Those efforts have proven a failure to this point, and a market that has been fairly sanguine about the potential negative implications of the fiscal cliff to this point had a violent reaction Friday morning, though the move was tempered somewhat after Boehner said he is still open to working with the White House on some form of compromise.

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Critics accuse Mr. Khan of pandering to hard-line Islamists and naively seeing violent extremism as merely a reaction to the American military presence in neighboring Afghanistan.

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