THE SALE ON EARPHONES I LINKED EARLIER SOLD OUT, so they’re making it up to people with a special one-day sale on speakers.

MORE THOUGHTS ON bankruptcy for states.

BELGIAN PROBLEMS? Think BIIGS: There’s One Euro Country Under the Radar. “Belgium faces an important test Monday, when it aims to sell between 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) and 2.5 billion euros worth of bonds in an auction that will indicate the level of investor confidence in the nation plagued by political turmoil and high levels of debt.”

PETER INGEMI, better known as “DaTechGuy” is on the radio in just a moment. You can listen live at the link.

GARRY WILLS, THEN AND NOW: “I don’t think Wills has been guilty of a heterodox political thought since his turn to the left. His 1962 review shows a bit of what was lost.”

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Toys & Games.

SISSY WILLIS: “We’re not looking for an unprincipled common ground.”

KNOXVILLE NEWS: Market Square skating rink now open.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT: They Are Not Liberals And They Are Not Progressives.

The statists who argue for the destruction of the dollar and for bank bail-outs (again) and for nationalised derangement of medical care and for green-inspired economic sabotage aren’t “liberals”. They do not believe in liberty; they believe in curtailing liberty. But neither do they believe in anything which it makes sense to anybody except them to call “progress”. Progress is the exact thing these statists are now trying and have always tried to destroy, and just lately have been doing a pretty damn good job of destroying. Progress means things getting better. These self styled “progressives” are only making things worse.

So what do we call them?

HAPPY HOLIDAYS from space.

TIRED TALIBAN WANT A TIME OUT. Boo hoo. “The commanders informed Zakir that they and their men were temporarily suspending combat operations and asked that he either transfer them to less hotly contested areas or let them recover in Pakistan until the spring thaw. ‘We have lost many friends and commanders,’ one member of the delegation told Zakir, says Mullah Salam Khan, a midlevel commander in Helmand province who was briefed on the meeting by a participant. ‘We are tired and want to take a rest.'”

AT AMAZON, markdowns and gift ideas in Kitchen and Home.

VODKAPUNDIT: Sink The Deutschmark!

RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE SITREP: Shoppers Back in Black Friday Binge. But is it a “broken army” that won’t be able to keep up the pace for the long term? It’s had a lot of demands put on it since September 11.

Related: Online Sales Surge 16% On Black Friday. Not too broken to stage a successful surge!

GRANDMA, PUT A LID ON IT: “President Obama is NOT a Muslim, whatever else he may be. But he needs this kind of story like a hole in the head.” Of course he’s not a Muslim. If he were a Muslim, he’d have to believe in something greater than Barack Obama.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: This is how you stop terrorists. “The TSA may be a useless invasive bureaucracy that has never caught a single terrorist, but the FBI knows what it’s doing.” Stopping a terrorist within walking distance of Michael Totten’s house.

EUGENE VOLOKH: I’m Proud To Have Such A Courageous Colleague.

A NUCLEAR STANDOFF WITH LIBYA.

FASTER, PLEASE: 3D printing offers ability to print physical objects. It’s Neil Gershenfeld’s world and we’re just living in it. Or soon will be. I had a column on this a while back.

BRINGING BACK THE BLASPHEMY LAWS IN BRITAIN. Jeez. A dozen guys with Korans and cigarette lighters could bring that place to its knees. But who would benefit from that?

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “Is contempt for religious indoctrination a ‘deeper problem’ that government should concern itself with? I think the deeper problem is that government officials in the U.K. seem to have lost touch with basic principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”

DAVID SKEEL: Give States A Way To Go Bankrupt: It’s the best option for avoiding a massive federal bailout. “When the possibility is mentioned of creating a new chapter for states in U.S. bankruptcy law (Chapter 8, perhaps, which isn’t currently taken), most people have two reactions. First, that bankruptcy might be a great solution for exploding state debt; and second, that it can’t possibly be constitutional for Congress to enact such a law. Surprisingly enough, this reaction is exactly backwards. The constitutionality of bankruptcy-for-states is beyond serious dispute. The real question is whether the benefits would be large enough to justify congressional action. The short answer is yes. Although bankruptcy would be an imperfect solution to out-of-control state deficits, it’s the best option we have, at least if we want to have any chance of avoiding massive federal bailouts of state governments.”

Via the Volokh Conspiracy, where there’s this additional suggestion: “Any law that lets states be bailed out should require them to renounce their state status and revert to being territories, to be reorganised by the federal government as new states. That has the advantage of getting rid of the old, dysfunctional, state government, removing the state and its inhabitants from national influence until they’ve had a chance to learn some wisdom, and being enough of a penalty to make bailouts unattractive to other states.” I see many problems with this approach, but I admire its spirit.

UPDATE: A Wall Street reader emails:

A big part of the hysterical elite reaction to the Tea Party is the justified belief that the outsiders would do everything possible to obstruct a federal bailout of the states and their unions’ pension/benefits funds.

Federalizing all the state workers’ liabilities has long been a unspoken goal of the permanent government.

Hmm. Meanwhile, Jim Bennett emails on state bankruptcy:

Something like it is inevitable. I think there should also be a provision permitting the subdivision of bankrupt states into two or more new states, analogous to the restructuring of companies which often involves spinoff of divisions. No accident that all of the really bad Too Big to Fail states are in the above-average half of the ranking of states by size. California is as big as a middle-sized EU member and acts like it, only with a less competent civil service.

By the way, there is a historical North American example of a state-level bankruptcy and receivership process during the previous depression. They ended up merging it into a larger entity.

It was voluntary, as a condition of a bailout.

Interesting. And reader Stephen Clark writes:

I too admire the spirit of the last VC suggestion you highlighted, if only out of malicious delight. If it ever became a serious proposal or seemed even the least bit likely of becoming reality, I imagine that the old concept of “states’ rights” would gain sudden and renewed respectability in some unlikely places. That alone would be worth the price of admission.

Heh. Indeed.

IN THE MAIL: From Travis S. Taylor, One Good Soldier.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH ON JIMMY CARTER, SLOW LEARNER. “There are a number of reasons why Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter was so utterly lopsided. One reason why the voters rejected the 39th President for a second term had to do with his unbelievably naïve approach to, and conception of foreign policy. Clearly, in the 30 years since his electoral debacle, Carter has learned nothing about statecraft.”

HOMELAND SECURITY is seizing Internet domains left and right. It’s not clear what protecting fatcat entertainment folks’ copyrights has to do with homeland security, though.

UPDATE: Protecting rappers instead of the border. “What the devil are these idiots doing? . . . This is a case for the music industry’s lawyers — not the $35 billion-a-year Department of Homeland Security.” Well, to be fair, the entertainment industries make a lot of political contributions to Democrats.

MORE ON THE STUXNET WORM: Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Ambitions. With a social-software component, too: “One additional impact that can be attributed to the worm, according to David Albright of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is that ‘the lives of the scientists working in the facility have become a living hell because of counter-intelligence agents brought into the plant’ to battle the breach.”