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).