SO DOES EVERY OTHER ADVOCATE OF IT: Elizabeth Warren misleads Americans on harm and costs of ‘Medicare-for-all.’

“Medicare-for-all” advocates claim that the focus on its cost to the federal government is disingenuous. We’re already spending well over $3 trillion a year on health care. The Warren/Sanders plan would relieve individuals and employers of that spending — and re-apportion it to the federal government.

Sanders and his allies like to cite a study from the libertarian Mercatus Center, which assumes that “Medicare-for-all” will adopt the existing Medicare program’s low payment rates — and thus save the country $2 trillion over a decade.

Of course, extending Medicare’s payment schedule across the entire health care system would reduce payments to doctors and hospitals by 40 percent, relative to private insurance. And it would raise demand for care by 11 percent.

In other words, “Medicare-for-all” posits that doctors and hospitals will have no qualms about treating more patients for less money.

It’s more likely that doctors and hospitals will respond to lower payment rates by reducing the supply of care they’re willing to deliver.

Quality will decline, too, as lower pay fails to attract the best talent.

THERE HE GOES AGAIN: Joe Biden: Cops Don’t Pull Over White Girls.

BREAKING: Rep. Katie Hill to resign amid allegations of inappropriate relationships with staffers.

ANOTHER TORPEDO CIRCLES BACK: FBI agents manipulated Flynn file, as Clapper allegedly urged ‘kill shot.’

TYLER O’NEIL ON FAITH: TobyMac Follows God Despite Tragic Death of His 21-Year-Old Son.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Pence: The NBA is a ‘Wholly Owned Subsidiary of China.’

OFF SCRIPT: Joe Biden Apologizes for ‘Lynching’ Comment in 1998: ‘Trump on the Other Hand Chose His Words Deliberately.’

Biden forgot to stick to the script that Trump is a blowhard who always speaks without thinking.

But any narrative in a storm, I suppose.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bret Easton Ellis Pins ‘Trump Effect’ on Media’s ‘Joker’ Attacks.

Reporters warned for weeks that “Joker” would inspire real-world violence, coaxing an army of incels to rise up in fury. Media outlets puffed up microscopic incidents at movie screenings after that narrative collapsed.

Ellis sees through their charade.

“It’s a kind of puffed-up moral superiority and a shocking hypocrisy,” Ellis said about the media’s “Joker” coverage. He compared it to the way reporters share news about all things President Trump.

It’s one sided, inaccurate and hyberbolic.

But it generates pageviews and pushes the preferred narrative, so facts and reason be damned.

GOING… GOING… Turkey May Go the Way of Venezuela.

Mr. Erdogan wrongly assumes that the cunning and aggression that brought him political success internally will also work internationally. This explains his unleashing thugs on the streets of Washington, abducting Turkish citizens accused of coup plotting from multiple countries, attempting to smuggle dual-use materials to Gaza, illegally drilling for natural gas in Cypriot waters, and shooting down a Russian jet fighter, among other bellicose actions.

Mr. Erdogan’s foreign-policy ineptitude has alienated other governments. Europeans seethe when he threatens to send 3.6 million displaced Syrians their way. Israelis despise him for a vitriolic anti-Zionism that compares them to Nazis. Egypt’s president hates Mr. Erdogan’s backing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Erdogan’s abject apologies haven’t compensated for shooting down the Russian jet. China hasn’t forgotten Mr. Erdogan’s accusing it of genocide against the Uighurs, despite his silence now.

When the candidate from Mr. Erdogan’s AKP party twice lost the Istanbul mayor’s race this year, most analysts saw this as a “political earthquake” and a “stunning blow” to Mr. Erdogan, but he remains as dominant and dangerous as ever. A ruthless ideologue, his continued rule could bring to Turkey the political repression, economic collapse, hunger and mass emigration that plague Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation, true, but Erdogan has been at it for a long time.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Molesting Olaf Doll Is Right on Target. “This week’s adventures include a bikini-clad vape thief, insane tractor violence, and what not to do with your extra bees.”

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Study Shows Conservative YouTube Content Leads To ‘De-Radicalization,’ Not Radicalization.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: GOP Has A Choice: Fight Anti-Trump Coup Effort Or Surrender Government To Democrats.

Some Republicans can be counted on to sit there and take it. This approach entails allowing Democrats to hold secret hearings where they handpick snippets to leak to a compliant media in service of setting a narrative. After the leaks are published by the compliant corporate press, these Republicans can impotently push back on some of it.

The other approach is to learn something from the previous few years. Trump’s surprising election was followed by attempts to delegitimize the Republican victory in 2016 by claiming it was due to “fake news,” desperate efforts to overturn the Electoral College, anti-Trump riots in Portland and D.C., the Clinton-directed claims that Russia “hacked” the election, the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, the release of the completely ridiculous dossier alleging that Trump was a Russian agent, the whisper campaign that the truth of Trump’s collusion was so bad that he might not be inaugurated. Yes, all this was before the inauguration.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG. Clinton ally Blumenthal sought to stop publication of Russia probe book.

A source familiar with the matter told Fox News that Blumenthal claimed the book – “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History,” by Lee Smith – was defamatory.

“Blumenthal tried to stop it from being published,” the source told Fox News, saying the Hillary Clinton confidant sent threatening letters to Smith and publisher Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group.

Fox News reached out to Blumenthal, who did not immediately respond.

The book, which is scheduled for release Oct. 29, includes allegations about the origin of the Russia probe and the involvement of Democratic operatives with the unverified anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The source said that the publisher’s legal team found Blumenthal’s legal claim “meritless,” and they intend to release the book as planned.

I just pre-ordered a copy.

IT’S DIFFERENT NOW BECAUSE SHUT UP: Schiff Leads the Kind of Partisan Investigation He Condemned in 2015.

IT’S SOMETHING: Senate to Vote on Resolution That Calls House Impeachment Proceedings ‘Illegitimate.’

MAYBE BEIJING COULD GET SERIOUS ABOUT REINING IN PYONGYANG IF THEY WANT TO AVOID THIS: Don’t be surprised when South Korea wants nuclear weapons.

Be even less surprised if they test one.

OH: Employees accuse Google of making a Chrome extension to spy on them.

Bloomberg reports that workers at Alphabet Inc.-owned Google discovered a new tool was being developed that would report employees who created large calendar events involving more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to a memo written by a staffer at the company. The tool would be part of the custom Google Chrome browser installed on computers at the company and used for searches of internal systems.

The employee memo says the Chrome tool is expected to roll out in late October. It calls the tool “an attempt of leadership to immediately learn about any workers organization attempts,” and said that while Google’s privacy team approved its release, the team noted “a number of concerns with respect to the culture at Google.”

Weird how such a progressive company might go to such lengths to prevent unionization.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Elusive Republican Backbone Spotted in District of Columbia. “None of the senators who have signed on to the resolution thus far are saying that the president is off-limits as far as being investigated for wrongdoing, they just want some of the Soviet trappings removed from whatever it is that’s going in the House right now.”

LEE SMITH: 10 Questions To Ask About Trump’s Removal Of Troops From Syria. “Trump’s critics appear to believe that backing a Marxist splinter group aligned with the anti-American, pro-Iranian axis in its war against a NATO ally is sound policy.”

The final question is the biggie: “How Could the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment Get It So Wrong?”

Trump simply saw U.S. support for the PKK for what it was: America fighting and paying to advance the interests of someone else, in this case U.S. adversaries, like Iran, Assad, and Russia. The complaint of Trump critics that the withdrawal will, conversely, benefit all warring sides—Iran and ISIS, Ankara and Moscow, etc.—is impossible to reconcile with the logic of conflict.

That Trump’s withdrawal showed more strategic clarity than the foreign policy establishment is hardly surprising. He ran against Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policies in the Middle East, in particular novelty items like Bush’s freedom agenda and Obama’s Iran deal.

From Trump’s perspective, those policies defined the divide between the Beltway bubble and the rest of the U.S. public that saw no wisdom in enriching an Iranian regime at war or spending American lives and money to promote democracy in places like Iraq, Lebanon, or the Palestinian territories where elections were certain to empower anti-American forces.

Why, it’s almost as though the establishment doesn’t give a damn about American interests.

FASTER, PLEASE: We’ve officially annihilated a second strain of polio. Only one remains.

WHAT PROCESS? Republicans Fight Trump’s Impeachment by Attacking the Process.

Obfuscation and expediency is not a process.

HMM: The Navy Obfuscates On Shock Testing The $13 Billion USS Ford.

The only certain tasks that the Navy mentioned about the USS Ford schedule were that flight ops were set to start in early 2020, and that the Navy was trying to work in repairs for the ships nine non-functional lower deck ammunition elevators–which get ammunition to and from weapons magazines–sometime during the next 18 months of at-sea testing, where they want to put in thousands of aircraft launches and recoveries, shaking the ship out.

Unfortunately, it did not sound as if the Navy was setting aside time to fit in a Full Ship Shock Trial (FSST), a vigorous test where explosives are detonated near a new Navy vessel to simulate near-misses in a battlefield environment.

If the USS Ford is not shocked–and the validity of the design is not tested–the shock trials will supposedly be shunted to to the future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), the next Ford Class carrier, when most of the remaining Ford class aircraft carriers (CVNs 80, 81 and 82) will be too far along in their production cycle to incorporate many fixes.

The Navy does not appear to be confident that the USS Ford will absorb a shock trial without major damage. The organization has not hidden it’s desire to push shunt shock trials upon a later Ford variant, shocking the next Ford class carrier sometime in the 2024 to 2026 time-frame.

Not good.

SNAP: British PM Boris Johnson Goes ‘All In’: Calls for Elections to End Brexit Impasse in Parliament.

SHE SEEMS NICE: Bette Midler Tweets Then Deletes Gratitude for Neighbor Who ‘Beat the Sh*t’ Out of Rand Paul.

ON THIS DAY: 75th Anniversary of The Battle of Leyte Gulf.