WOW: Today’s email blast from Barnes & Noble included a plug for Kurt Schlichter’s Militant Normals.

I was frankly shocked — in a good way — to see such a bipartisan selection from them.

I JUST WANT TO SAY TWO WORDS TO YOU. JUST TWO WORDS. ARE YOU LISTENING? Socialism Destroys.

KIDS THESE DAYS: Hilarious Video of Clueless Millennials Saying They’re Not Going to Vote.

D.C. MCALLISTER: Victims of False Accusations of Rape Need to Be Heard, Too. “They see themselves in Brett Kavanaugh.”

OUCH: Michael shuts nearly 40 percent of U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil output.

Between this, Canada’s refinery fire, the roaring economy, Venezuela’s ongoing collapse, and the (necessary) return of sanctions on Iran, it sure doesn’t look like we’re going to see any price relief soon.

SAD: Sears Prepares for Bankruptcy Filing as Debt Payment Looms.

Employees at M-III Partners, a boutique advisory firm, have spent the past few weeks working on the potential filing, the people said. In recent days, M-III staff have been at the retailer’s headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill., one person said. Sears continues to discuss other options and could still avert an in-court restructuring, the people added.

Sears, which has been losing money for years, has $134 million in debt due on Monday. Edward Lampert, the hedge-fund manager who is Sears’s chairman, chief executive, largest shareholder and biggest creditor, could rescue the company, as he has done in the past by making the payment.

But Mr. Lampert is pushing for a broader restructuring that would include shaving more than $1 billion from Sears’s $5.5 billion debt load, selling another $1.5 billion of real estate and divesting $1.75 billion of assets, including the Kenmore appliance brand, which he has offered $400 million to buy himself.

If there’s any way to save the long-troubled retailer, they’ve got to get out from under that debt first.

PLEASE: 35 States Tell the FCC to Get Off Its Ass and Do Something About Spoofed Robocalls.

Last November, the FCC created the 2017 Call Blocking Order, which is supposed to provide phone companies a means of weeding out and blocking robocalls. But a group of concerned attorneys general have observed that the robocall issue is getting worse, despite the order.

In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission received 4.5 million complaints about robocalls. The formal comment released today states that reports reflect there were an estimated 30.5 billion illegal robocalls made to cellphones and landlines last year.

The formal comment shakes its fist at scammers and spammers that have plagued the nation’s phones with robocalls—especially calls from spoof numbers that make it seem like the calls are coming from a nearby area code.

I get about a half-dozen of these things each day, and more during tax season.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Hillary Sez Dems Will Be Civil Once They Have Their Power Back and Much, Much More. “Hillary Clinton says Democrats can’t be civil with Republicans. Yeah, we know, we know. At least some of us know. Here’s a list John Nolte is keeping over at Breitbart of violence and harassment against Trump supporters. The tally is 583 acts of violence.”

It’s civility tomorrow and civility yesterday but never civility today.

MATT LEWIS: Kavanaugh Killed the ‘Never Trump’ Movement.

Consider the dichotomy that has emerged in the last week: We saw people like Erick Erickson, who once wrote a piece headlined “I Will Not Vote For Donald Trump. Ever,” suggesting they will vote for Trump in 2020, and people like Tom Nichols, formerly of The Federalist, saying Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the final straw (he quit the GOP).

Nichols and Erickson reacted to the exact same news in exactly opposite ways.

The Kavanaugh hearing essentially radicalized Never Trumpers. Some—as part of the GOP base’s backlash against the left’s attacks—are coming home and supporting Trump. Others—perhaps because their hatred of Trump has only intensified—were pushed completely from the fold. This process has been going on for a long time, but one gets the sense that the fight over Kavanaugh was the end of the road.

Where you stand on this probably depends on where you sit. Personally, I see the group who submitted to their Trumpy fate as making an understandable submission to the inexorable forces of tribalism and partisanship. Consider Erickson’s plight. If you are a conservative, you, too, might well be repelled by the left’s behavior last week.

Might?

The allegations against Kavanaugh were never shown to have any merit — that is, those that weren’t debunked, refuted, or recanted. Nevertheless, the Left’s smear job was as nasty as it was vociferous, and amplified around the world, 24/7, by the Resistance-MSM.

So no matter what else anyone might think of President Trump, the fact that he stood by his nominee throughout this unprecedented savaging is itself unprecedented — and praiseworthy in the extreme. I can’t imagine how Trump’s selection and protection of a good man and a well-qualified jurist could cause any conservative or right-leaning libertarian to put more distance between themselves and Trump.

Except of course, for those whose iron rice bowls or NOKD-snobbery have become more important than their oft-stated principles.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who Paid Jon Tester to Shoot Hundreds of Cows and Hogs, and Why, For the Love of God, WHY?

CRUEL, BUT FAIR: “The people who used to run the Democrat Party could have told them running out with ‘Believe All Women’ was a bad idea, and not just because it makes Bill Clinton look like a rapist.”

PLEASE, RUN WITH THAT: Dems’ Midterm Message: White Women Are Rape Apologists.

Nothing can top the unhinged diatribe printed in the New York Times on Saturday night. Someone might want to perform a wellness check on Alexis Grenell, the author of an opinion piece titled, “White Women, Come Get Your People.” The column is a view into the tortured mind of the average American woman on the Left, a piece laced with so much puerile anguish, race-baiting and vulgar imagery that it would be a funny read if it wasn’t so disturbing. And it is another example of how major news organizations are fomenting hate among Americans. The loathsome column does not merit publication on the most angst-ridden teenage blog let alone in the nation’s “newspaper of record.”

Grenell, a Brooklyn-based public affairs consultant and alleged Democratic strategist, started out with a bang, venting about a confirmation process “where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol.” She referred to her “rage headache” and her “stupid uterus” and claimed there is a “blood pact between white men and white women.”

She babbled some nonsense about how “white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain,” and “support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies.”

We voted for Trump, according to Grenell, to “prop up our whiteness,” whatever that means. She claimed we care the same about men falsely accused of rape as women who are actually raped, but then accused White House advisor Kellyanne Conway of “weaponizing” her own sexual assault “in service to her boss by discouraging women from feeling empathy with Christine Blasey Ford or anger at Judge Kavanaugh.”

It was a grotesque, twisted tirade unfit for public consumption and it wasn’t the first time Grenell has rolled out the “Republicans-for-rape” narrative.

The Democrats have worked hard to lock down the Trigglypuff vote, but at what cost of even slightly more moderate voters?

HOP TO IT: Mattis orders fighter jet readiness to jump to 80 percent — in one year.

In a memo issued Sept. 17 to the secretaries of the Army, Air Force and Navy, along with acquisition head Ellen Lord and acting Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness Stephanie Barna, Mattis acknowledges “budget constraints and shortfalls in aviation squadrons across the force” have led to “systemic underperformance, overcapitalization and unrealized capacity” in the fighter fleets.

“For change to be effective and efficient, we must focus on meeting our most critical priorities first,” Mattis wrote in the memo, obtained exclusively by Defense News.

Specifically, that means achieving a minimum of 80 percent mission capability rates for the Pentagon’s F-35, F-22, F-16 and F-18 inventories — a number well above the mission capability rates those aircraft now achieve.

A plane that can’t fly is as good as a plane shot down by the enemy, only the enemy didn’t even have to expend an pricey missile.

INNOCENCE IS NO DEFENSE: Two Students Hooked Up. It Was Clearly Consensual. He Still Spent $12,000 Defending Himself.

The email from the Title IX compliance officer went into great detail about the seriousness of James’s situation. He would be investigated in accordance with the university’s sexual assault and sexual violence policies, as well as the student code, which covers physical assault, threats of violence, and conduct that threatens health and safety. A finding of responsibility could result in suspension, or even expulsion.

But the email was short on details of the alleged misconduct. According to the Title IX office, a female student, Becky, had complained that James touched her “on her breasts and buttocks over and under her clothing without her consent.” (I am using pseudonyms for both James and Becky.)

James knew Becky. They had been classmates in a drama class, and, very briefly, friends. On the evening of October 20, 2017, they had met up with some other friends to play music. Eventually finding themselves alone in Becky’s dorm room, they kissed for a few minutes—and engaged in some light sexual touching—before other students interrupted them.

In James’s view, the encounter had not only been fully consensual, it was also mutual: Becky bore just as much responsibility for initiating it as James. And, as Becky would later make clear to the investigator, she had also touched him sexually—she explicitly described her own actions in her official statement.

If women can’t be accountable for their own actions, then what?

STUDY: Media Devotes 0.7 Percent of Coverage to Booming Trump Economy. “Talk about burying the lede.”

Funny, but they sure seemed on board with trumping up Obama’s worst-postwar recovery as some kind of economic miracle.

CONTRARY TO PREDICTIONS MADE BY… ABSOLUTELY NO ONE: A Woman Is Helming Doctor Who, and the World Has Not Collapsed.

“SEXY HANDMAID” SHOULD HAVE RANKED MUCH HIGHER: Top 10 Halloween Costumes To Troll Your Leftist Friends In 2018.

SATIRE… OR IS IT? The Left Learns An Important Lesson From The Kavanaugh Fight: They Need To Be Even More Obnoxious.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Bionic Limbs ‘Learn’ to Open a Beer.

JACK DUNPHY: Once Again, the Los Angeles Times Unfairly Profiles Police as Racists.

NEVER DOUBT THEIR END-GAME: The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does Japan Need an Aircraft Carrier?

In June of 1942, Imperial Japan was rather suddenly in need of four new aircraft carriers, but modern Japan could go with a leisurely build-up to that many and still give Beijing serious pause.

And for what it’s worth, Japan’s Izumo-class “helicopter destroyers” could, with fairly minor few modifications, carry a dangerous complement of F-35B jets, and they’ve already commissioned two of those.

BLOOMBERG DOUBLES DOWN: New Evidence of Hacked Supermicro Hardware Found in U.S. Telecom.

A major U.S. telecommunications company discovered manipulated hardware from Super Micro Computer Inc. in its network and removed it in August, fresh evidence of tampering in China of critical technology components bound for the U.S., according to a security expert working for the telecom company.

The security expert, Yossi Appleboum, provided documents, analysis and other evidence of the discovery following the publication of an investigative report in Bloomberg Businessweek that detailed how China’s intelligence services had ordered subcontractors to plant malicious chips in Supermicro server motherboards over a two-year period ending in 2015.

Appleboum previously worked in the technology unit of the Israeli Army Intelligence Corps and is now co-chief executive officer of Sepio Systems in Gaithersburg, Maryland. His firm specializes in hardware security and was hired to scan several large data centers belonging to the telecommunications company.

Both sides seem awfully confident that this hardware hack either did or didn’t happen.

BUT OF COURSE: Facebook Stifles Ads For Film On Abortion Monster Kermit Gosnell. “Facebook is censoring this story and destroying our attempts to get the news about this film out to the public.”

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Remember When Criticizing Kanye Was Racist?

“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” This was the moment when Kanye became a superstar. Even people who didn’t like his music cheered on this semi-coherent rant. Kanye spoke for every American who wasn’t quite smart enough to articulate an argument against Bush, but still knew in their bones that Bush was bad. Any attack was welcome, and the angrier and more irrational, the better. They literally blamed Bush for the weather, and Kanye became their hero.

And if you didn’t like what Kanye said back in ’05, or thought it was the wrong venue to say it, or had any other criticism whatsoever, guess what that made you? HINT: It starts with “R” and ends with “acist.”

But that was different because back then Kanye was still useful to the cause.