THE HILL: Nation might reach $16.4 trillion debt limit close to Election Day. “The analysis raises the possibility that lawmakers might have to raise the nation’s borrowing limit before the election, a scenario they took pains to avoid in the debt deal passed in August.”

SHIKHA DALMIA: Cheer Up, Liberty Lovers, Schumpeter Was Wrong.

CHANGE: America has lost almost a decade of progress to the financial crisis.

PLASTICS! “It looks like they are as much the future today as they were 45 years ago. Only now we’re talking about plastics grown from algae that cut the petroleum requirement by as much as 50%. And then there’s digestible plastics integrated with edible materials to create a whole new kind of disposable packaging — food packaging that we dispose of by eating it!”

MORE ON OBAMA’S CHOPS-LICKING CLAIM: “One of the many nice things about having a Republican back in the White House will be watching the left tutor us on how a truly loyal opposition behaves. No cynical partisan pleasure at bad economic news, no gleeful hand-rubbing over higher energy prices, no cartoonish demonization of the incumbent, no manufactured outrage over ‘extremist’ policies that melts away once a Democrat adopts them. Just true blue Team America, straight through for four years. Like they were with Bush.”

JOURNALISM: Females on Campaign Trail Go For Sexpot Look.

PROJECT ICARUS: Laying The Plans For Interstellar Travel.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “DANG. CHUCK JONES JUST DIED.”

COOLEST BOOK TITLE: I just ran across my UT colleague Hap McSween’s book, Cosmochemistry.

CHARLES BLOW BIGOTRY: New York Times Columnist Mocks Romney’s ‘Magic Underwear.’

EUROPE: German showdown with IMF looms as Bundestag blocks rescue funds.

BILL ESKRIDGE on the 9th Circuit’s Perry decision.

CURVES OF DEATH: Total GDP vs. Total Debt.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The compression of generations – 25 million adults live at home with parents because they’re unemployed or underemployed. The crushing cost of a college education today.

“I HAVE UPSET THE WOMEN, BUT THAT’S NOT MY PROBLEM.” “Today an online poll in the local Brescia newspaper asked readers what their opinion was and the majority, 46%, said that women should be ‘asking themselves why their partners prefer Laura to them’ and that there was nothing wrong in what she was doing.”

REPORT: ‘Lunch-In’ Protests Crackdown on Homemade Lunches. “Hands Off My Turkey Sandwich!”

LIFE IN A CHANGING MUSIC INDUSTRY: A profile of The Dirty Guv’nahs. “They have methodically built themselves a reliable paying audience across the Southeast without the benefit of a label or professional management. Aside from a booking agent, the band members handle their own business. Their success has come not just on the strength of their bluesy, swaggering brand of Southern rock ’n’ roll and a reputation as tireless performers, but by having a sensible 21st-century business plan and sticking to it.”

Key bit: “Instead of thinking, ‘What can I do to blow up and become the next Adele or Mumford and Sons?’—artists that get crazy popular but still get regarded as ‘authentic’—focus on things you know you can do that will increase your crowds 20 percent next year.”

Plus: “Last fall, when they announced a $20,000 Kickstarter fund-raising campaign to pay for those recording sessions, fans pledged the full amount in three days. The Guv’nahs eventually raised more than $36,000 through Kickstarter to record and promote the new disc.”

UPDATE: Reader Scott Boone writes that I should include a link to their website, which the Metropulse article didn’t include.

IF WE COULD JUST GET IT BACK DOWN TO THREE BUCKS NOW. . . . Flashback: DNC Chief Wasserman Schultz Rails Against Bush For $3-Gallon Gas.

ED DRISCOLL: ‘Chops Licking,’ Then and Now. “Gee, as the above video highlights, I can remember a politician who licking his own chops to see higher energy prices himself in 2008 — and several big media outlets on both coasts who also supported the idea themselves.”

FAKEGATE UPDATE: FBI called in over climate change mole. “The Chicago-based free market Heartland Institute has called in the FBI and threatened other legal action against a global warming proponent who has admitted stealing emails from the institute in a bid to embarrass and discredit the group’s questioning of climate change.” How’s that workin’ out for ya, Peter?

UPDATE: Related: Environmentalists in the pay of the gas industry:

To put the $26.1 million in context, compare the funding for the Heartland Institute, about which one critic stated, “That the Heartland Institute is effectively acting as a front group for big oil and energy, raising money from companies which are threatened by climate policies, so that it can essentially do their dirty work in undermining legislation that threatens their corporate bottom line.” Heartland received a grand total of $676,500 from Exxon between 1998-2006 and $200,000 from the Koch Foundation in 2011. If that amount makes Heartland a “front group for big oil and energy,” what does $26 million it make the Sierra Club for natural gas?

That’s different. We know their hearts are pure, no matter what our lying eyes say.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “I know you were just publishing a quote from another source but it was misleading in that Koch only gave Heartland a donation in the $20-25k range in 2011. The $200k comes from the disputed memo that was likely forged and contradicts the other documents whose provenance has not been questioned.”

PROBLEMS WITH GPS Jamming.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: She’s Doing Threesomes & He’s Doing Lonesome.

AT AMAZON, 70% or more off diamond jewelry.

CHANGE: Ex-Apple Man Streams Flash Onto the iPad. “On Wednesday, the company unveiled a new version of OnLive Desktop — an iPad application that lets users access a virtual Windows desktop and Windows applications housed on servers in the proverbial cloud — and this new version includes a browser equipped with Adobe Flash. Famously, Apple doesn’t allow the Flash player to run locally on the iPad, but OnLive is offering a way around the restriction.”

BILL QUICK: You Get What You Pay For:

Look, it is relatively simple. Graduate from high school, get a job, keep it, get married, and stay married. You won’t live a life of poverty and degradation.

Yet it is the very folks who claim to mean well who wreak the most destruction on the poor. Here’s a truth from the Copybook Headings: You get what you pay for.

Our society chooses to pay for bastards and wonders why the number of bastards increases. Our society refuses to support poor families with married fathers in residence, and wonders why the number of single mothers increases. Our society pays for single motherhood, and wonders why we get it. Our society gives stipends to unemployed and/or homeless males, and wonders why we get more and more of them.

Why on earth would any of the poor pay attention to “cultural signals” when the check that comes to them pays for exactly the opposite?

Incentives work, even when they’re perverse.