LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Budget Passes, Phonecall-Gate, Vegas Update and Much, Much More.

HMM: Wal-Mart’s Answer to Amazon? Its Own Web Mall.

The world’s biggest retailer is near a deal with Lord & Taylor that would give the department store dedicated space on walmart.com, according to a person familiar with the matter. Such an agreement would be the first step in creating an online mall that shoppers could access from Wal-Mart’s website, this person said.

Additional brands that could eventually be included in the project are men’s clothing company Bonobos and online retailer Jet.com, both of which are owned by Wal-Mart, as well as other traditional chains, this person said. Financial terms of the potential Lord & Taylor partnership couldn’t be learned.

Wal-Mart is seeking to build an anti-Amazon coalition as it begins to ramp up e-commerce sales after several years of sluggish growth. Last year Wal-Mart bought Jet, placing its founder Marc Lore at the head of U.S. e-commerce operations. Then Wal-Mart made a series of smaller e-commerce purchases including Moosejaw, Bonobos and ShoeBuy, both to expand its online selection and gain give it access to brands built online, executives have told investors.

Now Wal-Mart aims to make walmart.com more attractive to premium brands and high-income shoppers, an area Amazon has also pursued in recent years.

Higher-end brands have been reluctant to work with Amazon because of its reputation as a discount e-outlet. So why would a higher-end department store like Lord & Taylor partner with Walmart? Best guess: Amazon has grown so large that everyone else is frightened of being consumed by Bezos’s beast.

PETER FERRARA: Economic Growth Is Not a Mystery, Yet It Eludes Democrats.

Obama fundamentally transformed America by following the opposite of every Reagan pro-growth policy:

Raised the top tax rate of every major U.S. tax, except the corporate rate, which was already the highest in the developed world;

Imposed draconian regulation on health care, finance and most importantly energy, just when America was emerging with the resources for energy independence to lead the world in production of oil, natural gas and coal;

Raised federal spending, deficits and debt to highest in American history by far;

Supported the Fed in wildly destabilizing monetary policy, with near zero interest rates for nearly a decade, and a flood of money held back by the Fed for now, which only further discouraged global investment in America.

This is why the economy never recovered from the 2008-09 financial crisis, and why instead we got the worst economic recovery from a Recession since the Great Depression, with only 2 percent economic growth. America’s historical record is that the worse the recession is the stronger the recovery, as the economy grows faster than normal for a couple of years to catch up to where it should be on the long-term trendline. That is why we should have come out of the financial crisis in a long-term economic boom, potentially stronger than even Reagan’s.

But to this day, eight years later, that still has not yet happened. Instead, we are still $2 to $3 trillion below where we should be.

This is why Democrats lost the 2016 election. Trump promised to restore Reagan’s pro-growth policies. Hillary promised more of the same Obama failure.

Democrats have yet to catch up with the rest of the world in realizing that socialism does not work. That Bernie Sanders’ throwback silliness continues to spread throughout the Democratic Party is costing it big time.

The difference between 4 percent real growth and 2 percent after 50 years is the difference between America and Third World stagnation.

They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

GOP CONGRESSMAN: ‘There’s Nothing Wrong with Lowering Taxes for Rich People.’

BRUCE BAWER: A Visit to Tivoli.

HOW CAN WE MISS HIM IF HE WON’T GO AWAY: Barack Obama is “back” on the campaign trail he never really left.

BUZZFEED: A Minimum Wage Campaign Leader Was Suspended After Complaints About His Relationships With Female Staffers.

“SHOCKED” OR “SHOCKED, SHOCKED?” Judge shocked to learn NYPD’s evidence database has no backup.

As part of an ongoing legal battle to get the New York City Police Department to track money police have grabbed in cash forfeitures, an attorney for the city told a Manhattan judge on October 17 that part of the reason the NYPD can’t comply with such requests is that the department’s evidence database has no backup. If the database servers that power NYPD’s Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS)—designed and installed by Capgemini under a $25.5 million contract between 2009 and 2012—were to fail, all data on stored evidence would simply cease to exist.

Courthouse News reported that Manhattan Supreme Court judge Arlene Bluth responded repeatedly to the city’s attorney with the same phrase: “That’s insane.”

New York City is in the very best of hands.

BOB CORKER: ‘I Understand Sentiment’ Behind Calls for Trump Competency Test.

VIDEO: Ted Cruz Hits a Home Run Against Bernie Sanders: ‘He Fundamentally Misunderstands Robin Hood.’

FINALLY: Finally, proof that gators are snacking on sharks.

Researchers have found that American alligators like nothing better than to snack on sharks and stingrays and have been found grabbing the fearsome sea creatures as they swim by in estuaries in Florida and Georgia.

In a study published in the journal Southeastern Naturalist, James Nifong of Kansas State University and Russell Lowers, a wildlife biologist at the Kennedy Space Center, detailed for the first time how alligators on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are eating small sharks and stingrays.

“Before this,” Nifong said in a statement from Kansas State, “there have only been a few observations from an island off the Georgia coast, but the new findings document the occurrence of these interactions from the Atlantic coast of Georgia around the Florida peninsula to the Gulf Coast and Florida panhandle.” He said the alligators were spotted eating three species of shark as well as stingrays.

Anyone else see big potential for a “Sharkgator” franchise on SyFy?

WOMEN ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES: Inside a Secretive Group Where Women Are Branded.

Last March, five women gathered in a home near here to enter a secret sisterhood they were told was created to empower women.

To gain admission, they were required to give their recruiter — or “master,” as she was called — naked photographs or other compromising material and were warned that such “collateral” might be publicly released if the group’s existence were disclosed.

The women, in their 30s and 40s, belonged to a self-help organization called Nxivm, which is based in Albany and has chapters across the country, Canada and Mexico.

Sarah Edmondson, one of the participants, said she had been told she would get a small tattoo as part of the initiation. But she was not prepared for what came next.

Each woman was told to undress and lie on a massage table, while three others restrained her legs and shoulders. According to one of them, their “master,” a top Nxivm official named Lauren Salzman, instructed them to say: “Master, please brand me, it would be an honor.”

Good lord.

VIRTUAL TERROR: ISIS Puts Out Call for Supporters to ‘Fulfill the Call’ as Social Media Jihadists.

FASTER, PLEASE: Your Brain May Continue To Function After Your Death Long Enough For You To Be Aware Of It, Studies Suggest.

LAWYER: Obama DOJ Blocked FBI Informant from Talking about Uranium One Deal.

The corruption allegedly included bribery, kickbacks, extortion, money-laundering, and Russia getting 20% of our uranium against the better judgement of just about everybody.

D.C. Attorney Victoria Toensing, a former chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is representing the informant, an American businessman who worked for years undercover as an FBI confidential witness.

Toensing said that when he attempted to bring some of the allegations to light in a lawsuit last year, “the Obama Justice Department threatened him with loss of freedom. They said they would bring a criminal case against him for violating an NDA.”

“The coverup is worse than the crime,” the press used to say.

And do read the whole thing.

QUIT OR FIRED? Chelsea Handler’s Netflix Show Canceled After 2 Seasons. “The streaming giant’s first talk show switched from daily to weekly in its second season and struggled to cut through the cluttered late-night space.”

“Like so many across the country, the past presidential election and the countless events that have unfolded since have galvanized me. From the national level down to the grassroots, it’s clear our decisions at the ballot box next year will mark a defining moment for our nation,” Handler wrote on Twitter. “For these reasons, I’ve decided not to return for another season of Chelsea, and instead devote as much time as I can to becoming a more knowledgeable and engaged citizen and to focus on projects that have significance to me. My goal is to be better informed, raise my voice, and participate in a more meaningful way. I want to travel the country and visit areas and people I don’t know enough about, speak at colleges and listen to students, and gain a better understanding of our political divide. I have joined forces with EMILY’s List to elect more women to public office, register people to vote, and campaign for candidates who are fighting for women’s rights.

I can’t imagine why people weren’t tuning in.

TEXAS DEMOCRATS DILEMMA: If Not Mr. Leather, Then Whom?

ANDY PUZDER: NFL could have prevented protest mess, as any competent employer would.

I ran the company that owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurant chains for almost 17 years. Along with our franchisees, we employed about 75,000 Americans and we flew the American flag in front of many of our restaurants. Had any company employees decided to disrespect that flag in front of our customers, in our brand’s uniform and during their hours of employment, I would have encouraged our general managers to first warn them to stop and, if they refused, to fire them.

I am very supportive of First Amendment rights and would encourage employees to express their opinions openly and freely, on their own time. But employees have no constitutional right to alienate a business’ customer base, damaging the business that employs both them and their co-workers, not to mention the owners who have taken the financial risks to create that business. When you accept employment, you accept the responsibility to advance the interests of the business that employs you. You have no right, nor should any employer tolerate attempts, to damage that business by alienating its customer base.

These kneeling player-employees have put their NFL team owners in a difficult spot. On the one hand, they certainly do not want players alienating their customers. On the other hand, team unity is important to a winning season and they naturally want to be sensitive to their players’ concerns. But, they never should have been put in this position.

Indeed. Roger Goodell will be remembered as the NFL Commissioner who squandered more goodwill, more quickly than anyone could have imagined.

THE PURGE GOES ON: Turkey’s Erdogan Calls on Mayors to Resign.

The comments mark Erdogan’s most explicit demand yet for a shake-up of veteran politicians – some of whom are nationally prominent – after voters in many cities rejected an April referendum granting him sweeping power.

While Erdogan narrowly won the referendum to change the constitution and create an executive presidency, voters in 17 of Turkey’s 30 largest cities voted against the change. Since then, Erdogan has spoken of the need for renewal in local government and the ruling AK Party, citing signs of “metal fatigue” within administrations.

“People do not take these offices as independent candidates but as candidates shown by parties. We cannot regard these posts as chairs which are kept eternally and never abandoned,” the Hurriyet quoted him as telling reporters on his plane back from a trip to Poland this week.

“Get out — or else.”

CHANGE: Blue Apron is laying off hundreds of employees.

MARK MACKIE: Solving the Siege of Seoul.

As daunting as an evacuation of 10 million people may be, it is not unprecedented. About 14 million Chinese were evacuated from flooding in north China in 1998. In 1971, 18 million people moved from Bangladesh to India to escape Pakistan forces. In 2005, 3 million were evacuated in Texas and Louisiana due to Hurricane Rita.

Recently, the Russians appear to be evacuating 1,500 people from the northern North Korean border near Vladivostok. North Korea will wonder at a much larger companion action in the south letting the North Korean military know, even if the boss does not, that things have changed.

Seeing his hostage pool melt away may also concentrate the mind of the dictator himself. Simply an announcement of a planned evacuation may alter negotiating dynamics, and if implemented, the steady drip, drip drip of evacuees leaving Kim’s gunsights may get serious discussions for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula finally underway.

Read the whole thing.

CATALONIA: Spain moves to suspend autonomy.

Article 155 of the constitution, which cemented democratic rule three years after the death of dictator General Francisco Franco in 1975, allows Madrid to impose direct rule in a crisis but it has never been invoked.

BBC Madrid correspondent Tom Burridge says that for Madrid this is about upholding the rule of law in Catalonia, protecting the Spanish constitution and disciplining what it sees as an unruly, disobedient devolved government.

However, the central government wants to minimise the risk of large-scale demonstrations, our correspondent says. Civil servants and government lawyers have thought long and hard about what measures to adopt and when and how they should be implemented.

If Madrid’s recent actions are anything to go by, implementation of Article 155 seems likely to be heavy-handed and maybe even self-defeating.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Frontier Moved.

The Russian effort was in fact so small, especially when laid alongside Hillary’s giant purchases, that when asked to find the ads Facebook couldn’t even detect them. “Instead of searching through impossibly large batches of data … Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm. ‘They worked backward,’ a U.S. official said of the process at Facebook.” Only then could they find the needle in the haystack.

Faced with the numbers Madrigal concludes the ads themselves were unimportant. The Kremlin must have bought the ads as research; to discover what messages bombed and which succeeded. “Think of it as a real-time focus group to test for the most viral content and framing.” But the theory that Russian genius guided Trump’s diabolical babblings fails before one fact. It is now known that Facebook itself that was guiding Donald’s campaign.

Yes, Facebook helped Trump.

This was a regular product offering. Facebook had built analysis tools and offered consulting services to both candidates but apparently only Trump’s newbie team used the analytics Facebook supplied. Hillary’s team decided it did not need help, while Donald’s team took full advantage of it. “The Trump campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, says Facebook targeting played a major role in the president’s win last November. Parscale says the campaign accepted help from Facebook employees, which he ‘heard’ the Clinton campaign did not do.”

Fascinating, and serves as further evidence that Clinton made an election-losing mistake in making Robby Mook her point man for All Things Data.

For whatever this anecdote is worth, I’ve also noticed that while YouTube appears to be throttling (and in at least one case, demonetizing) Bill Whittle.com videos, on Facebook our traffic is still trending upwards.

LARRY SCHWEIKART: Blue States Getting Redder and Red States Getting Redder.

All the latest voter registration numbers at the link, but here’s the conclusion:

In short, among the truly contested states in 2016, the only ray of hope for the Democrats is Colorado, and even there, the trends have flattened some. They have stabilized New Jersey and Delaware, but Republicans continue to gain significant ground in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and above all, Pennsylvania. If these trends continue through 2020, Florida would be have a slight Republican registration edge, North Carolina would be nearly even, and New Mexico would be close enough that it could never be taken for granted. Moreover, Pennsylvania and Iowa would be solid Trump states.

The remarkable thing about the Republican trending states is that they have moved steadily ever since last November, in almost every case without a single break. Democrats continue to lose voters, and they are not becoming independents. All of this appears to be due to Trump and Trump alone, as the Republican Party has not offered any reasons to embrace it.

Stay tuned.

US NAVAL INSTITUTE: The Clock is Ticking in China: The Decade of Concern Has Begun.

For too long in our hallowed halls of government, academia, and media we have been told, “Don’t worry. China takes the long view and would rather kick the can down the road than confront a dispute head on.” That belief has been the accepted conventional wisdom for the past 40 years, but the falseness of this view now is becoming incontrovertible.

Understanding this reality is critical for the U.S. military—and the U.S. Navy in particular—when it comes to how and when Taiwan will be attacked from the Chinese mainland. The question no longer is a theoretical, open-ended affair; President Xi’s words in Zhurihe do not stand alone as an empty proclamation. Instead, they are a reminder of the continuity of Chinese leaders’ devotion to the reunification of the motherland, and when it comes to reunification, Taiwan stands at the top of the list of unrestored territories.

One should not forget that in 2013, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported that China’s leaders had recommitted themselves to “continue the 2020 Plan,” whereby they would be able to “build and deploy a complete operational capability to use force against Taiwan by that year.” By implication, these leaders believe that by 2020, the PLA also will be able to fend off U.S. forces and thus be able to successfully invade Taiwan.

As such, President Xi’s Zhurihe speech can and should be interpreted as certifying that the PLA (all Chinese military forces) has achieved the capability to “safeguard China’s national sovereignty”—two years ahead of schedule.

So, what does this mean strategically?

Read the whole thing to find out, but I’d add that since China acts as though its OK for North Korea to have nukes, then perhaps Taiwan should have them, too.