THE NEW YORK POST: TOPLESS NO MORE. “The writer of the greatest headline in the history of tabloidkind has retired.”

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW? A new Mossberg AR-15.

HOW CONVENIENT: Geithner: Debt-Ceiling Must Be Settled Until After 2012 Election.

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Contrary to Obama’s Scare Tactics, Social Security Checks are Not at Risk.

BOB OWENS: The “Assault-Weapons” Ban: How Silly Was It?

OPED: “War On Photography” Tramples Rights.

SALENA ZITO: FLOODS OF DISCONTENT. “Those voters, and growing numbers of other Americans, are gravely concerned about how the nation’s leadership is handling the economy. The result of their concern is less consumer confidence, which means less spending. And why would people spend? Gas prices are high, houses have lost value, jobs are hard to find — and if you have a job, you probably haven’t seen a pay raise in a very long time.”

JAMES JOYNER: If a crisis over the national debt is averted, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn may be the unlikely hero. But beware of praise from the NYT.

THE PROBLEM WITH PIE-THROWING: “Even the aspiring pie-thrower himself was unable to articulate a convincing case for what he did, either at the time or in a long-winded editorial after the fact. So I agree with Frank: in addition to being violent and degenerate, pie-throwing simply isn’t the incisively satirical act the pie-throwers seem to think it is. In fact, it’s the opposite of what it’s trying to be. People don’t have trouble understanding why Marbles would want to do this because pie-throwing is too surreal or subversive for our comprehension; we have trouble seeing the point because pie-throwing is trite, formulaic, old-fashioned, humanizing toward the target, and ultimately meaningless.”

BRUCE BAWER: A double tragedy for Norway.

IF YOU HAVEN’T CHECKED IT OUT, LATELY: Check out Jerry Pournelle’s blog.

LEE SMITH: Free Syria.

AT AMAZON, the Tools & Home Improvement value center.

SEX SCANDAL UPDATE: Troubled David Wu Reaches Out To Pelosi. “Rep. David Wu spoke to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other top Democrats on Saturday about his political future in the wake of allegations of a sexual encounter with a teenager, but it is not clear whether the Oregon Democrat will step down from office.”

Pelosi says she’s “too busy” to comment on the scandal.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: It’s Time To End The War On Salt: The zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Can we hold the people who peddled this advice accountable, at all?

THE FUTURE OF OFFICES: A Poll.

SURPRISE: Women More Likely To Sext Than Men. “Based on news headlines, you’d think men are hands down more likely to sext (that is, for those who don’t know, send sexy pictures of themselves via text) than women. But, color us surprised, it seems the opposite is true!”

LET THERE BE (SICKLY BLUE) LIGHT.

And now we have the light-bulb ban—the odd consequence of our current public religion, our present national ethics. For all this really is nanny-speak: the taking of the moral judgments that religious fervor has spewed into public life and the forming of them into platitudes. More than that, it’s nanny-speak made the law of the land, truisms with the force of congressional enactment. There’s an atheist group called the Abimelech Society whose members pride themselves on their supposedly daring feats of removing Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and destroying them. The daring is not readily apparent; the day is long past when public outrage over anti-Christian atheism posed much threat. But think of it as a metaphor: Perhaps the time is coming, after our current environmental revival has ebbed, when would-be bravos will sneak compact fluorescent bulbs from hotel rooms—and replace them with clandestine incandescents.

Heh. Edward Abbey “monkey-wrenching” for the 21st Century.

Plus this: “The psychological cost of these bulbs has not yet been calculated. Perhaps it never will be, but here’s one guess at a measure: The Department of Energy reports that from 2007 to 2008 the sale of CFLs in the United States dropped, despite the fact that CFLs were widely available, routinely advertised as superior, and large consumers like factories and municipalities had the looming enforcement of the energy bill to spur them to switch. It’s not that, as a nation, we didn’t try compact fluorescent bulbs. We did try them, and we found them wanting.” That’s been my experience.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG’S MASSIVE HYPOCRISY.

BYRON YORK: GOP Readies New Debt-Ceiling Plan: Bill Set For Sunday. “House Republicans are finishing work on a new proposal to resolve the standoff over the debt ceiling. The proposal, set to be finished and crafted into the form of a bill by Sunday, will be in two parts. The first will combine a short-term increase in the debt ceiling with spending cuts. The second will lay the groundwork for a longer-term increase in the debt ceiling coupled with far-reaching deficit reduction.”

LEADERSHIP: Responsibility for debt talks shifts to Congress, away from Obama.

THE ANSWER IS NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can the Left Resist the Temptation to Exploit the Norway Attacks?

HUFFINGTON POST: Boehner Set To Call Obama’s Bluff In Push For Short-Term Debt Ceiling Deal.

DATECHGUY is having a big fundraiser. I just sent him twenty bucks. (Bumped).