* House Republicans floated a proposal to extend the debt limit for 5-6 weeks "in exchange for a real commitment by this president" to hold budget talks, as House majority leader Eric Cantor put it.

• The White House said it would withhold its response until it sees a bill, but called Republican movement on the debt ceiling an "encouraging sign."

• It's unclear how close the sides were to a deal to raise the debt ceiling temporarily. Markets were up. But the president could refuse the extension if Republicans tie it in an unpleasant-for-Obama way to budget negotiations. The president has repeatedly said he won't negotiate over the budget until the government reopens.

• An end to the government shutdown appeared no closer. The Republican proposal on the debt ceiling did not mention the shutdown. House Republicans said the leadership offered to allow the Tea Party to continue the shutdown fight if the debt ceiling deal goes through. However if the two sides get close to a deal on the debt ceiling it's possible that a stopgap funding deal could shake out.

So, really, just more kabuki, I guess.  The general consensus seems to be that the GOP caucus agreed to let Boehner propose a short-term increase in the debt ceiling, but only if they could continue to hold the budget hostage to Obamacare.

The inside line from the Republican caucus is that the Tea Party-ers agreed to vote with Boehner on a short-term debt limit extension in exchange for his accepting an ongoing fight over funding the government. A spending bill known as a continuing resolution is required to reopen government. The White House has said it only would accept a bill that does not carry add-ons relating to Obamacare or other spending cuts. The House passed three spending bills with cuts to Obamacare and the White House rejected them one after another. Then the government shut down.

The current deal could mean that Boehner has agreed - out of some degree of necessity, it seems - to accede to the Tea Party desire to continue to wage a shutdown fight over Obamacare, in exchange for averting a default.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford was contemplating retirement after a life after politics, having quietly informed his friends that he had decided against running for re-election in the western Michigan congressional district he had represented since 1948.

As Archibald Cox's investigation into the break-in at DNC headquarter at the Watergate hotel and office complex approached its explosive climax, Agnew's ouster for crimes unrelated to that burgeoning political scandal proved the opening shot in a rapid-fire series of events over the next ten months, which would in short order pull Mr. Ford from the House floor and thrust him into the Oval Office as the only appointed president in our country's history -- a job he had neither wanted nor sought.

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule."
-- President Gerald R. Ford, Inaugural remarks at the White House, Washington, DC (August 9, 1974)

The Guardian today...
Patriot Act author prepares bill to put NSA bulk collection 'out of business'

The conservative Republican who co-authored America's Patriot Act is preparing to unveil bipartisan legislation that would dramatically curtail the domestic surveillance powers it gives to intelligence agencies.

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who worked with president George W Bush to give more power to US intelligence agencies after the September 11 terrorist attacks, said the intelligence community had misused those powers by collecting telephone records on all Americans, and claimed it was time "to put their metadata program out of business".

His imminent bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be matched by a similar proposal from Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, a Democrat. It pulls together existing congressional efforts to reform the National Security Agency in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sensenbrenner has called his bill the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection, and Online Monitoring Act - or USA Freedom Act, and a draft seen by the Guardian has four broad aims.

It seeks to limit the collection of phone records to known terrorist suspects; to end "secret laws" by making courts disclose surveillance policies; to create a special court advocate to represent privacy interests; and to allow companies to disclose how many requests for users' information they receive from the USA. The bill also tightens up language governing overseas surveillance to remove a loophole which it has been abused to target internet and email activities of Americans.

TGIF, my friends. We're just happy there isn't a BART strike...yet. Means no impossible drive into the city. And CalTrain, which we could take from Millbrae also, if there is a strike, will be crowded like a chain of sardine cans. Not a fun prospect either way.

WASHINGTON -- Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man's behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion.

The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.

But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified documents. The supervisor's cautionary note and the C.I.A.'s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden's record once the documents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

"It slipped through the cracks," one veteran law enforcement official said of the report.

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. all declined to comment on the precise nature of the warning and why it was not forwarded, citing the investigation into Mr. Snowden's activities.

Half a dozen law enforcement, intelligence and Congressional officials with direct knowledge of the supervisor's report were contacted for this article. All of the officials agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing criminal investigation.

In hindsight, officials said, the report by the C.I.A. supervisor and the agency's suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Mr. Snowden's top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the N.S.A. under much greater scrutiny.

Heavy volumes of traffic were reported on the Beltway during Friday morning's commute because of the rain, police authorities said, but there were no major incidents related to a protest by about 30 tractor-trailers and pickups against what organizers describe as excessive government intrusion.

Maryland and Virginia police officials said at mid-morning that the truck protesters appeared to have broken up into smaller groups and were traveling at the same speed as the rest of traffic along the Beltway.

In Maryland, state police officials said there were a few minor accidents on the outer loop of the Beltway in College Park at the Route 1 exit and at the Route 50 exit in Landover -- none of them were related to the trucker protest.

In Virginia, the trucks were traveling in the right lane of the Beltway earlier in the morning, keeping pace with other traffic -- around 40 to 45 miles per hour, due to the wet road conditions, said Virginia State Police spokesman Corinne N. Geller.

But by mid-morning, she said, the group was becoming harder to track.

Well, they did have ONE incident:

Earlier Friday morning, four tractor-trailers drove side-by-side, across all four northbound lanes of the Beltway's inner loop in Virginia. That caused traffic to slow to 15 miles per hour. State police troopers stopped the vehicles and "warned them not to impede traffic," Geller said. The drivers were not issued tickets and allowed to "proceed on their way."

Seems that we do.

Never quite realized that we are actually borrowing more money then we are producing.

Seems like we have a problem.

It's like a perfect storm of unintentional comedy, where do you even start poking fun? ;)

(Sigh!) To once again quote my late grandfather, "Yeah, sure -- and if the dog hadn't stopped to take a dump, he'd have caught that rabbit, too."

Too bad Ditka didn't express similar public regrets back in 1986 over his pointed refusal to allow the late, great Bears running back Walter Payton an opportunity to score a touchdown in Super Bowl XX, preferring instead to give those honors to William "The Refrigerator" Perry.