No HREF on Content menu on admin toolbar
I found the answer to my original problem. 

I went through the .info file and commented out JS files until the console no longer reported a mutation event.  Turns out that there was some odd JS code:

jQuery( "li:nth-of-type(2) &gt; a" ).removeAttr("href");


The selector is too vague. Guess what number the LI containing the Content menu is?  It's 2! And this little bit o'code took the HREF right off!

Thanks to @Clive for suggesting mutation observers.  Learned a lot from this bug.