COED COMBAT: My University of Tennessee colleague Rosemary Mariner is guestblogging at the Volokh Conspiracy.

ANNE APPLEBAUM compares Saudi Arabia with Apartheid South Africa. I think, however, that she underestimates some aspects of the problem. Too many western feminists respond with things like this: “I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we’re all going to hell fast and maybe we are all going to hell fast.”

JOHN TIERNEY on smart machines and dumb designers.

I’ve had some thoughts on the subject myself.

POLITICO: Liberals lose bigtime in budget battle. “This much is clear: Democrats in Congress buckled under pressure from the White House to hold spending near the administration’s specified limit, and they’re poised to give the president more war money with no strings attached. But the buckling didn’t stop there.”

CHARLES PAUL FREUND: A brutalist bargain.

KERRY HOWLEY on guest worker programs.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! “Republican Presidential candidate Fred Thompson today, upon hearing that rival Ron Paul’s supporters had raised $6 million in 24 hours to commemorate the Boston Tea Party, called on his supporters to match that figure in gun purchases before Christmas to mark George Washington’s victory at the Battle of Trenton.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Has anybody updated Patrick Healy’s May, 2006 story and calculated the number of days Bill Clinton has spent in Hillary’s Washington, D.C. house in the past year (now that it’s been officially designated as the place where you live when you live ‘with’ Hillary)? If you’re going to flaunt your home life then people are entitled to examine your home life.”

ABC: John McCain — The Comeback Kid? Hey, where have I heard that before?

GOOD NEWS OR BAD NEWS? Online sales up 18% over last year. That’s good, right? Well, not necessarily: “Despite this increase in sales this year, the growth rate for online retailers holiday sales numbers is lower than the increase last holiday season saw. “

MOVING AWAY FROM ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES in Ohio and Colorado. All I can say is, I told you so.

THE G.O.P. in search of itself.

REBECCA ROBERTS: “All of a sudden, Chelsea Clinton is on the campaign trail in Iowa. I have to say I’m surprised. . . . Until her mom started having serious Obama problems, we hadn’t heard a peep from her. Either Des Moines in December is a lot more fun than Manhattan, or she’s decided her mother really needs her out there.”

RIGHT: “Women must stop admiring men who drive sports cars if they want to join the fight against global warming, the Government’s chief scientist has urged.”

Not gonna happen.

A LOOK AT PATIENTS and evidence-based medicine: “The decisions whether and how to treat a disease ultimately lie with patients, who makes these decisions with their doctors’ help. It’s a value judgment, and there is no way to measure value. It is not quantifiable in inches, pounds, or miles per hour.”

RON FOURNIER: “Bill Clinton says Sen. Barack Obama is a callow, highly ambitious political prodigy who is asking voters to ‘roll the dice’ and elect him president. He should know — that’s a fair description of Clinton when he sought the presidency in 1992. The fact that the former president is stealing a page from the same Republican playbook used against him 15 years ago underscores the threat Obama poses to the candidacy of Clinton’s wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.”

SOME RECOMMENDED CHRISTMAS GIFTS for under a hundred bucks. And if that’s too rich for your blood, here are some recommendations for under 25 bucks.

MORE PROBLEMS for Eliot Spitzer.

MEGAN MCARDLE WONDERS what happened to the wild office party?

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE: The case against Ron Paul. Significant, as Bainbridge opposed the Iraq war.

THOUGHTS ON TORTURE, from Stuart Taylor. “We’ve come a long way since September 2002, when Nancy Pelosi, then a House Intelligence Committee member and now the speaker, listened without a peep of protest while being briefed about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on Qaeda leaders.”

DONALD SENSING experiences a moment of clarity, at a lower cost than some.

MICKEY KAUS: “The TV networks are screwing around with the already-absurd Iowa caucuses again, using an ‘entrance poll’ of only 40 precincts (out of more than 3,500) that threatens to manufacture a misleading result.”

A DEFENSE OF HILLARY CLINTON, from . . . Rush Limbaugh?

BOB KERREY digs into Obama a bit more. Hey, Obama, Osama, what’s the difference? Even Ted Kennedy can’t keep things straight.

UPDATE: Allah has video and asks: “Deliberate faux-innocent smear or well-meaning ignoramus? I’m inclined towards the latter just because it seems so hapless and heavy-handed that if it was deliberate it’d be more artfully done. Dropping the phrase ‘Islamic manchurian candidate’ in the midst of his ‘apology’? C’mon.” Yeah, it’s gotta be innocent, then.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More at the Huffington Post.