AT AMAZON, Christmas markdowns on watches.

DON SURBER: The Presidential Succession Begins. “The truth is Clinton took over the presidency on Friday when Obama just walked away. Leadership is about symbols. Mommy — Michelle Obama — called and Obama had to go home. He let Clinton take over and clean up the mess. . . . Being president sucks right now. It will get worse. His programs are a failure. His party does not like him. So he sent Biden to talk to the party and Clinton to talk to the press. At this point, it is merely symbolic of a resignation. A bad weekend. But it certainly is not something I have seen before in presidential politics.”

They’re taking bets on Obama’s departure. But he’s got an ace in the hole — he only has to run against the Republicans. . . .

THOUGHTS ON CONSENSUAL ADULT INCEST, from Eugene Volokh. Who doesn’t teach at Columbia.

AT AMAZON, Christmas markdowns on books.

THE MANOLO: Worst Cruise Entertainer Ever.

DON’T STOP THINKING ABOUT . . . YESTERDAY? Pejman Yousefzadeh on that Obama/Clinton press conference. Well, back in the 1990s, all our troubles did seem so far away. . . .

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have an underqualified Vice President wielding outsized influence. And they were right!

HOW TO MAKE a secret book safe.

A CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE CLASS.

The unemployment rates are part of a growing divergence between the fortunes of the college educated and the rest of the country, including proverbial Middle America. In his new study, “When Marriage Disappears,” University of Virginia scholar Brad Wilcox details how the college-educated have embraced traditional mores and habits — especially the formation of stable families — while they erode among everyone else.

Kay Hymowitz has made the same point.

TAKE THAT, POTATO BLIGHT: Scientists Find Weakness of Infamous Blight-Causing Microbe. “A year ago, scientists sequenced the genome of the nasty microbe that caused the Irish potato famine in the mid-1800s. Now they have uncovered how this destructive bacterium spreads and adapts to new species so quickly—and how to stop it.”

RON RADOSH: TNR And The Crisis Of The American Intellectual. And a related item from Walter Russell Mead.

UPDATE: Kenneth Anderson writes:

And note that the rule of New Class experts, seeking what Telos used to call “the wholly-administered society,” is not a function of greater coherence. It is actually what happens when institutions of ordered liberty falter, and create gaps that the mandarin-experts, replacing democratic legitimacy with technocratic claims of expertise, rush to fill in governance. In that sense, coherence within institutions, in the libertarian and democratic sense, is that which protects against the alternative claims of technocratic, expert — but let’s be real, today merely credentialled — legitimacy that arise when the former lags. I believe that what I have said here is quite consistent with, and indeed required by, Hayek’s political economy.

“Coherence” is a big problem for the United States at this moment, let alone Europe. China has coherence, at this moment, but only of a kind that Thomas Friedman could admire. The task, rather, is how to achieve coherence, “ordered liberty” to use the constitutionalist phrase, in a democracy. Because it is quite certain that less coherence does not automatically equal more democracy, and that more coherence automatically equals less democracy.

Indeed.

REPORT: GAWKER HACKED: “Gawker.com has apparently been the victim of a pair of security compromises this weekend, one of which put reader’s data at risk.” If you’ve got a Gawker password that you use on other sites, too, you should change posthaste.

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

CAPITAL COURTSHIP: Above The Law now matching up lawyers in DC.

REPORT: My HTC Evo Got Me Busted in Court. “From the bench, in the afternoon on Day No. 1 of the trial, the judge asked me to rise and state my name. After seeing my hotspot (with the perhaps-suspicious ID of ‘gethacked’) show up on his computer at the bench, the judge demanded to know whether I was transmitting a signal.”

CHANGE: “Mancession” Threatens American Dream. “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when the labor market deteriorated in 2009, men felt the brunt of it. Some 3.1 million jobs held by men were lost last year compared to only 1.6 million jobs for women.”

A WHEY TO LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE.

I BLAME THE ADMINISTRATION’S VIOLENT, ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Arsonist Strikes on Cape Cod, Leaves Calling Card: ‘F–k the Rich’. When will they be called to account for their inflammatory hate speech, which is producing acts of violence across the country?

NISSAN LEAF UPDATE: First Nissan Leaf delivery happening on Facebook today, but are there major delays nationwide? Reportedly, there are “many angry people.” I’m at least highly peeved — I signed up, but have gotten nothing but spam and unanswered email from Nissan.

MAIL ISSUES: For some reason, mail isn’t coming to me via the pundit -at- instapundit.com address right now. You can still email me at mail4instapundit -at- gmail.com. (Bumped: Still working on this. Sorry).

ENTREPRENEURS BRINGING TRANSPARENCY AND ORDER TO THE STUDENT LOAN BUSINESS: “Let’s hope the new House leadership understands this concept.”

IN THE MAIL: From Dr. Adrian F. Manz, Around the Horn: A Trader’s Guide to Consistently Scoring in the Markets and Trade Secrets: Powerful Strategies For Volatile Markets.

ROGER SIMON: Should We Gloat Over Obama’s Childish Behavior?

It’s easy enough for conservatives, libertarians, et al, to gloat about Barack Obama’s recent petulant, child-like performances — at first unable to be even slightly gracious in compromise with Republicans on the tax bill and then, only a few days later, fleeing in panic when Clinton acted the real president, fielding questions with a relaxed authority so surpassing Obama’s it was almost comical.

But there is a bigger reason not to gloat. We are stuck with this odd duck for another two years at minimum and now everyone, the entire world really, knows what he is like. They also know, if they have been paying the slightest attention, the etiology of his behavior: the man never had to face serious adversity until he was elected POTUS. And now he can’t deal with it. . . . We need a leader and don’t have one. This is extremely bad news for our country, especially now.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: John Avlon unconvincingly argues that Obama’s press conference was his most presidential moment ever. Of course, it would be worse for Obama if he were able to argue that convincingly . . . .

CHANGE: GOP Wants Obama To Show His Sincerity On Earmarks.

HISTORY: Muslims Save Jews in Untold WWll Story. “A wealthy man who worked in a tobacco factory took in the Colonomos family. Unlike many Jews in other parts of Europe who survived the war in cellars and attics, Jews in Albania were given Muslim names and treated as honored guests. Colonomos explains that under Besa, Albanians put their guests before their own family.”

UPDATE: Michael Totten emails:

Albanians are still defenders of Jews and also of Israel even today. I was in Tirana, the capital, a few years ago and heard a speech from prime minister Sali Berisha about the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Israel will accept an independent Palestinian state,” he said. “But Israel cannot accept the fundamentalists amongst Palestinians because their ideology is identical to that of the Nazis.”

Most Albanians are (nominal) Muslims, but they aren’t Jew-haters.

Good.