EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT Chip Saltsman and Barack the Magic Negro. Well, okay, not everybody, just people following the RNC Chair race.

A BUNCH OF AFTER-CHRISTMAS ELECTRONICS MARKDOWNS, some as much as 70%. It’s amazing to me that you can get a Canon Powershot 770 for $159. I remember thinking it was a big deal when my old 2 megapixel Olympus dropped to that price.

LESSONS FROM THE ICELANDIC COLLAPSE:

“As people have their expectations changed radically, you can have protests come out of nowhere,” even in developed countries, Bremmer said. . . .

The protests may escalate as bills come due and severance pay runs out for those who lost jobs at the three biggest lenders, including Landsbanki, the second-largest, says Stefan Palsson, a historian. He once led the Campaign Against Militarism, opposing NATO bases in the 1960s.

He said he’s surprised ordinary people are backing activists once considered “hooligans.” There was public outrage three years ago when environmentalists poured yogurt over aluminum representatives to protest a new plant.

“Now you have protesters kicking down doors at police stations, and respectable elderly people saying ‘Well, they’re young and full of enthusiasm, and anyway, they’re right!’” he said.

You can bet that the A.N.S.W.E.R. crowd would love to see this here. Will free-market backers know how to respond?

UPDATE: Reader Donald Gately writes:

You say that A.N.S.W.E.R. would love to see Icelandic-type protests here. But what if folks under 30 or 40 or 50 started staging large public protests about the Ponzi-scheme that is Social Security? What if taxpayers started staging massive protests about public pensions that let government employees (many of whom don’t have to participate in Social Security) retire at 50 with 90% pay – even while common taxpayers have to ratchet back their own retirement dates? What if financial and real-estate workers started staging protests about their jobs disappearing while the Democrats in congress do everything in their power to preserve cushy UAW deals? What if parents in neighborhoods with failing schools started actively protesting the stranglehold that the teachers unions have over their childrens’ education?

Those types of protests would likely un-nerve the left, and might actually lead to Change that the rest of us can believe in.

It could happen.

GEORGE W. BUSH, LIBERATOR? “Much of the condemnation of his policies though is driven by a venomous hatred of Bush’s personality and leadership style, rather than an objective assessment of his achievements. Ten or twenty years from now, historians will view Bush’s actions on the world stage in a more favourable light. America’s 43rd president did after all directly liberate more people (over 60 million) from tyranny than any leader since Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Stay tuned!

ALLISON KAPLAN SOMMER: Israel Furiously Attacks Gaza — And Braces for Reprisal.

UPDATE: More from Noah Pollak.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Liveblogging at Israellycool.

JOEL STEIN on how Republicans are blinded by love of America.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Reason Magazine Owes Me a Photo Credit.

TYLER COWEN: “I believe that moving more assets under government guarantees is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.”

IS OBAMA morphing into a drug-warrior? “He evidently felt he could not afford to throw even the tiniest bone to critics of the war on drugs.”

MOTHERS LURKING IN MIDDLE-SCHOOL BATHROOMS: “And, of course, this would never have been perceived as cute if Mother Aimée had been Daddy Arnie, squatting in the boys’ room.”

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Dodd’s mortgage problems make a WTIC list of top Connecticut news stories of the year:

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd plays an important role in the Wall Street bailout package and congressional inquiries about the failures of companies that deal in subprime mortgages.

But he was questioned about his own mortgages in 2008 after Conde Nast Portfolio magazine reported that Dodd got preferential interest rates on two mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corp.

Dodd acknowledged that Countrywide placed him in a “VIP section,” but he denied he knew he was getting a special deal and said he was not friends with Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

Dodd said that he and his wife refinanced their homes like millions of Americans did at the time and got a “market rate,” and would have walked away from the deal had he believed he was getting preferential treatment from Countrywide, a leading subprime lender at the center of the mortgage meltdown.

In October, Dodd said he will make information about the mortgages public after a Senate ethics inquiry completes its investigation.

There’s no reason for him not to release that information now, though he’d like you to think otherwise.

ARNOLD KLING: “Just to be puckish, suppose that we think of financial bailouts and fiscal stimulus as a Madoff scheme, and we use these four factors to explain why we fall for it.”

BUSINESS ISN’T BAD EVERYWHERE: Survivalist businesses surge in uncertain times.

RADLEY BALKO: Secrets of the Bailout.

A READER SENDS this cheerful news from U.P.S.: “Nearly half of companies with global supply chains say they fear major disruptions in their ability to source, produce and ship goods around the world. And they’re not doing much to prevent it.”

So how about starting?

THOUGHTS ON Krugman and Corruption.

SUSAN LEE: Are we becoming a nation of wussies? “Reckless behavior has almost disappeared from the financial landscape, sure. But so has a lot of reasonable behavior. And this may create a massive problem. What if, as conditions worsen, reasonable risk-taking totally disappears?”

A WEAK CHRISTMAS-SHOPPING SEASON means big after-Christmas sales at Amazon and, no doubt, elsewhere.

UPDATE: Various readers point out that the season may have been weak overall, but that Amazon did well. I certainly did most of my shopping (all of it, except for some restaurant gift cards) at Amazon. It was painless.

JULIE BAUMGARDNER: “I honestly don’t think women spend much time thinking about how they treat their husbands.” Plus this: “One woman in the group admitted she recently had returned home to see that her husband had mowed their 3-acre spread – and her only comment was, ‘You missed a spot under the tree.'”

QUESTIONS ABOUT PRESIDENT BUSH’S RESCINDED PARDON: I don’t think a pardon rescission should be valid, though I confess I’ve never thought about the subject much. On the other hand, someone who has believes that a pardon can be rescinded until it’s actually received by the pardonee. If the Bush Administration is taking that position now, it suggests that Bush isn’t likely to issue any blanket pardons before leaving office . . . .

WELL, THEY WATCH THE TV SHOWS, TOO: “An emerging affluent class abroad is drawn to suburbs with U.S. names that mimic the American ideal—down to the master bathroom and tree-lined sidewalk.” Also, while suburbanization is often linked to American character, it’s probably just the way a lot of people people want to live, if they can afford to. “If you look at how countries are moving up the socio-economic ladder, some of the things they all want is a car, a house, a nice view and air conditioning.” Some related thoughts here.

SARAH PALIN TOPS AMAZON BESTSELLER LIST. Okay, it’s in “office products,” but still . . . (Via the Sarah Palin blog).

CONGRATULATIONS to my University of Tennessee colleague Joe Williams: Discover magazine honors UT biology professor. “A University of Tennessee assistant professor of ecology and biology, Williams has traveled the world studying why flowering plants have diversified so much more quickly than cone-bearing plants, like pines. His work was published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and was named among the Top 100 Science Stories of 2008 by Discover magazine recently.”

TIM BLAIR looks at how Times have changed.

Plus, adventures in sentence construction.

POPULATION SHIFTS shuffling House seats.