Back in September, while I was in Washington, DC and involved in a counter-demonstration at Walter Reed against a bunch of anti-America war cockroaches activists, I mentioned Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steak House, an establishment that buses in patients from Walter Reed who have been severely disabled while fighting the Global War On Terror and gives them a comped dinner to show a part of their gratitude to these brave warriors who represent America in the fight for freedom around the world and for the continued security of the United States of America.

While I was in Washington in the last few days, I took a couple of wonderful people to dinner there, and it was a marvelous experience.

The establishment is decorated with genuine football memorabilia(remember great tackle Fran O’Brien?) and photos of numerous celebrities and members of major political families and political figures on a background of wood panelled walls(the atmosphere is incredible). There are both bar and dining room seating{my party and I sat in the bar}, and the crowd on any given evening consists of a mix of formal and casual. There is a lively bar filled with a mixed clientele of locals and tourists(the eatery is located in the basement of the Washington Hilton).

The food is to die for.

On the last visit, I enjoyed a crab cake appetizer that contained no fillers(in a delicious lobster cream sauce), then an entree of rare ribeye steak that literally melted in my mouth and a sizeable, succulent, meaty lobster tail that could only be described as awesome.

On the side was this enormous bowl of home-made mashed potatoes that deserved some sort of global award(a famous house specialty).

I’m one of those people who travel with a voracious apetite, but there was so much density to the nectar-of-the-gods provender that I couldn’t finish it all.

My companions revelled in Maryland Cream of Crab soup, a platter of jumbo lump crab cakes and a mouth watering, lobster-dominated seafood platter.

I had the opportunity to meet and chat with Hal Koster, one of the two owners, and he was every inch the patriotic American I expected he would be given the restaurant’s “do rather than talk about” policy of honoring the soldiers who have sacrificed so much in the name of freedom.

I’ll be spending a lot of time in the Nation’s Capital in the future, and Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steak House will be my Number One Eatery.

Anyone who visits Washington, D.C. and doesn’t have dinner and libations at Fran O’Brien’s will be missing out on an essential dining experience.

Trust me on this one.

Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, in a speech on Monday at Johns Hopkins, very easily, calmly and well, chastised the media for their partisan reporting on the war in Iraq.

The other question I posed is of critical importance: why does Iraq’s success or failure matter to the American people?
Consider this quote: “What you have seen, Americans, in New York and Washington, D.C., and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes.”

The speaker is Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior member of the terrorist group al Qaeda and a top leader in the effort to defeat U.S. and coalition forces around the world. The terrorists’ method of attack, simply put, is slaughter. They behead. They bomb children. They attack funerals and wedding receptions.

This is the kind of brutality and mayhem the terrorists are working to bring to our shores. And if we do not succeed in our efforts to arm and train Iraqis to help defeat these terrorists in Iraq, this is the kind of mayhem that a terrorist, emboldened by a victory, will bring to our cities again–let there be no doubt.

Indeed, the most important reason for our involvement in Iraq–despite the cost–is often overlooked. It is not only about building democracy, though democracies tend to be peaceful and prosperous and are in and of themselves good things. It is not about reopening Iraqi schools and hospitals or rebuilding infrastructure, though they are proceeding apace and are desirable and essential to ensure stability.

But, simply put, defeating extremist aspirations in Iraq is essential to protect the lives of Americans here at home.

And he tells the media,

So I suggest to editors and reporters–whose good intentions I take for granted–to do some soul searching. To ask: how will history judge–if it does–the reporting decades from now when Iraq’s path is settled?

I would urge us all to make every effort to ensure we are telling the whole story. To take a moment for self-reflection and reassessment.

Further it is worth noting that there are 158,000 Americans in uniform who are sending e-mails back to friends and families, telling them the truth as they see it. And much of it is different than what those in the United States are seeing and reading about every day.

Yes, this is an angle the liberal Mainstream Media doesn’t seem to be considering all that much — that while they are now playing footloose and fancy free with the news they deliver to the American public, when the smoke of Iraq clears and all the truths are lain on the table of public scrutiny, they will be exposed before the American people as purveyors of half truths and downright lies who misled their trusting readers, viewers and listeners in order to peddle their liberal agendas.

Michael Yon has posted another of his well received journals, filled with photos and great commentary, this one titled Birds Of Baghdad.

ALERT: How about some FACTS on our economy for a change — instead of the negative LIES that keep coming from the liberals and the media (but I repeat myself)?

Here’s a FACT: The 2003 Tax Reform Package helped boost our economy with revolutionary incentives for investment. The top rate for capital gains was slashed to 15% and for the first time, dividends are now taxed as capital gains rather than ordinary income. Without these fundamental, common sense reforms, our economy would not be as healthy and capitalized as it is today.

However, unless Congress acts in the next two weeks, these reforms and many more will start to expire at the end of 2005. Fortunately, tax reconciliation bills have been passed by the House of Representatives (H.R. 4297) and the Senate (S. 2020) that could give these tax provisions a new lease on life. What is uncertain is how the final bill will emerge from conference.

While both bills include some popular tax-cut extensions that have received bipartisan support in the past, there are major differences between the measures. The House bill extends the reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends for two years, which are currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2008. The Senate bill does not extend the reduced rates.

The differences between the House and Senate bills could set up a difficult conference between the two chambers as lawmakers attempt to trade and bargain for their favored provisions. Conservative action is needed NOW to make sure that capital gains reduction and dividend tax reforms are in the final conference report.

TAKE ACTION: You and I have worked hard to get Congress to start “sunsetting” (expire) certain laws and even agencies in the past. What we DON’T need to “sunset” are the very reforms that have BOOSTED our economy and kept it HEALTHY, in spite of the onslaught of the Clinton inflation in 2000 and 9/11 in 2001. The Democrats and liberal Republicans that want to “sunset” the beneficial reforms need to be STOPPED.

Congress is back in session for only TWO WEEKS — so they need to hear from YOU and I NOW. Click below now to send a FREE message to your BOTH your U.S. Senators and Representative, asking him or her to KEEP the vital 2003 capital gains and dividend reforms in the tax reconciliation bills:

http://capwiz.com/sicminc/issues/alert/?alertid=8298606&type=CO

NOTE: Be sure to forward this Alert to EVERYONE you know who wants to help get Congress to keep our economy healthy with these tax reforms. Thank you!

Sincerely,

William Greene, President
RightMarch.com

Jonathan Turley gives his take on parents’ rights in the issue of their minor childrens’ abortions here.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood, a case concerning the right of parents to be notified on abortions given to minor children. The case is seen as a bellwether on the court’s shifting majority on abortion as well as the future of parental notice and consent laws in 43 states.

and continuing later in the Op-Ed,

Pro-choice advocates would make abortion the only absolute right in our Constitution, even though it was not fully recognized by the Supreme Court until 1973. Conversely, parental rights have been recognized since the founding of our Republic but are routinely dismissed when they collide with the almighty right to an abortion.

The pro-choice crowd is represented almost exclusively by liberal socialist leftist anti-American scum progressives.

Moving along, there are two sides to this debate, one here,

GENEVA - Efforts so far by the food and drink industry to improve the nutritional value of their products to fight childhood obesity are simply not good enough, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

“The industry’s efforts are commendable, but inadequate. They are only a drop in the ocean,” Colin Tukuitonga, who oversees the WHO’s global strategy on diet and physical activity, said before a meeting with representatives of the food and soft drink industry.

Some industry giants such as Kraft, Nestle and Unilever have recently reviewed their recipes and reduced the salt, sugar and fat content of some of their products. They have also pledged to change some of their advertising and marketing practices.

and the other here.

There’s no correlation between ad exposure and childhood obesity. George Mason University’s Todd Zywicki noted at a forum last summer that the average American child actually watches less TV than he did 15 years ago. What’s more, children face less exposure to food ads now than they did then, for a variety of reasons. The remote control has made ad-watching optional over the last 20 years, and more recent technology like TiVo may make traditional commercials completely obsolete.

Broadcast television is also losing younger viewers to cable, where ads in general are 40 percent less prevalent and where food ads comprise about half the percentage of overall ad time that they do in broadcast. Cable also offers more options for channel-flipping during commercials, and premium cable stations like HBO, which have no commercials at all, have become popular. All told, the average American child viewed 900 fewer food commercials in 2003 than he did in 1994. That this same average child gained weight amounts to a pretty solid rebuttal to the theory that food marketing is a significant contributor to childhood obesity.

You’d need to ban ads in adult programming. The fact is, you simply can’t limit a kid’s exposure to food ads, unless you’re prepared to ban all food advertising. Most children’s television viewing isn’t limited to children’s television programming. Kids watch shows intended for adults, too.

In fact, the kids most prone to obesity – those with minimal parental supervision – are also very likely those most likely to watch adult programming. Former Federal Trade Commission administrator Timothy Muris pointed out in a conference last June that if Congress had caved and banned food ads aimed at kids the first time the idea was proposed in the 1970s, the only television show that would have been affected would have been Captain Kangaroo.

Today, such a ban would probably hit a few other programs as well, which brings us to the next point…

The ban would cripple children’s television. The FCC already mandates that broadcasters devote a portion of the broadcast day to children’s programming. Food ads make up a huge portion of the ad revenue for those programs. Cut off that ad revenue, and the broadcasters subject to FCC regulation lose any incentive to invest in high-quality children’s television. Why put money into a sure loser?

Furthermore, television not subject to FCC regulations — cable, for example — would likely drastically cut back on the amount of television time it carves out for children, or just disregard children’s programming entirely.

The cause of childhood obesity lies elsewhere. Several recent studies have suggested that the single best indicator of a child’s health, diet, weight, and activity level is the health, diet, weight, and activity level of that child’s parents. Children of active parents tend to be active. Kids tend to eat what their moms and dads eat.

That said, there’s also some evidence that the caloric intake among kids hasn’t changed much over the last quarter century. What has changed is the amount of time kids are active, outside, and exercising. Kids today may watch less television, but they more than make up for it with video games, Internet activity, DVDs, or some combination of the three.

On the latter side of the debate, the Cato Institute rightly points out that the true status of childrens’ respective states of fitness result from their emulation of their parents’ dietary and exercise habits and their own sedentary passtimes.

The former, based on the World Health Organization statistics, places the blame for childhood obesity on food producers and their marketing programs.

The WHO conclusions, as can be expected, are those championed by the left, who, bless their litigious little hearts, have of course been doing everything in their power to place all burdens for preventing childhood obesity on the evil food producers.

So, they seek to take away the rights of parents to have any knowledge of or involvement in decision making where their adolescent children’s having abortions are concerned while absolving parents of any blame for their children’s obesity, in all cases via the courts so as to place the law between parents and their responsibilities as parents.

In public schools, the left, again using the courts, this time the far left 9th Circus Circuit Court Of Appeals, has obtained a ruling that

“We … hold that there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children ….”
Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

In the same schools, where the right to prayer or any sort of religious reference was some time ago outlawed{except in the case of schools where the only religion permitted to be represented is Islam, via required Koran studies by Judeo-Christian children}, teachers and faculties are permitted to preach liberal doctrine to students or to revise history to meet the standards of the left.

In short, by small step after small step, each processed through the courts, the left is slowly but surely usurping the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, excluding them gradually ever more from any kind of parental rights and indoctrinating their children into a leftist school of thought not unlike the methods used in Chinese, North Korean and former Soviet schools.

This is an occurrance that should be of some concern not only to parents, but to all right-thinking Americans and something that needs to be addressed as the tenacious left, headed up by organizations like the ACLU, are yet again applying methods of gaining their ends that are slowly termiting the America we know and love out from under us.

The French have decided to start up a CNN-like news network.

The French government has given the green light for an international TV news channel to start broadcasting in French by the end of next year, with the aim of spreading the country’s vision to the world.

That easily qualifies for the comic quote of the day.

France’s “vision?”

Hah! More than ten percent unemployment? The large, violently hostile Muslim community they allowed to proliferate on their soil, then agitated by treating them like red headed stepchildren? A healthcare system that managed to help kill off some ten thousand senior citizens during a summer heat spell three years ago? A corrupt government that continued to sell war materials to Saddam Hussein after signing off on a UN resolution forbidding any country from doing just that? A well earned reputation for using immediate, unconditional surrender as their first line of defense?

“France must … be on the front line in the global battle of TV pictures,” a spokesman quoted Chirac as telling the cabinet, which approved the establishment of a company to run the French International News Channel (CFII).

“The aim is to bring France’s values and its vision of the world to everywhere in the world,” he said.

Just what we all need, a continuous international broadcast of French bullshit.

For a more realistic look at French “values and vision,” let’s go talk to GM Roper.

French values and vision, heh heh heh…

In the face of deteriorating security, Jewish residents of Karmei Tzur are taking matters into their own hands.

Shlomo Ne’eman, a member of Karmei Tzur’s municipality told Arutz-7 that residents have become fed up with the IDF’s systematic ignoring of all their requests to deal with the Arabs who target vehicles driving on the Hevron-Jerusalem road with rocks and firebombs.

Residents say they refuse to abandon their homes, as they suspect the IDF response is intended to induce them to do. “But we are also no longer willing to be placed at the mercy of the Arab hooligans and watch as our children are targeted on their way to and from school each day,” Ne’eman said.

Tuesday morning, at 7 AM, residents deployed along the main road, armed with their weapons used for guard-duty in their community. “We stood all morning near the neighboring Arab villages of Beit Umar and El Aroub and we guarded the road,” Ne’eman described. “And we intend to continue guarding until the army comes to its senses and takes matters into its own hands.”

This seems like the only real option they have to ensure the safety of themselves, their families and their community, and a prime example of the necessity for citizens to be armed. The situation they face is the result of their government’s failing to provide them adequate protection from the animals who pursue terrorism as a substitute for compromise.

Luckily, in their case, they are issued weapons for the purpose of guarding their town, but imagine if the defeatist Sharon administration had followed the American liberal doctrine of limiting firearms ownership to military, police and criminals. The entire community might have been butchered by now, men, women and children as the local Palestinians would have known there would be no one returning fire during a terrorist attack.

The armed presence of these citizens began working right off the bat, as the “brave” Palestinians have no stomach for fighting, only for murdering unarmed children who can’t shoot back and so were nowhere to be found where they had previously congregated, awaiting the passing of these school children to assault them.

American criminals of the armed robbery and home invasion persuasions are pretty much the same in that regard, they do not want a firefight during which they may be injured or killed, they want an unarmed, helpless victim as they, like their terrorist cousins, are cowards.

If they knew that prospective targets were armed, they would take their dubious “business” elsewhere, or perhaps find a new line of work.

Tony Snow’s latest column, “Cowardice, not corruption, plaguing GOPers” is very much on point, even in the White House but more particularly on the Hill.

The Republican Party in Washington is in trouble not because it’s overrun by crooks, but because it’s packed with cowards — and has degenerated into a caricature of the party that swept to power 11 years ago promising to take on the federal bureaucracy and liberate the creative genius of American society.

We see this constantly. Here we are with an overwhelming Republican majority in Congress, a formidable state of affairs that our right-thinking politicians should be using to advance the Republican cause and back the President when he nominates strong Republicans to such positions as judges in the higher courts and to ambassadorship in the U.N., et al. They should be supporting the administration on Iraq and the rest of the Global War On Terror.

Instead, these spineless, self-serving career senators and representatives Frenchly allow themselves to be browbeaten and bullied into submission by the liberal-led Democrat minority, as often as not leaving the President and his advisors hanging out in the breeze, lone-wolfing the defense of their policies and nominees on their lonesome, weathering blistering, patently false or twisted rhetoric from the left, while not even a cricket chirps from the right side of the aisle.

That’s because it’s more important to these Republicans to remain popular, looking to be reelected rather than to risk losing an election by doing what we elected and reelected them to do, what we pay them to do.

Do we really need to reelect these people? In my opinion, it’s about time for a good house cleaning at the polls, transfusing Congress with fresh blood to replace the complacent, fat assed, pusilanimous tax dollar parasites with newbies who stand for more than just being reelected.

Ann Coulter gives some succinct examples of Republican politicians’ arse creeping in their response to John Murtha’s cowardly cut and run redeployment proposal. It’s enough to turn your stomach.

The old Reagan quote about politics being the world’s second oldest profession yet having a lot in common with the first really rings true here.

The Miami Police Department has created a program that should keep citizens aware of the possibility of terrorist acts being perpetrated in their city, inspire vigilance and make things just a little bit hotter for any terrorists planning any operations there.

MIAMI - City police will attempt to thwart terrorists by staging random, “in-your-face” security operations at so-called “soft” targets ranging from city buses to sports arenas, officials announced Monday.

The idea behind the “Miami Shield” program is to make such targets less attractive to terrorists and improve vigilance among Miami residents. Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said al-Qaida and other terror groups carefully plot their attacks based in part on surveillance that identifies flaws and patterns in security.

Random, high-profile security operations will keep terrorists guessing about where police might be next, he said. For example, a group of officers might surround a downtown bank building, checking the identification of each person going in and out and handing out leaflets about terror threats.

“This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It’s letting the terrorists know we are out there,” Fernandez said.

What amazes yours truly is that the ACLU actually says they find no grounds for mounting one of their usual pit-bull legal attacks on the program. Hmmm…

Some police counterterrorism actions around the country have sparked debate about their constitutionality. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed one lawsuit in New York to challenge random searches of the bags of subway riders; a federal appeals court has halted pat-down searches at the stadium in Tampa where the NFL’s Buccaneers play after another ACLU lawsuit.

Howard Simon, executive director of ACLU of Florida, said the Miami initiative as announced appears aimed at ensuring people’s rights are not violated.

“What we’re dealing with is officers on street patrol, which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution,” Simon said. “We’ll have to see how it is implemented.”

Give ‘em time, they’ll find something, especially if the program seems to be enjoying any kind of success over the long haul, since what’s good for America is not good for the ACLU, and vice versa.

Fernandez said Miami officials want people to take notice of the beefed-up security so they are reminded that the threat from al-Qaida and its sympathizers has not disappeared.

“People are definitely going to notice it,” he said. “We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don’t want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears.”

At Monday’s Heat game against the New York Knicks, season ticket holder Tony Gonzalez, 34, said he wasn’t worried about any potential violation of civil liberties.

“When you enter an arena or stadium at full capacity you just don’t know who is going through the turnstiles,” said Gonzalez, an attorney. “Everything that helps our security, I’m for it.”