Washington – As President Obama and congressional leaders meet Saturday at the White House, trying to restart collapsed negotiations to avoid a government default, polls show the public sharply divided on the debt problem’s urgency, in a sour mood, and favoring more compromise between the parties.

Negotiations between House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama collapsed Friday afternoon. They had been working to hammer out a deal to reduce the nation’s debt and to increase the US debt ceiling to avert an August 2 default when the country is slated to run out of cash.

New polling data highlights the political challenges for both sides in the negotiations who were quick to blame each other for the breakdown in talks. Obama said Speaker Boehner had walked away from a deal that would have averted default and cut spending by $2.6 trillion.

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The United and Continental merger results in a new credit card offer for frequent fliers. The United MileagePlus Explorer Card from Chase is trying to catch the attention of a select group of frequent fliers, those with good or excellent credit. The card is offering a few new perks, such as a free checked bag, priority seating, 25,000 bonus miles after an initial purchase and no annual fee for the first year.

For those consumers familiar Continental OnePass Plus card or those who are already cardmembers you dont have to worry. Chase is making this transition as smooth as possible and cardmembers will still be able to receive all the benefits of the new card and you wont have to change cards to do so. As of right now, Chase is keeping $85 annual fee in place for the Continental One Pass cardholders.

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Choosing a host for your small business website, at first may not seem like a big decision. However, there are crucial things to take into consideration when dealing with Internet Service Providers. Mistakes can be made everywhere in your company but making a mistake when choosing a web host provider can potentially be fatal. In a 2006 Akami survey, 75% of people would not return to websites that took longer than 4 seconds to load. Improve your site’s loading speed and reliability, by choosing  a reputable web host and understanding the top 4 SMB pitfalls:

Is the majority of your business done via eCommerce? If your webhost doesn’t have proper backup, you are at the mercy of their servers. Putting your website on their server, means that if they have internal errors, you have a crisis.

Solution: You can host your main site on one server and have a mirror site on another server.

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Washington – A new spending proposal by the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Six” Tuesday is being called a potential breakthrough in efforts to include major deficit reduction in a “grand bargain” to raise the national debt ceiling.

But with Congress running out of time before the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline and partisan forces already criticizing the plan, it faces numerous challenges to break the deadlock on Capitol Hill.

It is, however, seen as having better prospects than the Republicans’ “cut, cap, and balance” bill passed by the House Tuesday night in a near-party line vote, 234 to 190. The bill, which would cap future spending at less than 20 percent of gross domestic product and require passage of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, has virtually no chance of passing the Senate, and the president has vowed to veto it.

The proposal by the bipartisan senators in the Gang of Six, by contrast, tries to strike a middle ground between spending cuts and revenue increases and is based on the recommendations of the president’s deficit commission.

The details of the proposal have yet to be released.

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The new combined credit card that grew out of the Continental-United merger more closely resembles the Continental OnePass than the card’s predecessor, the United Mileage Plus. Now that the two airlines have become one in the eyes of God and travelers, the old United credit card is being phased out and replaced by the newbie, the United Mileage Plus Explorer. While slightly higher annual fee may make the newcomer seem like a step down, the increased rewards rate, perks and travel benefits more than make up for a slight fee increase. Dont let the fee fool you: its a pretty great airline credit card.

*United says that this perk is only worth $50 roundtrip, but were not quite sure why.

So do these shiny new perks and the bumped-up rewards rate make up for the increased annual fee? We think so. The savings on waived checked baggage fees, which can amount to $100 for a roundtrip flight, will make up for the annual fee by themselves.

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