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At Amazon, Today's Deals. New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

And especially, Nectar King Mattress + 2 Free Pillows - Gel Memory Foam - CertiPUR-US Certified - 180 Night Home Trial - Forever Warranty.

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More, Eddie Bauer Men's CirrusLite Down Jacket.

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Still more, Great and British Knitwear Men's Lambswool Plain V Neck Sweater Made In Scotland.

And, Viper Shot King Regulation Bristle Steel Tip Dartboard Set with Staple-Free Bullseye, Galvanized Metal Radial Spider Wire; High-Grade Compressed Sisal Board with Rotating Number Ring for Extending Life, Includes 6 Steel Tip Darts.

BONUS: David Harsanyi, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun.

Women's March Founder Slams Group's Leadership, Calls for Resignations

A pretty big development on the left, with some doubling-down among the so-called women's march "leadership."

At the Times of Israel, "Linda Sarsour rapped for appearing to accuse US Jews of dual loyalty to Israel."

And on Twitter:

This is a must-read for everyone, but especially anyone who ever supported the toxic leadership at the head of the Women’s March, and was duped into financing it with their hard earned money https://t.co/g9B4vSSpSj

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) November 19, 2018

Teresa Shook, the Women's March founder who literally created its event page on Facebook, calls for the March organizers to step down over having "allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform": https://t.co/PXvdt9IJVx pic.twitter.com/FnQUcMKco1

— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) November 19, 2018

Women’s March Founder Calls for Current Co-Chairs to Step Down Citing Their Embrace of Anti-Semitism and Racism https://t.co/7BIHDHLY31

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) November 19, 2018

The Progressive Synopticon

From VDH, at American Greatness:

The Progressive Synopticon https://t.co/dXWPVIhRBl

— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) November 19, 2018

Sarah Silverman Checks Herself in the Mirror

At Drunken Stepfather, "Sarah Silverman Topless of the Day."

Also here, "Sarah Silverman Nude Scene."

AnnaLynne McCord in Tank-Top Underwear

I hate calling them "wife beaters," since I wear tank-top t-shirts and I don't beat my wife, lol.

But this is nice, at Taxi Drive, "Anna-Lynne McCord in Wife Beater."

Today's Deals

At Amazon, New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

And see, ECOVACS DEEBOT N79S Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Max Power Suction, Alexa Connectivity, App Controls, Self-Charging for Hard Surface Floors & Thin Carpets.

Also, Greenworks 20-Inch 13 Amp Corded Snow Thrower 2600502.

More, Skywalker Trampolines 15-Foot Jump N’ Dunk Trampoline with Enclosure Net – Added Safety Features – Meets or Exceeds ASTM – Made to Last – Basketball Trampoline.

Plus, Gemmy 36707 Airblown Nativity Scene Christmas Inflatable, and Gemmy 39127-32 Deluxe Airblown Movie Screen Inflatable with Storage Bag, 144" Screen 12 FT TALL x 11.5 WIDE.

Still more, The North Face Men's McMurdo Parka III.

And, KIND Bars, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, Gluten Free, 1.4 Ounce Bars, 12 Count.

More, Black Rifle Coffee Company JB Just Black Coffee Rounds for Single Serve Brewing Machines (32 Count) dark Roast Coffee Pods Cups.

BONUS: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge: A Novel.

The Premature Death of the Novel

This is interesting, particularly since I've been reading so many novels this year.

At Quillette, "The Novel Isn't Dead — Please Stop Writing Eulogies":

Many novelists find it harder to make a living today compared to just a decade ago, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to monetize true writing talent with crowdfunding tools, writes @GabrielScorgie. https://t.co/rF3os7t3Pi

— Quillette (@QuilletteM) November 14, 2018

The 69th National Book Awards Ceremony will take place this Wednesday in New York City. Nominees for the Fiction award include Brandon Hobson’s novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend—all excellent and acclaimed specimens of a literary genre that English novelist J. B. Priestley had called a “decaying literary form” even before Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm won the inaugural National Book Award for Fiction back in 1950.

Two decades later, postmodernist American author John Barth argued in The Literature of Exhaustion that the novel may have “by this hour of the world just about shot its bolt.” He won a National Book Award six years later for Chimera. More recently, Zadie Smith discussed her “novel nausea” while paraphrasing David Shields’ description of the crafted novel, “with its neat design and completist attitude,” as being “dull and generic.” Her most recent novel, Swing Time, made last year’s National Book Award longlist.

None of these obituarists seem to agree on the novel’s hour of death. According to veteran The New York Times writer Doreen Carvajal, the novel died in the 1980s, when books started to be valued less on their literary content and more on their sales. And yet over at The Guardian, Robert McCrum claimed a few years ago that the 1980s ushered in a golden age for writers and publishers alike. Meanwhile, Will Self, author of 11 books and five collections of short stories, claims the novel has been in a state of decay since the beginning of the 20th century, and is “absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony.”

While it is hard to argue with grand, subjective generalizations about the state of the novel, some objective facts are known: It is true that many novelists find it harder to make a living today compared to just a decade ago. A study done by the Authors Guild in the United States found that from 2009 to 2015, the average reported income of full-time authors decreased by 30%. Self-described part-time authors had their income decrease by 38% over the same period. However, this trend doesn’t seem to be affecting the best-selling literary novelists. Colson Whitehead sold 825,000 copies of The Underground Railroad. Emma Healey sold 360,000 copies of Elizabeth is Missing. Kate Atkinson sold 187,000 copies of A God in Ruins. These are strong numbers for literary fiction.

It is the “midlist” writer—the novelist who dedicates years of her life to writing a book that will sell perhaps 15,000 copies from Amazon and the deep recesses of Barnes & Noble—who is seeing her income disappear. Midlist writers frequently are having their manuscripts either rejected outright or accepted with a small advance. Rupert Thomson, a midlist author of over 10 novels, reports that an editor at Faber & Faber told him that he’d love to publish Thomson’s new work, but can no longer afford to offer respectable compensation. When Thomson asked what the editor could offer, he was presented with an amount so tiny that, by the author’s report, “I went home and sat at the kitchen table and drew up a balance-sheet. I thought: I’m going to have to change the way I live.”

Broadly speaking, there are two reasons commonly cited for the decline in sales and income. The first is what author Douglas Preston calls “the censorship of the marketplace”: Since midlist writers are no longer given advances large enough to survive on, many great books are simply never written in the first place because would-be authors are too busy working full-time jobs...

Teenage Juul Addiction

The F.D.A. was going to ban over-the counter sales, but stepped back after the outcry, apparently.

They're definitely addictive.

This is a great report, at NYT, "A Teenager, a Juul and Nicotine Addiction."

E-cigarettes may help tobacco smokers quit. But the alluring devices can swiftly induce a nicotine habit in teenagers who never smoked. This is the tale of one person’s struggle. https://t.co/NBLtSIS7pT

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 16, 2018

Why Trump is Right on California Wildfires

At FrontPage Magazine, "How “Green Policies” Are Burning the Golden State to a Crisp."

"Governor Jerry Brown would like to shift blame from faulty looney left-wing forest management policies to blaming global warming."

Pray for #CampFire victims. 🙏🏼https://t.co/QaQF55kcNW pic.twitter.com/IseAFZpURO

— Linda Suhler, PhD (@LindaSuhler) November 14, 2018

New Sophie Mudd Photos

At Hollywood Tuna, "Sophie Mudd’s Breasts Are the 8th Wonder of the World."

Sophie Mudd’s Breasts Are the 8th Wonder of The World https://t.co/4iQwBW1wnT

— Hollywood Tuna (@HollywoodTuna1) September 6, 2018

Vaping Babes

At Drunken Stepfather, "VAPING BABES OF THE DAY."

The Paradise Fire Nightmare

A spark by spark account of the Paradise fire.

It's like the apocalypse, man.

At LAT, "California fire: What started as a tiny brush fire became the state’s deadliest wildfire. Here’s how."

This minute-by-minute account of how Paradise burned is so harrowing that I couldn’t read it in one sitting. https://t.co/dnbbcPS8Zn

— Laura J. Nelson 🦅 (@laura_nelson) November 18, 2018

Daniel Flynn, Cult City

At Amazon, Daniel Flynn, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.

Orange County Goes Blue

My congresswoman, Mimi Walters, was ahead on election night, but the late ballot counting saw her slip behind and she's toast.

The Democrats swept all the so-called toss-up congressional districts in the county, plus a couple of other races that pundits had been watching. Republicans haven't been relevant in California for a long time, and while Arnold Schwarzenegger was Republican, he wasn't conservative. It's a blue, far-left California nowadays and I don't know what it going to take to swing it back the other way.

At LAT, "Orange County goes blue, as Democrats complete historic sweep of its seven congressional seats."

And, "Going, going ... with midterm wipeout, California Republican Party drifts closer to irrelevance":

For a party in free fall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that it's possible to plunge even further. https://t.co/kvKH2tl3nl

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 18, 2018

For a party in free fall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that it's possible to plunge even further.

The GOP not only lost every statewide office in the midterm election — again, in blowout fashion — but Democrats reestablished their supermajority in Sacramento, allowing them to legislate however they see fit.

After major defeats in Orange County and the Central Valley, two longtime strongholds, Republicans will have a significantly smaller footprint on Capitol Hill. (Democrats hold both Senate seats.) The GOP won’t even have enough lawmakers in California’s 53-member House delegation to field a nine-person softball team.

“It’s dead,” Mike Madrid, a former political director of the California Republican Party, said of the state GOP. “It exists in small regional pockets, where there are enough white, non-college-educated working-class communities for there to be a Republican Party. But that’s not much.”

Other states tilt lopsidedly in favor of one party or the other. But never before has a state with California’s huge populace and enormous import — socially, culturally, economically — been so dominated by a single political party. The implications will take years to fully comprehend.

Jim Brulte, chairman of the California GOP, professed not to worry. He said the party has legislative leaders “whose job it is to give voice to Republicans in the state capital.” Also, he went on, substantial numbers in the U.S. House and Senate, where the GOP holds the majority, will speak for Republicans in Washington as well.

The leader of House Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, hails from Bakersfield and enjoys a strong relationship with President Trump, which should help the state in its dealings with the administration. (If, as expected, San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi is elected speaker, she would also be well positioned to protect California’s interests.)

Still, many observers — not all of them dispirited Republicans — expressed concern about the effects of such thorough Democratic domination, both in terms of policy and, more broadly, faith in the state’s political system...

Yeah, "faith" in the system, of which there's none if you're conservative.

But keep reading.

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

The winner from last night's National Book Awards ceremony, Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.

Myla Dalbesio in the Middle of the Sea (VIDEO)

Hopefully, Sports Illustrated will keep the Rule 5 (babe-blogging) flame alive.

Victoria's Secret Chief Executive Jan Singer to Step Down

I guess Victoria's Secret is having problems, big problems.

At Quartz, "Victoria’s Secret’s CEO exits in the latest blow to the once-dominant lingerie brand":

Victoria’s Secret’s CEO exits in the latest blow to the once-dominant lingerie brand https://t.co/VG2Ix38MHI

— Quartz (@qz) November 14, 2018

The CEO of the lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret, Jan Singer, will leave her role at the company, owned by L Brands, after only two years, Bloomberg reports—the latest blow to a brand that has fallen far from the days when it held a near-monopoly on the bra market (pdf).

Singer, the former head of Spanx, was responsible for VS’s $4 billion lingerie business, which has taken a massive downturn in the past several years. And her departure—just a week after VS’s annual extravaganza of a fashion show got withering reviews—is only the latest sign of the company’s decline.

Most recently, a tone-deaf interview with the architects of the annual ogle-fest in Vogue last week served to showcase just how out of touch the brand has become. Edward Razek, chief marketing officer of L Brands, was roundly criticized on social media for his comments, many of which were defensive explanations for the show’s lack of diversity. Razek’s remarks about casting transgender models (referring to them as “transsexuals,” an antiquated phrase regarded as a slur) was especially crude:

“Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show? No. No, I don’t think we should,” Razek is quoted as saying. “Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.”

Razek later issued a meek apology via Victoria’s Secret Twitter account. But his message was clear: Transgender models—alongside any woman who doesn’t fit the brand’s narrow definition of bombshell beauty—does not belong in the “fantasy” that he and the show’s co-curator, VS executive Monica Mitro, want the brand to represent.

In his suggestion that the brand’s sex-kittenish aesthetic is working, the marketing chief seems to be indulging in his own fantasy, and missing a crucial fact: Victoria’s Secret is failing. As new, body-positive women’s underwear brands eat its lunch, investors have continued to abandon its parent company, L Brands, causing its stock to swan-dive—72% over three years and 43% in 2018 alone...

And everybody's hatin' on the VS fashion show, it turns out, moaning about how "out of touch the brand still is."

Right.

Mandatory intercourse with transsexuals coming soon. (*Eye roll.*)

Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes Mulls Retirement

Heh.

Serves her right.

At Instapundit, "THE DEMOCRATS MUST HAVE TOLD HER THEY COULDN’T PROTECT HER ANYMORE."

Dana Loesch: 'Law-Abiding People Should Not Always Be Paying the Price for the Actions of Criminals...' (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Dana, on Fox and Friends the other day:

President Trump Has Been Largely Absent Since Election Day

There's a little cottage industry of these "post-midterms blues" stories.

(See for example, Vanity Fair, via Memeorandum, "“Insanity,” “Furious,” “On His Own”: Trump's Post-Midterms Blues Are Vexing His Staff and Roiling the White House.")

And at LAT, "Trump, stung by midterms and nervous about Mueller, retreats from traditional presidential duties":

For weeks this fall, an ebullient President Trump traveled relentlessly to hold raise-the-rafters campaign rallies — sometimes three a day — in states where his presence was likely to help Republicans on the ballot.

But his mood apparently has changed as he has taken measure of the electoral backlash that voters delivered Nov. 6. With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment, according to multiple administration sources.

Behind the scenes, they say, the president has lashed out at several aides, from junior press assistants to senior officials. “He’s furious,” said one administration official. “Most staffers are trying to avoid him.”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, painted a picture of a brooding president “trying to decide who to blame” for Republicans’ election losses, even as he publicly and implausibly continues to claim victory.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who are close allies, “seem to be on their way out,” the official said, noting recent leaks on the subject. The official cautioned, however, that personnel decisions are never final until Trump himself tweets out the news — often just after the former reality TV star who’s famous for saying “You’re fired!” has directed Kelly to so inform the individual.

And, according to a source outside the White House who has spoken recently with the president, last week’s Wall Street Journal report confirming Trump’s central role during the 2016 campaign in quietly arranging payoffs for two women alleging affairs with him seemed to put him in an even worse mood.

Publicly, Trump has been increasingly absent in recent days — except on Twitter. He has canceled travel plans and dispatched Cabinet officials and aides to events in his place — including sending Vice President Mike Pence to Asia for the annual summits there in November that past presidents nearly always attended.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was in Washington on Tuesday and met with Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, but not the president...

More.