kentucky Farm Bureau, a lobby representing and supporting agricultural interests. He sued and the Bureau eventually admitted to firing him for his views. The lawsuit settled for an undisclosed sum, “Enough to make my attorneys and Uncle Sam happy,” Eklof said. (The Kentucky church has continued to follow his example and does not “allow weddings of non-members to be held on its premises until it can open its doors equally to all couples, including gays and lesbians.”)

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As Apple stock continues it’s a long steep slide, investors and market watchers are speculating about whether the Cupertino, Calif.-based company can regain the mojo that made it a market favorite. But a report in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) suggests that the Android platform, now installed on three out of four smartphones sold worldwide, is exercising a gravitational pull on app developers.

Google’s Android has long lagged behind Apple in the number of available apps and the number of apps sold, but the balance appears to be shifting. “Android is the platform of growth,” Misha Lyalin, CEO of Zeptolab, which puts out the popular game “Cut the Rope” told the paper.

The article quotes one techie who personifies the platform rift:

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