MICROSOFT CLAIM: Russian hackers are exploiting Windows flaw exposed by Google.

BUT OF COURSE: The Story of Obama’s Ransom Payment to Iran Gets Worse.

The president was returning $400 million in Iran’s “Foreign Military Sales” (FMS) account with the Pentagon, plus $1.3 billion in interest, but he failed to mention that in 1981, when Iran filed its claim before the Claims Tribunal at The Hague, the U.S. had responded with a counterclaim for $817 million for Iran’s violations of its obligations under the FMS program. In 2016, with both the claim and the counterclaim still pending, it was possible that Iran owed billions of dollars to the U.S., not the reverse.

Nor did the president mention the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and stipulating that Iran’s FMS account could not be refunded until court judgments held by the U.S. government against Iran for damages from terrorist acts against American citizens were resolved to America’s satisfaction. Those judgments, including interest accumulated between 2001 and 2016, totaled about $1 billion. The president did not explain how, under the 2000 law, with those judgments still outstanding, he could pay Iran anything at all.

Because he had a pen and a phone, and mostly because he wanted to.

Read the whole thing, which exposes the Obama Administration’s foreign policy for the criminal and anti-American enterprise it’s always been.

POLITICO: Hill Republicans raring to investigate Clinton from Day One.

If the GOP wins either or both chambers of Congress next week, and Clinton takes the White House, she’s likely to come under investigation by Capitol Hill from Day One, or possibly before she’s even sworn in. FBI Director James Comey’s recent decision to revisit the probe of her email setup, and an assortment of Justice sources who’ve leaked to the press since Friday, have armed GOP lawmakers with more than enough ammunition to rev up their own investigations, say Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

The dynamic could sour relations between Clinton and Capitol Hill from the get-go, dousing any hope of even a brief honeymoon for Clinton should she defeat Donald Trump next week.

Why should a full-court investigation be contingent on her winning?

PROTEST: Leader of Oregon standoff vows to “continue to stand”

Ammon Bundy told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a phone call from the Multnomah County Detention Center on Monday that it was their duty to stand.

“We did it peacefully,” Bundy said. “We did it legally, and the jury’s verdicts confirmed that.”

Bundy said the trial ended in “another example of the government not following the law” when U.S. marshals arrested his attorney for challenging the judge’s order to keep him in custody.

Bundy remains in jail because he still faces charges in the 2014 standoff at his father’s Nevada ranch. He said he had expected to be transferred to Nevada on Tuesday with brother Ryan Bundy, but U.S. marshals in Las Vegas would not comment about the move.

Ornery juries are vital to the health of a republic.

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: Donald Trump Can’t Merely Be Defeated—He and His Deplorables Must Be Crushed.

Will Dean, who bills himself as a comic, suffer any consequences for his vile, eliminationist rhetoric?

ALL LIVES MATTER: 2 police officers killed in ‘ambush’ attacks.

Police from Urbandale and Des Moines departments responded to a report of gunfire at the intersection of 70th Street and Aurora Avenue at about 1:06 a.m.

The first officers arriving on the scene found an Urbandale officer shot. The officer, whose name has not been released, died, said Des Moines Police Sgt. Paul Parizek in a news release.

At about 1:26 a.m., a Des Moines police officer was shot and killed near the intersection of Merle Hay Road and Sheridan Drive while responding to the scene where the Urbandale officer was shot.

Both officers were gunned down in their patrol cars.

Good lord.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): They’ve captured a suspect, who doesn’t look much like a Black Lives Matter activist.

POSTMODERN URBANISM: Venezuelan Government Tells City Residents to Grow Their Own Food.

Must be more of that bad luck.

AGING: Italy fears for Colosseum as ‘cracks get bigger’ after each quake.

That’s still not bad for a building completed 1,936 years ago.

JOHN SCHINDLER: McCarthyism 2.0 Has Infected the Democrats.

It’s time now to admit that Mitt Romney was right and Barack Obama was wrong. The president’s “flexibility” with Russia has meant outsourcing America’s Middle East policy to the Kremlin, while giving Moscow a free hand to steal Crimea and invade Ukraine, plus intimidate Eastern Europe with nuclear saber-rattling. Calling all this a needless geopolitical disaster is charitable.

Nevertheless, four years on, the very same people who assailed Romney’s realism about Russia are hard at work detecting Kremlin plots everywhere, trying to steal the presidential election from Hillary Clinton. Somehow, Vladimir Putin has mysteriously transformed from being a guy we can deal with, no sort of threat, to the devilish figure secretly tearing America apart. What on earth is going on here?

We know exactly what’s going on here: An election the Democrats are desperate enough to say anything or do anything to win.

2016, MAN.

Washington Post-ABC Tracking poll finds presidential race tied, as Trump opens up an 8-point edge on honesty

— Laura Walker (@LauraWalkerKC) November 2, 2016

It was just two weeks ago that Clinton was leading on which candidate was more trustworthy — anything can happen.

2016, MAN: Patient burned by mid-surgery explosion when laser ignites fart.

TAKING A LOAD OFF: Trump Supporter Charged With Dumping Manure at Ohio Democratic Party HQ Speaks Out.

IF YOU LIKE YOUR DOCTOR, TOUGH: Number of doctors participating in Obamacare plummets nearly 20%.

GOTV: Confidence Even as Hillary Clinton’s Momentum Slows.

Mrs. Clinton’s troubles still have not altered the overwhelming difficulties faced by Republicans running in states that Mr. Trump is likely to lose. And Republicans in some of these races have quietly started to take steps to win with the help of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters.

Late last week, Pennsylvania Republicans updated their scripts for volunteer phone callers and canvassers to identify, and ultimately turn out, voters who are supporting Senator Patrick J. Toomey — but who also plan to back Mrs. Clinton.

Triage — giving up on Trump for the possibility of saving Toomey.

Pennsylvania looks to remain the GOP’s will-o’-the-wisp.

BUYER’S REMORSE: States Where You Can Change Your Early Vote.

Early voting is up there with electronic voting on the list of things democracies do to corrupt themselves.

YOU DON’T SAY. ‘We’re not in perfect control’: U.S. plans operation against Islamic State in Syria despite obstacles.

The Obama administration is racing to settle questions that could scuttle a planned offensive against the Islamic State in the Syrian city of Raqqa that Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has said will begin “within weeks . . . and not many weeks.”

Senior administration officials have attributed the newly described urgency to Raqqa’s symbolic role as the “capital of the caliphate” claimed by the militants and intelligence indicating that it is the center of Islamic State planning for terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

But the officials acknowledged a wealth of problems that could derail the offensive, including the need to gather and train additional Syrian forces. More ominously, they cite the explosive dynamics between two allies: Turkey and Syrian Kurdish fighters, who form the bulk of the existing offensive force.

There’s also the little matter of Russia’s no-fly zone of Syrian airspace.

THE PURGE GOES ON: Turkish PM says has no regard for Europe’s ‘red line’ on press freedom.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: John Podesta’s Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ’s Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails.

THAT SOUNDS SEXIST: Clinton camp: The cake’s already baked.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Democrats Asked for This.

Clinton effectively locked up the nomination in June and wasn’t cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the FBI until July. What if she had been indicted? Would Democrats have run her anyway? Would they have substituted in a 74-year-old socialist who had lost the nomination battle, or someone else who hadn’t even run? Any of these circumstances would have been unprecedented, but Democrats risked it

They did it, in part, because they could never bring themselves to fully acknowledge the seriousness of the e-mail scandal and, relatedly, the ethical miasma around the Clinton Foundation. They considered it all another desperate trick of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

It isn’t just what Democrats risked for their party, but for the country.

THOMAS FRANK: “WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS AMERICA?” Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.

With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.

It’s nice of Frank to finally notice that what goes on in Washington is much worse than, say, Kansas.

AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: Spooked by Russia, Tiny Estonia Trains a Nation of Insurgents.

“We just have to stay alive,” Ms. Barnabas said of the main idea behind the Jarva District Patrol Competition, a 24-hour test of the skills useful for partisans, or insurgents, to fight an occupying army, and an improbably popular form of what is called “military sport” in Estonia.

The competitions, held nearly every weekend, are called war games, but are not intended as fun. The Estonian Defense League, which organizes the events, requires its 25,400 volunteers to turn out occasionally for weekend training sessions that have taken on a serious hue since Russia’s incursions in Ukraine two years ago raised fears of a similar thrust by Moscow into the Baltic States.

Estonia, a NATO member with a population of 1.3 million people and a standing army of about 6,000, would not stand a chance in a conventional war with Russia. But two armies fighting on an open field is not Estonia’s plan, and was not even before Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said European members of NATO should not count on American support unless they pay more alliance costs.

Since the Ukraine war, Estonia has stepped up training for members of the Estonian Defense League, teaching them how to become insurgents, right down to the making of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s, the weapons that plagued the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another response to tensions with Russia is the expansion of a program encouraging Estonians to keep firearms in their homes.

Forget the gratuitous swipe at Donald Trump, and marvel instead at reporter Andrew E. Kramer’s estimation of Estonians’ enthusiasm for their own national defense as “improbably popular.”

JAYVEE: Terrorists Behind String of Hotel Attacks Pledge Allegiance to ISIS.

LYING LIAR WHO LIES: Huma’s email testimony could haunt her as FBI renews probe.

FBI Director James Comey stressed in his letter to Congress Friday that investigators don’t know how significant the new emails may be. But even if they don’t implicate the Democratic presidential nominee, their mere existence could call into question testimony Abedin gave months ago about the email system.

FBI records reflect that she told investigators “that she lost most of her old emails as a result of the transition.”

During a June 28, 2016 deposition with the conservative Judicial Watch, Abedin also swore she looked for and turned over all devices she thought contained government work to the State Department.

“I looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department work on it and returned – returned – gave them to my attorneys for them to review for all relevant documents,” Abedin said. “And gave them devices and paper.”

Then what were 650,000 emails doing on a computer shared with her husband?

AN ARMY OF NONE: Are some of the Army’s best soldiers being forced out?

The Army is in a talent crisis. Its most recent study on the issue, in 2010, found only 6 percent of Army officers thought the service did a good job of retaining its best leaders.

The Army fights to keep private industry from leeching its best soldiers. With better pay, more comprehensive benefits and a stable location, the private sector seems tempting compared to military life.

But former Army officials and experts who spoke to Federal News Radio as part of our special report: The Army is Shortchanging its Future Force say the service is forcing out some of its best leaders even without the appeal of a private sector job luring them away.

The reports also says that “as the Army continues the drawdown of its total force from 1.3 million to 980,000, experts fear the service will push out the wrong people at an even faster rate.”

Retaining good soldiers is difficult even with good policy, and Washington and the Pentagon aren’t even getting the policy right.