by Michael A. Walsh

The joke goes that anything named "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms" ought to be a convenience store instead of an arm of the federal government, but what's going on in Washington these days with the embattled agency is no laughing matter.

Hardly a week passes now without some revelation about the Obama administration's complicity in what may yet turn out to be one of the worst and most lethal scandals in American history: Operation Fast and Furious.

In a classic Friday document dump -- a sure sign of an administration with something to hide -- the feds released to congressional investigators a month's worth of e-mail correspondence in the summer of 2010 between Bill Newell, then head ATF agent in Phoenix, and his friend Kevin O'Reilly, a former White House national-security staffer for North American affairs.

What do you know? Among the e-mails was a photograph of a powerful Barrett .50-caliber rifle that had been illegally purchased in Tucson and recovered in Sonora, Mexico, raising the possibility of a second "gunwalking" program, this one called "Wide Receiver."

Cincinnati's NBC affiliate, WLWT, is reporting that a store clerk was able to protect himself from an armed robber by distracting the criminal long enough to draw his own gun and fire.

From the article:

Grayson Matthews was working at the family-owned 12th Street Market on Saturday night when a man wearing a garbage bag walked in and demanded money.

"I laid it on the counter and he demanded more," Matthews said. "He said, 'Now I want the rest,' and he puts the gun up in my face."

Matthews said he held the money in his left hand and tried to distract the robber.

"I knew his eyes would follow the money, and I said, 'I have more hidden here,' and when I reached down, I grabbed my pistol and started firing," Matthews said.

The robber fled the Hamilton market, and police later arrested 37-year-old Curtis Jason Wright and charged him aggravated robbery.