PROJECTION: Nobel Idiot Paul Krugman Worries Trump May ‘Assault’ Hillary During Debate.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND INFURIATE PEOPLE. Trump’s Wisconsin strategy: Burn it all down.

“There’s no question, anytime Donald Trump takes after Paul Ryan, it just makes the people in Wisconsin a little more angry at him,” said Brandon Scholz, a longtime GOP operative who runs a governmental and public affairs shop in Madison.

Trump has never led a poll in Wisconsin during the general election, according to RealClearPolitics, and a Marquette Law School poll last week found him trailing Clinton by 7 percentage points — a departure from signs in September that he was closing the gap with Clinton.

In southeastern Wisconsin, home to the Milwaukee suburbs and some of the state’s most populous, heavily Republican counties, Clinton led Trump by just 42 percent to 40 percent, according to that October poll. In three of those deep-red counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, known as the “WOW counties” — Trump led Clinton by only 39 to 37 percent.

“He doesn’t have a prayer if he can’t do well in those Republican counties, the WOW counties outside Milwaukee,” Scholz said. “Those are ground zero for Republicans. If you intend to … do well in Wisconsin, you’ve got to take those three counties with 70, 80 percent of the vote.”

It’s a sharp decline from Mitt Romney’s performance last cycle.

2016 isn’t going nearly as well as I’d hoped.

HE WHO CONTROLS THE PAST… Rosenberg Lies Never Cease.

Robert and Michael Meeropol (they took the surname of their adoptive parents), just 6 and 10 years old when their birth parents went to the electric chair, are now old men, and they have campaigned for decades to clear Julius and Ethel, the only people executed by the United States for espionage during the Cold War.

None can deny that their story is chock-filled with pathos. CBS has them explaining how they asked to see the electric chair where their parents were soon to die, then recounting how there wasn’t exactly a long line of volunteers to take in the orphans of traitors back in 1953.

Getting their father off the hook for his service to Stalin, including passing atomic secrets to Moscow that helped the Soviets get “the bomb” years before anybody in Washington thought they would, became all but impossible in the mid-1990s, when the National Security Agency declassified top secret intercepts that made it crystal-clear that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy.

Read the whole thing.

I’d just add that with a majority of Millennials approving of socialism, and a third of them convinced that George W. Bush killed more people than Stalin, that it may be only a matter of time before the traitorous Rosenbergs get the official rehabilitation they don’t deserve.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: US and Russia could ‘start Third World War over Syria conflict’, says Turkey.

Turkish deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said: “If this proxy war continues, after this, let me be clear, America and Russia will come to a point of war,” the Daily Mail reports.

He suggested the Syrian conflict could be the beginning of World War Three, saying it had put the world “on the brink of the beginning of a large regional or global war”.

Earlier this month a Russian newspaper warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing an “astonishingly risky game” in the Syrian conflict that could lead to a Third World War.

Popular tabloid, Moskovsky Komsomolets, ran an article that suggested hostilities in Syria could spark a “direct military confrontation” between the nations of a similar scale to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

There’s a reason “peace through fecklessness” isn’t a saying, and we’ve had eight years of fecklessness.

MARKETING: Vegas Gun Store Holds ‘Pre-Hillary’ Gun Sale.

Get on in there before the price gouging starts!

The Las Vegas gun store Westside Armory is predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in November, and it has a message for customers: Buy now, because things are going to get expensive.

In an advertisement over the weekend in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Westside Armory said it was holding a “Pre-Hillary Sale” on tactical rifles, warning of a price surge if the Democratic nominee wins the presidential election next month.

“Don’t wait!” the advertisement reads. “Prices will skyrocket after Crooked Hillary gets in.”

That’s probably true.

Read the whole thing, especially the Washington Post being all aghast.

I’d add that $699 isn’t a bad price for a Smith & Wesson M&P Sport II, although I got mine for $100 less. But I suspect that $599 isn’t coming back any time soon.

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Big Labor Unions Step Up Presidential-Election Spending.

According to the most recent campaign-finance filings, unions spent nearly $110 million on the elections from January 2015 through the end of August, a 38% jump from $78 million at the same point in the 2012 election, and nearly double their 2008 total during the same period.

Almost every large union is spending more than ever before seen in modern elections. The AFL-CIO has spent $11.4 million funding outside political groups thus far, up from $5 million at this point in the 2012 election, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The National Education Association has spent $14 million, up from $7.7 million.

The unions’ efforts to support Mrs. Clinton are particularly crucial as polling shows white working-class voters—who often belong to labor unions—are drawn to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign message.

Clinton needs the help because she’s a terrible candidate, who in the primaries was able to beat an aging and unknown Vermont socialist only by cheating.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The FBI’s Own Investigation Summary Proves Hillary Clinton Broke The Law.

“Classification is an art, not a science, and individuals with classification authority sometimes have different views,” a State Department spokesperson said today. No doubt this is true. So why did Kennedy wait until a criminal investigation was well underway to ask law enforcement to scrutinize that particular document at that particular time? Is it customary for undersecretaries of State to ask the FBI to alter the classifications of documents that just happen to protect political candidates at the center of a politically explosive investigations?

Did Kennedy — a man who owes his high position to the Clintons — engage in this conversation on his own? Was he asked to do it? For months, law enforcement had attempted to contact him, and he ignored their inquiries. Why, according to FBI documents, did Kennedy only reach out to make this request?

What’s even more curious is that FBI Director James Comey didn’t consider this event — or, for that matter, the litany of other actions Clinton’s lackeys took to protect her — as a sign that there was, at the very least, an intent to influence the investigation.

It seems likely that Comey was a part of the influence from an early date.

NEWS FROM THE VENEZUELAN SOCIALIST WORKERS’ PARADISE: With hospitals suffering a catastrophic lack of supplies, the country’s babies are dying at a rate higher than Syria’s.

Infant mortality is rising fast here, at a time when it is falling in almost every other part of the world, in one of the most alarming signals that Venezuela’s social and state structures are unraveling.

“I think it represents a very serious social problem, where the basic functions of governance are breaking down,” said Janet Currie, an economist and expert on infant mortality at Princeton University.

Venezuela’s overall infant mortality rate—defined as deaths within the first year of life—is currently 18.6 per 1,000 live births, according to the most recent government statistics. That is well beyond the upper range of 15.4 Unicef estimates for war-torn Syria.

Lots of bad luck going around there — unexpectedly.

CONGRESSMEN BURGESS, PRICE, ROE: Our diagnosis as doctors — ObamaCare is about to collapse.

Back in 2010 just before ObamaCare became law, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services forecast there would be 24.8 million individuals in the exchanges by 2016. The actual figure at the end of 2016 according to Avalere Health will be 10.1 million.

In short, the exchanges are failing. The plans available are too expensive and come with too few choices. Younger, healthier individuals have little interest in paying exorbitant premiums for insurance plans that come with $5,000 deductibles. The result has been an unbalanced insurance pool where insurers must charge ever-increasing premiums to continue offering coverage.

Predictably, as the risk pools worsen, premiums skyrocket and insurers withdraw.

That means it’s working.

WHEN THEY GO LOW, WE GO HIGH: White House spokesman: Trump ‘snorted his way through’ debates.

You stay classy, Josh Earnest.

TWITCHY: WikiLeaks-BUSTED Politico journo doubles down with this lame denial.

According to Glenn Thrush, it isn’t always nice to make Twitchy.

A POSSIBLE GAME-CHANGER FOR TRUMP: Has the Hillary Hack Happened?

Noah Rothman reports:

According to documents released by the FBI on Monday, it is possible that classified information on Clinton’s server was compromised by longtime family associate Sidney Blumenthal and that information could have found its way onto a Romanian server.

“The search uncovered hundreds of files that the witness believed to be from Sidney Blumenthal’s server on a server in Romania,” reported LawNewz’s Chris White, citing FBI documents. “These files included Microsoft Word, Excel, and other documents, but no emails. Blumenthal’s email account was breached by the Romanian hacker Guccifer.” The hacker “Guccifer” is believed by the U.S. intelligence community to be a construct created by Russian military intelligence.

According to the source who spoke with the FBI, the documents housed on a foreign server contained one “sensitive” file listing the names of potentially active Islamist insurgents in Libya. The FBI’s source said the email did not originate on Blumenthal’s end and “contained a reference to an IP address range that included the IP address of Clinton’s server.”

It would be poetic justice if it was Sidney Blumenthal, who has done more than almost anyone to enable the Clintons, ended up being the one to inadvertently bring down Hillary.

I’LL HAVE WHAT THE TRILLIONAIRE AT THE END OF THE BAR IS HAVING: The Bourbon So Exclusive That Even Billionaires Can’t Buy It.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, IT’S OLD NEWS ANYWAY, LET’S MOVE ON.

#PodestaEmails10
OH CHUCKY TODD: Clinton campaign set the terms of how much NBC could cover the Clinton Foundation. https://t.co/tqVDjpnyPR pic.twitter.com/qWi4D1V1Eo

— Jikary Jack (@JikaryJack) October 17, 2016

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Case for Trump.

Trump’s defeat would translate into continued political subversion of once disinterested federal agencies, from the FBI and Justice Department to the IRS and the EPA. It would ensure a liberal Supreme Court for the next 20 years — or more. Republicans would be lucky to hold the Senate. Obama’s unconstitutional executive overreach would be the model for Hillary’s second wave of pen-and-phone executive orders. If, in Obama fashion, the debt doubled again in eight years, we would be in hock $40 trillion after paying for Hillary’s even more grandiose entitlements of free college tuition, student-loan debt relief, and open borders. She has already talked of upping income and estate taxes on those far less wealthy than the Clintons and of putting coal miners out of work (“We are going to put a whole lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”) while promising more Solyndra-like ventures in failed crony capitalism.

The normalization of a politicized federal bureaucracy would be the most lasting — and damaging — legacy of nearly two decades of Obama-Clinton administration.

DON’T YOU LOVE FARCE? Target halts clown-mask sales amid creepy-clown hysteria.

SHOT: Hillary Told Goldman Sachs Fracking Was A ‘Gift’ In Paid Speeches.

CHASER: Clinton Doubles Down Against Fracking in Debate.

HANGOVER: Clinton says she has ‘both a public and a private position’ on Wall Street.

Which Hillary are we supposed to believe?

JUSTICE? Retired general charged with false statements in leak probe.

Retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright has been charged with making false statements during a federal investigation into a leak of classified information, the Justice Department announced Monday.

Cartwright falsely told investigators that he was not the source of classified information contained in a book by New York Times journalist David Sanger, according to charging documents unsealed by prosecutors.

Neither the book nor the classified subject is identified in court papers. But Sanger has written about a covert cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the use of a computer virus called Stuxnet to temporarily disable centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland announced the case on Monday.

What kind of unreasonable prosecutor would bring such a charge?

AND THE YEAR ISN’T OVER YET: 1,000 more people shot in Chicago compared with same time last year.

IT’S ON: Chelsea Clinton, Bernie Sanders to go to Arizona.

Related: “If the presidential race in Arizona is close, Native Americans could throw it to Clinton.”

More: “I think he’s going to lose Arizona,” said Matthew Benson, a Republican state operative and former senior aide to Gov. Jan Brewer. “Barring something unforeseen, Trump is going to lose Arizona, and you’re still not seeing the type of activity you’d expect to see if he expects to save it.”

If there’s anything to these stories, Trump could be in worse trouble than McCain was after he “suspended” his campaign to return to Washington to get publicly rolled by Pelosi, Reid, and Obama.

EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: 32 Percent of Millennials Who Believe George W. Bush Killed More People Than Stalin.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation released its first “Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Towards Socialism” Monday. The survey showed a distinct generation gap regarding beliefs about socialism and communism between older and younger Americans.

For example, 80 percent of baby boomers and 91 percent of elderly Americans believe that communism was and still is a problem in the world today, while just 55 percent of millennials say the same.

Just 37 percent of millennials had a “very unfavorable” view of communism, compared to 57 percent of Americans overall. Close to half (45 percent) of Americans aged 16 to 20 said they would vote for a socialist, and 21 percent would vote for a communist.

When asked their opinion of capitalism, 64 percent of Americans over the age of 65 said they viewed it favorably, compared to just 42 percent of millennials.

The survey also revealed a general lack of historical knowledge, especially among young adults. According to the report, one-third (32 percent) of millennials believed that more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.

We have a brand new Lost Generation without a shot being fired.

2016, MAN:

Scientists are testing "methane backpacks" on cows as a way to reduce emissions https://t.co/mi2Q0H68um pic.twitter.com/UHgSia1czt

— Bloomberg (@business) October 17, 2016

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Problem Is Not the Presidential Candidates.

We should always be on guard against presentism, but in this instance I do not hesitate to say that the upcoming presidential election is the most alarming in American history. I can make that statement with confidence because I do not believe the most disturbing aspect of the election is the choice of candidates – even though the two major party nominees present the worst choice the American people have faced in my lifetime (Eisenhower was president when I was born), and perhaps ever.

The reason this is such a frightening election is that the Constitution’s mechanisms for reining in or ousting a rogue president are in tatters.

Read the whole thing.

YOU STAY CLASSY, LIZ WARREN: Trump’s a ‘selfish little sleaze ball’

Speaking of selfish, Warren “got paid $350,000 to teach just one class at Harvard,” despite that school’s crushing tuition costs.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Japan May Ramp Up Missile Defense In Wake Of North Korea Rocket Tests.