MORE MEDIA RETRENCHMENT: CBS swings to $12.46B 3Q loss after hefty charge.

Plus this: Condé Nast Cutting Five Percent of All Magazine Staffs; Future of Men’s Vogue In Doubt.

PRICING SIGNALS WORK (CONT’D): As Gas Prices Go Down, Driving Goes Up. When things get more expensive, people do them less — but when things get less expensive, people do them more! What could explain this phenomenon? It’s a mystery!

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Los Angeles Times’s Strange Notion of Journalistic Ethics.

HOW FAR TO THE LEFT would Obama’s judicial appointments go, and would they be as obviously biased as Ruth Marcus’s linking?

KARL ROVE: Don’t Let the Polls Affect Your Vote: They were wrong in 2000 and 2004. Yeah, vote how you want. Why wouldn’t you?

A PREDICTION: “If Barack Obama becomes President-Elect next week, don’t expect any of the snide anti-american Brits, Aussie and others to change their tune. They’ve had a hate figure in Bush for the past eight years, and I don’t doubt that Barack Obama will become an equal hate figure within a short amount time.”

Brian Micklethwait disagrees.

PJTV: BEN SHAPIRO on the Khalidi / Obama tape, and the demonstration at the Los Angeles Times offices. Free, with no registration required.

AN HP MINI-NOTE FOR $299: Randy Barnett emails: “Given your interest in mini-notebooks, I thought this would interest you, though it is the Linux version.” Yeah, that’s a good deal. I’ve got the Vista version of the Mini-Note and it’s kinda slow (because of Vista!) but has a great display, good battery life, and a terrific keyboard. The Linux version is probably a lot faster, but I assume the display, battery, and keyboard are the same. This model has flash memory instead of a hard drive, which is faster and more rugged but has a lot less storage. Then again, I’ve hardly used the space on my Mini-Note. I’d say it’s probably a good alternative to an Asus Eee PC – better keyboard and display for the same price.

SHOULD INSTAPUNDIT BECOME A POLITICAL MACHINE? Reader Alex Paul writes:

I’m a loyal reader of your blog and glad to see you doing so well in terms visits and page views as you posted with law professor blog link today.

One thing I would ask you to consider, or at least explain, is why you don’t provide more direction for fellow libertarians on what candidates to support financially. See this post.

My guess is that you could be a real force in promoting libertarian candidates–those that share your ideals–whether they be in the Republican party or elsewhere. After the Obama win on Tuesday, there will be an opportunity to dramatically shape the conversation about what the opposition role should be. For the good of the country, I am guessing that you want to direct that towards a principled libertarian opposition. With your presence in the blogsphere, you have the ability to shape that by asking support for those candidates, at whatever level of government, who fellow libertarians highlight to you, from your regular readers.

Well, I’ve never endorsed candidates, really, and certainly never tried to run any sort of organized fundraising program. There’s a niche for that — a sort of counter-Kos — but I’m not sure I’m the guy to be picking winners and directing donations. As Clint Eastwood says, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” What do you folks think?

REASON TV: Where’s My Bailout?

“>

AN OBAMA ENDORSEMENT from Tom Smith: “Some may say, and you call yourself a libertarian. But I have decided I can be a kind of statist, big government, expansive regulation, high taxing, low investing, industrial policy, aggressive PC enforcing sort of libertarian. If you look at libertarians for Obama, I would hardly be the first. . . . It’s not so bad really. It feels kind of like when you wake up in the morning and your mind is kind of blank, but in a peaceful sort of way. Rather nice, really. You know, healing.”

A REASON not to dump your PlayStation 2.

OKAY, I GUESS MCCAIN COULD HAVE RUN this video after Obama’s infomercial, too. “Where the money comes from, Heaven only knows . . . .”

I still like Cult of Personality better, though. But then, as a “himbo,” I guess this song strikes too close to home . . . .

SO IT’S BEEN THREE YEARS since I bought the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and about 60,000 miles, and I’m still very happy with it. It’s still pretty much the experience that I noted here. The interior and exterior still look like new, and the mileage is still good, something I particularly appreciated when gas prices spiked recently. Nothing has broken, and it’s very pleasant to drive. My only annoyance is that if you start the engine, then quickly reach down and move the selector from Park to Drive or Reverse you get an annoying “Shift to P Before Starting” message and have to restart. Apparently, it takes the computer about two or three seconds to boot, and if you shift out of P before that it thinks you were always in gear and refuses to start.

Of course, I have a 2006 model, and it’s been redesigned for 2008 so I don’t know how much this transfers over. But here’s a review of the 2008 model. And here’s another long-term report on the earlier Highlander Hybrid.

PAUL JOHNSON: A moral crisis, not a financial one.

INVESTIGATING Countrywide Mortgage and Chris Dodd. Plus Kent Conrad and a host of others.

TEN ESSENTIAL TOOLS for your kitchen drawer. But they leave out the Universal Package Opener.

NERDFIGHTERS! I love this bit: “I was sitting in the back, taking notes old-style for this post, when I noticed that every fifth person in the audience was recording it on their phones.” Thus, YouTube does the work. Is this the 21st Century, or what?

IF I WERE JOHN MCCAIN’S CAMPAIGN, I would have just bought enough time to run this video after Obama’s infomercial. Just enough time to add “I’m John McCain and I approved this message” at the end and keep it at 5 minutes . . .

DEBATING AN auto industry bailout. I’m against it, myself.

MORE ON MANKIW, OBAMA, and incentives to work. Or not. Time to “go John Galt?”

HMM: Obama’s Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology.

WILL CHINA BE THE NEW ELECTRIC-CAR MECCA? It has to be.

HOW TO ENCOURAGE ORGAN DONATION.

WHAT COMES AFTER BATTERIES?