TOMORROW IS CYBER MONDAY, the online shopping world’s equivalent of Black Friday. I wonder, though, if the greater penetration of home broadband means that people will be doing less of their shopping at work. I note that Amazon did a big Black Friday sale, but I’m not seeing anything on their site about a Cyber Monday sale. Does this mean they agree?

JEFF JACOBY: “Blind opposition to war that seems lost is understandable. But can Democrats be so invested in defeat that they would abandon even a war that may be winnable?”

Tom Maguire smells another flip-flop coming.

RIAA SCARED OF HARVARD? They should be. Harvard could literally buy and sell them. Except that its portfolio managers wouldn’t make such a poor investment.

IT’S EASIER TO GET SPOTTED DICK THAN YOU THINK, even in America. Consider yourself warned!

Sorry, I ran across that and couldn’t resist.

FIRST-CLASS PRISON ACCOMMODATIONS — IF YOU PAY: A symposium on “Pay to Stay” prison programs in First Impressions, the online companion to the Michigan Law Review.

THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE CATO SUPREME COURT REVIEW is now available for free online.

GREENHOUSE UPDATE:

While he had been invited long before being named co-winner of the 2007 Nobel peace prize, the tabloid daily Oesterreich claimed it had acquired a copy of the contract laying down generous conditions for Gore’s 40-minute talk to 800 invited guests.

Not only would the organisers make a private jet and luxury limousine plus bodyguards available to Gore, they also agreed to cover his entire travel costs and his hotel, restaurant and telephone bills, the newspaper said.

I guess commercial air tickets and a Prius were out of the question.

A TORT LAW POEM from Stuart Buck.

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD:

Few have been granted permission to see these marvels.

Indeed, the Italian government was not even aware of their existence until a few years ago.

But the ‘Temples of Damanhur’ are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

(Via Brian Micklethwait, who comments: “This reminds me of that thing about how if you owe the bank very little it’s your problem but if you owe them a lot it’s theirs. In this case, if you want retrospective planning permission for a patio extension, you lose. But, if you want it for several miles of ornately decorated underground caves illuminated with fabulous stained glass windows, no problemo.”)

MORE UNREST in Paris.

CHEAP SPACESHIPS in New Zealand.

I’LL BE ON ROB PORT’S Say Anything podcast in just a minute.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL on the Second Amendment:

The phrase “the right of the people” or some variation of it appears repeatedly in the Bill of Rights, and nowhere does it actually mean “the right of the government.” When the Bill of Rights was written and adopted, the rights that mattered politically were of one sort–an individual’s, or a minority’s, right to be free from interference from the state. Today, rights are most often thought of as an entitlement to receive something from the state, as opposed to a freedom from interference by the state. The Second Amendment is, in our view, clearly a right of the latter sort.

As a practical matter on the Court, the outcome in D.C. v. Heller might well be decided by one man: Anthony Kennedy, the most protean of Justices. However, in recent years he has also been one of the most aggressive Justices in asserting any number of other rights to justify his opinions on various social issues. It would seriously harm the Court’s credibility if Justice Kennedy and the Court’s liberal wing now turned around and declared the right “to keep and bear arms” a dead letter because it didn’t comport with their current policy views on gun control. This potential contradiction may explain why no less a liberal legal theorist than Harvard’s Laurence Tribe has come around to an “individual rights” understanding of the Second Amendment.

Indeed. It will be very hard for the Court to maintain its unenumerated-rights jurisprudence if it attempts to explain out of existence an enumerated right in which most Americans believe.

A BAR EXAM SCANDAL in South Carolina.

UPDATE: More here.

HEALTH CARE: Embrace the fantasy!

THE DECLINING DOLLAR: Good news?

TERRORIST SPEAKS: From his Turkish jail, a senior terrorist claims a key role in atrocities around the world.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON offers a history lesson for the risible Rowan Williams.

RETRO-FUTURISTIC ART: Visions of a future that never happened.

SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE: The Gucci line of baby gear. “Sure, you could save $750 by going with a Baby Bjorn instead of the Gucci baby carrier, but you’d be risking serious damage to your fashionista cred.” Uh huh.