My baby brother’s birthday, today. He was the “extra youngest” – a sort of “oops” nearly 7 years after I came along. Probably the only fully rational member of the family, in case you were wondering.

This is getting common enough for us to get very worried about it:

President Obama isn’t taking kindly to a television ad that criticizes his opposition to a popular scholarship program for poor children, and his administration wants the ad pulled.

Former D.C. Councilmember Kevin Chavous of D.C. Children First said October 16 that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had recently approached him and told him to kill the ad.

The 30-second ad, which has been airing on FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and News Channel 8 to viewers in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, urges the president to reauthorize the federally-funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for D.C. students to attend private schools.

The ad features Chavous and a young boy–one of 216 students whose scholarships were rescinded by the Department of Education earlier this year when the agency announced no new students would be allowed into the program. The ad also includes an excerpt taken from one of Obama’s campaign statements.

“I saw [Holder] at an event,” said Chavous. “He did ask me in front of others to pull the ad. My response was, ‘No, and I tell you what, if the president does the right thing, not only will we pull it but we will celebrate him.’ ”

Alas! To do the right thing would anger powerful, well-heeled special interests. In this case, the teacher’s unions – Obama might very much want poor, DC kids to get a good education, but not at the cost of campaign donations. I mean, come on – there’s a limit to a liberal’s bleeding heart, ya know?

More worrisome than Obama’s devotion to corrupt, special interests is the fact that his people have repeatedly tried to get anti-Obama messages off the air. I don’t think its because they are afraid of dissent so much as they just don’t want to deal with it. Its much better, for the Obamaniacs, if they can just ram everything through without any pesky dissidents mucking up the works, you see?

If any of you liberals still wonder why we’re more and more often calling you fascists, here is your answer.

The never ending story:

Democrats Ask New Jersey Secretary of State to Ignore Mismatched Signatures on Absentee-Ballot Requests

This year, New Jersey’s registered voters can request a mail-in ballot for any reason. (Before 2005, voters needed to provide a reason for why they needed an absentee ballot.) The state received about 150,000 absentee-ballot applications this year.

On about 2,300 of those applications so far, the signature on the request form does not match the signature on the voter’s registration forms with the state.

In a development that is depressingly predictable, the New Jersey Democratic party is asking the state to provide provisional ballots for all these voters. Those ballots could, presumably, be used to overcome any narrow lead by Republican Chris Christie over Democrat Jon Corzine on Election Day.

Once we are back in power, we should set up a Voter Protection Committee to investigate all accusations of voter fraud over the past 10 years. To be sure, we’ll have to deal with the kook accusations about Diebold, but it will be worth it to get at the real voter fraud endemic to the Democrat party. Once we get 100 or 200 Democrats in jail for voter fraud, perhaps the rest will decide that conducting elections honestly is a good idea.

The number of pages in Pelosi-care – from NRO’s The Corner:

A friend e-mails:

2009 Pelosi Health care bill – 1990 pages.

1994 Clinton Health care bill – 1342 pages.

So it’s 648 pages longer than even that bureaucratic monstrosity.

UPDATE:

E-mail:

A 2,000-page health care bill that costs a trillion dollars means that every page costs the American people a HALF-BILLION DOLLARS.

Pelosi-Care: 33% more crap than Hillary-Care!

UPDATE: And abortion is in the bill.

During the Bush years Democrats called 3.5% growth a recession.

Think about it.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: “…any short-term recovery we see during 2009 and 2010 is likely to be ephemeral“

Well, they both hate western civilization:

Around the globe, environmental protesters tried “a synchronized burst of more than 4,300 demonstrations, from the Himalayas to the Great Barrier Reef,” according to The New York Times.

The sweeping Oct. 24 protest was to bully developed nations like the United States into a climate change agreement when they meet in Copenhagen this December.

The 350.org protesters, who want to drop CO2 in the atmosphere to that level, were especially critical of the U.S. “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”

Oops, that wasn’t the eco-nuts, that’s a direct quote from Osama bin Laden in 2002. While al Qaeda and eco-nuts use different tactics, they share a similar enemy.

Civilization.

Birds of a feather?

Well, not exactly – but when your ideology is anti-human, you’re bound to find areas of agreement with the other anti-humans out there. The problem stems from believing a pack of lies. Osama believes a pack of lies. Environmentalists believe a pack of lies. Some times, the packs of lies overlap. This should get environmentalists to think, but it probably won’t…in fact, if we did get Osama’s head up on a pike, the left would resurrect his legend as that of a working class fighter for minorities and the environment (hey, if they can turn a cop killer like Mumia in to a commencement speaker, then nothing is beyond them…or beneath them).

Better, though, for people to seek Truth – its easily available. All you have to do is ask for it. Knock on the door, as it were.

…then you liberals would be going ballistic. But since its one of your own – from the New Editor:

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine (D) has personally furnished $22.6 million of the total of $24.1 million existing in his re-election campaign’s coffers — more than 90% of the total — according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

Gov. Corzine has outspent his two competitors in the state’s gubernatorial race, Republican Chris Christie and independent Chris Daggett, by more than 2 to 1 combined.

This 2009 general election spending is in addition to the $100 million the former Goldman Sachs co-CEO spent in his two previous campaigns for US senator and NJ governor, in 2000 and 2005, respectively.

Is this what you liberals want? Is keeping a man committed to abortion rights and profligate spending in office so important that you’ll sell yourself to a corporate shill as long as he toes your ideological line?

Unless you liberals start demanding a vote for Christie, you’ll be shown up as a bunch of power-grubbing scoundrels…

For the rest of us, its less of a shock:

Sales of new U.S. homes unexpectedly tumbled in September, their first drop in six months, underscoring the hazards to an economic recovery even as businesses appeared to be stepping up investment.

New single-family home sales fell 3.6 percent to a 402,000 unit annual pace from a downwardly revised 417,000 units in August, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected sales to rise to a 440,000 unit pace.

Unexpectedly? Unexpected by whom? For crying out loud, the only thing keeping any home sales going at all is the $8,000.00 tax credit and there’s only so many first time home buyers out there, ya know? With rising unemployment and increasing foreclosures, what on earth makes anyone think we can have a housing recovery?

Oh, yeah – I forgot: Obama fixed the economy and all’s well.

In a pig’s eye.

We’re broke. We’re in debt up to our eyeballs. We’re losing jobs. Our wages are falling. There’s no way that we, the people, are going to spend our way out of this mess…and that is what Big Government and Big Corporation are counting on…and we’ve had this massive run up in stocks because a bunch of suckers bought the notion that, some how, an increasingly impoverished people can be made to go on a spending spree when they’re broke and in debt. Obama flashing the cash at special interest, big corporations and a few people just won’t do the trick – especially since its borrowed cash which we, poor as we’re becoming, will have to pay back.

Monumentally stupid.

A disturbing news story:

President Barack Obama is considering sending large numbers of additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan next year but fewer than his war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, prefers, U.S. officials said.

Such a narrowed military mission would escalate American forces to accomplish the commander’s broadest goals, protecting Afghan cities and key infrastructure. But the option’s scaled-down troop numbers likely would cut back on McChrystal’s ambitious objectives, amounting to what one official described as “McChrystal Light.”

Under the pared-down option, McChrystal would be given fewer forces than the 40,000 additional troops he has asked for atop the current U.S. force of 68,000, officials told The Associated Press.

Senior White House officials stressed, however, that the president has not settled on any new troop numbers and continues to debate other strategic approaches to the 8-year-old Afghanistan war.

I’d like to say “keep debating”, Barry, and you might eventually get it right…but anyone who studies history knows that councils of war work out to be gatherings of cowards. Everyone gets their two cents in and the decision maker is left with what is best described as the sum of all fears. No decision has been made (which, in and of itself, is a terrible dereliction), but this was my worry all along – not enough troops to win, but enough to keep the bloodshed going at a faster pace.

Please, please, please let this story not pan out…

Explained:

SPIEGEL: You famously coined the term “Reagan Doctrine” to describe Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. What is the “Obama Doctrine?”

Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he’s able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn’t elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that diplomacy always fails?

Krauthammer: No, foolishness does. Perhaps when he gets nowhere on Iran, nowhere with North Korea, when he gets nothing from the Russians in return for what he did to the Poles and the Czechs, gets nowhere in the Middle East peace talks — maybe at that point he’ll begin to rethink whether the world really runs by international norms, consensus, and sweetness and light, or whether it rests on the foundation of American and Western power that, in the final analysis, guarantees peace.

SPIEGEL: That is the cynical approach.

Krauthammer: The realist approach. Henry Kissinger once said that peace can be achieved only one of two ways: hegemony or balance of power. Now that is real realism. What the Obama administration pretends is realism is naïve nonsense.

The real problem with Obama’s policy is that it will have to be paid for – in blood and treasure. After a century in which we learned the very hard way about how dictators are to be treated, Obama is going back to 1933 and figuring that they are just misunderstood nationalists who have legitimate gripes about the stronger powers in the world.

There is no international community. International law is only that which the United States enforces by brute, military force. Freedom is only protected by American power. The enemies of freedom and decency are kept at bay only by rank fear of the United States. Tinker with that – for a moment say that law will be enforced by treaties in and of themselves; that freedom is defended by words; that enemies are just misunderstood friends…and the wicked of the world will lunge for our throat. Why? Because wicked people are just that: wicked. There is no excuse for evil – they know darned well they shouldn’t do what they do, but they do it anyway because they like to do it and feel empowered by getting away with the ruthless oppression of others. Its really no more complex than that.

War is a terrible thing, but it isn’t the most terrible thing. We can have peace and freedom – but we can only have it if we have the military means and the moral will to use the means if pressed to it. We are not to fly off half cocked; we are not to see war as a primary means of conflict resolution…but everyone out there, friend and foe, must be convinced that if we are pushed hard enough, we will strike with devastating force. Only thus will there be a chance for peace – for a short moment, the world was being treated to proof positive about this – right after the fall of Baghdad when Libya gave up its nukes, Syria started to give up on Lebanon, Iran started to talk about peaceful relations…and then we got bogged down with internal, political debates where the left tried to use the war as a means to defeat Republicans…and the world took note of our national irresolution, saw that Bush would not be deterred, but also understood that Bush wouldn’t be President forever. They set the stage and they waited – and their patience has been rewarded: they now have an American President who doesn’t understand – and doesn’t want to understand – what they are made of.

They will strike at us – openly and in secret – as soon as they can.