Today's edition of quick hits:
* Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters this afternoon that House Republicans need to "get a life." He added, "Understand, we're dealing with anarchists."
* Confidence among investors has begun to fade: "Investors are worried that even a temporary government shutdown could endanger an already weak economic recovery. Stock markets fell worldwide on Monday as political disagreements in Washington made a shutdown on Monday night increasingly likely."
* Iraq: "Several explosions, some of them from suicide bombers, struck the heart of Iraq's northern Kurdish region on Sunday, setting off chaos and gunfights in the streets of the capital, Erbil."
* Pakistan: "A powerful car bomb blast killed at least 33 people, including women and children, in a busy market in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, according to a hospital official. The explosion -- which sent plumes of dark smoke into the sky and destroyed many shops outside a police station in the historic Qissa Khawani market -- injured some 75 people, said Dr. Arshad Javed, executive director at Peshawar's Lady Reading Hospital."
* Diplomacy: "Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Premier Nawaz Sharif, met for about an hour at New York's Plaza Hotel on Sunday. Shaking hands for the cameras, the meeting signaled a new effort toward cooperation between the two nuclear-armed neighbors."
* Not good: "A vice admiral who is second in command at the United States Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear war-fighting forces for the military, has been suspended amid an investigation into his possible involvement in illegal gambling, officials said on Saturday."
* Krugman: "No sane political system would run this kind of risk. But we don't have a sane political system; we have a system in which a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both, and in which Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party's delusional wing. For they are delusional, about both the economics and the politics."
* Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) capacity to believe strange things is limitless.
* And Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) today described the Ted Cruz wing of his party "lemmings with suicide vests ... because jumping to your death is not enough."
Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
