Bella Thorne Busts Out

At the Sun U.K., "HELLS BELLS: Bella Thorne bursts out of her bikini top and boasts ‘yes I know my boobs are big’Danielle Cinone: BELLA Thorne boasted "yes I know my boobs are big" as she shared saucy snaps with her assets nearly bursting out of her bikini top..."

Bella Thorne bursts out of her bikini top and boasts ‘yes I know my boobs are big’ https://t.co/BLkNPYonn9

— The Sun (@TheSun) December 17, 2019

Kelly Brook

She's still going, bigger than ever, apparently.

At the Sun U.K., "BABE HAS A SWIM Kelly Brook hogs the limelight as she swims with a pig in a plunging red swimsuit to celebrate her birthday in Bahamas."

Kelly Brook hogs the limelight with a plunging red swimsuit in the Bahamas https://t.co/vJbuZy9znG

— The Sun Showbiz (@TheSunShowbiz) November 27, 2019

After General Election, Britain's Social Democracy on the Way Out

Following-up, "Labour's Stunning Shellacking."

From Matt Seaton, at the New York Review, "The Strange Death of Social-Democratic England":

Margaret Thatcher persuaded many Britons that there was “no such thing as society.” Her heirs in the Conservative Party cast the EU as the new nanny state. Matt Seaton on what’s left of British social democracy: https://t.co/EEmw0s0r2q

— The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) December 13, 2019

The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’ point of view—than the one May repeatedly failed to get past Parliament. Nevertheless, the 2019 general election will go down as the moment British voters in effect voted a resounding “yes” in a de facto second referendum on Brexit and gave Boris Johnson a mandate to make his deal law and attempt to meet the latest Brexit deadline (January 31, 2020).

Far-reaching though the effects of this punctuation mark in the Brexit story will be, the 2019 general election may change the landscape of British politics and the fabric of its society in even more profound and decisive ways.

Brexit’s compromise over the status of Northern Ireland, half-in and half-out of Europe, is an unstable constitutional non-settlement that risks the fragile peace that’s held there since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, while accelerating the hopes of some for a United Ireland. But the future of the Union faces a still more pressing challenge from renewed calls for a referendum on independence for Scotland, where a large majority of voters favor continued membership in Europe. The specter of “the breakup of Britain” that has long haunted the United Kingdom may materialize at last—just at the moment when English nationalists are celebrating their Brexit victory.

So much for the political landscape; what of the social fabric? A fourth successive defeat for the Labour Party, with its most ambitious anti-austerity program yet, and an outright win for a Conservative Party that has purged its moderates have sharpened dividing lines, squeezed the liberal center, and broken consensus into polarity. A minority of Britons—roughly a third, who will now see themselves as effectively disenfranchised—voted for a radical expansion of the public sector, a great leap forward toward a socialist Britain. But the plurality chose a party that, while promising more spending, has actually recomposed itself around a reanimated Thatcherite vision of exclusionary, anti-egalitarian, moralizing social Darwinism. Some part of the Tory electoral coalition might have more welfare-chauvinist reflexes, but the greater part of it distrusts the state, resents the taxation that pays for it, and would like to shrink both.

What is at stake after this election, then—in a Britain that might soon mean, to all intents and purposes, England & Wales—is the future of what has made it a reasonably civilized country since 1945: social democracy...

Interesting.

Butthurt, but interesting.

Keep reading.

Charlotte McKinney New Bikini Photos

At Taxi Driver, "Charlotte McKinney Fills Out her Black Bikini Perfectly."

Charlotte McKinney Fills Out her Black Bikini Perfectly - https://t.co/0nlQUI4AYM - pic.twitter.com/oZ5liz1vxx

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) December 9, 2019

Jessica Bartlett

At Celeb Jihad, "JESSICA BARTLETT HUGE TITS AND ASS COLLECTION."

And on Instagram.

Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

Leftists have freaked out after President Trump defended himself against Speaker Pelosi's impeachment circus.

For example, at New York Magazine, via Memeorandum, "Trump Writes Insane Letter to Pelosi Showing Why He's Unfit for Office," and "It is hard to capture how bizarre and frightening Trump's letter to Pelosi is."

Cut through the fog. Read it yourself.

Via Mollie:

Media coverage of ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩’s letter to Pelosi is unhinged. Really worth reading actual letter instead of mediated interpretation from emotional and frustrated journalists. https://t.co/LZ60A5Fs45

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) December 18, 2019

What the New Socialists Want More Than Anything is to Punish the Rich

Radical leftists are looking to fulfill Marx's vision in the 21st century: Expropriate the expropriators!

Here's Jerry Z. Muller, at Foreign Affairs, "The Neosocialist Delusion: Wealth Is Not the Problem":

The neosocialists are descended from Rousseau. They downplay poverty and fetishize equality, focus on wealth distribution rather than wealth creation, and seem to care as much about lowering those at the top as raising those at the bottom.

The movement’s signature policy proposal is a wealth tax, an annual levy on household assets. Touted by economists such as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, all associated with the Paris School of Economics, the concept has been embraced by both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, U.S. senators from Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively, who are running for the Democratic presidential nomination. At first, Warren advocated a two percent tax on households worth more than $50 million and a three percent tax on billionaires. Later, pressed on how she would pay for her proposed universal health insurance, she doubled the billionaire tax to six percent. Sanders’s plan starts at taxing $16 million in assets at one percent and tops out at an eight percent tax for assets exceeding $10 billion.

The radicalism of this approach is often underestimated. Many people conflate wealth taxes with higher income taxes or see them as mere extensions of a similar concept. But wealth taxes are fundamentally different instruments with much broader ramifications for economic dynamism and individual liberty.

The main effect of a wealth tax would be to discourage wealthy individuals from holding demonstrable assets. Any individual or household within shouting distance of the threshold would have to get its assets valued annually, imposing costs and creating a permanent jobs program for tax lawyers and accountants, whose chief responsibility would be to figure out ways around the law, including moving assets abroad.

A wealth tax would dramatically curtail private investment. The higher people rise on the economic ladder, the more of their resources go to investment instead of consumption. Those investments, in turn, often fuel innovative, risky ventures, which get funded in the hopes that they will eventually produce still greater gains. A wealth tax would upend the incentive structure for rich people, causing many to stop funding productive economic activity and focus instead on reducing their tax exposure and hiding their assets.

Warren contends that calculating one’s wealth tax would be as easy as calculating one’s property tax, but that is ridiculous. Take a firm that has a market value but no income—a frequent situation for startups but also common for established firms in various situations, such as a turnaround. Rich investors in such firms would have to sell their shares to pay the wealth tax or force the companies to disburse cash rather than invest in the future. Either way, the tax would discourage investment, reduce innovation, and encourage short-term thinking.

A wealth tax, finally, would force everyone whose assets were near its minimal threshold to give the government a full accounting of all those assets every year: homes, furniture, vehicles, heirlooms, bank accounts, investments and liabilities, and more. The result would be a huge expansion of the reach of government into citizens’ lives, a corresponding reduction in citizens’ privacy, and the accumulation and storage of vast amounts of highly sensitive data with few safeguards to prevent their misuse.

It is not only successful individuals who draw the neosocialists’ ire; it is also successful companies. If a firm grows big enough to become famous, it becomes a potential target of vilification; if it grows too big, it becomes a target for destruction. Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, accordingly, have all pledged to break up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Here they can draw on a venerable antimonopoly tradition in American political culture from the trustbusters on, rooted in the assumption that the further away you move from Smith’s ideal of perfect competition among many small firms, the more the public is hurt. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, however, argued that Smith had greatly underestimated both the dynamism of capitalism and the role of entrepreneurs in driving it. Capitalism’s manifold benefits didn’t just happen; they were created, by a relatively small group of people responsible for introducing new products, services, and business methods. Entrepreneurs sought the big profits associated with temporary monopolies and so were driven to create whole new industries they could dominate.

Large companies, Schumpeter realized, acted as engines of innovation, plowing back some of their profits into research and development and encouraging others to do the same in the hopes of becoming an acquisition target. He would have been delighted with Silicon Valley, viewing technology giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft as poster children for the enormous benefits to consumers that entrepreneurs generate.

Companies such as Amazon and Walmart, meanwhile, maintain their position through furious competition in service and price, contributing to the virtual elimination of inflation in the American economy. And yet it is precisely these dynamic, successful, customer-oriented companies that the neosocialists want to tax heavily, burden with regulations, and cut up for parts.

Still more.

Image Credit: The People's Cube, "Chiquita Khrushchev: 'We will bury you!'."

Jennifer Delacruz's Mid-Week Forecast

Well, it's not snowing outside at the moment, heh.

Not too bad, a week or so before Christmas.

Here's the fantastic Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Alan Dershowitz, The Case Against Impeaching Trump

At Amazon, Alan Dershowitz, The Case Against Impeaching Trump.

Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion

At Amazon, Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

Lisa Page Explains 'Insurance Policy' Texts (VIDEO)

At Newsweek, "LISA PAGE REGRETS PETER STRZOK TEXT MESSAGES, REBUKES TRUMP FOR MOCKING HER WITH 'VILE, SIMULATED SEX ACT' PERFORMANCE."

New Era of Cyberwar

Sue Halpern reviews Andy Greenberg,'s, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers, at the New York Review: 

yup. That’s where we are https://t.co/xrqv5Rkc53

— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) December 14, 2019

These Obama/Trump Voters Are Just Trump Voters Now

It's Alexi McCammond, at Axios:

"He's proven what he's promised over and over to us."
Some Obama/Trump swing voters here are firmly in Trump’s camp now — and they're sick of impeachment.

The 2+ hour convo revealed major warning signs for the Dem Party in a crucial swing county. @axios https://t.co/QUqBcNTVsG

— Alexi McCammond (@alexi) December 16, 2019

Lindsey Pelas Busting Out in Green

Wonderful.

Brightens things up for the holidays!

🤓 pic.twitter.com/k4LRDbaRr0

— Lindsey Pelas (@LindseyPelas) December 14, 2019

Mitch McConnell Rejects Charles Schumer’s Opening Offer on Impeachment Trial (VIDEO)

He's the Senate Minority Butthurt Leader, at Politico, "McConnell rejects Schumer’s opening offer on impeachment trial: “It is not the Senate’s job to leap into the breach and search desperately for ways to get to ‘guilty,’” McConnell says."

Nice Playmate Lady

Don't know who this is, but she's wild!

Iryna Ivanova?

See here, for example, or just scroll her feed wow!

Are you still focused on work today? ❤️ LINK IN BIO for more https://t.co/YMKf7oVX7Q pic.twitter.com/PjKWPChW9v

— playmateiryna (@IrynaIvanova) December 16, 2019

Jennifer Delacruz's Tuesday Forecast

He's the fabulous Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Mark 'Gator' Rogowski Gets Parole

He was a skate buddy of mine from back in the day. Dude committed a heinous murder.

At ABC News 10 San Diego:

Labour's Stunning Shellacking

It's a realignment. From Toby Young, at Quillette, "Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke — And Now It’s Broke":

“The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history.” https://t.co/O0QYq4RFFC

— Quillette (@Quillette) December 15, 2019

The crumbling of the ‘Red Wall’ is the big story of this election and some commentators are describing it as a “one off.” The conventional wisdom is that working class voters have “lent” their votes to the Conservatives and, barring an upset, will give them back next time round. It’s Brexit, supposedly, that has been the game-changer—an excuse leapt on by Corbyn’s outriders in the media, who are loathe to blame Labour’s defeat on their man.

If you look at the working class constituencies that turned blue, most of them voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a significant margin—Great Grimsby, for instance, an English sea port in Yorkshire, where Leave outpolled Remain by 71.45 to 28.55 per cent. Labour’s problem, according to this analysis, is that it didn’t commit to taking Britain out of the EU during the campaign but instead said it would negotiate a new exit deal and then hold a second referendum in which the public would be able to choose between that deal and Remain. This fudge may have been enough to keep graduates on side, but it alienated working class Leave voters in England’s rust belt.

This analysis doesn’t bear much scrutiny. To begin with, the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history. At its height, Labour managed to assemble a coalition of university-educated liberals in London and the South and low-income voters in Britain’s industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North—“between Hampstead and Hull,” as the saying goes. But mass immigration and globalization have driven a wedge between Labour’s middle class and working class supporters, as has Britain’s growing welfare bill and its membership of the European Union.

At the October election in 1974, 49 per cent of skilled workers (C2) and 57 per cent of semi-skilled and unskilled workers (DE) voted Labour; by 2010, those numbers had fallen to 29 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. Among middle class voters (ABC1), support for the Conservatives fell over the same time period from 56 per cent in 1974 to 39 per cent in 2010. In 1974, Labour enjoyed a 23-point lead among skilled working class voters (C2), but by 2010 the Conservatives had overtaken them in this demo to lead by eight points—a pattern repeated in 2017. Among graduates, by contrast, Labour led by 17 points in 2017, up from a two-point lead in 2015. (See this data table compiled by Ipsos MORI, a polling company.)

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit—there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services—not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain.

Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election was followed by a surge in party membership— from 193,754 at the end of 2014 to 388,103 by the end of 2015. But the activists he appeals to are predominantly middle class. According to internal Party data leaked to the Guardian, a disproportionate number of them are “high status city dwellers” who own their own homes.

A careful analysis of the policies set out in Labour’s latest manifesto reveals that the main beneficiaries of the party’s proposed increase in public expenditure—which the Conservatives costed at an eye-watering £1.2 trillion—would be its middle class supporters.

For instance, the party pledged to cut rail fares by 33 per cent and pay for it by slashing the money spent on roads. But only 11 per cent of Britain’s commuters travel by train compared to 68 per cent who drive—and the former tend to be more affluent than the latter. Corbyn also promised to abolish university tuition fees at a cost of £7.2 billion per annum, a deeply regressive policy which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, would benefit middle- and high-earning graduates with “very little” upside for those on low incomes.

It’s also worth noting that Corbyn’s interests and appearance—he’s a 70-year-old vegetarian with a fondness for train-drivers’ hats who has spent his life immersed in protest politics—strike many working class voters as “weird,” a word that kept coming up on the doorstep according to my fellow canvasser in Newcastle. He’s also presided over the invasion of his party by virulent anti-Semites and Labour is currently in the midst of an investigation by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thanks to his failure to deal with this. One of his supporters has already blamed the Jews for Labour’s defeat.

But Corbyn isn’t the main reason C2DE voters have turned away from Labour, any more than Brexit is. Rather, they’ve both exacerbated a trend that’s been underway for at least 45 years, which is the fracturing of the “Hampstead and Hull” coalition and the ebbing away of Labour’s working class support.

Another, related phenomenon that’s been overlooked is that these “topsy turvey” politics are hardly unique to Britain. Left-of-center parties in most parts of the Anglosphere, as well as other Western democracies, have seen the equivalent of their own ‘Red Walls’ collapsing. One of the reasons Scott Morrison’s Liberals confounded expectations to win the Australian election last May was because Bill Shorten’s Labour Party was so unpopular in traditional working class areas like Queensland, and support for socially democratic parties outside the large cities in Scandinavia has cratered over the past 15 years or so.

Thomas Piketty, the French Marxist, wrote a paper about this phenomenon last year entitled ‘Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict’ and it’s the subject of Capital and Ideology, his new book. His hypothesis is that politics in the US, Britain, and France—he confines his analysis to those three countries—is dominated by the struggle between two elite groups: the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right. He points out that left-wing parties in the US, Britain and France used to rely on ‘nativist’ voters to win elections—low education, low income—but since the 1970s have begun to attract more and more ‘globalist’ voters—high education, high income (with the exception of the top 10 per cent of income earners). The nativists, meanwhile, have drifted to the Right, forming a coalition with the business elite. He crunches the data to show that in the US, from the 1940s to the 1960s, the more educated people were, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Now, the opposite is true, with 70% of voters with masters degrees voting for Hilary in 2016. “The trend is virtually identical in all three countries,” he writes.

In Piketty’s view, the electoral preferences of the post-industrial working class—the precariat—is a kind of false consciousness, often engendered by populist snake-charmers like Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban. He’s intensely suspicious of the unholy alliance between super-rich “merchants” and the lumpen proletariat, and similar noises have been made about the levels of support Boris has managed to attract...

Kenneth Turan Reviews 'Richard Jewell'

An economical review, but positive, at LAT, "Review: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Richard Jewell’ illuminates a real-life nightmare."

Review: Clint Eastwood's ‘Richard Jewell’ illuminates a real-life nightmare https://t.co/poZVU4PZPF

— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) December 13, 2019