As evidenced in their treatment of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

How do you mark the Berlin Wall coming down without including Reagan?

Well, NBC News shows us how, and, as a bonus, manages to include Hillary Clinton in the report, twice. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the four-minute, 12-second report doesn’t include at least one of the Kennedys.

Obama noted in his own remarks – taped (badly) for the event – how the fall of the Berlin Wall is akin to his being elected President of the United States. Hillary hit on that theme, too…Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II are simply not to be credited by the left for the simple reason that the left was flat wrong, and Reagan et al proved it. And, of course, no mention of how horribly inhuman was the communist system which built the wall. The left can’t have any of that – they hope to import at least some of that here.

But, then again, she’s also good looking, well armed and in the IDF. Enjoy.

Words fail me – there is, perhaps, just too much going on with today’s soldiers for me to pause and give proper tribute to the past. With the continuing battle in Afghanistan and the losses at Ft. Hood, the symbolism of 11/11 seems a bit out of place.

I can only, for now, think of my father – who joined the Marines at 17 in World War Two. And my grandfather and all his brothers, who went to serve in France during World War One. I also have in my mind’s eye the place where my father is buried – among his like, at the veteran’s cemetery. Row upon row of simple, gray blocks recording the mundane of birth and death, rank and branch of service. But then I remember the Marine who knelt before me – before the likes of me! – and handed me the flag that had draped my father’s casket…where did I earn such honor?…only in the veterans, and only in so much as I honor them.

Interesting:

Word has been leaked by the Washington Post’s insidery The Fix that White House communications director Anita Dunn will be the first Obama senior staffer to “resign” at the end of this month. I guess they don’t count czars as senior staff, but no matter. What’s interesting in The Fix’s rather lengthy report is that there is no mention of the red elephant in the room – ‘Papa Mao Tse-Tung,” as we used to say in the sixties. No, The Fix’s Chris Cillizza dances around, seemingly linking Dunn’s downfall, if that’s what it is, to her leading the administration’s charge against Fox News (taking one for the team, I suppose). He doesn’t mention Dunn’s notorious remarks at a high school graduation, when she cited Mao and Mother Teresa as her mentors.

Of course there’s this, so who knows?

The passing of the baton from Dunn to Pfeiffer had long been expected within White House circles as she had made clear when she took the job that the “interim” in her title was meant to be taken literally.

Hard to tell if that’s real or spin or, more probably, both, but Cillizza’s report also contains this eye-opening tidbit:

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and former Illinois Congressman, has made clear he would like to return to elected office at some point in the not-too-distant future and, if past presidencies are any guide there will be some further turnover in the senior staff over the next year or so.

As Chief of Staff it is Emanuel’s job to make things run smoothly, engineer political victories and make the President look Presidential at all times. To put it mildly, Emanuel has been rather ineffective at this. The bad news is that it might be leftist anti-Semites who are pressing for Emanuel’s ouster – I’m figuring that Emanuel is the sole voice of reason on Israeli issues inside the White House and that simply has to be rubbing some people the wrong way.

Be that as it may, we’re starting to see all sorts of cracks in the Obama edifice – from Democrats steering clear of him to MSMers finally (albeit mildly) questioning his acts to leftists growing increasingly frustrated with Obama’s failure to deliver a United Socialist States of America.

Its just going to get worse from here on out – we’ve got the man who will redeem Carter in the White House; no longer will that dimwit from Plains hold the title of “worst President”.

This, I think, can now been seen as a consistent trend – the GOP is leading, thus far, in the overall 2010 contest:

Republican candidates have stretched their lead over Democrats to six points in the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 43% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 37% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent. Republicans have held the lead for over four months now.

Voters not affiliated with either party continue to heavily favor Republicans, 43% to 20%.

its in those Independents where our 2009 victories came from, and the more Obama, Pelosi and Reid push left, the more those Independents will swing behind us.

I agree whole-heartedly and am glad I, too, never bought in.

Remember that, fellow Americans – no matter what you see or hear, everything is just peachy keen. So, please ignore this:

Gold futures – as well as spot metal – extended record highs shortly before futures floor trading opened in New York on Monday.

A markedly weaker U.S. dollar was mainly behind the surge.

In recent trading, December gold was up $11.70 at $1,107.40 an ounce after hitting a most-active record of $1,111.70. Nearby November gold hit $1,109.30, a front-month Comex record. Spot gold also hit a fresh all-time peak of $1,111.15 an ounce as the U.S. dollar weakened against the euro.

The continued record extensions are bolstering fund expectations that gold prices will keep rising, said George Gero, vice president with RBC Capital Markets Global Futures.

In addition to dollar woes, stronger equities futures and crude prices were helping gold, Gero said.

People are hiding their wealth – converting our rapidly devaluing currency in to gold and oil so that no matter what the government and banks screw up next, they’ll have something left. Of course, not all of us can do this – in fact, most of us can’t. We have to hold on to our ever more worthless dollars because we have to pay the day to day bills and don’t have a lot of surplus cash to shovel in to thousand-dollar-an-ounce gold or seventy-dollar-a-barrel oil.

As I’ve always said, pay very little attention to what people say – people with money are telling us that the economy is getting better…but what they are doing with the money (betting it on stocks, taking profits and converting the results in to commodities) is a much more powerful statement than all the glad-handing about “green shoots” and other references to Happy Days Are Here Again. We’ve got a dead economy, and all we’re waiting for is the burial.

Obama and his bankers hope to finesse things and figure that some how, some way, the wherewithal will be found to get Americans consuming again – thus allowing China to sustain its bubble and keep buying US bonds so we can finance our continued finessing of the economy. See the circle? Well, its a circle jerk. We, the people, are playing center.

Time for us to break out of this – to get past the idiots who brought us here and start laying our plans to build an economy based upon hard work, savings and real wealth. It’ll be a lot more boring – not quite as many X-Boxes under the Christmas tree – but once we do it, we’ll never have this problem again.

Ah, but China is a giant on spindly legs, just as Japan was in the 80’s. A quote from a related article over at Mish’s pretty much tells the tale:

All my young in-laws are rushing in to buy condos putting life savings down as well as laying down additional borrowed family cash down and then paying way more to buy each month than it would cost them to rent. It’s as if the boom crash in the west never happened and they believe themselves immune.

Indeed – the tip off, for me, was some tens of millions of dollars being paid for an apartment in Hong Kong. When people are being that stupid with money, a crash is inevitable. But the bankers are counting on it – especially those most heavily invested in China.

What astounds is that it is certain that no major entity is doing business in China without providing bribes and kickbacks to the elite. It is certain that China’s government is lying about economic and government spending statistics (China’s announced military budget, for instance, is a laughable lie). China is a corrupt, cruel government which makes its living by cheating its own people and ripping off western economies, especially ours. And here we go – and why? Because the money men still think they can get easy profits out of China. So does the Chinese government, which has essentially ordered this madness to happen. And easy profits are all they care about – because that is how you get the swell bonuses which buys the pretty toys which make you a better person than everyone else…

It will come crashing down – and the latest replacement for the United States will be shown to be the absurdity it always has been.

We reported earlier that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan attended the same mosque at the same time as two 9/11 hijackers, but now we’ve also learned that he “had been attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda.” months ago, and federal officials were aware of it.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

[…]

Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.

In a blog posting early Monday titled “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing,” Awlaki calls Hasan a “hero” and a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

According to his site, Awlaki served as an imam in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia.

Does this information point to Hasan being just a guy “who snapped” or a guy who thought long and hard about what he planned to do?

The real tragedy here is that this could have been prevented. For liberals who convinced themselves that Bush either knew 9/11 was gonna happen and didn’t do anything about or just ignored the warning signs, I’d love to know how they feel about the fact intelligence officials were well aware of Hasan’s actions months ago and nothing was done about it.

Perhaps we need to be asking what did Obama know and when? Or was it just political correctness that let this happen? There was clearly plenty of warning and actionable intelligence. But nothing happened.

After 9/11, no one knew what lay ahead for this country. We can only guess at how many attacks on U.S. soil were foiled thanks to the efforts of the Bush administration and our intelligence agencies, It appears that symbiotic relationship designed to keep us safe has broken down..

I guess Obama is just too busy.

While it’s easy for the left to claim a short term victory out of Saturday night’s vote in the House, I am sitting here calmly, knowing very well Obamacare is heading down a long path to nowhere.

For starters, it won’t pass the Senate. Moderate Democrats in the Senate won’t go for it.

Second, the far-left isn’t pleased. They want taxpayer-funded abortions. A bill that doesn’t mandate this is of no interest to them. NOW is already mobilizing against the current version. Any legislation with pro-abortion measures simply cannot pass, yet one House Democrat is confident the Stupak amendment won’t be in the final version. So, that razor-thin victory for Obamacare will became a comfortable defeat. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Joe Lieberman promises to join a filibuster of any bill the public option, some far-left Democrats won’t support a bill without it.

Third, once details about this bill (which wasn’t given the promised window of transparency) are widely known and discussed, you won’t see as many House members so willing to vote for it after they’ve heard a mouthful from their constituents.

With mid-term elections coming up, and polls showing lack of support for government-run health care, I am not worried about Saturday night’s vote.