A pre-scheduled visit to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. by a group of Mississippi veterans went ahead despite the government shutdown after the vets refused to allow the barricade around the closed memorial to hold them back.

The government may have shut down for the first time in 17 years, but Jon Stewart is staying put because his excoriation of House Republicans is essential.

For the first time in 17 years, the U.S. Government has shut down, as Congressional Republicans refused to pass a budget resolution funding the federal government without attaching provisions to delay or defund Obamacare.

With nine hours remaining until the midnight deadline, the Senate just voted 54-46 to reject the House budget proposal that would have delayed Obamacare for a year. The bill now returns to the House.

With the deadline just hours away, Congress has a lot of work to do before almost certainly letting the government fall into a partial shutdown. This is what will (probably) happen today.

Remember when Al Gore and the Clinton Administration made everyone happy by "reinventing government" back in the '90s, on the principle that government functions would be more efficient if a third-party private intermediary were taking profits on them, because the invisible hand of the free market will always produce optimal results? The New York Times has an update on the operations of USIS, the company born in 1996 with the privatization of the Office of Personnel Management's investigative operations.

House Republicans just advanced a bill that would continue to fund the government for the next three months, but would also remove all funding for President Obama's healthcare plan. If the Senate doesn't approve the bill — and it won't - much of the federal government could shut down on October 1.

Do with this as you wish, but it could be a trap: "Budget cuts are hurting the Internal Revenue Service's ability to go after tax cheats, the agency's inspector general said Tuesday."

Perhaps you are under the impression that if you do not use email or the telephone, both of which we now know subject you to government surveillance, you can fly under the spies' radar. Perhaps you think a postcard sent to your sick grandmother in Ohio is free from bureaucratic scrutiny. You are wrong.

Want to buy a PRISM t-shirt? You can't: Someone is claiming copyright over the logo of the vast NSA surveillance operation, and they took down my Zazzle store.

Ever since 9/11, the American government has been busily constructing the most comprehensive surveillance state in this country's history. This vast and invasive bureaucracy is too big to hide, but the public has done its part by politely ignoring it. No longer. Now is when we, the people, choose whether or not we will accept the end of privacy as we know it. If history is any indication, we will.

The man who introduced the CIA's Chief Technology Officer, Ira "Gus" Hunt, at yesterday's GigaOM Structure:Data conference in New York City thought it would be funny to quip, "If you don't give a big round of applause for our next speaker, he's gonna find out and it's gonna go on your permanent record." It was supposed to be a little joke, but then Hunt took the stage for his speech on "Big Data," told everyone that the CIA is now attempting to "collect everything and hang on to it forever," and suddenly it wasn't so funny anymore.

If the National Anthem is too old-timey for your tastes, you can petition to change it to R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)".

The government today kinda-sorta weighed in on the whole Manti Te'o hoax thing by issuing a set of State Department guidelines on how to avoid being the victim of "Internet Dating Scams."

Looking at the latest favorability figures is enough to establish that congress is wildly unpopular.

The General Services Administration is undergoing a total administrative overhaul after throwing an $823,000 conference in Las Vegas in October 2010. The four-day affair included "a clown, a mind reader and a $31,208 reception," as well as countless pillaged minibars.

Happy 101 years and one day after the birth of Ronald "The Gipper" Reagan—the man that the American public ranks as the greatest president ever.

Voulez-vous deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians during World War I ce soir? Not for long.

After Congress passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act last week that allows for indefinite military detention of citizens without a trial on America soil, we pointed out 20 of its most alarming provisions. President Obama not only has the ability to veto any of those provisions, but has also previously spoken out against indefinite detention. So we're good,! Except that, as Jon Stewart explained on tonight's Daily Show, we're actually not.

Last week the U.S. Senate passed 93-7 a version of the National Defense Authorization Act that includes provisions giving the military the right to detain you forever and without charge if they think you're some kind of terrorist. Consider it an early holiday present! There is no exchange policy, sorry.