JEN RUBIN: Tester Gets Testy With Conservative Female Activists. “Tester’s response evidences a degree of panic that the ad might catch on.”

TOM BLUMER: Red States, Including the ‘Newly-Reds,’ Excel at Job Growth: But for them, the U.S. economy might already be in another recession.

WELL, THEY HAVE COMPETENT MANAGEMENT: Apple Has More Cash On Hand Than The U.S. Government. Or as the story explains: “That’s because Apple collects more money than it spends, while the U.S. government does not.”

MORE ON CONFESSED FORT-HOOD TERROR PLANNER JASON ABDO, including his antiwar activism and denuncation of “islamophobia.” Plus this: “Isn’t a phobia an irrational fear? Well if Abdo is found to have been part of a terror plot, I guess he wasn’t experiencing an irrational fear.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THAT ATF GUN-SMUGGLING SCANDAL: THE WHITE HOUSE KNEW. “Why was a National Security Council staffer asking about an operation that no one in the upper echelons of the administration was supposed to be aware of? We find it hard to believe it was for O’Reilly’s personal amusement. Why would Newell request that he not be acknowledged as the source?”

CLAIM: President Obama Must Use 14th Amendment to Raise Debt Ceiling, Restore Confidence. I think such a move would promote the breakdown of confidence in representative government, and lead many to feel far less compelled to pay their taxes or otherwise comply with government edicts. It is, essentially, a species of taxation without representation.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Where Are The Jobs?

I had some similar thoughts a while back. Also here.

BYRON YORK: In Debt Fight, Dems Reject Republican Compromise. “What about Obama? His compromises, if any, are more difficult to discern because the White House has been militantly secretive about its position. In the past few days, in fact, White House spokesman Jay Carney has gotten downright testy whenever reporters point out that Obama has never released a debt-ceiling plan, making it impossible to know exactly where he stands, and therefore whether he has compromised on any of his original positions.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale!

RECOVERY BUMMER (CONT’D): Economy Grows at Sluggish 1.3%; Consumers Pull Back.

Plus, keep an eye on those revisions!

MICHAEL WALSH: Lethal Fiasco: A Justice Department “Fast and Furious” Coverup?

Operation Fast and Furious — the Obama administration’s lethal gun-running fiasco — keeps getting uglier and uglier.

In a series of hearings, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley have been systematically dismantling the administration’s preposterous claim that no one in the Justice Department — which oversees the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — knew anything about the so-called gun-tracking operation. . . . On Tuesday, the ATF agent in charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, told Issa’s House committee that he discussed the operation with the national-security director for North America, Kevin O’Reilly, an old friend, in the form of a “you didn’t get this from me” e-mail in September 2010. (The White House insists the e-mail had nothing to do with Fast and Furious, but instead concerned the larger, legitimate Project Gunrunner gun-tracking program.)

We already knew that the debacle also involved the FBI and the DEA (both part of DoJ), but Newell also revealed that even more agencies were part of the program, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Homeland Security) and the IRS.

It gets worse. Issa and Grassley also have identified a dozen Justice Department officials who they say knew about the program, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.

Yet President Obama insists that Holder & Co. knew nothing about it.

Color me skeptical. We need a special prosecutor.

WALTER OLSON ON MCDONALD’S AND THE HEALTH NAZIS. Note this:

If anyone’s feeling an uneasy soup-stain-on-shirt-front sense of embarrassment, it should be Mayor Bloomberg’s Health Department. That department has gone on a huge public campaign to encourage odium for sodium, with processed soup a designated villain, as with a notorious public-service ad showing salt crystals spraying out of a can of the product. Doesn’t seem to be working, now, does it?

In fact, the science on salt and health has long been more complicated than you might think. Per Scientific American, “In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart attacks, reduces your blood pressure or has no effect at all.” This month, the venerable science monthly ran an article by Melinda Wenner Moyer under the startling headline, “It’s Time to End the War on Salt.” City health commissioner Thomas Farley must have needed reviving with smelling salts, assuming his office hasn’t tried to ban those yet.

There’s a lot of junk science in health regulation, but there’s no accountability when it’s wrong.

JENNIFER RUBIN: Why there was no vote.

UPDATE: Professor Jacobson: “The failure last night to pass the so-called Boehner bill was a mistake. I hope it will be corrected today.”

He continues:

I don’t disparage the intentions of the 25 or so who were not willing to vote for the bill. In fact, I agree with them as to where we should end up. I disagree with them as to how to get there.

My disagreement is that they are treating this vote as the end of the line, the last chance to save this sinking ship.

That’s not my perspective. This is an opportunity to change direction of the ship, and spend the next year fighting for the types of deeper changes which will save the ship.

The Boehner bill establishes the principles of no new taxes, dollar-for-dollar offsets of debt and budget cuts, capping the growth of government, and the necessity of further cuts. The Boehner bill also establishes this agenda as the agenda for the presidential election by making sure that more hard decisions are made during the electoral season.

There is uncertainty as to what no debt ceiling raise means. Frankly, I don’t know whether it will be no big deal or catastrophe. But I am confident that regardless, it plays into Obama’s hands.

The lack of job growth, the failure of a recovery to materialize, any further economic damage, and so on, will be placed on our doorstep, however unfairly. The narrative for the presidential election will be changed dramatically, and not in a way that helps us rid ourselves of a president who is deeply committed to the expansion of government by regulation if not legislation. . . .

Passing the Boehner bill out of the House, to near certain rejection by the Senate and Obama, puts the onus for any negative consequences where it belongs, on the Democrats. But only if Republicans pass it out of the House.

Update: I should also add that some of the monied Tea Party organizations, which only to a limited extent represent the “movement,” have lost their way when they announce that they will target Allen West over his decision to vote for the Boehner bill. Allen West?

I think he’s right.

YOU KNEW THIS WAS COMING: Breitbart TV: The Great Debate: Candidate Obama vs. President Obama.

TODD ZYWICKI: FALLING FOR THE TWO-INCOME TRAP. “But here’s the catch (as I have noted previously here and here)–while that conclusion is what Professor Warren says is the upshot of her analysis and is the what appears to be the conclusion of her analysis, that is not actually what her own data actually shows. . . . I should stress that I don’t blame Caldwell at all for misunderstanding this point from The Two-Income Trap. Warren and Tyagi provide no explanation why they would present all other expenditures in terms of percentage change in dollar amounts but taxes, and taxes alone, in terms of the change in the percentage of income dedicated to taxes. . . . In fact, based on their data once the math is done the real conclusions of Warren and Tyagi are inescapable and in fact (as Caldwell will be pleased to know) extremely conservative: the financial problems of the middle class are caused by an astonishing rise in the tax burden on middle class families over the past three decades. Nowhere, however, will one read Professor Warren advocating income and property tax cuts as the obvious policy implication of their book–although that is unambiguously the logical inference.” (Emphasis added).

THAT’S NOT A PROBLEM, THAT’S A WORTHY GOAL: Law School Reform and $300,000 Faculty Salaries.

MARCELLUS SHALE: Economic Impact Bigger Than We Thought.

ALZHEIMER’S: The News Is Not Getting Better.

WHEN DID KIDS BECOME THE EQUIVALENT of second-hand smoke? When parents quit disciplining them, I’d guess.

ITALIAN INTEREST RATES movin’ on up. “Italy has had to pay much more to borrow than a month ago as investors continue to worry about its huge debts. Italy had to pay an interest rate of 4.8% to sell 3.5bn euros ($5bn; £3.1bn) of three-year bonds – up 1.1 percentage points from June.” This sort of thing tends to feed on itself.

DINKLIFE: A website devoted to the Dual-Income, No Kids lifestyle.

A. BARTON HINKLE ON TEA PARTY COVERAGE: The media praises far-left politicians while demonizing advocates of limited government.

HILLARY’S TRIUMPH.

BILL QUICK EMAILS: “Well, it’s taken a while to get it pulled together, but I finally managed to retrieve the digital rights on my early cyberpunk stuff, and I’ve now got it all reissued as Kindle books at Amazon. I’ll be issuing all my short SF in digital as well, as soon as I can get it converted from dead tree. I’ll price the shorts at 99 cents a pop, and maybe also offer five-story collections at $2.95. I agree with that post you had up a few days ago – I think $2.99 is the sweet spot for reprints, definitely. I might go a buck or two more if I publish a new book in digital only format, just to see how it goes. That 3-tiered price structure is already in place, more or less. Publishers are just fighting over the price points now. The first short I’m going to issue is one I had in Analog back in 1989 called ‘Bank Robbery.’ In it I predicted the web, the collapse of dead tree publishing, and made a pretty good guess as to what would replace it. I just never thought I’d be living that damned story.”

IS HOLLYWOOD RUNNING OUT OF IDEAS? I’d say that Battleship: The Motion Picture argues for “yes.”