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Malin Ackerman
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NPR has a slightly bizarre article claiming that the effects of the Snowden leaks "aren't what he intended."  Except the article doesn't really suggest that at all.  It does focus on how the NSA is now spending a ton of time trying to figure out how to prevent future leaks, but that's to be expected.  It also talks about how the NSA needs to focus on that rather than on spying on everyone with a hint of "and you might all die because we can't do our jobs" added in for flavor.

NSA folks in the article also complain that the bad guys might use other forms of communication, but they've been saying that all along, and that's a silly complaint. As noted, most actual terrorists were already pretty aware of what technologies to avoid.

What the article really means by its title is that the NSA itself hasn't had a mass-epiphany that it should change its ways. But I don't think anyone ever believed that would happen, let alone Snowden. The effect that Snowden appears to have wanted was to have the public more aware of what the NSA was doing, hopefully leading to policy makers in Congress to fix the problems that have allowed the NSA to have gone so far overboard with its surveillance efforts. And that debate is happening, and considering how many bills have been introduced to reform the surveillance state, it appears that the debate is having an impact. How big an impact remains to be seen, but to argue that it's not having the effect he wanted is just wrong.

To no one's surprise, Claire Danes won best actress for "Homeland," and "Behind the Candelabra" took home eleven Emmys, including best film or miniseries, best director for Steven Soderbergh, and best actor for Michael Douglas.

Last night was the first "live" episode I've watched and I did enjoy the anticipation.

"The highest result of education is tolerance."
- Helen Keller, author and activist (1880-1968)

And then, in the bottom of the 7th, Alexi Casilla collides with Nick Markakis, and looked like he could have broken his neck; fortunately, he seemed to be okay and returned to 2B.  Meanwhile, the ball he caught, he lost in the collision, and the Rays ended up later in the inning scoring 2 runs to tie the game.

I think Machado's injury has really shaken them up.  Casilla is out of the game now, too.

Interview with Richard Eskow, senior fellow with the group Campaign for America's Future, conducted by Scott Harris

Although income inequality has been rising in the United States over the last 30 years, a new report from economists at the University of California at Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University have found that the wealth gap has now reached record levels. According to analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service, the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. pulled in 19.3 percent of total household income in 2012, the largest share for nation's wealthiest citizens in more than 100 years. The next highest share of wealth taken by the richest was recorded in 1927 at 18.7 percent, two years before the start of the Great Depression. According to the study, incomes among the top one percent rose by 31.4 percent between 2009 and 2012, while incomes for everyone else grew just 0.4 percent. The top ten percent of earners in the economy now control more than half of the nation's total income.

Rather than bailing out wall street over the subprime mortgage mess they created for themselves and everyone else, the administration and the fed could instead have paid off every mortgage in the country, subprime or not, for less money (only about 12 trillion) than the 18-20 trillion they gave wall street as a reward for pillaging the economy. This could even have been done with tax credits thus avoiding any outlay of money from the fed.

It would have restored the value behind the CDO mortgage backed securities that wall street got themselves into so much trouble with, and thus saved wall street while tremendously boosting the consumer driven economy as the money would have gone directly to the mortgage holding banks while at the same time effectively doubling the amount of bailout money by lifting an enormous debt weight from all those homeowners who would then have had an equivalent amount of disposable funds to spend any way they chose.

The US consumer economy would be rockin' by now.

Now, had this been done Obama and the Democrats would likely have lost all future donations from wall street and they'd be whining so loud we couldn't hear ourselves think - those donations of course were more important to Obama than bailing out homeowners instead of the party's corporate owners.

Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, "my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks"
[snip]
...in April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin, after a two-year inquiry, issued a fat report detailing several transactions, including Goldman's Abacus deal, that Levin and his staff believed should be investigated by Justice as possible crimes.
[snip]
Meanwhile, Obama's political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year's scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama's Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.

Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: Why I have gone on hunger strike
In an open letter, the imprisoned Pussy Riot member explains why the brutal conditions at Penal Colony No 14 have led her to undertake a hunger strike in protest...

"My brigade in the sewing shop works 16 to 17 hours a day. From 7.30am to 12.30am. At best, we get four hours of sleep a night. We have a day off once every month and a half."

Even if conservatives lose the battle to defund Obamacare -- and it's a foregone conclusion that they will -- they appear to have already won the real policy fight over a government shutdown fight, which was about spending.

President Barack Obama and Democrats won't cave on Obamacare. But they're poised to cave when it comes to continuing spending at austerity levels ordered by sequestration -- across-the-board cuts put in place by a deal made in the 2011 shutdown threat. And in doing so, they'll surrender important leverage to replace the damaging spending cuts to the military along with programs like health care, education and scientific research.
...
"By extending last year's post-sequester levels, Speaker Boehner is trying to lock those additional spending cuts into place and create a new baseline from which future negotiations must begin," read the CAP brief, written by President Neera Tanden and economic expert Michael Linden. "Having Congress adopt those levels in the short term is likely to make it easier for conservatives to keep those cuts in place for the long term." link

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told a fundraiser in August that "we're not going to increase the debt limit without cuts and reforms" on "the mandatory side" of the ledger, impacting programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. link

These guys... they are like highschoolers with their bravado and putting some form of mojo into handshakes and stares.

Rouhani has said publicly he wants to work with the US, IMO there isn't one GD good reason for Obama not to meet with him beyond some idiotic sense of posturing.