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Salt Ban in NY City Restaurants?

Posted by Defend America on Thursday, March 11, 2010 10:45:02 AM

Chefs Call Proposed New York Salt Ban 'Absurd'


Updated: Thursday, 11 Mar 2010, 8:01 AM EST
Published : Wednesday, 10 Mar 2010, 7:36 PM EST

By ARUN KRISTIAN DAS / MyFox New York

MYFOXNY.COM - Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

"No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises," the bill, A. 10129 , states in part.

The legislation, which Assemblyman Felix Ortiz , D-Brooklyn, introduced on March 5, would fine restaurants $1,000 for each violation.

http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/new_york_state/chefs-call-proposed-new-york-salt-ban-absurd-20100310-akd


Tags: government  
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'Resetting Our Reset Foreign Policy'

Posted by Defend America on Thursday, March 11, 2010 10:43:05 AM

March 11, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Resetting Our Reset Foreign Policy
Obama’s old foreign policy wasn’t working; thank goodness he’s hitting the reset button.

Almost every element of Barack Obama’s once-heralded new “reset” foreign policy of a year ago either has been reset or likely soon will be.

Consider Obama’s approach to the eight-year-old War on Terror. Plans made more than a year ago to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 have stalled. Despite loud proclamations about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, in a civilian court in New York, such an absurd pledge will probably never be kept.

Talk of trying our own former CIA interrogators for being too tough on terrorist suspects has also come to nothing. And why not put an end to the second-guessing of anti-terrorism protocols, since the Obama administration, in a single year, has quadrupled the number of assassinations by Predator drones of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan? After all, the targeted killing of hundreds of suspects is far more questionable than waterboarding three confessed killers.

The Obama administration seems to have embraced the once widely criticized Bush-Petraeus strategy in Iraq of gradual withdrawal in concert with Iraqi benchmarks. Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden in Orwellian fashion claims that our victory in Iraq may be one of the current administration’s “greatest achievements.” Was it not a defeatist Biden who not long ago advocated the trisection of Iraq into separate nations?

And after months of waiting, Obama finally sent more troops to Afghanistan, adopting a surge strategy that looks a lot like Bush’s 2007 escalation in Iraq — this despite the fact that he once assured the country that Bush’s surge, in a tactical sense, “wasn’t working.”

Almost all of the once-derided Bush anti-terrorism protocols are still in place — wiretaps, intercepts, tribunals, and renditions. And given that there were more foiled radical-Islamic terrorist plots in 2009 than in any year since 2001, President Obama will probably stop his outreach speeches to the Islamic world and his serial recitations of American sins.

http://article.nationalreview.com/427437/resetting-our-reset-foreign-policy/victor-davis-hanson
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Holder Responds to the Missing Brief that He Forgot to Give to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Posted by Defend America on Thursday, March 11, 2010 9:02:53 AM

Holder Failed To Alert Senate To Old Brief

March 11, 2010 - 7:13 AM | by: Mike Levine

During his confirmation more than a year ago, Attorney General Eric Holder failed to notify lawmakers he had contributed to a legal brief dealing with the use of federal courts in fighting terrorism, the Justice Department acknowledged on Wednesday.

“The brief should have been disclosed as part of the confirmation process,” Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said in a statement. “In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed.”

Still, the “amicus brief,” filed with the Supreme Court in 2004, resonates years later as Holder finds himself defending the handling of some recent terrorism cases, particularly the interrogation of alleged “Christmas Day bomber” Umar F. Abdulmutallab.
 
The brief – filed by Holder, then a private attorney, former Attorney General Janet Reno and two other Clinton-era officials – argued that the President lacks authority to hold Jose Padilla, a U.S citizen declared an “enemy combatant,” indefinitely without charge.

In making their case, Holder and the others argued that using federal courts to fight terrorism, which includes providing Miranda rights to terror suspects, would not “impair” the government’s ability to obtain intelligence, which they called “the primary tool for preventing terrorist attacks.”

“Many terrorists who have been arrested and provided counsel have decided to cooperate and provide valuable information to the government,” their brief said. “Over the last decade, the investigative, detention, and prosecutive authorities [of the federal court system] have been used in many cases not only to identify, arrest, and punish persons who have committed terrorist acts, but to disrupt and thwart terrorism before it can occur.”

But the brief did acknowledge a possible risk in such use of the federal court system – a risk, the brief said, that is outweighed by the advantages.

http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/03/11/holder-failed-to-alert-senate-to-old-brief/


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'Holder's Undisclosed Padilla Connection'

Posted by Defend America on Thursday, March 11, 2010 8:37:58 AM
‘Acceptable’ Risk
Holder’s undisclosed Padilla connection.

Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration have advocated trying Khalid Sheik Muhammed, and acquiring intelligence from Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in the criminal-justice system. The protections afforded individuals in the criminal-justice system generally exceed those afforded in the military system, so one might think terrorists would be put at an advantage if they are treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants. But we must reject, the president has told us, “the false choice between our security and our ideals.”

It is not unreasonable to expect that a person who is told he has a right to remain silent might exercise that right. Nor is it far-fetched that requiring the unanimous agreement of twelve jurors, as opposed to the vote of two-thirds of the members of a military commission, is more likely to result in an acquittal. But, we are reassured by Holder, there’s little cause for concern, because criminals usually talk when offered leniency and “failure is not an option” with KSM’s trial — an unusual vow for an attorney general to make about a criminal trial that will be decided by an impartial judge and jury.

The message is simple and absolute: Giving more constitutional rights to suspected terrorists will not impede our efforts to protect national security.

But the attorney general had a different view not so long ago when he was a lawyer in private practice. Back then he understood that Mirandizing terrorists, to choose one example, is not without risk to our national security. In 2004, he joined former attorney general Janet Reno and two other Clinton-era Justice Department and CIA attorneys on an amicus brief (a brief by interested third parties offering views on the legal questions in a case) to the Supreme Court supporting Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen suspected of working with KSM and others in an al-Qaeda plot to explode a dirty bomb in a U.S. city. The brief can be found here.

http://article.nationalreview.com/427455/acceptable-risk/bill-burck-dana-perino
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'Bart Stupak has Problems'

Posted by Defend America on Thursday, March 11, 2010 8:11:46 AM

Bart Stupak Has Problems

Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak has problems.

Big problems.

Here's the situation. He and his bloc of pro-life Democrats want Stupak's pro-life language in the final health care bill. The talk of late is that this might be done by inserting the Stupak language into the reconciliation bill that is currently being negotiated. Here's how this scenario would go down: the House votes for the Senate bill, which does not have the Stupak language; then it votes for the reconciliation "fixer," which does have the Stupak language; then the Senate votes for the reconciliation fixer; in the end, the Stupak language becomes law.

That's a mess.

For starters, Stupak has to hold his anti-abortion coalition through the House. He did this in November - convincing the Speaker that he had enough votes to kill the House health care bill unless he got his pro-life language inserted into it. He has to do this again now.

But then he has an even bigger problem: the Senate.

Senate Republicans want us to believe that they'll move to strike any Stupak language from the reconciliation bill. One of the best Captiol Hill reporters in the business, David Drucker, has the details on GOP bluster:

Republicans, hoping to sow doubts among House Democrats about reconciliation's prospects for passing the Senate, revealed Tuesday they intend to raise procedural objections over any abortion language that shows up in a reconciliation package -- even if it toughens prohibitions against federal funding. Specifically, Republican Senators plan to raise a budget point of order, a procedural move objecting to the reconciliation process that requires 60 votes to defeat.

This is what is known as a non-credible threat. Don't believe this for a minute.

The reason is simple: Senate Republicans will not have an opportunity to kill the main health care bill. By the time the reconciliation bill comes to the floor of the Senate - the main bill that they hate will have passed the House and likely will have become the law of the land (assuming that the Democrats don't find some Rube Goldberg legislative device to make the Senate act on reconciliation first). Thus, Senate Republicans will face the following choice: health care reform with the Stupak language or health care reform without the Stupak language.

That's really no choice at all.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2010/03/bart_stupak_has_problems.html

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