(CNSNews.com) – The Washington Post Web site is ticking down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the debt ceiling deadline – the moment on August 2nd when the Obama administration says the U.S. government will be forced to default on its legal obligations.

In fact, it will be up to President Obama to choose which bills to pay and which not to pay. Default is an option, but it’s unlikely the administration would refuse to pay the interest on the national debt.

The U.S. Treasury, however, is sounding an alarmist note. If Congress fails to increase the U.S. credit limit, “the government would have to stop, limit, or delay payments on a broad range of legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and many other commitments,” the Treasury Department says on its Web site...

House Republicans prepared to unveil a new deficit-reduction bill as early as Monday night, charging ahead with a two-stage plan to raise the debt ceiling despite stiff White House objection.

Both parties are working on their own fallback plans after a weekend session of private talks failed to yield a compromise.

While little has congealed on the Democratic side, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is working on a plan to cut $2.7 trillion from the deficit over the next decade and extend U.S. borrowing authority into 2013. The plan, so far, would not raise revenue and does not appear to tackle entitlements, though aides said more details will be available later Monday...

Laws of science can simply not be broken.

There's Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary Motion.

There's Newton's Laws of Motion which govern force, mass and inertia.

And then there are scientific dictates like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Congress makes laws. But it's governed by laws, too...

Washington – The Senate is moving to cast away a budget cutting plan passed by the Republican-controlled House, clearing the way for increasingly urgent government talks over raising the nation's debt ceiling. President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner searched once more for an ambitious $4 trillion grand bargain, but officials said wide differences remained.

Less than two weeks from an Aug. 2 deadline that could precipitate a first-ever government default, the continuing Obama-Boehner talks kept alive the possibility of substantial deficit reduction that would combine cuts in spending on major benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid and revenue increases through a broad overhaul of the tax code.

"We have the opportunity to do something big and meaningful," Obama declared in a newspaper opinion piece. And from the Capitol, Boehner said House Republicans were prepared to compromise and prodded Obama: "The ball continues to be in the president's court"...

The White House retreated Wednesday from President Obama’s vow to veto any short-term increase in the nation’s debt limit, opening the door wider to a bipartisan Senate compromise plan to boost borrowing for now in exchange for a promise by Congress to cut spending later.

“If both sides agree to something significant, we will support the measures needed to finalize details,” said presidential spokesman Jay Carney. “We believe a short-term extension absent an agreement to a larger deal is unacceptable.”

Last week, Mr. Obama declared unequivocally that he would not sign a temporary extension of the debt ceiling. He called the interim approach a shaky way for the U.S. to “manage our affairs”...

As Washington continues to grapple for a way out of its debt dilemma, a separate bipartisan budget plan by the Senate's "Gang of Six" appears to be losing momentum.

Critics complained that the proposal contains larger tax increases than advertised.

While the plan would lower the top tax rate from 35 percent to somewhere between 23 and 29 percent, it also targets some cherished tax breaks...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defying a veto threat, the Republican-controlled House voted Tuesday night to slice federal spending by $6 trillion and require a constitutional balanced-budget amendment to be sent to the states in exchange for averting a threatened Aug. 2 government default.

The 234-190 vote marked the power of deeply conservative first-term Republicans, and it stood in contrast to calls at the White House and in the Senate for a late stab at bipartisanship to solve the nation’s looming debt crisis.

President Obama and a startling number of Republican senators lauded a deficit-reduction plan put forward earlier in the day by a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators that calls for $1 trillion in what sponsors delicately called “additional revenue” and some critics swiftly labeled as higher taxes...

OK, so you wake up from a long drunken bender and discover that you burned through every bit of your money, raided your retirement savings and maxed out all your credit cards with debts your grandchildren will be paying for the rest of their lives. What do you do?

A) Stop spending, pay off your debts and figure out some way to never go on a drunken bender again where you spend all of your money and sentence your grandchildren to the modern day debtor’s prison.

B) Keep spending money you don’t have, apply for new credit cards and don’t do anything that would keep this from happening again for fear that it might make the credit card companies nervous about your financial stability...

The House of Representatives is considering its own plan to raise the debt ceiling today: the "cut, cap and balance" plan. Republicans who support it say it's needed policy to right the country's financial situation. Democrats say it would dismantle the government's safety net and change the nature of the country. So what is it?

Their plan, which would cut $111 billion in federal spending this year, would also set mandatory caps for federal spending as a percentage of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. Those caps would start at 22.5 percent and go down to 19.9 percent by the end of the decade and stay there for the foreseeable future. The plan would also require a balanced budget amendment be passed by the Congress and sent to the states for ratification.

The House of Representatives has approved the GOP's 'Cut, Cap and Balance' plan with a vote of 234 to 190.

The bill imposes caps on federal spending as a percentage of GDP. It also allows for an increase in the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion in exchange for both the Senate and House approving a balanced budget amendment.

House Speaker John Boehner played a muted role in public during the day, but later applauded the passage of the plan.

“House Republicans are the only ones to put forward and pass a real plan that will create a better environment for private-sector job growth by stopping Washington from spending money it doesn’t have and preventing tax hikes on families and small businesses," he said in a statement. "The White House hasn’t said what it will cut"...