FROM MICKEY KAUS, a conflict-of-interest disclosure.

ROBERT FARAGO: ATF Death Watch 100: Feds Fed Fast and Furious Firearms to the Sinaloans. “We don’t know the exact motivations for Operations Fast and Furious and Castaway; they must be multiple given the alphabet soup of federal agencies involved (by the ATF’s own admission). Nor are we clear as to why the U.S. Attorney’s Office let a machine gun modifier and bomb-maker (caught red-handed) walk from custody back into Mexico. But one thing we do know: the guns that the ATF let slip from surveillance ended-up in the hands of the Sinaloa drug cartel.”

BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “Plenty of otherwise intelligent people convinced themselves to vote for Obama last time. They could be stupid again. Too soon to get cocky.”

THE LONELINESS OF THE ATLANTIC BLOGGER:

ROGER SIMON: Attention Van Jones: The Arab Spring Is A Horror Show.

UPDATE: Reader Donald Gately writes:

“Arab Spring in the U.S.? Bring it! Not only are the Occupy Wall Street crowd clueless about history – they are oblivious to early 2011 news.

If the US saw the equivalent of Egypt’s “Arab Spring”, the US would soon be ruled by a coalition of “Christianist” clergy and the US Military.

It would be almost worth it, just to see the look on some people’s faces.

I’d rather keep our Constitutional government, even in its current degenerate state. But I get the point. Yeah, they’re clueless.

SMALL PARENTING TRIUMPHS: So my daughter has been into MC5, the New York Dolls, and so on lately. When we were in the car the other day I put in my favorite album by the Mr. T Experience. She looked skeptical as only a teenage girl confronted with dad’s musical tastes can, but later asked if she could borrow the CD. Win!

And Dr. Frank, if you’re reading this — nice job!

BOB OWENS: Punch-Drunk Eric Holder Swings Back at Critics, Hits Self: The evidence continues to cast strong doubts on the attorney general’s truthfulness.

ROGER KIMBALL: Obama’s Other Jobs Policy. “If Barack Obama has his way — that is, if the policies he has advocated actually become law — another Steve Jobs would be squashed in his garage by government busybodies or (should he miraculously survive) regulated and taxed to death by federal bureaucrats. Steve Jobs was a walking embodiment of the American spirit of innovation. Barack Obama’s entire administration is dedicated to stamping out that spirit. He wants to centralize innovation, punish success, and regulate ingenuity. Obama’s fundamental error is his belief that economic success lies in redistributing rather than in creating wealth. His so-called ‘Jobs Bill’ is in reality an anti-jobs bill. Despite his apparent personal fondness for Steve Jobs, the sad irony is that the bill is also at bottom an anti-Jobs bill.”

Luckily, he can’t even get Congressional Democrats to support it.

OCCUPY MADISON: The Movie.

TAXPROF: Democrats’ Millionaire Tax (49% Top Rate, 29% Capital Gains Rate): Smart Politics, Bad Tax Policy. I’ve got a much better program of revenue enhancements in mind. Also, labor law reforms. Occupy Hollywood & Vine!

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Business & Investing. There’s already a Steve Jobs bio about to come out?

RACISM! David Bernstein on yesterday’s Smithsonian attack: “Pictures from the Washington Post show almost entirely white protestors. They attacked African American guards who tried to keep them out of the Smithsonian. Imagine the media reaction if a gang of tea partiers had assaulted a bunch of African Americans.”

REASON REPORTS FROM NEW YORK: Danny Cline: Occupy Wall Street Thug, Raving Anti-Semite. “This vaguely effeminate psycho represents only himself. But having listened to three years of palaver about how the Tea Party is composed of nothing but bible-thumping racists who want to strafe Mexican babies, I will not miss this chance to give the response that’s been working for me since I was in grade school and the Soviet Union was still in power.”

OBVIOUSLY, THE #OCCUPY MOVEMENT IS ALL ABOUT RACISM: Occupy Atlanta Won’t Let John Lewis Speak. An overwhelmingly white crowd, silencing a black man — do I have to draw you a picture, people?

UPDATE: New marchers, old school.

IT’S REMOTE AND HARD TO GET TO: Worker at South Pole Station Pushes for a Rescue After a Stroke. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but this is a non-emergency at this point — she had the stroke on August 27 — and an early flight would risk a lot of other people’s lives. When you sign on for these kinds of things, you’re going to a place where you can’t just call 911. Reading the story, this seems more about psychological needs than physiological ones.

KATHY SHAIDLE: Steve Jobs: The Other Man In My Marriage.

That Altair 8800 picture is funny. I saw one of the very first of those back when it was touring the country; it might even have been the very machine that Bill Gates saw. Of course, I saw it and thought that if it had some decent software it might be worth buying, while Bill Gates saw it and thought that he could make money creating decent software. Yeah, I was, like 13, but I had studied some programming. I just didn’t have the vision that Jobs or Gates had.

OKAY, WE DIDN’T GET THE IPHONE 5 — but at least they’re rolling out new Leatherman multitools! I used my Skeletool just the other day to remove a broken bulb from a lamp. Can the new ones be even better?

Related: Bestsellers in Multitools.

BABY BUST: Some charts on delayed motherhood.

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: Operation Counterweight: The Electoral Strategy For The Rest Of Us.

RAND SIMBERG: She Knew The Job Was Dangerous When She Took It. “So, here’s my question. NASA was recently considering abandoning the International Space Station because they didn’t have a reliable lifeboat to extract astronauts in an emergency. But Amundsen-Scott is inaccessible for half of the year, every year, and yet people winter over there. Why isn’t the NSF spending billions to develop an Emergency Crew Extraction Vehicle for the south pole?”

OBAMA’S BEST STRATEGY FOR 2012: Run a nostalgia campaign! “Remember how you felt in ’08? Maybe not you, specifically, but remember the hope? The inspiration? Don’t you want to feel like that again? Etc. etc.”

Speaking of nostalgia, that sounds kind of familiar: “Hey, baby — remember how it was when we were first together? Let’s put aside the arguments, the cheating, the restraining orders and just return to those feelings!”

MESSAGE TO MEN: Your health isn’t worth the cost of prostate screenings.

Hey, it’s not like you’re women or something: “After the task force’s recommendation against routine mammograms for women under 50, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius announced that the government would continue to pay for the test for women in their 40s. On Thursday, the administration announced with great fanfare that as a result of the health reform law, more people with Medicare were getting free preventive services like mammograms.” You know, somebody important.

Seriously, this advice may be medically sound — just as the mammogram advice might be. But, post-ObamaCare, everyone is going to be suspicious that (1) “health advice” will be driven by cost considerations more than health; and (2) politics will determine where money gets spent — and saved. Anecdotally, my dad’s PSA took a sudden jump, and although his doctor recommended “watchful waiting,” he went ahead and had a biopsy, which found a pretty aggressive cancer. Six months of waiting might have cost him a lot, but he’s fine now after nearly ten years. That may count as anecdote, rather than data, except that in my case it also counts as “family history,” so I think I’ll keep the PSA tests up.

MICHAEL WALSH: “Bring back the trivium and the quadrivium, says me.”

WHY CRAZY PEOPLE make better bloggers.

PAUL RAHE: Our Duty To Serve Our Country.