Ted Cruz blasted by angry GOP colleagues  —  Ted Cruz faced a barrage of hostile questions Wednesday from angry GOP senators, who lashed the Texas tea party freshman for helping prompt a government shutdown crisis without a strategy to end it.  —  At a closed-door lunch meeting …

Live mic catches Senators McConnell and Paul talking strategy  —  WASHINGTON, D.C. - WPSD Local 6 got an inside glimpse Wednesday night to how much the government shutdown is about the messaging for congressional lawmakers.  —  After finishing an interview with CNN, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul ran …

Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law  —  A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people …

California exchange overstated its Web traffic for Obamacare launch  —  Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, discusses the launch of the state's insurance exchange Tuesday in Los Angeles.  (Reed Saxon/AP / October 2, 2013)  —  California's health insurance exchange vastly overstated …

Montana lieutenant governor announces Senate bid  —  Montana Lieutenant Gov. John Walsh (D) will run for the Senate, he announced Thursday morning, giving Democrats a viable recruit in the GOP-leaning state.  —  Walsh, a former adjudant general in the Montana National Guard who served in Iraq …

Denny Hastert Disses the ‘Hastert Rule’: It ‘Never Really Existed’  —  The former Republican speaker's ‘rule,’ that you can't bring legislation to the House floor without a majority of GOP votes, is cited as the reason Boehner can't end the shutdown.  But Hastert tells Eleanor Clift it's a ‘non-entity’ …

Extremists, Not “Nihilists”  —  The rapidly spreading progressive CW about what House Republicans are doing is that they are “nihilists” who have blundered into an impasse and have no clue how to get out.  Jonathan Chait vividly compares them to characters in the Cohn Brothers' tragi-comedy Fargo:

Power says she's regretted calling Hillary a monster ‘every day since’  —  U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power says she's regretted calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the 2008 presidential campaign “pretty much every day since.”  —  “It was beyond searing,” Power said Thursday on NBC's The Today Show.

Mark Levin to Obama: You lay one hand on WW2 vets and I'LL BRING HALF A MILLION PEOPLE TO THAT MEMORIAL!  —  Mark Levin warned everyone on Capitol Hill that if they lay a hand on the WWII vets at the memorial to arrest them for visiting their own memorial, he'll bring a half a million people to march on Washington.

The right's new lie about its shutdown intentions  —  If Ted Cruz is making John Boehner dance like a marionette, then Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., is the guy helping Cruz keep the strings untangled.  —  He's the author of the House's version of the famous letter insisting that Republicans …

Brendan Mahoney Saves ObamaCare  —  Great news!  They got a 30-year-old dude to sign up!  —  “People complain of having to stand in line for hours, often in vain, and many are losing patience with the government's explanation that unsavory conspirators are to blame for the nation's problems,” reports the New York Times.

Taylor Griffin running for Congress in N.C.  —  Taylor Griffin, a former aide to President George W. Bush who went on to co-found Hamilton Place Strategies, has moved back home to eastern North Carolina and on Thursday will announce a challenge to a fellow Republican, Rep. Walter Jones.