In November, voters in Colorado and Washington State voted to legalize marijuana.
8:47 PM 10/26/2011
On Tuesday, three of my friends emailed me about a Herman Cain ad that was on the Internet. In the ad, Mark Block, the Cain campaign chief of staff, makes his pitch for supporting the campaign and then takes a puff of a cigarette. The ad ends with Cain slowly smiling. Someone commented on YouTube that it was at once the worst political ad he had ever seen and the greatest political ad he had ever seen.
11:06 PM 06/13/2011
In 2003, Springfield, Missouri banned smoking in restaurants. But the mayor of Springfield, Jim O’Neal, wasn’t satisfied, and in the spring of 2010 he pushed the city council to ban smoking elsewhere. Some members of the city council thought the ban that he proposed went too far -- i.e., banning smoking from the American Legion halls, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) halls, and tobacco shops. So, O’Neal decided that rather than presenting the proposal to the city council, he’d present it directly to the people. The proposal appeared on the ballot in April of this year as Question 2:
4:11 PM 01/22/2011
Recently, Alan, a friend on my Facebook fan page for my book, The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State, asked me: “...what's your take on the report from the surgeon general, Thursday, that only one cigarette kills millions of people and causes global warming and makes kittens cry?” Well, my take on that is this: what the new, portly surgeon general, Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, reported, if not as Alan described it, is also absurd, and she thinks people will believe it because she is, after all, a doctor and a government official. Her absurd report is this: even only brief exposure to secondhand smoke causes really bad health problems.
6:57 PM 11/27/2010
Recently, it was announced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that the Food and Drug Administration, which now regulates tobacco, will require all cigarette packages to carry scary warning labels depicting the evils of tobacco use, complete with gruesome photos of a cancerous lung, a man smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy tube, and a corpse.
10:17 AM 11/09/2010
Now that the midterm elections are over, the political climate should begin to be more business-friendly than it has been in recent years because, beginning in January, there will be many new Republican governors and state legislators who should be more favorably disposed to individual rights and freedom than their Democrat predecessors were. Among the states that will have new Republican governors are Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, and Wisconsin, all of which have draconian indoor smoking bans. These bans should be either repealed or revised, especially concerning bars, restaurants, and hotel rooms.
