This week, the Los Angeles City Council banned new fast food restaurants from opening in poor neighborhoods in south Los Angeles for at least a year. Now, this law will supposedly combat obesity by attracting a better breed of restaurants with healthier food choices.

The assumptions here are breathtaking, including the notion that all-knowing government bureaucrats can make people eat approved food. I mean, people — including the poor — choose what they want from menus (what they can afford), and there’s no reason to expect that’s going to change. And what happens when the “wholesome” restaurants that the city council wants to move into these neighborhoods don’t show up? Will the council mandate that they appear — and then dictate how much they can charge for their more expensive menus? Will council members decree no french fries or burgers… ever?

The same day as the fast food ban, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted their own injunction, this one prohibiting pharmacies from selling tobacco products. It goes into effect in the fall.

Now, California is awash in budget problems, and Democrats are talking about raising taxes on businesses again. The things that these dunderheads are tasked to do — like manage their own budget, provide quality education, and fix the roads — they can’t do. Yet these meddling liberal tyrants want to control the inventory of businesses; they want to ban businesses they don’t like — just to satisfy their arrogant self-delusions!

You know, sooner or later (I hope), even you liberal voters are going to have your fill of these people… maybe not, though.

I live here and I am amazed at the how fast people will run over that LIBERAL CLIFF.

God help us all.

Oh, I forgot, California liberals are repelled by God… oh well, for the Conservatives that do live here, God help us.

Last week, the surge didn’t really make any difference. It was the political coalitions that did come together that Pelosi just denied have come together and have worked!

This party cannot even get on the same page about all this. This is a party that has invested in defeat, and Pelosi still is. Obama is obviously privy to this. He’s running a different campaign here than she is, and he’s obviously seen some focus group data that indicate that he’d better get on board this thing because the American people like victory, and to try to talk it down and to suggest it isn’t one is not going to help. The thing is, I know what a lot of you are saying, “He’s just a plain old fraud. I mean, this is worse than Clinton.” I agree with you.

On CNBC, a lady was promo-ing some things coming up in her program, and one of them was Obamanomics.

What the hell is Obamanomics? And then I remembered, Obama had a meeting with close economic advisors, and it’s the retreads from the Clinton years. There’s been no change, and there certainly isn’t anything new. Obamanomics?

Boy, he dropped that Middle East trip real fast, didn’t he? Now he’s gotta get on the domestic side. And he’s got this is a group of ten or 12 people. Robert B. Reich and Larry Summers and Warren Buffett.

Who else is in this? Robert Rubin. Yeah, how’s CitiBank doing there, Robert? The stock price of CitiBank, Robert, what’s, it around 15 bucks? And this is Clinton‘s treasury secretary savior.

He’s running multiple campaigns, at least two, and that’s why he’s unsure of himself when he’s speaking off the teleprompter.

The focus has to be on his lack of experience, not that he’s a fraud, because the people that are going to vote for him don’t care. This is going to be a referendum on Obama. It really is. So people are going to have to vote against him.

Well, I know that’s not a perfect world. You want to have somebody out there you could vote for. But this campaign, this election is going to be a referendum, up or down, on Obama. And people are going to have to be convinced that there is a great risk in electing this guy, and just running around and telling him he’s a fraud, that’s just going to be interpreted as politics as usual.

“Well, look, that’s the same thing you guys said about Clinton. We like Clinton. It’s the same thing you guys said about him.” Yeah, even though it’s true, even though the guy lies through his teeth, even though the guy is just all over the ballpark and says things strategically and tactically without any foundation.

See, we know what the foundation is. The foundation is pure, ultra-leftist and liberalism.

So the campaign has to make them feel scared of Obama being in power. Whatever takes place has to make them frightened of what this guy is — and not because he lies, and not because he’s a fraud, ’cause most people think all politicians lie, and most people think that all politicians are frauds. So for one party to say that about another and vice-versa is not going to change anybody’s vote.

Meet the Press — Tom Brokaw said to Obama,

“This is what USA Today had to say about your position on the surge. ‘Why can’t Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics thought that it would? That’s a conditioned response on their part. What is the stubbornness say about the kind of president he would be?'”

OBAMA:

There’s no doubt that the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain. If you — if you — if you had talked to them, uh, and — and said, you know, what, we’re going to bring down violence to levels that we have, I think — I suspect USA Today’s own editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that.

Pelosi today on The View says the surge isn’t working because the politicians of Iraq have not taken control of their country. Obama says it’s worked better than even Bush or Cheney thought, or McCain thought.

Now, that’s the first time he said this. I’m telling you he is running a dual or maybe a triple campaign. He is saying one thing to one group of people, another thing to another group of people, and he’s trying to have it both ways. That’s why he’s stuttering around.

Pelosi is just an idiot.

Obama said it wasn’t gonna work, had no chance of working. Then he said it’s done really okay, but it’s because the politicians came together. He said the reason the surge worked is because the great Sunni awakening and the Sadr army and the Shi’a all came together over there, this is while he was there saying this.

They’re all over the place, and Pelosi, a day after he says this, goes out and says, it didn’t work because the politicians have not gotten their act together.

Now, again, in Pelosi’s case, because she’s not the candidate here, in Pelosi’s case, she knows the audience. It’s an ultra-left-wing audience. They don’t want to hear about success. They don’t want to hear about how things work. They want to hear anything but failure. She knows that most of the hostesses on that show want to hear nothing but failure.

Now here is Obama saying on Meet the Press, no doubt the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including Bush and McCain. And if you want to talk to them and say, you know what, we’re going to bring down violence and levels we have, nobody would have — that was the objective.

Why do you think it was planned, Senator? What was the point of the surge? This is where his inexperience and his real lack of intelligence and judgment display themselves. Why plan the thing? They’ve got some polling data that says he’s on the wrong side of the surge business, the American people love hearing about successful military operations.

The American people don’t want to lose military operations, they don’t want to lose wars.

And Obama, he’s gotta get himself on the right, “Oh, yeah, worked better than anybody ever thought,” why plan it? You think they planned a 50% success surge? Why even plan the operation if you don’t plan for it to succeed as wildly and as thoroughly as possible?

It’s an emotional thing. It’s party loyalty; it’s ideological loyalty; it is devotion to a personality and a cult. Most people are not thinking about Obama. They just think they want change, the Bush administration has been bad, they’ve been led to believe the country is going to hell in a hand basket, he’s going to fix it, he’s going to make the rest of the world like us, that’s going to make us safer.

There isn’t a whole lot of thought going into Obama’s support and his campaign illustrates it. He’s all over the ballpark. He’s saying five different things about every subject.

PELOSI:

The surge’s purpose was to have a military time frame where there would be military, uh, security to enable the government of Iraq to make the political changes necessary for reconciliation. I said it before when I was here, and I’ll say it again. Even with all the time that has elapsed, they still have not done that. The purpose of the surge was to pass the laws to bring reconciliation, so we could bring our troops home safely soon, honorably and responsibly; and that has not happened. Now the government of Iraq is saying, “We want you to go home,” so maybe the time has come for us to sit down with them and figure that out.

None of what she said is accurate. The surge was not done to bring the troops home soon. The surge was done to help achieve victory to quell a bunch of violence, insurgent violence and defeat terrorists who are keeping that country just torn apart.

It has succeeded overwhelmingly!

OBAMA:

There’s no doubt that the violence, uh, has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain! Uh, if — if you had… If you talk to them, uh, and — and “You know what? We’re going to bring down violence,” to levels that we have, I think — I — I suspect USA Today’s own editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that.

The ego of this guy knows no bounds. Well, you talk to anybody, why, it’s worked better than anybody thought. Aside from having not heard that before from anybody, but especially from Obama, the idea that the surge worked better than anybody thought is akin to saying, “You know, those bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, man, they worked better than we thought.” Why drop the bomb, why do the surge if you didn’t intend it to work well? But aside from that, here you got Pelosi saying in one story that it didn’t work, didn’t accomplish anything, you’ve got the Democrat presidential nominee, presumptive, Obama saying, it “exceeded everybody’s exceptions.” I know what Pelosi is doing, and she’s just pandering to an audience that watches that stupid TV show. But this thing with Obama is what’s fascinating to me because with every story he tells about the surge, he has a different view.

This past weekend, Lawrence, Massachusetts welcomed Army Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez home. Fourteen months ago, the 25-year-old was reported missing after he and two other soldiers were captured during an ambush in Iraq.On Saturday, Sgt. Jimenez’s flag-draped casket, resting atop a horse-drawn carriage, was somberly escorted by members of the 10th Mountain Division through flag-lined streets. They made their way to the church where Alex took his First Communion — and where his parents would say goodbye. His father, Ramon, wore his son’s dog tags around his neck; his mother, Maria, placed a cross on his casket.

Hundreds of people attended the services for Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez, including the Massachusetts governor and other elected officials. But perhaps the most poignant words offered came from a stranger to the family — a 57-year-old woman — who left work early to attend. Asked by her manager why she was attending the funeral of a solider she didn’t even know, Sharon Dupont gave this answer through her tears: “You know what? He didn’t know me… but he went over there for me.”

My friends, we do know Alex Jimenez — and all the other courageous men and women, from every background, every neighborhood of America, who answered the call of duty and gave service to this country with their lives.

We know them well. And the reason we know them well is because they are the best among us.

Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost
By ROBERT BURNS and ROBERT H. REID – 2 days ago

BAGHDAD (AP) – The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace – a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the AP on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq’s future.

“Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it,” Crocker said. “It’s actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what’s left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on.”

Shiite militias, notably the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have lost their power bases in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. An important step was the routing of Shiite extremists in the Sadr City slums of eastern Baghdad this spring – now a quiet though not fully secure district.

Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran. Still talking of a comeback, they are facing major obstacles, including a loss of support among a Shiite population weary of war and no longer as terrified of Sunni extremists as they were two years ago.

Despite the favorable signs, U.S. commanders are leery of proclaiming victory or promising that the calm will last.

The premature declaration by the Bush administration of “Mission Accomplished” in May 2003 convinced commanders that the best public relations strategy is to promise little, and couple all good news with the warning that “security is fragile” and that the improvements, while encouraging, are “not irreversible.”

Iraq still faces a mountain of problems: sectarian rivalries, power struggles within the Sunni and Shiite communities, Kurdish-Arab tensions, corruption. Anyone could rekindle widespread fighting.

But the underlying dynamics in Iraqi society that blew up the U.S. military’s hopes for an early exit, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, have changed in important ways in recent months.

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital. People are expressing a new confidence in their own security forces, which in turn are exhibiting a newfound assertiveness with the insurgency largely in retreat.

Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war – four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago. From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

Beyond that, there is something in the air in Iraq this summer.

In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Now a moment has arrived for the Iraqis to try to take those positive threads and weave them into a lasting stability.

The questions facing both Americans and Iraqis are: What kinds of help will the country need from the U.S. military, and for how long? The questions will take on greater importance as the U.S. presidential election nears, with one candidate pledging a troop withdrawal and the other insisting on staying.

Iraqi authorities have grown dependent on the U.S. military after more than five years of war. While they are aiming for full sovereignty with no foreign troops on their soil, they do not want to rush. In a similar sense, the Americans fear that after losing more than 4,100 troops, the sacrifice could be squandered.

U.S. commanders say a substantial American military presence will be needed beyond 2009. But judging from the security gains that have been sustained over the first half of this year – as the Pentagon withdrew five Army brigades sent as reinforcements in 2007 – the remaining troops could be used as peacekeepers more than combatants.

As a measure of the transitioning U.S. role, Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond says that when he took command of American forces in the Baghdad area about seven months ago he was spending 80 percent of his time working on combat-related matters and about 20 percent on what the military calls “nonkinetic” issues, such as supporting the development of Iraqi government institutions and humanitarian aid.

Now Hammond estimates those percentage have been almost reversed. For several hours one recent day, for example, Hammond consulted on water projects with a Sunni sheik in the Radwaniyah area of southwest Baghdad, then spent time with an Iraqi physician/entrepreneur in the Dora district of southern Baghdad – an area, now calm, that in early 2007 was one of the capital’s most violent zones.

“We’re getting close to something that looks like an end to mass violence in Iraq,” says Stephen Biddle, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who has advised Petraeus on war strategy. Biddle is not ready to say it’s over, but he sees the U.S. mission shifting from fighting the insurgents to keeping the peace.

Although Sunni and Shiite extremists are still around, they have surrendered the initiative and have lost the support of many ordinary Iraqis. That can be traced to an altered U.S. approach to countering the insurgency – a Petraeus-driven move to take more U.S. troops off their big bases and put them in Baghdad neighborhoods where they mixed with ordinary Iraqis and built a new level of trust.

Army Col. Tom James, a brigade commander who is on his third combat tour in Iraq, explains the new calm this way:

“We’ve put out the forest fire. Now we’re dealing with pop-up fires.”

It’s not the end of fighting. It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

Maj. Gen. Ali Hadi Hussein al-Yaseri, the chief of patrol police in the capital, sees the changes.

“Even eight months ago, Baghdad was not today’s Baghdad,” he says.

EDITOR’S NOTE _ Robert Burns is AP’s chief military reporter, and Robert Reid is AP’s chief of bureau in Baghdad. Reid has covered the war from his post in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Burns, based in Washington, has made 21 reporting trips to Iraq; on his latest during July, Burns spent nearly three weeks in central and northern Iraq, observing military operations and interviewing both U.S. and Iraqi officers.

LINK TO ABOVE ASSOCIATED PRESS STORY

It’s nice to see the Media trying to catch up with reality. Finally.

Where the hell is the rest of the Media on this?