WHO KNEW? “From Iraq to taxes, a bedraggled Bush is blooming.” Plus, a look at the new bipartisanship!

ADVICE TO HILLARY: “Anyway, given today’s outlook, Hillary is well advised to drop the ‘halo of inevitability’ and don the fur suit of the Energizer bunny candidate who will just keep going and going even if she, say, loses the first three primaries and the next three. Her strategists are presumably already thinking about such a long-haul comeback plan.”

THE DECLINE of the West.

I, FOR ONE, WELCOME our new robot hecklers.

FROM RADLEY BALKO, a Cory Maye update.

MICKEY KAUS: “I would be less skeptical of the severed-friendship part of HuffPo’s story if it wasn’t exactly what the Clintons would want to come out right about now.”

AARON HANSCOM: Is murder a victimless crime?

JOHN HAWKINS interviews Matt Sanchez. On don’t ask/don’t tell: “Personally, I’d settle for gays serving, if Congressman John Murtha would stop outing himself as a Marine.”

CHRISTMAS TOYS: Educational, and otherwise.

Educational or not, I like the marshmallow gun.

SCOOP!

IM IN UR CAMPANE GRILLIN YR D00DS.

ARE THINGS AS BAD FOR THE G.O.P. AS PEOPLE THINK? Special election wins in Virginia and Ohio suggest not. But who knows? If they keep blowing it on pork, they could still lose big in 2008.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe they’re doing better on pork.

CAIR INSTRUCTS THE MEDIA? But why would anyone listen to an organization with only 1,700 members, and that is funded by foreign potentates?

HMM: “The Young America’s Foundation has sued the Department of Defense for failing to enforce the Solomon Amendment — the law that requires schools receiving federal funding to give access to military representatives for recruiting purposes, and to treat military recruiters in the same way they treat all other employment recruiters.”

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR the person who has everything.

NATIONAL REVIEW endorses Romney.

HIJAB POLITICS AT The Huffington Post.

PROFESSOR PUNISHED FOR BELIEVING IN EVOLUTION.

Biologist fired for not believing in evolution.

You’ve got to walk a fine line on this subject, I guess. My position: I evolved — but I didn’t inhale.

THE OTHER DAY I ASKED IF IT WAS TIME TO ABOLISH THE CIA: Christopher Hitchens says yes.

UPDATE: On the other hand, John Podhoretz asks: Is Jose Rodriguez a hero?

BOB ZUBRIN HAS A BOOK OUT ON ENERGY POLICY, and Fast Forward Radio interviews him here.

COMPETING ON PRIVACY:

Will privacy sell?

Ask.com is betting it will. The fourth-largest search engine company will begin a service today called AskEraser, which allows users to make their searches more private.

Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.

Ask, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp based in Oakland, hopes that the privacy protection will differentiate it from more prominent search engines like Google.

The search world needs more competition. If you go to Ask.com you can see the little “AskEraser” button in the upper right. I still miss Jeeves, though. And you knew he would never blab . . . .

TOM SMITH — the law professor Tom Smith, not the journalist Tom Smith — on the guilty pleasures of NYT editorials.

EVAN COYNE MALONEY reports that his flap with Indiana University has ended amicably.

DAVID FREDDOSO: “That Republicans would not welcome an earmark-free bill is yet another sign that they are hopelessly in the grip of New Deal politics.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Today’s video: Huckabee sucks up to the teachers’ union.”

Plus, Huckabee’s plethora of pardons.