FROM ANN ALTHOUSE, A WARNING: “If so, then Bannon serves his own ambition when he offers up material with which to take down Trump. That should be a reason to mistrust him, but if you hate Trump and want him destroyed, you welcome Bannon, the man you once loathed. Should liberals allow their anti-Trump passion to speed Bannon along? Maybe they think that Bannon is so ugly and ridiculous and obviously evil that he could never get very far if he decides to run for President, but it’s that kind of thinking that let Trump get so much traction that he could not be stopped.”

The Germans thought they were being smart when they put Lenin on that train, too.

THE AYATOLLAH REGIME CONFRONTS A NEW REVOLT.

HMM: Tories Don’t Want Second Brexit Vote, But Many in Labour Do.

The overwhelming majority of members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party don’t want there to be a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership, according to a survey published Thursday. For the other main U.K. parties, the opposite is true.

Just 14 percent of Conservatives favor holding a second vote that might reverse Brexit, according to the YouGov survey of political party members for Queen Mary University of London. By contrast, the proportions for the opposition Labour, Scottish National and Liberal Democrat parties are 78 percent, 87 percent and 91 percent respectively.

Interesting that Britain’s most statist parties all follow the European tradition of wanted to hold just enough votes to produce the desired result.

Also interesting is that the Bloomberg headline reads “Tories Don’t Want Second Brexit Vote, But Many in Labour Do,” but the URL takes a harder slant. The text there says, “tories-don-t-want-second-brexit-vote-but-everyone-else-does.”

REMEMBER WHEN PAYING TAXES WAS “PATRIOTIC,” AND TRYING TO MINIMIZE THEM WAS HEARTLESS TREASON? Andrew Cuomo: New York exploring ways to circumvent GOP tax overhaul.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that the state government would explore a “major” overhaul of its tax system to circumvent the cap on state and local tax deductions imposed by Republicans at the federal level.

“We must protect New York taxpayers from this assault,” said Cuomo at his state of the state address. Cuomo has proven to be the most vocal critic of the new $10,000 limit on the deductibility of state and local taxes.

You know how you could protect them, Andrew? By lowering taxes.

SNOWFALLS ARE A THING OF THE PAST: Winter Weather Advisories in effect as snow blankets the DMV, Wind Chill Advisory coming.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “It’s so cold that Elizabeth Warren is claiming to be an Eskimo.”

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Chelsea Clinton denies worshipping Satan.

Saul Alinsky, whom her mom corresponded with and who offered her a job, could not be reached for comment and sulfur.

OOPS: North Korea accidentally hit one of its own cities with a ballistic missile last year.

In April, Pyongyang launched a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile that failed shortly after launch and ended up hitting the city of Tokchon, roughly two hours from the capital, The Diplomat reported on Wednesday.

The missile’s failure was widely reported at the time but it was not previously known that the Hwasong-12 crashed in a populated area.

I wonder exactly how the Kim Regime blamed us for another one of their failures.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Judge overturns campus rape finding after officials call accused student ‘motherf—er.’

THESE ARE HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS — WE JUST LIVE IN THEM: 27% of California Adolescents Identify as ‘Nongender Conforming.’

RATTLE THEIR WALLS: What Washington can do to support Iran’s protesters.

Instead of continuing to protect the supreme leader and his tyrannical regime, the White House and Congress should move in a new direction — backing policies that hold the regime accountable and siding with the Iranian people.

All regime officials and assets should be re-designated under US sanctions, immediately freezing the supreme leader’s vast business empire in all its parts.

Any person or company found complicit in the regime’s attempts to block communications between protesters should feel the enforcement of US sanctions prohibiting censorship in Iran. Key entities involved in the oppression of the Iranian people and in the diversion of resources from the people to terrorism and missiles must be targeted with maximum sanctions as well — starting with Iran’s terror-finance headquarters, the Central Bank of Iran.

Next week, Trump will have to decide whether to continue waiving sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. With the Iranian people crying out for a new government — and given the bank’s continued involvement in terrorism, missiles and human-rights abuses — sanctions should be reimposed on this financial backbone of the regime’s non-nuclear-related illicit activities.

President Trump must also confront Iran’s regional aggression, especially by blocking Iran’s attempts to establish a permanent presence in Syria. Iran, as well as our regional partners, needs to understand that America isn’t abandoning the Middle East.

Finally, the administration should put its talk about peaceful regime change into action. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has publicly endorsed a peaceful transition in Iran and in his October Iran speech, Trump said, “We stand in total solidarity with the Iranian regime’s longest-suffering victims: its own people.”

The president should announce a comprehensive review of US assistance to the Iranian people and reallocate and increase funding to groups and activities that have the best chance of assisting change from inside Iran.

It’s probably foolhardy to get any more specific than Richard Goldberg and Jamie Fly have done here, without POTUS’s more bird-eye view of our assets and the Mullahs’ weak spots. But I would add one more generality. Whatever course Trump and Tillerson decide to take, it should be founded on the same four words Ronald Reagan said to his national security team regarding his post-detente policy towards the Soviets: “We win, they lose.”

ROLL CALL: Doug Jones Now Faces the Red-State Democrat’s Dilemma.

Doug Jones will enter the Senate on Wednesday as the Democrat who did the impossible — he won his seat in Republican-dominated Alabama. He will now join a small cadre of red-state Democrats who have to navigate an increasingly divisive political environment.

Jones said he was elected because he emphasized finding common ground and working across the aisle. He will now have to prove it — especially if he has any hope of keeping his seat in 2020.

Time will tell exactly how Jones will balance representing a ruby-red state while maintaining Democratic values, including his pro-abortion rights stance. Jones has indicated he intends to be an accessible representative and forge bipartisan compromises when possible.

If the GOP is smart, they’ll force votes on some issues that will make life tough for him, Manchin, etc.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. Russia and Venezuela’s Plan to Sidestep Sanctions: Virtual Currencies.

In Venezuela, the idea has come from the top. President Nicolás Maduro laid out a plan last month to create a homegrown digital currency known as the Petro, which would be similar to Bitcoin but backed by the government’s oil and natural resources.

In Russia, officials under President Vladimir V. Putin have floated the idea of a Bitcoin-like crypto ruble.

“When it comes to state-sensitive types of activities, this instrument suits us very well,” one of Mr. Putin’s aides, Sergei Glazyev, said last month in a conversation about the crypto ruble, according to several Russian news outlets. “We can settle payments with our business partners all over the world regardless of sanctions.”

Economists and virtual currency experts have given Venezuela’s Petro and the crypto ruble from Russia low probabilities of working in the way the governments seem to anticipate. That’s because Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are decentralized systems with no one in charge, while the Russian and Venezuelan plans would give the leaders of both countries a measure of control over the new currencies.

Another hurdle: Both Russia and Venezuela are low-trust societies. One is a oligarchical kleptocracy, the other is a “democratic” socialist state on the verge of failure.

Putin and Maduro can put all the high-tech gloss on that they want, but their underlying structures are still rotten.

MARK STEYN: Virtue-Signaling While Rome Burns. “I don’t know if His Holiness ever gets into street clothes and leaves his impressively walled city-statelet to wander the streets of Rome, but, if he did, he would see, in Italy as in France as in Spain as in Germany, that Christendom is dying on his watch. In 2016 I attended (as the Pope did not) the funeral in Rouen Cathedral of Père Hamel, the eighty-five-year-old Catholic priest whose throat was slit during Mass by two Muslim men. The service, for all its protestations of unity and forgiveness, chilled me: I felt mostly the absence of faith, or at most its exhausted remnants. Père Hamel had shared, enthusiastically, his Holy Father’s illusions: In Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, he had given land next to his church to the local Muslim community to build a mosque. So no ‘closed’ heart there. And he was repaid for his generosity with ritual decapitation.”

BUBBLE: Blockchain announcement sends stock of Hooters franchisee soaring.

“Eating a burger is now a way to mine for cryptocoins,” said Dennis Becker, CEO of Mobivity, the company that’s helping Chanticleer jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. “Every meal enjoyed at any Chanticleer Holdings brand will accrue currency for the consumer that can be used for future meals or traded with other consumers.”

Chanticleer Holdings owns a number of different brands, most of them burger-related. These include Little Big Burger in the Northwest, American Burger Co. on the East Coast, and the national BGR chain.

Evidently, the stock market believes that putting these restaurants’ reward programs on the blockchain raises their value by around 50 percent.

What’s the advantage of blockchain-based rewards?

“Mobivity Merit is real cryptocurrency, leveraging the same infrastructure and principles of bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, litecoin,” Chanticleer CEO Michael Pruitt says in the company’s press release. Rather than being locked into one specific rewards program, customers will be able to transfer their reward points across multiple restaurants. Meanwhile, the Mobivity blockchain will help companies track their customers’ preferences, allowing them to provide more personalized service.

So it’s really about advertising then.

THE HILL: White House: Trump hasn’t shifted on not cutting entitlements.

President Trump has not changed his position on protecting entitlement programs from funding cuts, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday.

After last month’s GOP victory on tax reform, many Republicans are calling for changes to the social safety net as a way to cut government spending. But, asked about Trump’s repeated campaign pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Huckabee Sanders said he doesn’t support cuts to the programs.

“The president hasn’t changed his position at this point,” she said at a White House briefing, adding that conversations with lawmakers are ongoing.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has set his eyes on entitlement reform for 2018.

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” he said in an interview last month.

Medicare and Medicaid “are the big drivers of debt,” Ryan said, “so we spend more time on the health-care entitlements, because that’s really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.”

Ryan said Trump is beginning to warm to the idea of slowing the spending growth in entitlements.

My suggestion: Cut entitlements, then add a box on the tax form where taxpayers can donate money to make up the difference. And allow them to check a box to make their donation public. Then when people complain, we can look to see if they’re doing their part.

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK:  Construction Workers Discover 130-Million-Year-Old Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Eggs In China.

WHAT THEY NEED IS A NEW PSYCHIATRIST:  Change and history: the Times gets a new publisher.

BECAUSE PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF FIGHTING SHOULD BE PACIFISTS!  Progressives Freak Over Photo Of Armed Secretary Of The Navy.  Remember when I told you that logic was a tool of patriarchy?  It’s a ploy of conservatives too.  This is why the left eschews it.

NEWS I WANT TO USE:  Are Ammo Prices Ready To Drop?

BECAUSE, REASONS:  Meryl Streep Excuses Self, Blames Trump Women Over #Weinstein. Logic is a tool of a the patriarchy!

IN AN INTERVIEW GRANTED FROM HIS COLLEGE DORM:  Pizza for breakfast is good for you, food expert claims.

EXPERTS BLAME THE ABSENCE OF SAFETY CAPS:  Man mistakes glue for eye drops, extreme pain ensues.

THEY HAVE WHAT?  ONCE MORE I FIND ‘MOST WOMEN’ LIVE IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE:  Nearly half of women have experienced ‘period shaming’.