LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Las Vegas Massacre Update and Much, Much, More.

WASSERMAN-SHULTZGATE UPDATE: Lawyer For IT Aide Says Dem Congressmen To Blame For Falsified Spending Records.

House Democrats ordered the systematic falsification of records showing how they spend their taxpayer-provided office budgets, according to lawyers for two former House information technology (IT) aides.

It’s a remarkable accusation that pits sitting lawmakers against the former aides, Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and his wife Hina Alvi. Imran was arrested in July while trying to board a flight to Pakistan, and then indicted on four counts of bank fraud involving moving money to that country. Imran and Hina, who was also indicted, face a court date Friday.

One of Imran’s lawyers, Aaron Page, acknowledged the invoicing discrepancy Aug. 21, telling The Daily Caller News Foundation, “This is just how things have been done for forever. This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing.”

The swamp just keeps getting deeper.

SHOT: May’s troubles inspired pity – but she needed to inspire Britain.

Theresa May may not have the love of her party. But she has its admiring, horrified sympathy.

If her speech today had been precisely choreographed to act as a metaphor for her premiership, it could not have been more perfect.

A bright, confident start. A sudden disruption (via a “comedian” with a P45). The whole thing plunging off the rails, as May’s voice went from strong and stable to weak and wobbly.

The PM struggling on, even as many in the audience were begging her to stop. Equilibrium just about restored, but still the sense that the whole thing could fall apart at any point. And then – just when she thought she’d got through it, the slogan behind her starting to fall apart.

CHASER? YES, THAT WAS A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING: The Tories are giving Jeremy Corbyn a clear run at No 10.

Corbyn is now the bookies’ favourite to be the next prime minister. He has Theresa May to thank for this change in his fortunes. It was her decision to call an early election that allowed him to turn things around. Up to this point, Corbyn — for all his grassroots adulation — had been a bit of a Westminster joke: 172 of his own MPs had previously declared that they had no confidence in him. But his internal critics, who wanted to ensure there was no stab-in-the-back narrative, stayed silent this time. Corbyn was free to fight a campaign where low expectations worked in his favour.

Helped by Tory divisions, Corbyn has consolidated his position since the election. Voters have hardly recoiled on realising how close to power he is. Instead, Labour is still polling at 40 per cent or above.

May is no Thatcher and Corbyn is no Blair — Britain’s mood may be swinging dangerously Left.

BUCKLEY MUST BE SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE: Yale Student Suggests Chelsea Manning for Buckley Society ‘Disinvitation Dinner.’

VIDEO: Milo Yiannopoulos Sang ‘America the Beautiful’ While Neo-Nazis Heil Saluted Him.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): To be clear, it’s two Nazis in a Karaoke bar, not a remake of Triumph of the Will.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Glass House of the NFL.

Multimillionaire young players, mostly in their 20s, often cannot quite explain why they have become so furious at emblems of the country in which they are doing so well.

Their gripes at best seem episodic and are often without supporting data. Are they mad at supposedly inordinate police brutality toward black citizens, or racial disparity caused by bias, or the perceived vulgarity of President Donald Trump?

The result, fairly or not, is that a lot of viewers do not understand why so many young, rich players show such disrespect for their country — and, by extension, insult their far poorer fans, whose loyal support has helped pay their salaries.

ESPN talking heads and network TV analysts do not help. They often pose as social-justice warriors, but they are ill-equipped to offer sermons to fans on their ethical shortcomings that have nothing to do with football.

In truth, the NFL’s hard-core fan base is not composed of bicoastal hipsters. Rather, the league’s fan base is formed mostly by red-state Americans — and many of them are becoming increasingly turned off by the culture of professional football.

Indeed. When purveyors of popular entertainment take stands unpopular with their fans, the result is professional suicide.

HMM: Was the Las Vegas Gunman’s Homicidal Rage Politically Motivated? “Why was there an uptick in gun purchases in the fall of 2016?”

It does seem strange that we’ve heard next-to-nothing about his motive, but that could just be because nobody yet knows.

WELL, YES: CIA Official Says China Can Do More to Pressure North Korea.

Michael Collins, the deputy assistant director of the CIA’s East Asia Mission Center, said China by all public accounts is enforcing international sanctions against North Korea, but noted Beijing’s tact in excluding key exports from their sanctions list and agreeing to limits on trade rather than an all-out ban.

“It’s clear the Chinese want to maintain influence with this regime and are probably worried about undercutting that if they pull all of their support away from North Korea,” Collins said at an intelligence conference organized by the CIA at George Washington University. “Their challenge, in my view, is to … assess the extent of support they provide to North Korea and to what extent that encourages North Korean behavior.”

Beijing accounts for 90 percent of Pyongyang’s trade, making its cooperation critical to enforcing U.S.-backed sanctions aimed at curbing the regime’s nuclear activities.

Though China last month began limiting energy supplies to the North under new United Nations sanctions, the restrictions do not apply to crude oil, which accounts for the largest share of energy exports to Pyongyang. North Korea imports all of its oil, primarily from China, providing Beijing with substantial leverage to cutoff a lifeline to the regime.

China will continue to support North Korea for at least as long as the cost of doing so (which is relatively cheap) is less than the benefit (causing major headaches for the US, Japan, and South Korea). But since nuclear nonproliferation is dead in Northeast Asia and Chinese support for North Korea helped to kill it, maybe it’s time we talked publicly to Japan and South Korea about developing their own nuclear arsenals.

It sounds extreme, but it might be the only way left short of war to change Beijing’s calculus.

GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE YOUNG: Another Thing Amazon Is Disrupting: Business-School Recruiting.

The Seattle-based retail giant is now the top recruiter at the business schools of Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University and University of California, Berkeley. It is the biggest internship destination for first-year M.B.A.s at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College and Duke. Amazon took in more interns from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business than either Bain & Co. or McKinsey & Co., which were until recently among the school’s top hirers of interns, according to Madhav Rajan, Booth’s dean.

All told, Amazon has hired some 1,000 M.B.A.s in the past year, according to Miriam Park, Amazon’s director of university programs—a drop in the bucket for a company that plans to add 50,000 software developers in the next year. But Amazon’s flood-the-zone approach to recruiting and hiring future M.B.A.s—in some cases before they have taken a single business-school course—is feeding the career frenzy on campus and rankling some rival recruiters.

The talent wars begin even before classes do. This past June, Amazon sponsored an event at its Seattle headquarters for 650 soon-to-be first-year and returning women M.B.A. students, some of whom left the event with internship offers for summer 2018.

Scott DeRue, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, urges Amazon and other avid hirers to refrain from recruiting activities until at least the end of the first week of classes. “It’s nearly impossible,” Mr. DeRue said. “You say an academic building is off limits, and they’re at restaurants and coffee shops across the street.”

It feels like someday we’ll all work for Amazon — and judging by my monthly statement, maybe I already do.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Democrats Have No Idea How To Prevent Mass Shootings.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Why Conservative College Kids Should Be a Protected Class.

MICHELLE OBAMA: ‘All Men, All White’ GOP Makes People Distrust Politics.

“We should be working actively to mix it up, so we’re getting a real broad range of perspectives on every issue. Shoot, I would see that in Congress,” she stated.

“At the State of the Union address… when you are in the room what you can see is this real dichotomy. It’s a feeling of color almost,” Obama said. “On one side of the room is literally gray and white. Literally, that is the color palette on one side of the room. On the other side of the room, there are yellows and blues and whites and greens. Physically, there’s a difference in color, in the tone, because on one side all men, all white, on the other side some woman, some people of color.”

“I look at that, and I go, no wonder. No wonder we struggle, no wonder people don’t trust politics. We’re not even noticing what these rooms look like,” she added.

That statement isn’t coherent enough to rebut.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Well, Marco Rubio kind of did.

THIS WILL END WELL: U.S. Needs to Join the Race for Multinationals’ Tax Revenue, Experts Say.

Or instead we could reduce and simplify our corporate taxes substantially, become an international tax haven, and reap the investment benefits.

But that would mean far fewer opportunities for graft, political manipulation, and plunder.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: Equality and the NFL.

IN A WORD? SOCIALISM. How did Venezuela get to this point?

That collapse of the oil industry happened in two steps. First, all the know-how of that industry, centuries of man-years of experience was lost in the firing of these people. They were not only fired but persecuted, so most of them left the country. Many of them left the country. And they caused, for example, an oil boom in Colombia [where many of them moved to]. Colombia went from producing 200,000 barrels of oil [per day] to a million barrels of oil thanks to the fact that Venezuelans knew how to extract much more oil from the fields that Colombia was already exploiting.

So there was a massive loss of human capital. They also wanted to create a politically conscious oil company, so they started to put an enormous amount of social programmes and other things on the books of PDVSA, the oil company. And as a consequence they starved the company from investment and they ran the company in an amazingly corrupt way, and this is really not just talk about corruption but evidence of corruption in massive ways. There were these foreign oil companies… These foreign oil companies have been complaining to the government that they want to wrest control of the procurement of oil projects because they know that this procurement is being done at multiples of what things should cost. There’s people that have been found in the US owning hundreds of millions of Dollars of money that has been laundered out of PDVSA and so on.

So they really destroyed the hen that laid the golden eggs, at the time when their own plans and their own announced plans was to move Venezuela to produce six million barrels of oil. And instead of increased production they have never been able to stop a very rapid decline in production.

Excellent interview with Venezuelan economist-non-grata Ricardo Hausmann.

Highly recommended.

IT’S THE JOOOOOS: Erdogan points out Mossad’s role in northern Iraq poll.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pointed out the role of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad in the recently-held illegitimate referendum in northern Iraq.

Speaking at a joint news conference with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani in capital Tehran, Erdogan said: “What is the referendum organized by northern Iraq’s regional administration for? No country in the world apart from Israel recognizes it.

“A decision made at the table with Mossad is not legitimate, it is illegitimate.”

Sadly, Erdogan is correct when he says that no country other than Israel recognizes the Iraqi Kurds’ referendum, which again shows a lack of imagination and backbone at the State Department and/or White House.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Latest on the Vegas Massacre and Much, Much More.

BONE UP: B-1B To Fly Through 2040 Without Major Life Extension.

In 2012 and 2013, Boeing began fatigue testing the wing and fuselage, respectively, to validate the predicted life of the B-1B, which at the time was forecast to fly through 2050.

With 72% of wing testing and 20% of fuselage fatigue testing now complete, the Air Force estimates the B-1B can operate through 2040 without needing an expensive life extension.

Brig. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the Air Force’s program executive officer for fighters and bombers, says B-1B testing is extremely important and helps identify which parts of the swing-wing supersonic bomber need closer inspection and which need repair or replacing, and in what timeline.

“As of right now, we don’t plan a fully fledged life extension,” Schmidt confirmed during a Sept. 25 interview.

Like the Boeing B-52 and Northrop Grumman B-2, the B-1B was built tough and will fly longer than expected without needing new wings or other major structural upgrades, like smaller fighters and attack aircraft. The B-1B was originally designed to fly 9,681 equivalent flight hours. But data provided by the fighters and bombers directorate at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, shows it lasting far longer. The projected service life of the B-1B, originally built by Rockwell and acquired by Boeing, will reach 19,900 equivalent flight hours, the service says.

That’s great, but the Air Force had better get moving with the planned B-21 Raider, because it looks like the B-1B and the B-52 will start entering retirement at about the same time.

LIZ PEEK: President Trump isn’t responsible for Puerto Rico’s decades of corruption and collapse.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are very, very concerned about the people of Puerto Rico. Both have joined the mayor of San Juan in criticizing President Trump for not doing enough for the Commonwealth in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Seriously, where have they been?

Where were they when Puerto Rico’s debts ballooned to $123 billion, thrusting the economy into an 11-year recession?

Where were they when 50,000 of the island’s best and brightest hightailed to the mainland every year, looking for jobs and opportunities, as median household income sank to $18,626 as compared to $56,516 on the mainland?

Where were they as the territory’s power system went bust, while its administrators came under FBI investigation for stealing from the people of Puerto Rico?

They were nowhere to be seen, except of course during election season.

Clinton and Sanders are good at feigning concern, but the real action is from the Democrat-Media Complex, which sees in Puerto Rico a chance to “Katrina” Trump like they did George W. Bush.

AND PROBABLY NOT BECAUSE HE WANTS BETTER PRICE ON A KIMBER 1911: Joe Scarborough Is Enraged That Gun Manufacturers Make Money.

MARK RIPPETOE: Your First Days in the Gym.

RAND SIMBERG: Out With the Old Space Age, In with the New.

BECAUSE HE COULD? Why ‘the most interesting man in the world’ ditched beer for tequila.

LAWMAKERS WARN TWITTER CEO: ‘Eliminate Racially Divisive Communications’ or Face New Regs, Government Oversight.

THEY MUST WANT MORE TRUMP: Trump will win in 2020 if the left keeps calling him a racist.

Robert Robb:

I now believe that the left will re-elect Trump. The ruction over NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem illustrates the point.

The left has talked itself into believing that Trump’s alleged appeals to white racism were what put him over the top.

More astute psephologists have pointed out that the actual difference was made by people in industrial states who previously had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but switched to Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Hard to attribute those decisions to white racism.

Nevertheless, the left now interprets all of Trump’s actions through the prism of perceived appeals to white racism. If Trump were to tweet, “It’s a lovely day in Washington,” the left would denounce it as a dog whistle to white supremacists.

Which brings us to the NFL ruction. Players began kneeling during the national anthem reportedly to protest what they regard as racial injustice in the United States. Trump denounced them in Trumpian fashion.

According to the left, since the players were protesting racial injustice, Trump was endorsing racial injustice by criticizing them. There goes that dog whistle!

To most Americans, that’s nuts.

Well, yes. But as Bill Whittle likes to say, if Republicans didn’t have Democrats to run against, they’d lose every time.