Mark Knows It All

Eating out used to be easy. You picked up the telephone and called a restaurant and made a reservation. Now, with the mega-restaurants, it has become somewhat more challenging. These chains take the attitude that their food is good, and the "folks" can just wait in line to get in. The Cheesecake Factory, Brio, Brava Cucina, Outback, think nothing of telling you that there is a 2 hour wait on a Saturday night. My wife and I have solved the problem by nurturing our inner coot-itis. Translated, we eat at 4:oo on Saturday afternoon. The wait then is usually just 15 minutes. Throw in an Early Bird special, and we are ready to retire in Miami. But every now and then, you gotta do what you gotta do. A case in point was this past Friday night. I have been craving Chinese food for the past several weeks. In Youngstown, good Chinese food is hard to come by. That leaves the choice of doing without, or driving to The Sesame Inn in Pittsburgh, or to PF Changs in Cleveland. Of the two choi...

I enjoy singing and belong to an ad hoc choir called Seraphim. We practice every Monday night and offer three public performances each year. The origin of the choir appears to have been rooted in a local Methodist church, and was then supplemented with current and former members of the Youngstown Symphony Chorus. This past year, it hired a new director, who brought in several new members who sang under him at the various churches where he served as choirmaster. The result is a group of people of various ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs sharing in their love of music of all types. Kris, our Seraphim director, currently is Chairman of Music at Mary, Mother of Hope Catholic Church in New Castle, Pa. This is a big, old fashioned, Gothic Catholic Church with a brand new paid for pipe organ worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is a magnificent place to sing with unbelievable acoustics. Seraphim performed its Christmas program at the church. Sadly, Christmas was marred...

Sorry, gave you a bad link. Below is the TREASON referenced article from Time Magazine Posted Thursday, May. 23, 2002In the hours after September 11th, FBI agents in Minneapolis shared a macabre joke. For weeks prior, they had tried to interest FBI headquarters in Washington in Zacarias Moussaoui, now known as the 20th hijacker. They had begged FBI Headquarters to give them permission to seek a search warrant of Moussaoui's computer. They were denied. In their frustration, they joked that headquarters back in Washington must be infiltrated by agents of Osama Bin Laden. Why else would their work have been thwarted? This disturbing story is told in a 13-page, single-spaced letter written to FBI Director Robert Mueller by Colleen Rowley. The letter, portions of which TIME magazine has obtained, chronicle the efforts of Rowley, the Minneapolis Chief Division Counsel, to get the FBI interested in Moussaoui. Moussaoui was arrested in August on a visa violation after the Minnesota flight...

Treason is defined in Webster's Pocket English Dictionary as "giving your country's secrets to the enemy". Those leaking the NSA surveillance story to the New York Times, and the New York Times itself, are traitors. I am not sure who is worse. The Times sat on the story for over a year, claiming to do "follow up reporting" to their initial information. It only decided to go public with the story when one of its reporters quit and wrote a soon to be published book mentioning it. The Times had to go to press before the reporter's book made it to the bookstore. That is even worse. I would hope that the person who leaked the story at least had some noble intentions. The Times was worried about money and reputation, and was willing to betray this country for both. The war on George Bush by the left wing media has gone beyond the pale. What options did the New York Times have other than publishing this story and giving this information to the enemy? It had sev...