Happy Thursday morning! Two more days until the weekend. In the meantime, here are some of the stories we’re looking at here at Moyers & Company HQ…

Hostage negotiations continue…

• Bill highly recommends this Washington Post op-ed by E.J. Dionne on why this shutdown is different from those of the past.
• NRO’s Robert Costa reports that John Boehner is looking to revive the Grand Bargain.
• Josh Eidelson reports for Salon that this has liberals worried about Social Security cuts ending up in the mix.
• At the Washington Examiner, Byron York points out that Republicans need to come up with a Grand Bargain within their party before they can offer one to the Dems.
• Jennifer Bendery with a reminder at The Huffington Post that the House has the votes to pass a clean funding bill with no strings attached right now.
• Politico’s Alex Eisenstadt on why many House Republicans have no incentive to deal.
• Meanwhile, Obama has a talk with Congress’ mom and dad Wall Street bankers, reports Jim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times.
• The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports that things got testy at a meeting of Senate Republicans when Tom Coburn took Mitch McConnell to task for “letting things spin out of control.” Ted Cruz also got some heat.
• Grover Norquist tells The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that Cruz “pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away.”
• Tim Murphy rounds up 30 ways the shutdown is already hurting people over at Mother Jones.
• Another poll — this one from CBS — finds that Republicans who identify with the tea party movement are the only Americans who are happy about what’s happening.

Day two –> HHS reports almost 5 million hits on the Healthcare.gov site, according to Sam Baker at The Hill. BUT: California “vastly overstated” its first-day web traffic, according to the Los Angeles Times. Officials blamed an internal miscommunication.

Red State dispatches–> At AlterNet, Steve Rosenfeld takes a look at how the first day went down in conservative states, according to local media reports. ALSO: ThinkProgress reports that Disney is promoting its part-time workers down in Orlando to full-time status in response to the ACA.

Pushing Wendy –> John Nichols writes for The Nation that a “bold pro-choice woman” like Wendy Davis can win in the Lone Star State.

Radioactive –> BBC reports on yet another leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

No white hats –> At The Washington Post, Liz Sly says “foreign extremists” now dominate the Syrian rebel movement.

Watching the watchers –> McClatchy’s Anita Kumar reports that Obama’s NSA oversight panel is full of friendly administration insiders.

You can’t handle the truth! –> NRA tried to stifle a study which found that gun dealers support more background checks, according to Rebecca Leber at ThinkProgress.

Trolling pollster –> PPP with another survey of Americans’ views on conspiracy theories.

10,000 walruses –> National Geographic with a tragic story about the beasts huddling together on a tiny island as sea ice disappears.

What did we miss? What are you seeing? Let us know in the comments!