AGING: Italy fears for Colosseum as ‘cracks get bigger’ after each quake.

That’s still not bad for a building completed 1,936 years ago.

JOHN SCHINDLER: McCarthyism 2.0 Has Infected the Democrats.

It’s time now to admit that Mitt Romney was right and Barack Obama was wrong. The president’s “flexibility” with Russia has meant outsourcing America’s Middle East policy to the Kremlin, while giving Moscow a free hand to steal Crimea and invade Ukraine, plus intimidate Eastern Europe with nuclear saber-rattling. Calling all this a needless geopolitical disaster is charitable.

Nevertheless, four years on, the very same people who assailed Romney’s realism about Russia are hard at work detecting Kremlin plots everywhere, trying to steal the presidential election from Hillary Clinton. Somehow, Vladimir Putin has mysteriously transformed from being a guy we can deal with, no sort of threat, to the devilish figure secretly tearing America apart. What on earth is going on here?

We know exactly what’s going on here: An election the Democrats are desperate enough to say anything or do anything to win.

WHY ISN’T HILLARY 50 POINTS AHEAD? Dems anxious over tightening race.

Democrats are taking heart from early voting figures. Around 20 million people had already voted by the time the FBI story broke. That figure has now risen to more than 27 million, according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor who is an expert in early voting.

The figures have been broadly positive for Democrats, but with significant caveats.

Voting by registered Democrats has outpaced that of Republicans in several key states, and there are some reports that Latino turnout is especially strong. On the downside for Clinton, African-American turnout looks like it could be problematic, especially when compared to the high bar set by President Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Extrapolations from early voting returns are further complicated by some states adopting different processes than before and others setting up fewer polling locations. There is also the perennial question of whether either party is truly finding new voters in the early tallies or is simply getting people who would have voted for its nominee on Election Day to cast their ballots earlier.

In any event, the Comey news has boosted the spirits of Republicans, even those who hold no great fondness for Trump.

“At a minimum, it has put Hillary back on defense for the closing 10 days of the race, and that’s hugely significant,” said GOP strategist and Hill contributor Matt Mackowiak. “It has also brought back all these questions about Hillary’s trustworthiness and honesty. … I didn’t think the race was competitive on Thursday, and now I do.”

Well, stay tuned.

2016, MAN.

Washington Post-ABC Tracking poll finds presidential race tied, as Trump opens up an 8-point edge on honesty

— Laura Walker (@LauraWalkerKC) November 2, 2016

It was just two weeks ago that Clinton was leading on which candidate was more trustworthy — anything can happen.

TRUMP’S GENDER GAP OFFSET BY HILLARY’S: “The gender gap is still there but it is now the same as Hillary’s gender problem with men. His support among women is the same as Romney’s was –39 percent — while Hillary is at 38 percent among men (Obama was at 40 percent).”

HEATHER HIGGINS IN THE HILL: If Dems will rig a debate for Clinton, what won’t they do to win?

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had to resign from her post at the DNC after emails revealed she was favoring Clinton and working against Sanders. Now we know that, at the same time, Brazile at CNN was proving her Clinton loyalist bona fides by abusing the system and rigging the game to bolster Clinton over Sanders.

The DNC must have been laughing themselves silly over the fast one they were pulling to elevate Brazile, who was putatively objective when it came to Democratic primary contenders, to dispose of Wasserman-Schultz’s double dealing. Instead we now learn what insiders already knew: that Brazile was a corrupt Clinton partisan herself. Meanwhile, Wasserman-Schultz went to … Clinton campaign staff. . . .

Americans now have reason to wonder about the other debates and who else in the so-called unbiased media world was seeking to assist the Clinton campaign by sneaking her a preview of questions or tilting the news in her favor. Such thinking is no longer cynical; it’s just realistic as we’ve seen just how widespread the corruption and bias goes.

And if people are willing to cheat in the debates, what else wouldn’t they justify cheating on to accomplish their ends?

Anything at all, it seems.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Despite Investigations, Obama’s IRS Has Never Stopped Targeting Conservatives.

JOURNALISM: “Mic was unable to speak with the teens directly to hear their account of the costumes. However, after the Snapchat image was posted to the internet, Twitter users were quick to call out the image as distasteful.”

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HOW YOU KNOW HILLARY IS POLLING BADLY: David Brooks: Read Buber, Not The Polls!

NONSENSE, VOTING FRAUD IS A MYTH: State raids Delco offices, seeking evidence of voter registration fraud.

Pennsylvania state police have raided a Delaware County political field office seeking evidence of possible voter-registration fraud, according to court records.

In a warrant filed late last week in County Court, investigators said they were seeking documents, financial information, and lists of employees at the Norwood office of FieldWorks LLC, a national organization that often does street work for Democrats, records show.

The warrant did not specify the nature of the probe, but said agents also were looking for “templates . . . utilized to construct fraudulent voter registration forms” and “completed voter registration forms containing same or similar identifying information of individuals on multiple forms.”

Unexpectedly!

DOUG BRINKLEY ON THE CLINTONS’ RESPONSE TO COMEY: “Bill and Hillary Clinton tend to strike back harder and go after character assassination.”

Love the kicker at the end. Hillary has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

SAYS . . . CHRIS CILIZZA? Donald Trump gave a very, very good speech today in Pennsylvania.

Trump ended — and, yes, one of the big pluses of the speech is he didn’t go on and on and on — with his strongest point: He is fundamentally different from the people who have been elected president in the modern era.

“I am not a politician,” Trump said. “My only special interest is you, the American people. The guiding rule of the political class in Washington, D.C., is that they are looking out only for themselves. They will say anything, and do anything, to cling to their power and prestige at your expense. I’m running to change and reverse decades of failure, and to work with the American people to create generations of success.”

That is an absolutely perfect message for this I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore electorate. People want change desperately. And almost no one believes Clinton represents that radical change — or anything close to it.

There seems to be a big shift in mainstream-media punditry this week. I wonder what it means?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Mitchell Hamline Welcomes 338 1Ls This Fall, Down 14% From 2015 (42% From 2010).

HILLARY’S HUBRIS, WEINER’S PORN and COMEY’S CONSCIENCE : My latest NY Observer column. This one’s still relevant, too.

YES. YOU SHOULD BE SCARED OF RUNNING OUT. Should We Be Scared Of Butter?

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GEORGE KORDA: “Quit worrying. Times are always desperate.”

STEVE HAYWARD: Buyer’s Remorse, Democrats? “If Hillary loses a week from today, it will be in part because a number of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, never that enthusiastic about Hillary to begin with, stay home. I suspect a lot of Democratic grandees are already privately venting their second thoughts if not outright regrets about having let her have the nomination. . . . Democrats who are attacking James Comey should be placing the blame where it really should be: on Hillary.”

SO I GUESS SHE’S NOT “LOST” ANY MORE? Orlando Gunman’s Wife Breaks Silence: ‘I Was Unaware.’

Warning signs of radicalization can seem obvious in hindsight. Ms. Salman knew her husband watched jihadist videos, but she did not think much of it because the F.B.I. seemed to have cleared him, she said.

Agents had investigated Mr. Mateen in 2013 after he told work colleagues he was a member of Hezbollah, had family ties to Al Qaeda and wanted to die as a martyr. Ten months later, the F.B.I. closed the case. That same year, they questioned him again in connection with another terrorism investigation. So when Mr. Mateen told his wife to mind her own business about the videos, she did.

“The F.B.I. let him go,” she said.

Funny that this story is coming out now.

BUT OF COURSE: Labor MP Wrote Income Inequality Book Using Unpaid Interns.

“Labor have criticised the PaTH programme, specifically the internship component, despite many Labor MPs (and Greens for that matter) using interns in their own political offices,” a spokesperson for Cash told BuzzFeed News.

“Labor MPs seem to appreciate the value of internships themselves yet deem businesses using interns as ‘exploitation’ – hypocrisy writ large.”

At least he gave them publication credit.

THE MARC RICH PARDON RETURNS IN 2016: The FBI has released information about Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of super felon Marc Rich. The Bureau released a heavily redacted file in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Team Hillary is livid and questioning the release and its timing. Well, of course. Hillary has no respect for the FOIA. She created her home-brew email server to evade record keeping requirements and avoid FOIA scrutiny.

That noted, the timing is a bit curious, but we don’t know when the FOIA request was made.

Politico published the article. A sample:

…the atmospherics in the records are unhelpful to the Clinton campaign. The records repeatedly refer to the probe being handled by the “Public Corruption Unit” and make clear that the FBI was examining claims that Denise Rich’s Democratic Party “donations may have been intended to influence the fugitive’s pardon.”…“It appears that the required pardon standards and procedures were not followed,” the internal FBI memos said.

Now a plot twist: James Comey took over an investigation of the pardon and didn’t “seek any charges in the case.”

Another quirky deep background connection: VP Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was Marc Rich’s attorney.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: US Copyright Office officially allows owners to work on their own car.

2016, MAN: Patient burned by mid-surgery explosion when laser ignites fart.