END OF A THRILLING BEACH MOMENT: 747s Will No Longer Land At St. Maarten. “For years, crowds have gathered on Maho Beach to watch the four-engine jumbo jet barely clear the sand before landing at the Caribbean airport.”

SELF-DEFENSE: Pizza Hut employee shot, killed armed robber with own handgun.

The headline doesn’t make it clear, but the employee was carrying his own handgun — and was up against three robbers, at least one of whom was armed.

THE FBI’S CLINTON FOUNDATION PROBE: “This Wall Street Journal story is such a blockbuster in every way that arguably the most significant news comes in the 14th (!) paragraph… Yes, you read that right: the FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation. The story goes on to detail how the investigation has been tearing the bureau apart and creating a rift between the FBI and DOJ.”

Former Attorney General Eric Holder stands ready, in his own special way, to let the healing begin.

I’M AMAZED AT HOW GOOD AND CHEAP digital cameras have become compared to, say, 10 years ago.

I THINK THAT HORMONAL CONTRACEPTION FOR WOMEN IS RISKIER THAN GENERALLY BELIEVED, AND I SUSPECT THAT’S TRUE FOR MEN, TOO: A new male contraceptive injection is 96% effective in human tests: But side effects could mean it never gets released.

POLITICO’S GOTTA POLITICO: Trump camp basks in Clinton’s suffering.

To be fair though, Politico has headlined Clinton basking in stuff, too.

LONDON DAILY MAIL HEADLINE MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: Morning show Halloween battle: Today crushes it as they relive the 90s while Good Morning America does a Ghostbusters and Pokemon mash-up — and George Stephanopoulos refuses to wear a costume.

Sure he’s wearing a costume – George pretends to be an objective journalist every morning on ABC.

DON’T CRUSH THAT DWARF, HAND ME THE PLIERS (AND DUCT TAPE): Emergency Repair Work And You: How To Salvage Your Wrecked RPG Campaign.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Who’s Putin For?

Putin’s got a lot going with Hillary. His pals donated more than a hundred million dollars to the Clinton Family Foundation while she was secretary of state, and they gained ownership of twenty percent of America’s uranium supply. If Putin were really trying to elect Trump, he’d be leaking the details of that relationship. But no, the big story broke more than a year ago in the New York Times, and isn’t one of the major themes of the WikiLeaks archives.

Ergo, those who think WikiLeaks is part of a Russian deception—and I’m quite prepared to believe that—have to explain why the most devastating information about Hillary comes from the Democrats’ favorite daily newspaper.

Plus, if I were Putin and really wanted Hillary elected, I’d be inclined to openly endorse Trump, on the theory that most U.S. voters would reason “if Putin likes the guy, we’re better off without him.”

Read the whole thing.

My take is that Putin prefers Clinton, but would be happy to take either one so long as they enter the White House mortally wounded.

HILLARY CLINTON, spoiler candidate? “So if you’re a Democrat in Utah, who gets your vote? The fellow with a shot at blocking Trump? Or Clinton, the spoiler candidate?”

By the way, I don’t understand why critics call him Egg McMuffin. That seems like a big mistake in labeling. Everyone loves Egg McMuffins.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Reasons To Start Eating Full-Fat Dairy, According To Science. Plus reason 6: It’s delicious.

2016, MAN: Video footage of a man who wrestled with a giant panda bear after breaking into a zoo enclosure in southern China went viral over the weekend.

BUT WHAT ABOUT EVIL CLOWNS, HUH? WHAT ABOUT THEM? No Evidence Whatsoever That Sex Offenders Attack Trick-or-Treaters on Halloween.

THEY HARDLY HAD A CHOICE, DID THEY? CNN severs ties with Donna Brazile.

It wasn’t much more than a half hour ago that I asked what CNN would do to restore its reputation — behold, the power of Instapundit!

Somewhat more seriously, discovery should be a hoot if Brazile is foolish enough to file a wrongful termination suit.

CHANGE: Hillary’s unlikability now eclipses Trump’s.

It’s only by two points, but it still shows that this year more than any other has been a race to the bottom.

TRACKING POLLS: Today vs. Yesterday. “The change looks extreme, don’t you think? One day?” It’s 2016. Anything can happen.

POLITICO: Poll: Forty-five percent of voters say they agree with Trump’s claim that Clinton’s email scandal is worse than Watergate. “And asked to compare the two scandals, voters view Clinton’s email issues and Trump’s sexually aggressive comments about women as equally bad.”

STILL ON THE CHARTS: My Looking Ahead: October Term 2016, from the CATO Supreme Court Review is still #5 on the SSRN Top Recent Downloads chart.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

When Trump mentions something from a classified briefing, the media loses their minds.

Now Harry Reid does it. I'm waiting for the outrage. pic.twitter.com/WTL8iTx1Zz

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) October 31, 2016

SOCIOPATHS SELDOM ARE: WaPo Flashback: Harry Reid lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes. He’s still not sorry. “Romney didn’t win, did he?” (Bumped).

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS. Media hypocrisy in two screenshots: A tale of dueling Washington Post editorials.

As Jim Treacher tweets, good work, WaPo.

Speaking of the WaPo then and now, Glenn already linked to their headline this morning yesterday that “Once the hope candidate, Obama in his final days faces a hopeless electorate.”

Glenn linked to it under the headline of “Fundamentally Transformed,” but perhaps not entirely, which leads to a couple of questions: Americans have sure kept letting our poor, beleaguered president down a lot over the last eight years, haven’t we? And also, contra the claim that the Post made at the beginning of his administration, through its then-surrogate Newsweek, I guess we’re not all socialists now, huh?

IT’S FIXERS, ALL THE WAY DOWN: New Email Shows Donna Brazile Also Gave Clinton Questions Before CNN Presidential Debate.

The email sent by Brazile to Clinton chairman John Podesta and communications chief Jennifer Palmieri was headlined unambiguously: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.” The email was sent March 5, the day before a CNN Democratic presidential debate featuring Clinton and her primary opponent Bernie Sanders.

“Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint,” Brazile said in the body of the email. Sure enough, one of the questions directed to Clinton during the debate was from a woman who spoke about the Flint water crisis’ effect on her family, asking what Clinton would do in her first hundred days in office.

Further down in the story, this update: “In a second email released Monday, Brazile promised Palmieri and Podesta she would “send a few more” questions before the CNN town hall.”

James Comey is doing his bit to restore the FBI’s reputation. What will the DNC, CNN, or ABC News do to restore theirs?

BEACH PRIVILEGE. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL, MAN. Ben Ratliff goes “Looking for the Beach Boys” in the New York Review of Books, jumps the shark, and overshoots the landing ramp so hard he winds up instead trapped in a box canyon worthy of an Indiana Jones movie. And if you think that metaphor is overwrought, get a load of this:

But time and social change have been rough on the Beach Boys. Their best-known hits (say, “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Get Around”) are poems of unenlightened straight-male privilege, white privilege, beach privilege. It is hard to imagine that they helped anyone toward self-determination or achieving their social rights. Brian Wilson’s great integrative achievement as a songwriter and producer was absorbed in bits and pieces by others—Paul McCartney especially—but it mostly worked for him alone. In their rhythm and humor the Beach Boys sound squarer all the time compared to Motown, the Beatles, and the Stones, and a lot of Phil Spector. Of course, it comes down to individual songs.

We all like songs. But we also tend to regard a cultural institution like the Beach Boys—a fifty-year-old rock band, heavy with institutional honor—as having some kind of fixed identity and owning some kind of essential rightness. What is, or was, the essence of the Beach Boys, and what were they right about? In this time of curation and reassessment, we have cash in hand and we are here to understand the Beach Boys. What are we paying into? What are we understanding?

Exactly. What are we understanding? (By the way, somebody must have recently edited Ratliff’s Wikipedia page. As of the time of this post’s draft, his bio ends, “He teaches cultural criticism at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is known for introducing the concept of ‘beach privilege’ into popular vernacular.” Achievement unlocked!)

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A President Clinton would be out of control. “‘Someone somewhere should have told her no.’ Those are the words of a Clinton ally quoted in a roundup of Democratic reactions to Hillary Clinton’s FBI news by congressional newspaper The Hill. And, despite the fact that they come from a Clinton supporter, albeit an angry and disappointed one, they may illustrate the best reason for choosing Donald Trump instead of Clinton. . . . The truth is, neither one of our leading candidates for president is a paragon of virtue. But only one of them has already made a habit of flouting the law while in office, selling favors and escaping the consequences, and only one of them is likely to be able to pull it off from the White House.”