WATCH THOSE WATCHES: I mentioned this watch sale the other day, and a reader — whose name I’m omitting in case his wife reads InstaPundit too — emails: “I’ve been looking for a watch for my wife for months and found a great one on Amazon last night – following your link to it.” So here it is again in case anyone else finds it useful. It’s not quite too late!

A TV STUDIO in a box: “If you were impressed when manufacturers began putting home theaters in boxes, wait until you feast your eyes on NewTek’s TriCaster, which packs an entire live television production studio into a comparable cube of space. With minimal training, anyone who can operate a computer can use it to broadcast professional-quality live video over the internet or on television.” Cool.

ROBERT REICH stands tall for separation of powers: “Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who supports an auto industry bailout, nevertheless agrees that President Bush’s unilateral loan plan is illegal and unconstitutional. . . . it’s an example of a man standing up for a principle even when the principle is inconvenient. Too bad Obama couldn’t muster similar courage.”

CLAIRE BERLINSKI: The Looming Crisis in Turkey. Oh, goody.

ANTHONY RANDAZZO: More laws and further regulation wouldn’t have prevented the Bernard Madoff scam.

WITH OBAMA ELECTED, ALL IS FORGIVEN: Hiltzik returns to L.A. Times. It’s a jubilee!

MEGAN MCARDLE on Bush’s automaker loan program: “The really miserable thing is that even a total bankruptcy may not be enough. Wipe out the shareholders, cut the bondholders to the bone, shuck the gold-plated medical benefits, toss out the UAW contracts, close the dealers–and we still may be left with companies that cannot make a profit without a now-defunct financing business based on ever-growing loans to ever-poorer credit risks. The Big Three, with the help of the UAW and all their other partners, has spent 25 years building a reputation for poor reliability and ugly cars. Brands matter. Once destroyed, they’re very hard to repair in the best of times. These are not, quite, the best of times, are they?”

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of news from the Apple empire.

THOUGHTS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMY from Fabius Maximus. I don’t know how bad things will get — I tend to be overpessimistic in general, which over the years has cost me, financially — but I think he’s right that Main Street hasn’t really felt it yet. This isn’t a demand-falloff-driven meltdown, it’s a case of the fish rotting from the head down.

BARACK OBAMA, WAR CRIMINAL? Over at Democrats.com they’re asking, If Obama Fails to Prosecute War Crimes, Is He A Criminal Too?

In the future, everyone will be a war criminal for 15 minutes.

MORE ON OBAMA, RICK WARREN, AND gay marriage.

UPDATE: Jerry Brown, for Prop 8 before he was against it.

JOHN TIERNEY:

Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990

Next: Paul Wolfowitz for head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

DEMOCRATS losing their political advantage on corruption. Gee, do you think?

IOWAHAWK: SantaCorp Pleads Case for Bailout.

But Dan Collins is unpersuaded: “What Iowahawk fails to mention is that SantaCorp had this labor agreement thrust upon them in the wake of the Wonka Oompa-Loompa Scandal of 1980. By whom? Congress.”

IF THE MACHINE GETS MAD ENOUGH AT HIM, THAT MIGHT NOT TAKE LONG: Blagojevich Vows to Fight Charges With ‘Last Breath’.

A BUNCH OF snow toys.

UPDATE: Reader Bruce Lampley is liking Amazon this Christmas:

I picked up a Leap Frog didj (their version of the Nintendo DS – with built-in homework) for our 8-year old from Amazon. It’s $90 in the store. I paid $60, then saw it had gone down another $10, so I e-mailed Amazon to ask for a refund of the difference. They e-mailed me back within a couple of hours and said since it hadn’t shipped yet, they would refund the difference. Which they did.

I’m liking Amazon. Did I mention I got free shipping too?

Maybe this is why Americans are driving less . . . .

THOUGHTS ON Bernard Madoff, human networks, and single points of failure. Never trust any one person with all your money, no matter how much you trust him or her.

REPORT: Americans are driving less. Well, not me — I’m on the road today. But I think it’s premature to say that “America’s love affair with cars is ending.” Maybe we just need a little “me time.”

UPDATE: Some skepticism on this report. And, by the way, can we please abandon all variations on the cliched phrase “America’s love affair with the automobile?” That was overused before I was born.

MAPPING YOUR LIKELIHOOD of dying in a natural disaster.

UNVEILING THE NAVY’S fighter-plane-sized unmanned aircraft.

A ONE-DAY-ONLY Friday sale at Amazon.

THE OBAMA CABINET: A middle-of-the-roader’s dream?

JEFF JARVIS: Try living without Google, France.

FROM “ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH” TO CHIEF SWITCHMAN! “You might appreciate the irony that Citigroup’s primary federal regulator is Timothy Geithner.”

HURRAY FOR ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING! Our ancestors intervened and prevented a natural ice age from happening thousands of years ago.