SOMETIMES YOU SHOULD DO AS THE ROMANS DO: The Islamic State threatens to come to Rome; Italians respond with travel advice.

EVERY WORD SHE SAYS, INCLUDING THE AND A: After Clinton Minimizes VA Troubles, Three Reports Expose Shortfalls Across Country.

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: Commerce Department digs deep into Census Bureau.

INDIE AUTHORS HALLOWEEN SALE: Nocturnal Lives Boxed Set.

HELLO COLD WAR, MY OLD FRIEND: Two Russian Bombers Buzz U.S. Aircraft Carrier.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY DON’T CARE: How New York fails students who are gifted but poor.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Designating Official Halloween Costume Sensitivity Consultants.

THERE’S NO THIEF LIKE AN OLD THIEF: And this isn’t even about Hillary  Octogenarian jewel thief should call it a career.

INCENTIVES MATTER: Free Speech suffers another setback.

Free speech has suffered a lot of setbacks in recent years. College campuses are setting up “free speech zones” that limit where students can express their opinions without the risk of offending their more thin-skinned classmates. Expressing an opinion online or telling a joke that’s misinterpreted can actually get someone fired.

In the latest example, the Austin music, technology and movie festival known as South by Southwest cancelled two panels after receiving threats of violence. Members of each panel had been subjected to such threats in the past at separate events, but the previous events had stepped up security and moved ahead (including at one event that I attended).

Cancelling the panels rewarded those who made the violent threats. Because SXSW caved, it’s not difficult to believe future events might be targeted and cancelled.

When you reward conduct, you get more of it. Why is this so hard for some people to understand?

IS TED CRUZ TAKING AN ARMY OF DAVIDS APPROACH? “The Cruz mobile app, which helps volunteers coordinate and sign up new people, has been downloaded 22,251 times.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Give Bankers Skin In The Game: Gambling billions in a single trade might vanish if losses hit traders’ personal wallets.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. AR-15s Are Fun To Shoot.

SONNY BUNCH: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified. “Yes, it was horrible, and yes, it would be nice of it didn’t happen. But it was an attack on a legitimate military target and defensible under Just War Theory, an attack intended to save lives by deterring other major powers from beginning conflicts of their own. The Imperial Grand Moff Tarkin is no worse than Democratic President Harry S. Truman — and no one worth listening to considers Truman to be a monster.”

JEB’S STRATEGY FOR VICTORY: Rely on GOP voters’ “Attention Deficit Disorder.”

SPACE: Russia locks all-female crew into space simulator for eight days.

FROM BLUE LIGHT TO RED: The cop who retired and opened a (legal) brothel. “When I tell people what I do they flinch sometimes – but that wasn’t any different as a policeman.“

HARRY SIEGEL: What Cops Don’t Want To See.

I don’t know if Comey’s hunch is right. Neither does he.

I do know that if Obama is serious about restoring trust in American justice, not just rallying 2016 Democratic voters, it’s not enough for him, Comey and Co. to admit their ignorance. They need to finally get the feds’ eyes open in the 13 months they’ve got left.

Of course, reformers have their own blind spots. I’m writing the day of NYPD Officer Randolph Holder’s funeral. He was shot dead by Tyrone Howard, a man with an arm-long rap sheet and a history of gun violence who was in a drug diversion program since he was, on paper, a non-violent offender.

If Holder had killed Howard instead, it’s not hard to envision the righteous reports about the father of two who’d been caught up in the system, the marchers chanting for the cop who killed him to face justice.

Read the whole thing.

2016: THE NOSTALGIA TRAP: “How Republicans can avoid the mistakes Democrats are making now,” as explored by Fred Bauer at NRO:

The president talks much about History and the importance of being on the “right side” of It. However, so much of what counts as “progressive” these days seems like a tired remake of Sixties politics: The Great Society meets New Left radicalism but with iPhones and skinny jeans. As with many remakes, this version is less exciting (we’ve seen how this movie ends) and less current. I don’t mean to discount the differences between the Great Society and the Great Disappointment of the Obama years. For instance, a globalized faux cosmopolitanism — simultaneously tribalist and anti-national — seems to have taken much greater hold in the current administration (and perhaps even among some of its supposed political opponents). Yet the Left’s allegiance to the comfortable pieties of the Sixties seems part of the reason for its many failures.

This worldview sees a rural good ol’ boy clinging to his guns and his religion as the greatest foe of “progress.” Thus, it is woefully unprepared to confront the reality of black-robed fanatics beheading religious minorities, enslaving villages, and setting fire to the Middle East. Because of its limited moral imagination, it also struggles to persuade a heterogeneous body politic. Early proponents of Great Society welfare policies might not have foreseen how, too often, well-intentioned government dictates could destroy communities, tear apart families, and destroy the foundation of economic opportunity. Experience has — or should have — disabused us of this naïveté. And say what you will about the dangers of central planning, the technocrats of the past were at least able to do things like put a man on the Moon. The mandarins of today struggle to get a health-care website up and running. Outside the narrowly political realm, as the Far Left claims a resurgent voice in cultural affairs, we have increasingly seen how radical progressive politics are a cultural dead end: Rather than a spirit of creativity, exploration, and accomplishment, radical leftism gives us only the petty tyranny of a Maoist struggle session.

All of this brings us back to the Republican party. Nostalgia is a significant temptation for the GOP right now, though for Republicans the nostalgic black hole is the 1980s rather than the 1960s. As a number of conservative reformers have argued, Ronald Reagan proposed solutions to problems facing the United States that differ in many ways from the challenges facing the country today. (To note that difference is not to criticize Reagan. The fact that these problems differ is partly a result of policy successes, especially the collapse of the USSR.) These differences in situation suggest that, even if we keep to the same foundational principles, our application of these principles should change.

Read the whole thing.

ARE ANTIBIOTICS A CAUSE OF CHILDHOOD OBESITY? “Children who are given antibiotics over the course of their childhood gain weight significantly faster than those who do not, experts have warned.” Hmm. The Insta-Daughter had a lot of antibiotics as a kid — ear infections — but she’s quite slim.

MODERATOR MALFEASANCE: Ben Shapiro: CNBC’s S***show of Epic Proportions: The Full Moderator Breakdown. “Wednesday night’s epic s*itshow of a debate highlighted one fact beyond all others: if Republicans are to win the presidency in 2016, their main opponent will not be Hillary Clinton, but the established media. CNBC’s panel of questioners, apparently drawn directly from a focus group for the Democratic National Committee, revealed their Hillary Clinton butterfly tramp-stamps long enough to unleash a stream of hit jobs on the candidates.”

Plus: 3 Republicans embraced big government at debate and you missed it: Christie’s, Huckabee’s and Bush’s gaffes explain why conservative voters don’t trust their candidates.

JEB CAN FIX IT? Jeb Bush attempts to revive his floundering campaign with a new slogan:

Am I the only person who made the unfortunate connection with someone rather more notorious who used a similar slogan for his TV series?

Perhaps Jeb might want rethink his slogan while there’s still time. But then, candidates whose campaigns appear to be in a death spiral often make rather ill-conceived decisions. And as the American Spectator posits, “The CNBC debate marked the end of the Bush family’s hold on Republican politics:”

The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last judged, correctly, that “Bush’s attack on Rubio was both a tactical and strategic failure. His campaign is cooked.”

This matters, because it puts paid to the entire narrative of the 2016 GOP race as it was built from the outset and the assumptions surrounding that narrative that have informed voter behavior to date.

Jeb Bush as the inevitable GOP nominee, the Establishment choice that the grassroots is powerless to combat, is the single largest factor animating Donald Trump’s rise in the polls. That rise may or may not have stalled, as multiple polls show that Ben Carson has either caught him or passed him (though there is still disagreement on this point), but the race has for quite some time been cast to Republican voters as a choice between Bush the establishmentarian and Trump the iconoclast. Trump has profited greatly from that proposition, and it has fueled his ascent to the top of the polls.

But that is no longer how this race is perceived, because no one sees Bush as inevitable anymore. And if that’s the case, voters terrified of a Mitt Romney-style fix being in are now free to vote for the candidate they’d really like to see win instead of playing defense and supporting the one they think can stop the candidate they’re terrified of.

I feel badly piling onto Jeb as his campaign appears to circle the drain. On the other hand, look who is attempting to boost Jeb’s prospects…

IF YOU WANT MORE MIDDLE CLASS OPPORTUNITY, THEN YOU NEED LESS REGULATION AND CRONYISM: There’s actually a big economic fight happening in the Democratic Party.

One side believes what’s gone wrong for the middle class is that wealthy and powerful players have rewritten the tax code, trade deals, labor law and other policies in order to advantage themselves, at the expense of workers. Middle-class stagnation, in this view, is a choice that can be corrected by shifting power back to workers, at the bargaining table and elsewhere.

The other side, the Third Way side, believes that the stagnation is a natural consequence of a globalizing economy, which has disproportionately benefited people with high skills and people who own stock, businesses and other forms of capital. That’s the story Kodak is meant to represent. Its demise wasn’t imposed by someone else’s policy choice, it was a failure of the company to adapt. To boost the middle-class, by that logic, workers need to be given the means to adapt.

Nothing that we’ve done since 2008 has advanced that cause.

TO BE FAIR, THERE ARE FEW THINGS SCARIER THAN SOCIALISM:The Department of Energy Wants You to Dress Your Kids Up in ‘Energy-Themed’ Costumes for ‘Energyween,’ and if you’re their mom, Hillary would like you to dress up in her most historic costumes.

But before heading out, make sure all those costumes have been vetted by the Central Halloween Costume Sensitivity Scrutinizer!

Because, you know, you wouldn’t want to scare someone on Halloween without first giving them a trigger warning, right? Trigger treat!

A WARNING TO BIBLE BULLIES EVERYWHERE: Threatening seventh graders for expressing their faith in class is probably not a winning strategy. And aren’t Christians supposed to have “a ready defense” of their faith?