joining us shortly, mark landler white house correspondent for the "new york times." welcome one and all. let me just start. albert, to you and then chuck and then major garrett. did the president say anything new today and has anything changed? albert? >> well, no, i don't think he really did, charlie, except perhaps he made people slightly more aware of the stakes, which are humongous. i've been in this town for a long time and i've watched some pretty bad things: the impeachment of clinton which was a fiasco, a couple government shutdowns. we are headed potentially for something that's so much worse than anything we've ever seen. the shutdown itself is a little league baseball game compared to the world series of fiascos if they let this debt ceiling, if they tolerate it to fall. i -- all my reporting can't come up with an end game. i still think it won't happen and i think any kind of end game you come up with is only going to kick the can down the road on these other issues. but i think right now we are headed for a potential political and economic cataclysm unle

"new york times" white house correspondent mark landler who had a fascinating interview with national security adviser susan rice. that was in the sunday times. mark, first to you. this white house denial that the president even knew about the snowden leaks regarding angela merkel. is the denial he saw the product in the presidential daily brief in what they were learning from germany but didn't know the source. how could they have such a source, angela merkel and not have it in the president's pdb. >> well, andrea, the brief the president gets every day has sort of a binder that's attached to it that has a lot of other supporting documents. i think one of the questions here is, is it possible that the actual intercepted data and background material was in that supporting document, which the president wouldn't receive in his daily brief but would be available to his top advisers, national security adviser, chief of staff, and others that take part in the briefing. so one of the questions is if president obama didn't know, did senior officials who regularly brief him know. if they did

we begin this evening with the presidential press conference and the reaction with al hunt, mark landlero is the last, biggest, and most historically important forcing mechanism ever and to pick up on al hunt's point, if that is not the forcing mechanism, if that's not the vice that takes these disparate interests and shoves them together if even for six or eight weeks we have entered a fundamentally new era of politics where political indecision and the inability to reach compromise and a deal-- even an unsatisfactory one-- begins to inflict economic harm not just here but throughout the global economic system. >> rose: we continue with a conversation with margaret atwood. >> i think the theme is probably like a lot of books of this kind about imagined futures. the theme is really in the nature. so who are we really? what are we capable of? how far can we change without ceasing to be ourselves? >> rose: we conclude with eileen rockefeller. you say "without anxiety and desire to heal it i would not be writing this story." >> yes. you know, i think anxiety is a great motivator and that wh