As the shutdown hits the one week mark, House Speaker John Boehner warns the country is headed for default, blaming President Obama for not being willing to negotiate. 
Politico: “The government shutdown is lurching into a second week after a fruitless weekend on Capitol Hill. A rare Saturday session was dominated by now-familiar shutdown messaging from Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, with each side trying to blame the other for keeping the government shuttered. Even House-passed legislation that would pay federal workers prompted an angry reaction from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. There were no signs of serious negotiations over the weekend, and the longer the standoff drags on the more likely the fight will bump up against the Oct. 17 deadline to raise the debt ceiling — setting the stage for a giant battle over fiscal policy in the coming weeks.”
Washington Post: “House Speaker John A. Boehner on Sunday defiantly rejected calls to reopen the government and raise the federal debt limit, warning that the nation is headed for a first-ever default unless President Obama starts negotiating with Republicans. ‘That’s the path we’re on,’ Boehner (R-Ohio) said on ABC’s ‘This Week.’ Of Obama, he added: ‘He knows what my phone number is. All he has to do is call.’”
MSNBC: “Now on day six of a government shutdown, Boehner repeated that he wouldn’t bring a clean government spending bill to the floor. ‘There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR,’ he insisted…A number of House Republicans have signaled their willingness to vote for a clean spending bill in order to end the shutdown. Based on an independent analysis by the NBC News Hill team, as many as 22 House Republicans have indicated they would support a clean CR. That means if all 200 Democrats voted in favor, it could pass.”
National Journal: “The speaker has not had an abundance of opportunities to explain himself to the public during the current shutdown fiasco. Sunday’s interview was his first on network T.V. since the shutdown began. That’s obviously at least in part by his own choice. But the result is a foggy image of who the speaker is, what he really wants, and what he’d be willing to do to find a deal to reopen the government and prevent a debt default later this month.”
NBC News: “Organizing for Action is set to double down on Republicans over the government shutdown with a new TV ad hammering the ‘irresponsible’ and ‘reckless’ House GOP leadership ahead of the debt limit showdown. The cable television ad from the president’s former campaign arm… will run nationally on cable news.”
Wall Street Journal: “Six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government acknowledged for the first time Sunday it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for coverage. The Obama administration said last week that an unanticipated surge of Web traffic caused most of the problems and was a sign of high demand by people seeking to buy coverage under the new law. But federal officials said Sunday the online marketplace needed design changes, as well as more server capacity to improve efficiency on the federally run exchange that serves 36 states.”
New York Times: “After back-to-back terms ending in historic rulings that riveted the nation, the Supreme Court might have been expected to return to its usual diet of routine cases that rarely engage the public. Instead, the court’s new term, which starts Monday, will feature an extraordinary series of cases on consequential constitutional issues, including campaign contributions, abortion rights, affirmative action, public prayer and presidential power.”
Politico: “Republicans are eager for November 2016 — and not just because Barack Obama’s presidency will be in its final days. It’s when Harry Reid, the man reviled by Republicans for his inflammatory rhetoric and hardball tactics during the government shutdown, could be booted from his Nevada Senate seat. Reid knows it — and he’s quietly plotting his plans more than three years out. In an interview from his Senate office last week, the 73-year-old majority leader insisted he’s running for reelection in 2016. He’s ramping up his campaign organization, and he’s getting ready for the onslaught the GOP is preparing to send his way.”
NEW JERSEY: New York Times: “Cory A. Booker is an undisputed star of a new generation of African-American leaders, electrifying liberal audiences with his oratory and charming the social media set with his digital savvy. But the Senate campaign Mr. Booker, a Democrat, is running in New Jersey — at times sputtering, unfocused and entangled in seemingly frivolous skirmishes over Twitter messages involving a stripper — has unnerved his supporters, who thought that a robust and unblemished victory over his Republican opponent, Steve Lonegan, would catapult him onto the national stage. As his allies move to shore up what was supposed to be a painless path to Congress, the biggest and wealthiest of them, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, will start spending more than $1 million on Monday to broadcast television commercials on Mr. Booker’s behalf, a vast sum to pour into a single candidacy.”
“Booker brought in big bucks in the final weeks of his Senate bid in the New Jersey special election. That’s in part thanks to some megawatt help from Hollywood.” Roll Call looks at “a number of players in the entertainment industry who contributed toward his $2.58 million total haul for August and September.”
PENNSYLVANIA: Allentown Morning Call: “Less than two months after one of his lawyers created a political firestorm by comparing gay marriage to unions of 12-year-olds, Gov. Tom Corbett torched himself with a similar analogy. He compared gay marriage to a union between brother and sister during a TV interview that aired Friday morning….m; Corbett issued a written apology about six hours after the interview aired. He said he did not mean to offend anyone by making a legal argument between sibling wedlock and same-sex marriage because both are illegal under state law.”
VIRGINIA: Washington Post: “The federal government shutdown continued to reverberate across the Potomac River in the Virginia governor’s race Sunday as businessman Terry McAuliffe pointedly called on Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II to denounce the shutdown and one of its key architects, Sen. Ted Cruz.Cuccinelli (R) — a longtime ally of the tea party movement who is running to lead a state fueled by federal spending — made no mention of the shutdown in his remarks at a campaign event.”
Politico: “In the clearest sign yet of the potent effect of the government shutdown on the Virginia governor’s race,” Cuccinelli “avoided being photographed with Ted Cruz at a gala they headlined here Saturday night—even leaving before the Texas senator rose to speak. Backstage, a source said, Cuccinelli urged Cruz to work with Democrats to end the federal shutdown. But he did not make that point, or even acknowledge Cruz, in short public comments to some 1,100 social conservatives.”
AP’s Bob Lewis: “Cuccinelli last week rolled out what he believes is a game-changer” against McAuliffe: “the Affordable Care Act, or ‘Obamacare,’ for Cuccinelli’s purposes. His loathing for the Democratic-passed law is in many ways his calling card. It was the first action to put him in the national limelight and rocketed him to superhero status among the nation’s conservative tea party movement when he became the first state attorney general to sue challenging the law’s constitutionality — just one day after Obama signed it. On Tuesday, it became a major feature of Cuccinelli’s struggling campaign.”
AP: “Coal has emerged as a defining issue in the race for Virginia’s governor, and the stark divide between” Cuccinelli and McAuliffe “has grown wider with the release of new federal pollution limits on coal-fired power plants.”
WYOMING: Los Angeles Times reports that “outside group is jumping into” the bitter GOP primary battle between Sen. Mike Enzi and Liz Cheney “with the first TV spot of the campaign, a 30-second advertisement that attacks Cheney for, one is led to believe, backing same-sex marriage. The spot features clips of Cheney from a 2009 appearance on MSNBC … in which she expressed opposition to a constitutional amendment banning the marriage of same-sex couples and support for a State Department move extending benefits to the same-sex partners of Foreign Service employees. The spot, which ends with the tag line ‘Wrong for Wyoming,’ takes a generous share of creative license. Cheney provoked a sisterly spat by declaring in August her opposition to same-sex marriage.”