HEH: “He gets the Nobel Peace Prize one week, the next week he’s declaring war on Fox News and gay bloggers.”

UH OH: Dollar Reaches Breaking Point as Banks Shift Reserves. “Central banks flush with record reserves are increasingly snubbing dollars in favor of euros and yen, further pressuring the greenback after its biggest two- quarter rout in almost two decades.”

Meanwhile, Charles Austin writes, “Just asking. But has anybody checked George Soros’ trading activity recently as the dollar started its sharp decline? He does have more practical experience in bringing down a country’s currency than anyone else I can name.”

VIDEO: Steve Wynn vs. Jennifer Granholm.

THIS POST SAYS YOU CAN fax your Senators on healthcare via a website for that.

E.J. DIONNE: Angry White Men Have Real Grievances. I didn’t realize that was even possible.

ROGER SIMON: “For a guy who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama is sure suddenly playing rough with his enemies.”

DUTCH BANK RUN LEADS TO SEIZURE: “The Netherlands’ central bank said Monday it has taken control of DSB Bank NV after clients began a run amid fears the regional lender might collapse. Doubts about the health of DSB, a small but well-known bank based in the north of the country, grew since the start of October as media reports questioned its solvency and clients began having problems withdrawing money from their Internet accounts.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: This isn’t reform, it is stupidity.

FIGHTING the hate.

UPDATE: “Hey, that water won’t carry itself.”

PHOTO MIS-TIMING: The lame hairstyles should have been a tipoff.

A.P.: Dems Scramble After Warning From Health Insurers.

MORE ON COLUMBUS: Rand Simberg on Columbus and space.

Plus, Columbus and the Jews. And, although I linked it below, Celebrating The Wrong Italian.

JOE LIEBERMAN MAY SPONSOR DON’T-ASK-DON’T-TELL REPEAL IN THE SENATE. I’m fine with that, but find it kind of amusing. . .

But isn’t it the case that Obama could suspend DADT tomorrow under his stop-loss authority? Or am I wrong about that?

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “I think you’re right. I think Lieberman, who has been the target of much Obama abuse, is calling a bluff.” We’ll see.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Cameron Jackson writes:

Stop loss applies to deployment and is overcome by a chapter, which, under 600-20, a DADT violation is. Generally, you’re not going to deploy someone under a chapter. When I took my company to Iraq, I left behind (and chaptered) two good officers for failure to establish a family care plan (another 600-20 violation). In Iraq, I initiated two chapters; one for pregnancy (obvious) and one for mental health.

Unfortunate, but there it is.

You can probably answer the legal aspects better than I can, but how we apply DADT has less to do with stop loss and more to do with a policy making decision among our civilian leadership. You just need to rewrite AR 600-20, on the Army side.

I’ve got two friends that are probably DADT violators; one used to be under my command. Both are good Officers.

Since I never had specific knowledge, the issue never came up, and I am white as snow, as far as my oath and ethics.

Still, we need to reach a point where everyone can take a bullet for their country.

Sorry, if I bother you with this long missive.

No bother. Thanks.

ONCE AGAIN, I’M CHARGED WITH BEING too charitable to President Obama. Well, that’s just me, I guess.

SURPRISING PRAISE for the Chevy Sprint Turbo.

CHANGE: “A simple question: what was all the fuss about last week with a new reserve currency anyway? Here is an answer. If OPEC demands payment for oil in something other than U.S. dollars, then people who buy oil (and who doesn’t?) have to stockpile the other currencies in which oil is priced and traded. That would be pretty tough on America.”

RANGEL UPDATE: Rangel gets primary challenge from former campaign director. So is it for real? Or a distraction to forestall more serious challengers?

PAJAMA-BAITING IN THE WHITE HOUSE: Mickey Kaus thinks it’s Axelrod, and that it’s deliberate.

Meanwhile, Jake Tapper on Facebook: “Who cares what some anonymous coward at the WH thinks about bloggers?” Bloggers, of course!

UPDATE: Reader Paul Harper writes on Rangel and Pajama-baiting:

Interesting timing re: take off the pajamas. Kaus is often right on this stuff and Obama badly needs an excuse to stand still a while longer in Afghanistan. But the real function is to erect another kind of Dem to distract the media from the scandal that could really cost the WH and the Dems in 2010 and 2012: a close connection to Charles Rangel.

Unfortunately, the optics of race are part of this undercurrent; but the reality is that Rangel is simply practicing the kind of pocket-lining that Dems and Republicans of all political stripes have been practicing for ages. Rangel, however, is about (maybe) to be caught.

Obama looks good, saintly, when preaching for everyone to be just like him calm and composed as he stands transfixed in the headlights of history. Me? I’m all for jumping out of the way or for figuring out someway to knock out the driver quick.

Obama needs real opposition in Congress in 2010 and Axelrod understands how vulnerable Dems are on the Chicago politics of cash issue.

Are they that smart? Anyway, InstaPundit, at least, remains undistracted — see the next post.

LIVER CELLS MADE FROM SKIN CELLS: “Researchers converted human skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells and then converted the stem cells into liver cells that were able to function in the livers of mice.” Faster, please.

LEARNING TO DEAL WITH an Everest of digital data.

THE BATTLE FOR oatmeal honors.

HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY: Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. For those of a different bent, I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea : A Life of Christopher Columbus, which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:

At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .

Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”

Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.

Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:

This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit. (Reposted from 2005, but it still fits.) [Doesn’t this leave you vulnerable to charges of recycling too? –ed. I prefer to think of it as “They came at us in the same old way, and, you know, we beat them in the same old way.”]

UPDATE: The original link to Bennett’s column seems to have succumbed to link-rot, but I believe this is it.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: In the Crosshairs of the Syrian-Iranian Axis.

BIODIESEL myths and facts.

GOV. SCHWARZENEGGER: He Won’t Be Back.