YEAH, IT’S BEEN A LITTLE SLOWER THAN USUAL. I’m taking a semi-vacation from blogging this week. Still online some, but less than usual. Email in particular, isn’t getting the usual attention. Just ready for a post-election break.

LOOKING FOR BOOKS to give kids for Christmas or Hanukkah? Check out the Books for Kids Blog for lots of reviews and recommendations.

SOME GIFT IDEAS from Dave Barry.

DPREVIEW.COM REVIEWS digital cameras under $150. Meanwhile, I know I promised a review of the Panasonic LX-3, but I haven’t had time to do a proper writeup. I’m happy with the pics I’ve gotten from it so far. Here’s one.

MICKEY KAUS: “Holder’s Defense: ‘I was played for a sucker by a lobbyist!’” Plus, observations on the Mumbai coverage.

A TERRORISM SURVIVAL BUNDLE for Windows Mobile.

FEARS OF A MEASLES EPIDEMIC IN BRITAIN:

There have been more than 1,000 measles cases so far this year – putting Britain at risk of a deadly epidemic, health officials say. The Health Protection Agency blamed unfounded fears about the combined MMR jab for the increase and urged parents to vaccinate their children.

In the first ten months of 2008, there were 1,049 confirmed cases in England and Wales – the highest level since the early 1990s.

I had a column on this problem a little while back.

ROGER KIMBALL: Political Freedom Dies in Great Britain.

VAMPIRE MOVIES that don’t suck.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN AND STEVE CALABRESI DEBATE the constitutional status of Presidents and Vice Presidents.

IS VALLEJO, CALIFORNIA’S FISCAL FREEFALL the beginning of a trend? More problems with those underfunded/overgenerous public employee pensions:

But the largest share of the blame in Vallejo has centered on public-safety salaries and benefits, which make up about 75 percent of the city’s general fund budget. Base pay for firefighters is more than $80,000 per year and employees can retire at age 50 with a pension equal to 90 percent of their salary, the result of a retroactive pension increase several years ago. . . . The California Professional Firefighters union proclaims, “If allowed to stand, Vallejo’s attack on its own employees would send shock waves throughout the labor movement.”

Read the whole thing.

HARRY REID SPENDS THE TAXPAYERS’ MONEY, WHILE DISRESPECTING THE TAXPAYERS: We won’t have to smell the tourists anymore.

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

INDEED: “But what if the government were held to the same standard as private management? If the government were a private company it would be too broke and uncreditworthy to continue operating. . . . Yet who among the political class – the very managers who remorselessly oversee the financial train wreck in their own institution – has called for a pay or benefit cut for the President or Congress, let alone actually taken one? Which officials have curtailed travel by private jet, forgone their annual salary, or cancelled scheduled retreats and vacations? . . . So in a show of good faith, I would like to see our federal leaders take the lead in fiscal accountability by refusing to accept a salary until, as they’ve demanded of the automakers seeking a bailout, they can demonstrate a plan to bring their enterprise into the black and repay their debt.”

THE MUMBAI ATTACKS: A case of operational metamorphosis?

CHEAP PLASTIC SOLAR CELLS are getting more efficient. If they’re cheap enough, of course, they don’t have to be that efficient to be worthwhile.

IN THE MAIL: From Steve White, Saint Antony’s Fire. Not to be confused with St. Elmo’s Fire.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: Are You Better Off Than You Were 40 Years Ago? “Government has grown, but freedom has grown faster.”

IT’S TIME TO ORDER THIS YEAR’S Festivus poles! Ah, there’s nothing like seeing the little kids’ eyes light up when you bring one of these beauties into the living room. . . .

Time for a Festivus Pole Insta-Poll!

INTERESTED IN SUPPORTING LONGEVITY RESEARCH? Here’s a suggestion.

ER, THEN WHAT’S THE POINT, EXACTLY? British Testimony: Lap Dances ‘Not Sexually Stimulating’. Maybe things are different over there . . . .

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

ED DRISCOLL: Won’t Get Fooled Again. “If the New York Times and its writers and editors can’t see the difference between an unfortunate shopping incident and the Spanish Civil War, one wonders what what value the newspaper has as an information source to be trusted by their readers.”

A ROUNDUP OF REACTIONS to the James Jones appointment.

WELL, GOOD: Silicon Could Give Lithium Ion Batteries 10X More Capacity. Faster, please.

QUESTIONING WHETHER THE MUMBAI ATTACKS were really aimed at foreigners.

CARLETON COON IS SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE: Anthropologists and the military.

SOME NO-FRILLS TOYS That Every Child Should Have. They left out the Johnny Astro, though . . . .

FROM BOB OWENS, reflections on six months of carrying concealed.

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, harmless conversations could get you suspected of terrorism. And they were right!

THE CARNIVAL OF RECIPES is up!

STRATEGYPAGE: The bad news from Africa. “The problems in Africa are pretty basic, but most Western leaders are unwilling to deal with them head on.”

SLOW-COOKER ADVICE: In response to some earlier recipe posts, people asked me about my All-Clad slow cooker. I like it, but it’s discontinued and the new model is awfully pricey. I got mine as a gift, but I don’t think I’d spend that much money on one, especially as Consumer Reports liked this Hamilton Beach better for under fifty bucks.

I do recommend this cookbook for slow-cookers, and here’s my recipe for Lamb-and-Guinness stew.

QUESTIONS ABOUT Sirtuin-enhancement drugs for aging.

HOMELAND SECURITY: “The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials. . . . There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement.”

TRYING TO STOP DEFENDANT’S LAWYER FROM being paid? Doesn’t seem like part of a prosecutor’s job to me, but what do I know?

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHAT TO DO about those overgenerous / underfunded public pensions: “Why Isn’t Anyone Talking Later Retirement for Government Workers? . . . The irony is that much of the news around GM, Ford and Chrysler involves their huge defined benefit obligations. Much of the debate around whether to put more government money into these companies tends to come back to the issue of pension and health care payments to those companies millions of retirees. Private workers may end up working longer to balance out the good news that they are living longer. Yet there is virtually no discussion of this with regard to government and public sector workers. I imagine that is because government workers tend to be the ones who vote on their own retirement ages.”

GOOD QUESTION: With Hillary Clinton at State, who gets her N.Y. Senate seat? Well, Eliot Spitzer’s free . . .

GOOD NEWS! “Edmunds (via Dow Jones Newswires) estimates that the American new car market is down 28 percent in November, but up 1.9 percent from October.”

HIGHER EDUCATION and a “looming affordability challenge.” Will higher ed be the next bubble to burst, with student loans providing the easy credit that inflated it?

IF G.M. GOES DOWN, what will happen to the Corvette?

DETROIT-TO-DC CARAVAN, cancelled. “Remember the growing movement to caravan a few hundred of Detroit’s most fuel efficient vehicles to the automaker’s next meeting with Congress? Not happening. Interestingly, it wasn’t for lack of support. In fact, it was just the opposite.”

A RANGEL ROUNDUP: In case you were busy, you know, having a life over the weekend, don’t miss the editorials calling for Rangel to step down — here, here and here — and, by way of background, this scandal roundup. Plus, shades of pay-to-play.

ADVANCING PHOTONICS using nanomechanical devices.

SPACE TOURISM lifts off.

JENNIFER RUBIN: Mazel Tov, Hillary!

IN THE MAIL: Matthew Alexander’s How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. Interesting, and undoubtedly relevant. As the Mumbai attacks illustrate, the terror wars are far from over.

INSTA-POLL: After “Black Friday” comes “Cyber Monday” — but I think that was a bigger deal back when people had high-speed Internet at the office, but not at home. Am I right?

OOPS: Government flex-fuel mandates increased fuel consumption. “Problem was, replacement flex-fuel vehicles had larger engines in their predecessors and often ran on gasoline, usually due to difficulty obtaining E85.”

MORE AUTO INDUSTRY WORRIES: “The agency that protects pension plans raised new concerns about Detroit’s three auto makers, saying their use of pension funds to pay for restructuring threatens to drain the funds and leave the agency footing the bill.”

WE’RE ALL JOE THE PLUMBER: Widespread database abuse in Delaware. We’ve had similar problems in Tennessee.

EDITORIAL: Rep. Rangel may prove Democrats’ albatross amid party’s loud claims of public integrity. Well, along with William Jefferson, Chris Dodd, Kent Conrad, Barney Frank . . . .

IF YOU’RE IN D.C., you might want to check out this discussion with Nick Gillespie and Russ Roberts on The Price of Everything, at the Cato Institute, at noon today.

AND NOW, A word from our Sponsor. Heh.

HMM: In Lean Times, Online Coupons Are Catching On. I bought my Dell Inspiron laptop with the help of a $500-off coupon a reader told me about. More like that, please!

ANDREW BREITBART: Six Degrees of Imran Khan. And check out this photo. “Like their Hollywood counterparts, the Bollywood thespians appear predisposed to blame everyone but the culprit.”

HOW MUCH SHOULD WE trust Google? Less than we are trusting Google, I’d say.

NOW THAT THE END IS IN SIGHT, should someone make a sequel to No End in Sight? Why not?

GEORGE WILL on politics on campus.

THE MOST ETHICAL CONGRESS EVER? “Shades of Pay-to-Play.”

JUSTIN HIGGINS: How the G.O.P. can take back the youth vote.

OUCH: British Couple at Taj Hotel: “We Thought We Were Safe, Then CNN Stepped In.” Ouch.

SCORCHED EARTH: Activists Seek Revocation of Tax Exempt Status of Churches That Supported Prop 8.

FIGHTING CRIME, THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY: Victim shoots man during robbery try. “An armed robber who tried to stick up a man Monday night ended up getting shot when the victim pulled out his own gun, police said.” (Via Gun Pundit).

AT DAILYKOS, worries about famine in 2009. I thought that Obama was going to fix all of that. Instead, it’s sounding more like a John Ringo scenario. Can this be right?

MARK STEYN ON MUMBAI: Just go read it, okay? But here’s a bit: “What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events.”

An armed citizenry would help a lot. So would a system that let text-messaging guide responders (but beware of spoofing). On the other hand, this is no super-tactic. It takes a lot more training and resources than a car bomb, to do less damage — except for the media-induced fear, which is the main goal, but which peaks the first time it’s tried.

Plus this: ‘But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall. . . . This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too.”

DO TELL: Muslims “Worry About Image” after Mumbai.

IN LIGHT OF THE EARLIER DISCUSSIONS about Mumbai and the value of an armed citizenry, it’s worth noting that India apparently has strict gun control laws that, as usual, don’t seem to have kept guns out of the hands of killers.

DAVID ALTMAN: Lessons from Mumbai: “Today, we see the emergence of a dark, new, and different army, with new branches that include all the components of a military, yet still utilize the terror doctrine. The advantage of terrorist armies is first and foremost the fact they are not subjected to any law or international convention. They do not face any pressure and they are not accountable to anyone. They tie the hands of the responding force, which is the only side subjected to conventions pertaining to human rights, war captives, and the targeting of civilians.”

UPDATE: Reader Steve Turney emails: “David Altman calls for creating ‘an international anti-terror force… this force must be specialized, it must study the new threat, and it must be able to provide an immediate response by forces trained especially to that end.’ If the Indian forces were slow to respond, how much faster would an international force be? Where would they be based? Murtha might recommend Okinawa.”

Yeah. I think Altman meant something a bit more preemptive, and not reactive. But if you want first responders with guns to be fast, then the first responders have to already be on the scene. Which means they need to be the kind of people previously described as “victims,” only with guns . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related item from Andrew Bostom.

I WONDER IF THEY’LL HAVE SPECIAL CAMPS FOR THAT? Bangkok Protesters Aim to ‘Re-educate’ Rural Thai Majority.

IN THE WAKE OF MUMBAI, an agnostic Jew considers Chabad.

AN “ELEGANT AND EASY” pork tenderloin recipe.

SO MUCH FOR post-racial America, I guess. “The number two man at NBC News believes Barack Obama’s skin color gives him more legitimacy around the world than possibly any American leader in history.”

UPDATE: Reader Thomas Prewitt writes: “I find it curious that no one at NBC ever said that our black female Secretary of State has more legitimacy around the world than possibly any Secretary of State in history.” Yeah, go figure.

GEERT WILDERS: “Our culture is better.”

As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. “We believe that — ‘we’ means the political elite — that all cultures are equal,” he says. “I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You’re not a xenophobe, you’re not a racist, you’re not a crazy guy if you say, ‘My culture is better than yours.’ A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better.”

Read the whole thing.

KIM DU TOIT is retiring from blogging. He’ll be missed.

MORE BIG BLACK FRIDAY WEEKEND SALES. Still a few hours left before they realize that this isn’t actually the worst shopping season ever . . .

REVIEWING THE Blackberry Storm.

HOW THE MUMBAI ATTACKS ARE PLAYING: Jihadists see “invasion” as a triumph.

AN INTROSPECTIVE NEW YORK TIMES PIECE provokes a discussion.

WHAT WILL ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER DO after he leaves the governorship of California?

With his governorship entering its final years and his ability to attract the spotlight intact, the question is arising more frequently: What will Arnold do?

Will he share the stage with Al Gore as a global environmental crusader, promote green technology for an Obama administration, run for the U.S. Senate? Or might he pursue political reform on a broader scale, as he has hinted in appearances with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who shares Schwarzenegger’s independent streak?

Whether he’s marketable on any of that stuff will largely depend on whether he can stave off bankruptcy for California without a federal bailout. But if he follows in Al Gore’s footsteps, he’ll presumably be a bit braver.

JOHN KASS on Dick Durbin and George Ryan: “It was as if the Combine reached out and grabbed the people of Illinois and slapped us hard with a backhand across the mouth, letting us know who runs things, the sting of the knuckles on our nose to remind us that Illinois is not Camelot. . . . In what universe does redemption come without cost, where cynicism so casually dresses itself up as mercy and compassion? Here. In this place. In Illinois.” Read the whole thing.

MUMBAI: Doctors shocked at hostages’ torture.

ADVICE ON home-cooking for hard times.

THE SPIN BEGINS! New York Times trying to credit Obama with Iraq win. Bob Owens deconstructs.

Compare with this assessment in the Kansas City Star: Bush leaves Iraq in good shape for Obama.

A READER SENDS A LINK TO THE “APPLESEED PROJECT,” which is working to create a nation of riflemen. Seems like a good idea.

UPDATE: Reader Jason Ruser sends a link to this report from one of their events.

FROM BOOMERANG CHILDREN to boomerang parents. “Between 2000 and 2007, the number of people 65 and older living with their adult children increased by more than 50 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

IN THE MAIL: The Vorkosigan Companion, which fans of Miles Vorkosigan will find interesting.

GETTING CREATIVE, with leftovers.

RUSSIA TIGHTENS Europe’s energy noose.

THOUGHTS ON those Mumbai policemen who didn’t shoot.

UPDATE: Lots of interesting discussion in the comments. Related item here.

DAVE HARDY: High-tech shipping sets up vessels for pirate attack.

MUMBAI — AN EPIC FAIL: Plan was to kill 5,000. Underperforming by 95%.

CREATING RECEPTIVITY TO HIGHER TAXES via a recession? If the politicians think they can get more of our money by making the economy suck, well . . . isn’t that a bad incentive?

MORE MEN ARE TAKING THE LEAD in caring for elderly relatives. I’m not surprised to hear this, as it matches what I’ve seen in my own life.

NOW THEY TELL US: Obama’s “Not Black,” according to a piece in the Washington Post. Hmm. Gates reappointed at Defense, an Iraq-Hawk Secretary of State, keeping the tax cuts, and now the next President turns out not to be black — hey, they told me if I voted for McCain we’d get a third term for Bush, and I guess they were right!

L.A. TIMES: Liberal Groups Feel Welcome in Washington Again. “Their vision includes federal laws banning job discrimination against gays; expanded hate-crime laws; public land protections from logging and oil drilling; and easier union organizing of workers.”

LITTLE MISS ATTILA has moved.

ANOTHER EDITORIAL ON CHARLES RANGEL:

Are congressional Democrats truly committed to dealing with the economic and fiscal policy challenges they face next year? The answer will be seen in how they address their increasingly problematic Charlie Rangel situation.

Scarcely a day goes by without yet another ethical impropriety coming to light regarding the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee.

Read the whole thing.

WHAT BIG THREE AUTOWORKERS MAKE, and what they cost.

UP TO 65% OFF in this big kitchen and home sale. Panic sales are yielding good savings this year. . . ..