Frank James

As Thursday brought the prospect of another scheduled afternoon White House meeting between the antagonists in the debt-ceiling battle, it was only natural to wonder how that session would go considering what happened the day before.

On Wednesday, as been widely reported, that meeting got somewhat testy, with President Obama telling congressional Republicans, specifically House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, not to test his resolve.

Rep. Louis Gohmert, a Texas Republican, suggested Wednesday that he'd like President Obama to be more like President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

No, he wasn't talking about wanting Obama to massively expand the federal government or engage in more Keynesian pump-priming.

In a proposal that appears to be mostly about finding a way to raise the debt ceiling while protecting his fellow congressional Republicans from having to vote to do so, Sen. Mitch McConnell has suggested a way in which Congress could effectively give President Obama the power to raise the debt ceiling.

But it would also seem meant to potentially put Obama on the defensive by having him take the political heat for raising the debt ceiling. Repeated polls have found a majority of Americans opposed to a higher debt ceiling.

When you're a U.S. president, you can never have too many followers. So it makes sense, then, that President Obama would eventually turn to that ultimate population of followers, the 140-character delimited Twitterverse by holding the first White House Twitter town hall Wednesday.

At the event scheduled to start at 2 pm eastern time and "presented" by Twitter, people will be able to tweet their questions to the hashtag #AskObama.

With the July 4 holiday behind us, it's now 27 days until D-day, with the "D" standing for default, which the Obama Administration assures us the federal government will do on its debts unless Congress increases the nation's $14.3 debt ceiling before then.

Where do things stand? Pretty much where they did before the holiday, except now there's even less time.