President Obama and Congressional leaders at the White House last month. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Finally — finally — it looks like the government is coming to some sort of resolution to the debt-ceiling standoff. The wrangling continues right to the last minute (the deadline is tomorrow people!), but reporters are already looking at the impact that discussions will have on the reputations of the parties and individual politicians.

“…[E]ven as a compromise was announced on Sunday evening, both parties were prepared to try to define the deal as staying true to their respective principles,” The New York Times writes. “How well each of them does in shaping perceptions of the outcome could have a substantial effect on the 2012 presidential race and the balance of power in Washington as the ideological fight over the size and role of government grinds on.”

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NYC firefighters get the news about bin Laden's death via Times Square ticker. Photo: Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Twitter took a lead role in breaking the news last night that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In stories this morning, many report hearing the news first via tweet. Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is reported (by CNET and others) as the first reliable source to report on Twitter that bin Laden was dead.

Prior to that, White House comms director Dan Pfeiffer tweeted that President Obama would be making an announcement at 10:30 p.m. Even before that, Sohaib Athar, who goes by the name @ReallyVirtual, tweeted about hearing helicopters overhead in Abbottabad, “a rare event,” he wrote. Mashable says that he was actually tweeting the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Forbes also has an interesting story about Twitter’s scoop and the impact it’s having on news and other areas. And Gigaom breaks down the “seven stages of news” in the social media age.

Photo: AP

Evidence already shows that some people will continue with what President Obama calls this “silliness,” but the White House has made the President’s birth certificate public for all to see, definitively, once and for all.

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said during a presser this morning. “I’ve got better stuff to do.” According to Politico, the President sent a legal team to Hawaii to get a special copy of the certificate.

“At a time of great consequence for this country – when we should be debating how we win the future, reduce our deficit, deal with high gas prices, and bring stability to the Middle East, Washington, DC, was once again distracted by a fake issue,” White House comms director Dan Pfeiffer said in a statement. According to Politico, Pfeiffer added that “the White House hopes to defeat the issue by addressing it directly.” Fingers crossed.

Rather than being shamed by this nonsense, Donald Trump appeared at his own press conference to squawk about how proud he is. This man is in the lead for the GOP presidential nomination.

White House spokesperson Dan Pfeiffer announced today that Jay Carney will be taking over the @PressSec Twitter handle. The account has been silent since January 28. If his press briefing yesterday is any indication, Carney on Twitter will be all kinds of wild and crazy. “Scribes delighted,” Fishbowl DC writes, in Carney’s decision to jump around the briefing room to take questions, rather than sticking with Robert Gibbs’ pattern of going row by row.

GQ has published a must-read profile of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. However, one of the most interesting, and perhaps truthful quotes in the story comes from White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer (pictured), who testifies to his frustrations of dealing with a press corps that he says is hell bent on generating headlines that will light up the blogosphere:

“The basic philosophy is, the beast is either feeding on you or feeding on someone else. The media is more combative an enterprise than ever before—combative with the White House, newspapers literally fighting for their economic lives every day. You have outlets of ideological agendas in the briefing room on both sides who ask questions that fuel the debate. Every reporter sitting in that room, whether they admit it or not, wants to ask something that’ll lead the Huffington Post. So it’s incredibly provocative.”

Read the full story here.

Vanity Fair‘s Todd S. Purdum has an upcoming piece on the Obama administration. In it, he included a bit on political PR in the age of 24/7/365 always on media.

Said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer:

What they teach you on the first day of press-secretary school is to worry about blowing something up by giving attention to it. ‘Don’t blow something up.’

However, as Purdum notes, “But today, he [Pfeiffer] says, there’s no choice – the story will get blown up anyway, and you simply have to respond.” [h/t Politico]

[Image: Pfeiffer with Obama]

Here’s some proof that it’s ok to have a social media ghost writer. [We kid!] The President has one, obviously. President Obama appeared on ABC’s “The View” today, and talked a bit about his social media presence.

“I don’t tweet on a regular basis,” said Obama. “I think there’s an official president’s tweet, but some 20-year-old is doing a lot of the tweeting.”

In the video above, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer explains the decision making behind Obama’s appearance on “The View.” TVNewser has more.

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The House of Representatives passed health-care reform yesterday, and the spinning will continue from both sides of the aisle for days, months and years to come.

Already, The Washington Post is reporting on President Obama’s “public relations blitz” to drive positive public opinion of the bill.

“The Republicans have way overshot the runway in their criticism of health reform,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer told the Post.

After the jump, a look at some of the hundreds of press statements issued after the vote.

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Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.com

Dana Perino, former White House press secretary to President George W. Bush, did some Monday morning PR quarterbacking of President Obama’s sit down last night with Fox News’ Brett Baier on Fox and Friends today. “What I don’t understand, from a communications standpoint, is why the White House did the interview in the first place,” said Perino.

She said the administration should have held a press conference instead, which Fox would have covered anyway, and in which they may have had more control or could have selected the questions in advance.

In February, we noted how the Obama administration prefers sit down interviews as opposed to press conferences.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already moved on to today’s news from the Congressional Budget Office. A report from that office said the health-care bill will reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over the next 10 years and by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years after that.

Also: Perino will guest host Fox and Friends tomorrow.

TIME‘s Michael Scherer takes a look into how the White House is managing a news cycle that seems to move exponentially faster with each passing day. From the story:

“We have a theory of how the news media work in this Internet age,” explains Dan Pfeiffer [pictured], the buzz-cut 34-year-old who recently became the third person to serve as Obama’s communications director. “There is basically a constant swirl going on.”

This twister still includes the newspaper front pages, nightly news broadcasts and magazine covers that can often shape the national debate. But it also incorporates Sarah Palin‘s Facebook page, the latest Internet attack videos and that e-mail your aunt just sent you. “There is a constant conversation that goes on all day long, through blogs, through cable TV, through Twitter, between reporter, subject and reader,” says Pfeiffer, who sits down the hall from the Oval Office. He says his new job is to “make sure we are not getting swallowed up by the swirl.”

PRNewser has spoke with a number of political PR operatives who have said the fast changing news cycle is one of the reasons why the Obama press team has become more active on Twitter, in an attempt to squash incorrect or incomplete stories there, before they bubble up to mainstream media.