House GOP to attach Obamacare delay to CR  —  House Republicans will vote to pass a one-year delay of Obamacare in exchange for funding the government, a plan that drastically increases the chances of a government shutdown this Tuesday.  —  The decision was announced by the GOP leadership …

Obama and Rouhani: ‘Jaw jaw’ better than ‘war war’  —  Editor's note: David Rothkopf writes regularly for CNN.com.  He is CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine, and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Follow him on Twitter.

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens  —  WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times …

The One Weird Law That Dictates How Government Shutdowns Work  —  A shutdown would end up costing more because of the price of restarting the government — and other odd facts about the late-1800s Antideficiency Act.  —  If rogue Republicans do not relent over the budget impasse by October 1 …

Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: September 2013  —  As the clock counts down on open enrollment and the rollout of the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), in the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll we asked people who say they don't have enough information about the law …

Obama Stripped to Skeleton Staff in a Government Shutdown  —  A U.S. government shutdown means President Barack Obama will have fewer people to cook meals, do the laundry, clean the floors or change the light bulbs, according to a White House contingency plan.

Worse Is the New Normal  —  A few years ago, after the publication of my book America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we're rich enough to be stupid.”  That's to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known …