Reflecting on the Colorado recalls  —  We did a poll last weekend in Colorado Senate District 3 and found that voters intended to recall Angela Giron by a 12 point margin, 54/42.  In a district that Barack Obama won by almost 20 points I figured there was no way that could be right and made a rare decision not to release the poll.

WSJ op-ed writer Elizabeth O'Bagy fired for resume lie  —  The Syria researcher whose Wall Street Journal op-piece was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain during congressional hearings about the use of force has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for lying …

Who Do You Trust?  —  WASHINGTON — Vladimir Putin, who keeps Edward Snowden on a leash and lets members of a riotous girl band rot in jail, has thrown President Obama a lifeline.  —  The Russian president had coldly brushed back Obama on Snowden and Syria, and only last week called John Kerry a liar.

Sydney Leathers, former sexting partner of Anthony Weiner, attempts to crash his election night party  —  The 23-year-old, clad in a tight red dress and platform heels, said that she wanted to finally meet the man who ‘manipulated’ her into a months-long relationship.

Trader Joe's To Drop Health Coverage For Part-Time Workers Under Obamacare: Memo  —  After extending health care coverage to many of its part-time employees for years, Trader Joe's has told workers who log fewer than 30 hours a week that they will need to find insurance on the Obamacare exchanges next year …

Exclusive: IAC And Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown To Part Ways  —  A source with direct knowledge of the situation says IAC does not plan to renew Tina Brown's contract when it expires in January.  A decision has not yet been made on the future of The Daily Beast.  —  Jason Kempin / FilmMagic

Lhota Hopes to Capitalize on Elite Dismay Over a Liberal Tilt  —  They are startled and unsure how to react.  “Terrifying,” is how one banker put it.  —  Many in New York's business and financial elite, stung by the abrupt ascent of Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic tax-the-rich liberal …

THE FALLING MAN  —  Do you remember this photograph?  In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001.  The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.  —  SPECIAL OFFER

NR v. Booker  —  Newark mayor Cory Booker has a very active imagination.  Eliana Johnson demonstrated that with her report on Booker's moving, highly detailed accounts of his involvement with “T-Bone,” a hard-luck drug dealer who Booker admitted to a friend is a fiction.

NSA shares raw intelligence with Israel  —  • Secret deal places no legal limits on use of data by Israelis  —  • Only official US government communications protected  —  • Agency insists it complies with rules governing privacy  —  • Read the NSA and Israel's ‘memorandum of understanding’

The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery  —  An updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows that the top 1 percent of earners took more than one-fifth of the country's total income in 2012, one of the highest levels recorded in the century that the government has collected the relevant data.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘America 3.0’  —  AMERICA 3.0: REBOOTING AMERICAN PROSPERITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY — WHY AMERICA'S GREATEST DAYS ARE YET TO COME  —  As we return to reality from the lazy, hazy days of summer, we find our nation war-weary, broke and politically fractured.  We are a subprime-mortgaged house divided.

GOP bill blocks food stamp users from buying junk food  —  Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday proposed legislation that would require people using federal food stamps to buy only healthy food.  —  The Healthy Food Choices Act, H.R. 3073, reflects a long-standing criticism …

Barack Obama's Syria speech was an incoherent mess - he is outperforming Jimmy Carter as the most feeble US president of modern times  —  Billed as a game-changer on Syria, the President's White House address landed with a thud that could be heard as far away as Damascus.

This Was a Samantha Power Speech  —  America still doesn't quite grasp the novelty of what Obama is doing in Syria.  This is an intervention driven primarily by humanitarian concerns.  There is no chance we'd have reached this point without those chemical attacks.

Chemical Disarmament Hard Even in Peacetime  —  Spread far and wide across Syria, the chemical weapons complex of the fractured state includes factories, bunkers, storage depots and thousands of munitions, all of which would have to be inspected and secured under a diplomatic initiative …