The upshot of this idiotic proposal by the Health Minister will be nothing more than a diminution of disposable income for a quarter of the Japanese population. This is just what a country suffering from a decades old lack of consumer spending and stagnation needs. The new unapologetic smoking Prime Minister Noda should sack this zany health bureaucrat at the first opportunity.

Want to see our referenced article on smoking in Japan? Click here.

If you think it's impossible to remove smoke from a room you should read this.

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Iowa Straw Polls

Ron Paul's One Percent Solution

If you're an Iowan and a Republican and you smoke, would you please do the nation a big favor? Would you get out and vote in the August 13 Iowa Straw Poll for Ron Paul and get his campaign momentum rolling in high gear. Do it for your fellow smoking, overweight, fun-loving. easy-going sisters and brothers. And do it for your country.

This nation can't take much more of the smothering nannyism the Obamas' (Both Barry and Let's Move Michelle) and the Democrat nouveau Puritans are bringing to the table. And the Republican's aren't much better at times. Luckily, Mother Hen Mike Huckabee has stepped aside. Tim Pawlenty talks the talk, but raised cigarette taxes in Minnesota. Michelle Bachmann is too much of an unknown entity. As is Mitt Romney who, as a Mormon, is unlikely to show much lenience towards any of our beloved vices.

Ron Paul is a doctor and, as such is said to personally dislike tobacco. But he's also a committed, practicing libertarian. He holds the concept of private property and personal freedom as sacred. Ron Paul's time has come. If we don't elect him, he's already said that he'll be retiring from his house seat after his term expires. This is our last chance at him.

Here's what we know. There are 430,000 smokers in Iowa. If just one out of one hundred (4,300) would show up and vote for Mr. Paul it would likely put him over the top, or at the very least provide him a very strong second place showing. In 2007, Mitt Romney won it with 4,516 votes (31%). Mother Hen Mike came in second with 2587 votes (18.1%) John McCain got just 101 votes and came in 10th. Ron Paul came in 5th place with 1305 votes (9.1%) - something we don't want to see repeated this time around.

One out of a hundred. Just imagine that if you will. Surely you're sick and tired of paying high taxes and being treated like a modern day leper. Get out and vote and encourage anyone you know who is Republican and on the wrong side of the BMI index to join you in voting for Dr. Paul. This is both doable and mission critical. Your nations future as a free country full of individuals hangs in the balance. It's that or more ObamaCare, scowling health nazi Kathleen Sebelius, Tobacco Nutter William V. Corr, and FDA grafitti artist Margaret Hamburg. Oh, and we almost forgot first lady Michelle 'LetsMove.org' Obama.

One percent of Iowa's smokers can legalize freedom. Pass it on.

And speaking of FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg read on to find out what she's got in store for your cigarette packs come next October. Scroll down.

UPDATE: Ron Paul did indeed take second place. How's that for prescience on our part? The MSM took absolutely no note of his second place finish, a scant 152 votes behind Rep. Bachmann, who was campaigning one state away from Minnesota. Meet the Depressed and ABC whatever-they-call-it should hang their heads in shame for the complete lack of coverage. Lots of air time about Texas tobacco tax raising Rick Perry (Major Boo!!!) and Tim Pawlenty (he's dust now, yet more prescience) and wall-to-wall interviews of the barely victorious Bachmann.

As the MSM talking heads badmintoned about, trading esoteric talking points predicting how and why We the People would vote when it all comes out in the wash in 2012, one couldn't help but notice how worthless they've become. Not one mention of Ron Paul. He will win despite the total media blackout by the brain-dead, rapidly fading pundits of the old-fashioned megaphone media.

When Ron Paul becomes the new President in 2012 they will all come out of the woodwork crowing "We told ya' so!" Yeah, right.

Pre-Update: The Republican debate turned out to be a real Friday night barn burner. Ron Paul clashed repeatedly with boy scouty Rick Santorum over defense spending, a candidate so weak he should voluntarily withdraw so as not to dilute the voting pool (and he should take Gingrich and Pawlenty with him).

Here is a quote from Yahoo! News:


There was a surprising tussle between fellow Minnesotans Michelle Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty in which she critcized the former governor for raising cigarette taxes! That shows that she is not afraid of glancing off the supercharged third rail of smoking issues. The woman certainly has guts. She also nicked him for his support of cap and trade, another good point in her favor. The problem is that she too voted for the cigarette tax as a state senator.

The fact that a cigarette tax was even raised for discussion probably sent millions of the tobacco community simultaneously reaching for the volume control on the remote.

It all started off with a question for Tim Pawlenty after he bragged about balancing his state budgets without raising taxes. Here is what followed verbatim.


Pawlenty squirmed and wiggled and made an excuse that the deal he struck with the Democratic legislature over cigarettes was called a health fee rather than a tax. To the payers it is all the same regardless of the label.

Another development in Rep. Bachmann's favor was her declaration that she actually fought against the cigarette health fee. This is the first indication of any position from her concerning smoking we've ever managed to find.

Additionally, in the comments section, several Democrats and outright Obama supporters admitted that if they were to cross the aisle and vote for a Republican, it would be for Dr. Paul. This is the independent swing vote which, when combined with the smoker vote, will catapult him over the Reformed smoker in the White House in 2012.

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Led by tobacco neurotic Margaret Hamburg

OBAMA'S TAGGING CREW AT THE FDA SET TO STRIKE SOON

Just when the automobile industry is showing signs of making a recovery how do you suppose they'd react to something like this? Hey, if they can do it to the tobacco industry, why not the carmakers? And why not Obama Motors? What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Cars not only kill people by way of mangled steel road wrecks, but they pollute the air with deadly exhaust fumes as well. The yellowish-brown-gray pall lingering over Los Angeles at the end of each day certainly isn't coming from tobacco products. If we're going to save precious lives with gruesome product labels, the front door of your vehicle would seem to be an excellent place to start. Before you turn that ignition key or start a conversation on your cellphone as you hurtle down the highway at 65 miles an hour, a graphic warning of what could happen to you and your extra vulnerable child passenger is an entirely pertinent necessity.

The Obama administration and its tagger crew, led by FDA chief Margaret Hamburg, is about to spray paint ugly grafitti all over that pack of smokes you just paid a small fortune for. In New York City that might amount to as much as $15. The new packaging is due to commence this October 2012, which will give you one whole month to think over how to return the favor by graffiti-ing your ballot (in the eyes of the Democratic Party) on the first Tuesday in November, 2012. By then you'll probably have bought yourself an attractive cigarette case but, just for that day, we suggest bringing your trashed-up pack along unsheathed as a visual reminder of just who the guilty party was.

By now everyone knows the story behind Obama's transition from Marlboro smoker to the archetype, vindictive ex-smoker who has decided that because he's taken the plunge and suffered through the horrific pleasure-denial pangs of quitting, that it's your turn now. Wife Michelle made his foreswearing the guilty pleasure a prerequisite to her helping him campaign for the oval office. Does anyone really believe she'd have sat the race out in utter silence if he'd refused to kneel down to her demands?

This dreadful Reformed Smoker president has turned into a smokers worst nightmare. From his measure-the-White-House-for-drapes transition team that included William V. Corr, the vile control-freak behind The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, to Kathleen Sebilius to Nancy-Ann De Parle and finally to FDA commish Margaret Hamburg, this guy has come after smokers with a cruel vengeance.

Two weeks into his term he foisted the SCHIP tax increase on us. Then came the PACT legislation (the chief sponsor was Anthony Weiner, D-NY) which made it impossible for us to save some money on cigarette purchases via the internet. Control of tobacco was then turned over to the FDA, headed up by Ms Margaret Hamburg, which led to this final straw of defacing our cigarette packs.

One of the most insidious aspects of Prohibition v2.0 has been the redefinition of what constitutes private property. A pack of cigarettes starts out the property of the tobacco company, goes through the distribution channel, and finally ends up as a possession of the smoker. The government is directing the tobacco companies to purposely uglify their product packages, thereby theoretically discouraging their sale. This is setting a hideous precedent and it's done all in the name of an unachievable, pie-in-the-sky public health goal. The sheer futility of this exercise in tyranny was expressed by a frazzled commissioner Hamburg when she justified her actions on the grounds that government efforts to eradicate tobacco had entered into stall mode since 2004. In other words, we asked you all nicely to quit or else and since you don't respond, well, we have our ways to make you comply.

There are times when the FDA commissioner seems to be channeling famed spinmeister Joseph Goebbels. In announcing her intention to begrime the private property of reticent-to-comply smokers, she smugly invited
the general public to pile on to her public enemy number one's by participating in selecting the eventual grotesque labels. She actually eerily resembles the former Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Perhaps an enterprising cigarette case maker will capitalize on this. How's this for a snazzy cigarette case frontispiece. What do you think, fellow smokers?

Goebbels exerted totalitarian control over the media, arts and information in Germany. The antismoking power lobby has adopted many of his brassy tactics. By the way, Poor Joe had to sneak around behind the big bossman's horrific glare when he wanted some nicotinic relief from the stresses and strains of vilifying German smokers, drinkers and Jews. You heard that right, Joseph Goebbels smoked.

In an interview with the terminally cool, Ambien-voice radioheads at NPR (National Public Radio) she improbably seemed to back off of any personal responsibility for the gruesome, state-sponsored graffiti attack she is unleashing. She told the All Things Considered show that "Well, we are responding to congressional action. A vote was taken, a law was implemented, and specifically we were asked to put in place these warning labels." It almost sounds like the "We vere only followink orders" alibi.

Hamburg could have gone retro by including some period pieces from the original antismoking boys of Berlin. After all, this demonization thing isn't all that new, it's been done before, with similar results - abject failure. Adolf said: "Before going into retirement, I shall order that all the cigarette packets on sale in Europe should have on the label, in letters of fire, the slogan: 'Danger, tobacco smoke kills; danger: Cancer.'

Where'd we get this stuff and this graphic from? Why none other than the National Alliance News - News for White People Worldwide. One of its administrators had posted it boastfully under the title "Adolph Hitler - World's First Anti-Smoking Champion". Go there and see for yourself if this seems too unbelievable to be true. http://www.adolfthegreat.com/Trails-Talent/lungcancer.html

Here is some of the accompanying text:

Because of strong Nazi support for Science and medical research, most scientists, physicians and biologists became Nazi party members.

Germans were encouraged to take exercise, eat plenty of vegetables, drink mineral water instead of alcohol and stop smoking.

To reduce breast cancer, women were taught self examination. Nowhere else in the world had such a government sponsored health campaign existed up to that time. When the Allies invaded at the end of World War II, on seeing the terrible hunger and deprivations amongst the destitute public, they promptly imported 93,000 tons of tobacco to get Germans smoking again.

Here's a couple of classic period pieces that should surely dissuade youngsters from starting the habit, once again with that ever-popular retro look. It looks like either would fit right into the top 50% of the pack (as required) quite nicely, eh?

Ms Hamburg justified her action on the grounds that the smoking prevalence rate was no longer dropping and it was time to turn up the heat on smokers, long the object of her derision and scorn. "That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result, it is not propaganda's task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success." This quote, while not directly attributable to Dr. Hamburg, would nonetheless seem to sum up her position accurately. Her cross gender doppelganger of seventy years past wrote that.

The unmistakable mirror imaging of present day Standard US Government Perfect Human Specimen guidelines with its 'culture of the body' counterpart of 1930's Germany is defensively brushed off by public health experts as a fallacy. How in the world is the health and welfare of its' citizenry not a proper function for the role of government intervention, they'll argue. To anyone with a sense of history, it sure feels creepy. The fact that refraining from tobacco and fast foods has become some sort of national duty should give everyone pause.

Hamburg has long been part of what can only be described as a continuing pogrom of the smoking culture from our country. She'll be able to rest only after the last cigarette in America is extinguished. Her mother and father will be proud when this moment arrives.

Daddy David Hamburg got into the smoking prevention game very early on. Over thirty years ago, when nobody really gave a damn, there was Dr. Hamburg with his hand in producing a report grossly exaggerating the health risks of tobacco consumption. One wonders why the Hamburg family doesn't simply choose to privately abhor smoking rather than rallying everyone within earshot to their particular disposition, one which is rudely dividing our society in the process.

Margaret's daddy spent his early days in peon studies focused on psychiatry. Perhaps he should have a leather couch session with daughter dearest to probe just what is behind her sociopathic personality. She is gleefully implementing and pushing hard for labels that stand a very good chance of breaking the maternal bonding process between mothers who smoke and their offspring. This is sick. Pure and simple sick. Margaret Hamburg couldn't care less. Where's daddy's input when you really need it?

If you happen to be a young smoking mother, you had better not leave one of these packs laying around the house for your impressionable nestling to view. This entirely predictable side effect is ignored by the callous commissioner. And where's the depiction of the father exhaling? Not enough shock value in that apparently. Hamburg is one sick puppy.

This is also an insulting slap in the face to all of those post war baby-boomer moms who regularly smoked around their children during that high smoking prevalence era, which coincided with the largest population boom in our history. Millions upon millions of their offspring miraculously managed to survive. If you're between the age of forty to sixty-five years of age, you're likely one of them.

Papa Hamburg the shrink also dabbled in the realm of psychosomatics. He studied at The Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago (1953-56). Seeing as a goodly proportion of the perceived health dangers of smoking (second and third hand smoke comes to mind) by a terrified populace is indeed psychosomatic in nature, you might think she'd have some insight into the subject. Instead she just keeps plugging away, spewing the same-old, worn out boilerplate drivel. And she's convinced herself that it's all grounded in settled science and therefore real.

By this token, she might even find herself with a harrowing case of self-imagined lung cancer or, worse yet, a real stroke brought on by her overwhelming fantasized fear of tobacco contamination. She was born in 1955 and, as such, it's a pretty safe assumption that she was exposed to volumes of secondhand smoke for the first 35 years of her life.

The wily Britblogger Leg Iron had a typically amusing take on rendering psychosomatic injury to our good, trembling antismoking friends. Check it out:

"They will think that because I smoke, I can give them a disease. I can. I can give you high blood pressure and possibly a heart attack, maybe even an aneurysm, just by standing near you. Not because of any real toxins but simply because you believe it. I can induce all sorts of psychosomatic symptoms just by sitting next to you on the bus and letting it be known that I smoke. With this level of preconditioning, I can induce real chest pains in people just by describing them. I don't need to be able to hypnotise you first. That's already been done. All I need do is drop in the suggestion.

And don't think I won't."

Read it and weep Dr. David Hamburg, your daughter may be the next in line.

Even mama bear Hamburg was a rabid antismoker. Beatrix Hamburg was a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior at Harvard University, circa 1987. They don't come much more hardcore tobacco neurotic than this family. Oh, and did we mention that Margaret was New York City's heath commissioner in the 1990s where she fought for a total ban on indoor smoking in public places long before states and cities began adopting such aggressive restrictions.

Is this scary enough to make you quit?

RJ Reynolds and Lorillard are fighting the regulation in court. Hopefully they will win their case and the FDA can go back to some other more useful pursuit involving either food or drugs, neither of which tobacco is. The Association of National Advertisers is considering jumping in to the fray as well, as the prospect of having Uncle Sam and his cronies on future packaging design teams can't be a good thing. Uncle Sam and Aunt Margaret don't do anything very well. The ANA rightfully contends that the new text and graphics requirements would convert product packages and marketing into platforms for the government's viewpoint.

Unless the tobacco companies are successful in their pending lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration, it is a safe bet that an old smoking accessory - the cigarette case - will make a rip roaring comeback in the fall of 2012. If you can find a pure play enterprise with this specialty product at the top line, invest heavily in it.

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CALIFORNIA BAD DREAMIN'

If you guessed that this website is Made in California, you guessed right. And if you savor living your life pretty much just as you please, you're likely no fan of California. The state's role as a legislative trend setter might have been the catalyst behind that new anti-smoking ordinance you're stuck with. Or maybe a new soda tax or the elimination of Happy Meals, the list goes on and on.

Super talented musician Joni Mitchell once wrote a song about coming back to California to bask in its tolerant, freedom-loving social climate. At one time people actually moved here to loosen up. You do remember Joni Mitchell don't you? You know, "Paved paradise, put up a parking lot", yeah that's her. She likes to smoke and compose brilliant, complicated melodies. If you live in Los Angeles, that paved parking lot is about the only place you still can have a smoke in public. She's had enough of the sunshine and liberal fascism, she's a musician who is saying goodbye to uptight LA. The Canadian native has another home on British Columbia's sunshine coast to escape the nouveau Puritan bad vibes of the Golden State. Here's a stanza from her song California:

Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't want to stay here
It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here
Oh, but California
California I'm coming home
I'm going to see the folks I dig
I'll even kiss a sunset pig
California I'm coming home

Over at Rich White's excellent website Smoke Screens we happened upon a thought provoking guest blog posting laid down by one Juliette Tworsey, lead singer and guitarist from the band Firebug. She too likes to smoke and write music. She moved to Los Angeles from Chicago a couple of years ago probably expecting to find a tolerant, freedom-loving place. Instead she's run up against rude, tyrannical doormen at local nightclubs who've been emboldened by antismoking laws passed by the horrid LA city council. She's learned to avoid certain towns like god-awful, leftwing Santa Monica, because of their rigid regulations that even include a ban on smoking on patios in apartments and condos. These ordinances will wind up outlawing barbecuing on the patio as well, because that would also qualify as secondhand smoke. To live and die in LA is to perpetually walk on Nanny State eggshells.

She'll need to bypass nearby Calabasas, California, too. It's against the law to smoke anywhere there and Juliette is a redhead*. California is, as one commenter at Banging on About the Smoking Ban opined, "a hell-hole". All of this over the completely legal and non-intoxicating intake of tobacco.

So why all this hubbub over one state's obsessive hangup with smoking in public? It's because like it or not, California does influence the rest of the world with its long cultural coattails. California has a very big mouth and places literally on the other side of the earth, like Tunisia, seem to be following its healthist, do-gooder lead.

Among the many highlights Tworsey includes is this observation of life in LA: "In the last few years, I have witnessed an increase in vitriolic hatred towards smokers, due in large part to the never ending barrage of anti-smoking adverts that we are subjected to almost daily, thanks in large part to the voter-approved prop 99."

Indeed Prop 99, approved by voters in 1988, is a nasty little piece of deviance that collects a quarter per pack from smokers which goes into a fund that scores of California's university junk scientists/parasites habitually tap into for financial sustenance. There's a particularly ominous angle to 99 that we've never seem reported before; it was used as a vehicle by the California Department of Health Services to defeat yet another ballot proposition a decade later that would have repealed Rob Reiner's Prop 10. Meathead's Prop 10 doubled down on Prop 99's twenty-five cent ripoff by boosting the tax by fifty cents per pack.

Back in the year 2000, just two years after Prop 10's razor thin passage, Ned Roscoe, a Libertarian and owner of the discount chain of smoke shops Cigarettes Cheaper, managed to qualify Prop 28 on the ballot. It called for the repeal of Reiner's dreadful and patently unfair tax measure. In the final month before the election, television viewers were bombarded with a constant barrage of anti-smoking public service messages courtesy of the California Department of Health Services, whose coffers we're bulging at the seams from Prop 99 money.

You want talk about a dangerous precedent set in motion, here it is. When state agencies start taking sides on ballot initiatives, using taxpayer funds to sway voters, it's a bad day for democracy. As government employees tend toward the left end of the political spectrum, various arms of the government could then become stealth campaigners for Democrat candidates by way of PSA's disguised as health and safety messages. That is precisely what went down in 2000. Needless to say, Prop 28 went down also. It was dirty politics and technically illegal, but it was successful nonetheless.

Tworsey continues on with her "Life in LA" guest post:

"So, are people still smoking in Southern California?

The irony is that I have never seen so many smoke shops open in such close proximity to one another as I have witnessed in the last couple of years. This would seem to imply that, despite anti-smoking statistics, people are now smoking MORE, not less."

"Ah, but what would I know…I'm only someone who actually lives in the city."

She's got a good point here. There is very likely an undercount of the prevalence of smokers in LA. Who in their right mind wants to respond to a survey and admit to smoking, given the current poisoned public opinion towards the subject? No one trusts the disclaimers that promise not to sell their information to third parties. To answer affirmatively might be to wind up on someones DO NOT RENT TO or DO NOT HIRE list.

The two mega-population centers of California - San Francisco and Los Angeles - seem to be hell-bent on outbidding one another in the virtuosity vendue of which is the more smoker unfriendly city. They both boast of achieving a sub-15% smoking prevalence by making smoking an anti-social, unpopular affair. Prevalence is an empty, cold hearted stat when you take into account a combined population of more than 25 million people between the two urban sprawls. Even at 15%, that prevalence amounts to 3,750,000 alienated human beings not at all content with their newfound subhuman status.

San Franciscans look down their persnickety noses on flashy Los Angelenos, considering them ostentatious and less sophisticated plebs. The feeling is not mutual. LA people nurse an inferiority complex of sorts that they then try to overcompensate for by adopting soppy social causes so as to be 'taken seriously'. They want you to know that it's not all glitz and glamour on Sunset Boulevard, why just look at all of the public service announcements featuring young, rich movie idols made for NBC's "The More You Know". And the rest of the world is beginning to despise both cities after reading about some of their outrageous lifestyle regulation ordinances. A growing number of Europeans are crossing them off their vacation itineraries.

Tworsey lances some subterranean, festering angst with her fine essay. The ten comments that follow it are compelling to read. There is a lot more going on in Tinseltown than meets the eye of the casual mainstream media coverage observer. Ditto for the audiences soaking in the ubiquitous and monotonous 'smoke-free dining' PSA's one hears 24/7 on LA talk radio, announcing the smog capital's latest round of outdoor smoking regulations. The "30-Second Hates" are narrated by a woman whose gleefully passive-aggressive, yet intimidating voice resembles that of a North Korean newscaster announcing that nations' intention to go nuclear with anyone who dares not comply with their wishes. The ghastly haze pictured in this postcard perfect shot of Los Angeles is not from secondhand smoke, but you already knew that. Try pointing that out to LA councilman Bernard Parks, a man whose automobile undoubtedly contributes to the problem, and you'll get a Barney Fife-like lecture on the far more eminent danger of phantom transient cigarette fumes. That's cool Bernie, you just keep whistling past the graveyard if it makes you feel safer.

Even if you could care less about what happens in the People's Republic of California, you should read this article and then bookmark Juliette's excellent website - Jredheadgirl. On top of making some really good music, she's a trench fighter for the right to be left alone in peace to enjoy the subtle, wizardly pleasures of the golden leaf. We even made use of an article her site led us to, by Danish researcher Klaus K, as inspiration and background for the following paragraphs on music and smoking. The Jredheadgirl blog supplies 200% of the recommended minimum daily requirement of useful information.

Despite the never-ending cacophony of imagined negative side effects unraveled by universities and fake charities and spun out to the masses, they'll never pin a scarlet letter on musicianship and smoking. It requires more than just dumb luck to write a good song, it takes focus and concentration, two well-known beneficial side effects of nicotine. Here's a quote from Klaus K's blog:

"The brain works better when it gets nicotine - almost like an optimized computer. Nicotine is a "work-drug" that enables its consumers to focus better and think faster."

Joni Mitchell herself weighed in on the benefits of smoking. Here's a couple of memorable quotes, both from the summer of 2008.
"...Don't get her started on the anti-smoking mood of our times. The reason, she claims, is political, not concern for health. She has been smoking since the age of 9 and considers it a form of self-medication. She spoke wistfully of the days of a rough childhood in North Battleford, when she would ride her bike to the edge of town to enjoy lighting up and watching the birds. 'That was the best part of my childhood,' she said. 'Nobody has any focus any more. I think it's because they quit smoking'", Toronto Star (Canada), Jun. 12, '08)

She went on to say to the Irish Times:

"She remains an enthusiastic advocate of smoking. 'How did Ireland give up so easily on smoking?' she asks. 'People are going to die of butter, or alcohol, or something. Why pick on cigarettes? I really couldn't have gotten through life without them, because I have a certain kind of nervous temperament and they calm me. I also couldn't have done as much, because smoking helps me to focus. I was sitting on a terrace in LA and this guy complains about the smell of smoke. I hadn't even lit up. Then I overheard him complaining that nobody can concentrate anymore and I said, 'Yeah, it's because they're not smoking'. The world is so full of ex-smokers, I don't know how anyone gets anything done'", Irish Times, Jul. 19, '08.

Joni Mitchell is the consummate musician, definitely one of the finest to ever strum a Martin guitar whilst employing one of her forty different tunings for our lucky ears. Her singing voice is simply divine. The song California was from her 1967 album Blue.

Joni Mitchell's album Blue was ranked #30 on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the highest placement for a female artist.

Now that you've read this article sans the annoying mental interruptions of blue underlined links, we've got a whole raft of them to catch up on here.
First we'd like to point you in the direction of Rich White's excellent website Smoke Screens: The Truth About Tobacco

Rich is the author of a book bearing this same title, which is available for purchase at his web page. Making sense of the jumble of tobacco science twisted by inconclusive conclusions, torn by double negatives, and obscured by confounding confounders, is what Rich does best. Let him separate the wheat from the chafe for you; just do what Laura Bush used to fancy doing before she quit, smoke and read.

Here's Juliette Tworsey's guest post "Life in LA", it is a must read. When you've arrived there, you've arrived at Rich's blog. Be sure and click on the archives, there's a lot of good reads contained therein.

And last but not least, here is Juliette's splendid web site Jredheadgirl

*See our article on Calabasas and redheads

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A Startling Huffington Post Comment

CONVERTING LEFTIES TO SAVE THE NATION FROM DOOM

Smoking in the Huffington RoomOn occasion, we still boldly strive to convert lifestyling Lefties into libertarian Righties here at smokervoter.com. Some would say it's an impossible dream and not worth the effort. It most certainly is an uphill battle. But something has to be done or we will end up with a Nanny State so entrenched and tyrannical that eventually there will be nothing, not even what outfit to wear to work, left for the individual to choose in the very near future.

If you ever find yourself out in a clover patch with some free time on your hands, you'll probably start surveying the immediate area for that mystical, illusive four-leaf exception. We happened upon just such a specimen the other day after stumbling upon an article at the left-leaning Huffington Post which featured White House Press Secretary Robert Gibb's revelation that Obama hadn't smoked for the past nine months.

There are some who are skeptical about this claim. There's a lot of square footage at the executive mansion and sneaking a smoke somewhere isn't beyond the realm of possibility. The president has been less than honest at times, like when he increased taxes on minimum wage earning smokers after promising not to raise taxes on the middle class during the campaign. On the other hand with militant cancer survivor and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer hot on the trail, he'd better be extra careful. Bob's been trying to get the President and John Boehner together over at the National Institute for Health to quit smoking together in a mushy kumbaya moment.

Wall eyed Bob and the media dinosaurs at CBS managed to scoop the nimble blogsters at Huffpo when in his closing monologue he included effusive praise for Obama for quitting the habit. The Huffington Post was stuck with an antiquated White House press briefing for its content. With smoking becoming one of the ultra volatile issues of our times, the word count of the public comments far exceeded that of the actual article. After a raft of predictable Hoorays! and Hurrahs! and accusations of the Republicans sleeping with the tobacco industry, out of nowhere (left field actually) came this nonplussed comment from a brave progressive poster who shall remain nameless:

"Just because I am the kind of person who likes to intentionally explore other perspectives, AND because I have an innate sense that this obsession with smoking and moralizing over it is being hyperbolized, I googled the following: "Activities more deadly than smoking". Drum roll, please... Mobile Phones Obesity Soda pop Un-protected sex Being a couch potato Alcohol use I am not pro-smoking. I am pro-informing. And I am certainly anti-hyping, anti-moral superiorizing, anti-crusading. They want to put pictures of diseased lungs on cigarette packs now? What's next: decals of obese depressed people attached to sofas? Chicken Little: "The sky is falling!" Recently said: "That one puff on that cigarette could be the one that causes your heart attack," the Daily Mail quoted Surgeon General Regina Benjamin. Yes, and that one lottery ticket could be millions. We are not well served, not well informed when we get this kind of misinformation from our public officials. It really dumbs down the conversation."

This commenter wasn't just any run-of-the-mill blue dog Democrat type either. We clicked on the profile and found that he or she had 891 prior comments and 291 friends. Among the many breadcrumbs left by this opinionated individual were severe criticisms of Bush, McCain and the rightwing in general. There was also a smattering of well thought-out points expressed that were critical of the leftwings' casual dismissal of individual liberties.

We won't name this poster either, as finding out they're being quoted on a pro-smoking website like ours could only serve to close their mind up like a startled box turtle. It's rare that the millions of brainwashed eyeballs drawn to Huffington's blog are exposed this kind of truth and especially from one of their own.

It is doubtful that this person will ever vote for Mitt Romney or whoever the Republicans end up nominating. Ron Paul? That's a different story. This is the kind of Lefty who conceivably might cross the line and help vote down a local or state anti-smoking ballot initiative without sacrificing their Big (as in federal level) Vote. Converting these voters is indeed worth the effort, and to reach out to them is a vital part of crushing the Nanny State.

How easily we forget that once upon a time our friends and neighbors who now unswervingly support the Democrat party line once tooled around town sporting QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper stickers on their unwashed Volvo station wagons. Housing rights, employment rights and a progressive rather than a regressive tax structure mattered to them. Isolating and then relentlessly bashing a convenient minority group wasn't exactly what you would expect from them.

And, no, Arianna Huffington doesn't smoke. We needed a graphic to spice up the article and took the low road of digitally modifying a snapshot of the queen of altruist, left-leaning blog journalism. One of the easiest tricks in the book is to insert a cigarette and some whiffs of sidestream smoke to the picture. It's simply too hard to resist the temptation to take a stalwart anti-smoker and put a burning cancer stick dangling James Dean style from their stiff upper lip.

Don't miss the next article. It is a commentary on the unfolding events in North Africa and a fledgling revolt taking place in Spain to a recently imposed smoking ban there. Just tap the DOWN ARROW.

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Spain Resisting Smoking Ban

LET THE DOMINOES FALL WHERE THEY MAY

Images of thrusting fists, angry faces and smashed up cars, all caught herky-jerky smartphone verite style, are seared into our consciousness lately. It started in Tunisia, spread to Egypt and now is turning ugly in Libya. Egyptians were tired of autocratic rule with no say in how the rules are made. It jogged my memory bank back to a MSM report I recall watching about an Egyptian smoking ban forced by decree upon the city of Alexandria by local officials a few years ago.

Unlike the majority of smoking ban reportage I see, this one featured a cabbie who was none too pleased with the upcoming change. The usual drill is to interview a few people on the street and magically everyone, smoker and non-smoker alike, is thrilled to the bone with the ban. They might throw in a wimpish retort to make things look balanced, but it inevitably ends with the interviewee deciding to quit the habit - tomorrow, of course. Well, tomorrow never comes; very few people quit despite all of the crowing by the prohibitionist lobby.

No, this Egyptian taxi cab driver was genuinely angry and defiant. He said he had no intention whatsoever of abiding by the new rules. If one of his fares objected, he would simply direct them to roll down their windows. I found it refreshing to watch. Now that they've shoved off their old leadership I'll bet the smoking ban will cease to exist. Forty percent of Egyptians smoke, mainly men but women also, and my guess is that those who don't are far more tolerant than our spoiled-boomer, nostril fanning culture is.

In Spain an extensive and very unpopular smoking ban went into effect in January. There was reportedly pressure from the new world order crowd at the World Health Organization exerted upon the Spanish government to condition any impending loan bailouts upon following through with implementation of their infamous Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (abbreviated WHO FCTC). Spain was a signatory country. Only four Eastern Mediterranean countries are not on board with the FCTC and one of them is Tunisia.

Spain's economy is teetering on the brink after a building boom gone bust. The last thing they need is for their hospitality industry to go broke behind one of these disastrous-to-business smoking bans. North of one-third of Spaniards smoke, dine and drink coffee and wine at cafes there.

Many Europeans vacation in Spain purposely to escape the drab, smokefree eating and drinking establishments back home. This supplies the hard currency reserves Spain is in dire need of. The WHO is playing chicken with the ultimate fate of the Euro in order to satisfy their adamant never-gonna-happen dream of a smokefree planet. Although they occasionally fulfill a needed mission with infectious disease control, the WHO should just get out of the lifestyle modification business altogether. The planet is just too vast and varied for cookie-cutter diet, drink and tobacco regulations to even begin to work.
Spain's hotel entrepreneurs are resisting the ban and Bravo is all I have to say for them. I hope the government backs down from their foolish stance and the WHO limps away licking its wounds. And much in the same domino fashion of the North African resistance to ham-handed authoritarian rule, I hope that Greece, the Netherlands, France and the UK follow suit and resist and reverse their detested smoking bans.

If you want to keep up with the latest happenings, tune into the Banging on About the Smoking Ban blog expertly authored by Frank Davis. He's a veteran freedom tourist who has been vacationing in Spain for ten years.

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A new political community forms

Introducing the Tobacco Lovers Community

If you keep up with the alacritous musings over on the British pro-freedom and anti-nanny blogs you've probably become familiar with a frequent commentator by the name of Junican. Junican is a shrewd problem solver who tends to think out of the box and likes to take concrete, constructive action. Like the rest of us, he despises the nanny state and never tires of inventing novel ways to bring about its ultimate destruction.

He left a comment on Leg-iron's Underdogs Bite Upwards blog the other day that suggested that we smokers need to rebrand ourselves as the 'smoking community' in the future and he's right on the money with this one. Leg-iron was ad-libbing in his usual workmanlike fashion on the concept of acceptability. The word obviously grates on him, much like the word appropriate does. When anyone in the ruling class deems anything unacceptable, as in smoking or eating an unapproved diet, it overnight seems to take on the authority of an edict which is at once both infallible and inviolable. We all know the drill by now.

A surefire way to come in from the wilderness of segregation and banishment and rejoin the family of man is to gain recognition as some sort of community. Communities often share similar foods, like Cheetos and juicy double cheeseburgers and bubbly soda pops. They quite often share common customs, like drinking in the sacred output of the tobacco plant. Communities often share political goals, namely their continued survival and the preservation of traditions.

Since none of the four main pollsters seem capable of detecting just how we smokervoters and the officially overweight tend to vote, it's up to us to self-aggregate via the blogosphere and word of mouth. It will be a lot easier on us if we begin referring to one another as the Smoking Community or the Free-Eating Community. It might even liberate the Gallup's into counting our heads, as they could now do so without appearing to condone a discouraged societal behavior in the process.

This will, in turn, lead to our recognizing one another as fellow human beings and upstanding citizens who need to band together in common defense against an ongoing assault from a healthist-scientific-government axis of sworn enemies out to eradicate 'our kind'. It is they and their old time, tent-preaching prohibitionist mindset that need to be shown the shortest route back to dustbin of history.

Politicians are naturally drawn to communities. A community is simply newspeak for the term demographic. For the past two decades they've been carefully distancing themselves from smokers while currying favor with the Latino Community. No candidate in their right mind wants to be painted with the broad brush of being a friend of Big Tobacco. But, standing up for the wants and aspirations of the Smoking Community and helping them come in from the shadows is a whole different enchilada.

Junican further spun the term into the Tobacco Lovers Community with that warm-fuzzy 'love' word thrown in to appeal to the sappy, altruistic tendencies of the aging hippie baby-boomers. We could also work the religion angle in. It would be wise to simply call tobacco a Mayan ritual plant that we use to get closer to God. That's actually true if you look into it in more detail.

At this point in time we're portrayed as evil drug addicts killing ourselves slowly and every one around us instantaneously (how does that work?) with but one puff of toxic gray smoke from a plant obviously put on earth by the devil himself. It's all the result of a concerted hate campaign planned and orchestrated by a gold-digging bunch of power-tripping people who simply don't like the smell of burning tobacco and enjoy telling others what to do or not do.

By rebranding into the TLC (Tobacco Lovers Community - no undefined acronyms are allowed on this site!) we can recruit slick pinstriped lawyers to defend members of the community from being fired, from being evicted and all the other goodies that come from group victimhood. Churches in the form of taverns will spring up where we can congregate and indulge in our holy sacramental wine and gold leaf tobacco together. Why didn't we think of this before?

From here on we are now a smoking community known as the TLC or Tobacco Lovers Community. Now go forward and spread the term far and wide to every corner of the earth. Use the term in your comments, use the term in conversation, use the term in e-mails to your representatives. Just make sure to define this acronym with the full name first and don't simply throw out TLC. Undefined acronyms and initialisms are surely the reason for the demise of modern civilization.

Smoking is hereby entirely acceptable and a thoroughly appropriate pursuit.
Read the next article down and learn just what the power of community status can involve. The Latino Community singlehandedly influenced the recent mid-term elections by voting as a unit. DO READ ON...

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Coalition Voting

Latino Coalition Voting Saves Three Democrats from Defeat

If you use any text editor other than perhaps Microsoft's Notepad, with its many built-in limitations, it's fun to play around with the Find and Replace feature in order to easily rewrite articles. This little word-changing expedition will hopefully serve as an object lesson for those masochistic smokervoters and overweight voters who cast ballots for the Democratic Party in the mid-term 2010 election.

Thanks to your efforts we still have Democrat nannies Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer in the Senate, and Jerry Brown at the helm at the capitol in California.

This is from the Newshawksreviews

Original text:

Latinos Saved Jerry Brown, Michael Bennet, Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid
By Ed Coghlan on Nov 5 2010

The Republican electoral tsunami that swept the country slowed down noticeably once it reached the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast. And there appears to be a reason. A record breaking Latino voter turnout probably saved Democratic U.S. Senate seats in Colorado, Nevada and California.

First this original sentence:


Now after a few choice word substitutions that reflect the fact that nationally smokers make up an even larger voting demographic than Latinos (20% vs. 9%), we exchange Latinos with smokers and reverse engineer Democrats with Republicans.


What a difference a word can make. What a difference your vote can make. We need to steal a page from the Latino Community and start voting in unison. Those two senate seats would haven given the Republicans 49 instead of the current 47 seats. The Democrats would be toothless, clawless tigers if we'd captured those two races.

Carly Fiorina, a cancer survivor, most likely wouldn't have been much of an improvement over Barbara Boxer. But we're talking California here folks, enough said. The same goes for Meg Whitman, but a Republican veto threat, held over the heads of the worst state legislature on earth, would have been preferable to what will now exist in California.

Barbara Boxer has no business being a senator at all and particularly not a California senator, a fact made all the more insulting to the natives with her thick Bronx accent and all. She won with 5,218,441 votes to Fiorina's 4,217,366. It is estimated that there are 5 million smokers in the state. A one-hundred percent turnout and a similar party voting preference by the Smoking Community is a bit of a pipe dream but a 65% turnout coupled with as little as a 60% Republican slant to said votes would have turned it all around. Take 650,000 votes out of Boxers column and add them to Fiorina's tally and it's back to New Yawk with irritating little Barbie.

We've said it over and over and over again here at smokervoter.com but it's worth a least one more repeat. There are 46 million smoking voters in this country. If 65% turn out to vote and 65% of those vote Republican, that forms a net voting bloc almost 9 million strong. This mirrors the strength of the much sought after Latino coalition almost exactly. We form almost 20 million of the overall Republican electorate in the process. We can't be ignored. Throw in the party faithful, the Taxed Enough Already faction, and a few million fed-up overweight voters and it is Sayonara time for the healthist themed Democrats and their mollycoddling Nanny State.

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http://www.independent.org

Who Says There's No There There in Oakland.

If you've been to this website before you'll note that the city of San Francisco, or Frisco as we prefer to call it, comes in for a lot of well deserved criticism. Frisco represents everything many Americans and indeed many human beings in general simply detest; a complete lack of freedom to choose how to live their daily lives and persistent interference by a paternalistic government. San Fran is the capital of an area of 7.4 million of the least free-living people in the country.

It should come as no surprise then that Frisco (oh how we love that term, it irritates them to no end) votes Democrat on an extreme basis. San Francisco has not voted more than 20% for a Republican presidential or senatorial candidate since 1988. So much for individuality and diversity of opinion, eh?

Against this backdrop you gotta' wonder what it must be like to buck this trend and live and work in the Bay Area while maintaining a libertarian philosophy. Well right across from San Fran is the city of Oakland, home to the Independent Institute, one of the greatest think tanks in America. Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institutes quarterly journal The Independent Review. We like this guy immensely. He doesn't actually reside in the Bay Area either, he knows better than that. You only go around once.

Here are some excerpts from an article he penned January 10, 2011 by the title "Puritanism, Paternalism, and Power" and subtitled Whiskey and Gunpowder.

This is some good stuff here. In the future we will be highlighting a lot of the writing and commentary from the Independent Institute. It's made all the better by their geographic location right across from the heavily repressive City by the Bay, as they can look out the window and see exactly what it is they don't aspire to be.

And speaking of bucking trends, if we smokers beat the typical turnout of 55% by turning out at a 60% rate and then reversed the Bay Area's 80%-20% preponderance against Republicans, we would end up a 16.6 million net voting bloc. What does that amount to? One in four of the magic number of 66 million votes required to elect a GOP President. That is what is known as a major league bargaining chip in power politics.

If you simply can't wait for us to post some more literary gems from this site, here is the link to it. May we suggest using the search box and typing words such as obesity, smoking, tobacco, sin taxes and such into it. Long may these people run.

http://www.independent.org

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WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION CLAIMS 600,000 PEOPLE DIE ANNUALLY FROM SECONDHAND SMOKE

If you noticed a shrill mechanical beeping noise in late November, its source was likely the sound of millions of BS Meters simultaneously going off as the Great Big Lie of 600,000 annual deaths from second hand smoking made the rounds on the media circus medicine show circuit. Newscasters from the big three major networks, still practicing their decrepit one-way megaphone communication business model, stared right into the cameras and perpetrated the sinister fallacy that smokers are wantonly killing innocent women and children with their evil habit. It was feeding time for the hoop-jumping seals perched in front of their beloved telescreens.

Diane Sawyer was beside herself, breaking into that strange weepy voice she gets, as she recited the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) written script. The guy from CBS, young Jeff what's-his-name, to his credit looked like he wasn't really buying what he was saying. The Nanny Broadcasting Company, with anti-smoking PSA Boy Brian Williams at the controls, spun the malarkey some more. The barking seals who still rely on the three majors at truth feeding time, gulped down their red herrings without even so much as chewing first.

But a mega-popular conservative talk radio show host was having no part of this BS notion. He labeled it as pure bunk. Back in 1998, the WHO produced a paper which found no significant public health threat to secondhand smoke and then proceeded to toss it away into the circular file. Mr. Limbaugh's ace research team managed to retrieve it, ironed out the wrinkles, and for years had it posted on the website for all to see. It's lucky that his show has such high ratings and that he's not legally constrained from challenging WHO's assertions. WHO doesn't mess around with dissenting opinions; consumers, growers and producers are not allowed any input to their findings of fact.

El Rushbo really gets worked up in to a lather over the secondhand smoking myth, as well he should. He commented, only half-joking, that he remembers (when restaurants and smoky bars were the norm) having to exit the premises by stepping over the dead bodies of patrons sprawled out on the floor in death throes from inhaling deadly tobacco fumes.

He went on to thank smokers once again for bankrolling free childrens' health care and got in a brilliant dig at a co-sponsor of the study, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, by noting the rise of black market cigarette sales in the Nanny Mayor's kingdom. Smokers, in turn, need to thank Mr. Limbaugh as well for his many years of countering the wild claims of Tobacco Control Inc. before an audience of 15 million listeners. Scan the radio dial and listen hard to find any such parallel from progressive political talk shows.

The phantom fatal harm of second hand smoke is a keystone to WHO's stratagem of shifting tobacco smoking from being viewed as a victimless crime to an outright assault on the lives of impeccant non-smokers. It's also why there are no smoking-friendly bars and restaurants, as this would supposedly subject employees to deadly working conditions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have made it impossible for anyone to even experiment with a business plan that includes such a prospect.

Not quite one generation ago smokers and non-smokers mingled everywhere and anywhere on a regular basis. This study seems to suggest that all the while, smokers were silently killing off their immediate family and co-workers and everyone else around them.

Were this to be believed we should be witnessing a huge upward spike in deaths from heart disease and lower respiratory infections right about now, as smoking peaked in the early 1970's and all of those innocent by-standers should be overloading the body racks at the local morgues. No such thing is taking place.

The health research team from Sweden apparently outsourced the mathematical modeling to Al Gore's first rate number-crunchers. They reportedly made use of a brand new Microsoft Excel spreadsheet Function known as ETSfactor, which auto-multiplies everything by 100,000. Mayor Bloomberg's philanthropic pal Bill Gates donated the Excel plug-in for free.

The ETSfactor function also auto-excludes any confounding input data, like indoor wood and animal dung fired cook stoves, from the calculations. Data that might have explained why women composed 48% of the supposed fatalities while men were only 26%. Especially from Africa and South Asian households.

The optimistic smoker might look at this as a pathetic last gasp of scary misinformation being pushed out by a faltering neo-prohibitionist movement. The pessimist might see this as the beginning of the Final Solution, wherein all tobacco products are banned worldwide. The WHO is quite possibly the most powerful supra-national governing entity on the planet.

The study was funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which manages the charitable giving of New York Nanny Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News. Conflict of interest comes to mind. While it should come as no surprise to any longer suffering New Yorker paying around $13/pack, you might think his patronage would adversely taint the conclusions. If you exclude anyone connected with the tobacco industry from any involvement, yet allow an anti-smoking extremist like Bloomberg to influence the outcome of this scientific study, you've lost all credibility.

Nobody in their right mind should take this study seriously.

Here is the WHO report Limbaugh's team recovered, it's very hard to find: A special thanks goes out to Marcus Aurelius of the excellent website Clearing The Air. A link to this long standing freedom of choice web site is right under the WHO report. Stay tuned for a full-scale review of this web site. It's got very important information about some serious and feasible solutions to the aforementioned smoker-friendly bar situation.

WHO Secondhand Smoke Report

The Clearing The Air Website

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One Puff of Smoke Can Kill You

Progressives Lie Progressively

The original draft of this piece now resides in the Recycle Bin. We started off with a slightly ad hominem attack on the awkward, rather unprofessional PBS Newshour interview segment between the Surgeon General and Judy Woodruff in which it was proposed that even one slight wisp of secondhand tobacco smoke was capable of causing a fatal heart attack to the recipient on the spot. Stooping down to the gutter-level antics of Tobacco Control Inc. isn't worth the time.

To anyone who can read body language, Dr. Regina Benjamin's delivery was embarrassingly amateurish. She came across like a teen-ager lying to her mom (Judy Woodruff in this case). She would sow a little white lie out of the corner of her mouth, and then an odd smile would come over her face as if to say "Okay, since you bought that one, here's the next one." She really didn't have much fresh empty rhetoric to add to her "settled science" litany of there being 7,000 chemicals in smoke fumes and the no safe level fallacy. Her Janus-faced monologue progressively built up to the grande finale "New Revelation" that just one puff of tobacco was enough to immediately cause a heart attack, both to the mainstream inhaler or a secondary recipient. The ever squinting Judy ate it all up and finished the interview by thanking her guest for this fascinating new information while commenting that she wasn't aware of this latest twist.

The best way to install a new operating system on a computer is to reformat or wipe the hard drive clean. In this way, the old information on the disk doesn't clash with the new. The tobacco-hating scientific community seems intent on wiping out all cognitive recollection of smoky clubs and restaurants still floating around in the collective consciousness of millions upon millions of people born between 1930-1975. The Surgeon General's report absolutely beggars belief to any rational person. Search through all the newspaper archives you can get your hands on for a headline that reads "First-Time Bar Patron Dies of Heart Attack from Inhaling Cigarette Smoke at Joe's Club" and see what turns up.

The fact that our Surgeon General isn't a natural-born prevaricator should actually come as a welcome sign. And Judy Woodruff was one of the first Big Three MSM teleprompter-reading parrots to jump ship, out of personal integrity concerns, from the pharma-sponsored commercial media to Public Television. It's hard not to like Judy Woodruff, she's such a sweetie. The same holds true when you look into the Surgeon General's background. She is a genuinely nice person who has had to put up with some cruel criticism of her big-boned chassis by the very Healthist creeps she's now tasked with supporting because of her job title. She's only the messenger and Judy is only the vehicle.

Dr. Benjamin doesn't truly believe what she said about instant secondhand heart attacks and it showed. Even the thoroughly indoctrinated "Wipfli Youth"*, those born after 1985, are likely to have come away from this fractured media encounter with a grain or two of skepticism as to its veracity.

The real evil-doers behind all of this slanderous and blatantly absurd misinformation, designed to make Typhoid Mary's out of smokers, are the lifestyle medicine doctors, scientists and researchers who cash despoiled payroll checks drawn on the accounts of fake charities, various university schools of public health and the likes of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

*Of Heather Wipfli fame, one of the worlds foremost antismoking maniacs.

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Exit Polls

Don't Give Smokers Any Bright Ideas

Something very big happened on Nov 2, 2010. The recently written-off-for-dead Republican party came storming back into power and the exit pollsters were right there outside of the polling places collecting their data and painstakingly probing into the makeup of voters who brought about this changing of the guard.

They collected info on Latinos, women, Blacks, the youth vote and angry, older suburban white men and women partial to Tea. Missing in action, as usual, was any questioning of the relatively large contingent of voters whose personal preference is to consume tobacco products.

Billions of dollars flow into fake scientific charities, as per the Master Settlement Agreement, in order to study the mating habits, the educational levels and every other facet of life under the sun of we smokers. No one seems interested in how we tend to vote.

Given that the one and only Very Large Tax Increase that the ruling party and its exalted leader actually foisted upon the citizenry was the SCHIP bill, one might logically surmise that any organization interested in political science would show at least an iota of curiosity by studying the reaction of these human beings to said tax increase.

Of particular interest should have been measuring the backlash by under $30K/Year smoking voters to an unprecedented 2,000% increase in bulk tobacco taxes brought about by the SCHIP vote. One might expect them to have turned on their perceived protectors, the Democratic party, in great numbers. It is quite possible they did so, but we'll never know. It's not politically correct to even ask anymore.

If you didn't know better you might gather that someone, somewhere doesn't want 46 million people to get any ideas about banding together in self defense in order to vote out of office any party that vigorously lines up with their sworn enemies - the fake charities who consume and dispense all of that Master Settlement Agreement largesse.

Whadya' think?

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Obama's Post-Election Press Conference

If you don't smoke - bully, bully for you - as a guy who sang wonderfully, smoked constantly and lived to be 84 years old once vocalized. Now once again, if you don't smoke, you are incapable of understanding what we're about to say here. Obama sneaked into the little top secret smoking lounge, located somewhere in the White House and away from the prying eyes of the public, and smoked a couple of cigarettes just prior to his press conference. How do we know? Believe it, we know. The President was relaxed and fully in control of his thoughts at this press conference and he shined like he used to shine before his wife clamped down and made him quit.

We'll skip all the complex neuro-chemical constructs at work here and just get down to the nitty-gritty. No one who smokes really wants to quit. It's a pleasure that is hard to define. Non-smokers find this hard to grasp, but it does exist and to ignore it is to live in a fantasy world of perfect little androids who all live forever on bouncing social security checks.

If you smoke, you can readily detect when Obama has been on a long cigarette drought. His eyes dart around, he hesitates in his answers, he gropes for his words and he desperately seeks out the TelePrompter. Similarly, on the campaign circuit he flashes his highly partisan and angry rhetoric when he hasn't had a smoke in two days. That's just the way it is with quitting something you really enjoy doing and which affords you some blessed relaxation from stress. And it's safe to say that Mr. Obama has experienced more than his fair share of stress.

Maybe, just maybe, we could all just grow up for a minute and allow the President and John Boehner to get together in a room, break out a pack of smokes, a presidential edition Bic lighter, and let them talk and smoke to their hearts content. Lowered stress, finely honed concentration and sharpened focus are all upshots of smoking that the lifestyle preachers leave out of their tired old sermons.

What is needed right now is to tell the psychopaths who compulsively see everything in terms of 'Don't Smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke', to shut the hell up and let these two grown men just talk without their prearranged, double-dyed dockets in place. They have bonsaied mankind with their magisterial cause celebre long enough.

Economics is one part money and one part mass psychology. A compelling national voice can positively affect the economy. Franklin Roosevelt, with his showcase cigarette holder in full view, was such a voice. As was the inspiring optimist Ronald Reagan. We need for Obama to recapture his once-vaunted communication skills, which were in evidence at the post election news conference today. The economy is still in dire straits. We're not saying that he should criss-cross the country with a Marlboro hanging out his mouth. What we're saying is that Michelle should back off for the sake of this country and just let the man smoke if that's what he wants to do.

The Nicorette's are just not working. It's strike three for Johnson & Johnson.

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The Midterm Elections

Smokers Revenge: Obama's Middle Class Tax Cut Betrayal

REMEMBER THE SCHIP VOTE

House and Senate Contests

Dear fellow smokers: Remember the SCHIP vote. At the federal level the party of the workingman really stuck it to you within months of their sweeping 2008 victory. If you happen to roll your own, you've seen your one pound bag of tobacco reduced in quality to a batch of horrid stems and sticks. If you smoke tailormades you lost about $250 in purchasing power. And that's just at the national level.

The All Important State Races

State legislators have been very active during the past two years dreaming up new ways to criminalize the legal activity of smoking. It would certainly be nice if candidates would come right out and brag about how hard they'd been on smokers lately. That way, those on the receiving end could make up their minds on whether to retaliate at the polls with their sacred votes. The truth is they wouldn't dare. They know how to count and it would be foolhardy for any serious political strategist to write off one in five potential disciples.

Don't overlook those critical statehouse races; state senators and governors have turned to taxing the sins of the few in lieu of the pocketbooks of the many in order to shore up their out-of-balance sheets while still holding onto their seats.

Buenos Dias Smokers: the Invisible Voting Bloc

Politicians bluntly court the Latino vote by going around and unashamedly misspeaking "Bu-aye-nous Dee-yahs" from the podiums to show how down with 'la causa' they are. Latinos are 16% of the population and about 9% of likely voters. Smokers are 20% of the population and constitute an equal amount (20%) of likely voters. So, why aren't these same campaigners addressing crowds with proclamations like "Hello Smokers! I'm on your side!"

The McLaughlin Group recently led off its broadcast with a piece on "Latino Poder", thus showing off their Spanish spelling prowess with the correct terminology for the word 'power'. Shortly thereafter a big screen icon flashed with a 65% Democrat - 22% Republican breakout of Hispanic voting preferences. One thing about John is that he does fairly good research, so this tallying up is probably at least passably accurate.

You can Google your heart out or Bing till it stings with the terms "Democrat"+"tobacco taxes" and the only possible conclusion you will come to is that Democrats are not your friends if you happen to smoke. By this token it would then seem to follow that smokers might be expected to break down along a reversed ratio - 65% Republican - 22% Democrat.

Don't bother opening up the little turquoise calculator, here's the numbers out of a likely 25 million smokervoters: 16,250,000 for the GOP and just 5,500,000 for the Dem's. That is almost 11 million net votes, which is some serious political power for the beneficiary party. What about the remaining 13% undecided? Go ahead and split that, it doesn't change the outcome - it's a wash.

In a very real sense, as smokers you've become the invisible bloc, never mentioned dare they ruffle your feathers somehow. The Democrats are completely mum while out on the rubber chicken circuit when it comes to hurting smokers with their past legislative efforts. No, it's after the votes are in that the fangs come out.

Image is Everything

When November 2nd rolls around and the people have had their say by selecting the best actor in a 30-second political sound bite, the midterm elections of 2010 will finally draw to a close. Everyone will complain that this is the dirtiest election ever, but it's all actually very par for the course. It's all about images, silly little images that you're expected to take into the voting booth with you and then react by placing your X next to the name of the candidate who left the best mental impression.
We can play this game too. Here's a few images retrieved from down the page and brought up front and center. We hope you'll print them out and put up them up on the refrigerator with those cute little magnets. Sear these thought pictures into your brain and carry them into the polling booth, especially if you voted Democrat in 2008.


If you live in California, Nevada, Washington, Illinois, Kentucky, or Colorado and you smoke, your vote is especially crucial. The odds are good that unabashed smoker John Boehner will soon replace Bay Area control-freak Nancy Pelosi as Mr. Speaker of the House. Let's get the Senate back while we're at it.

Here are a few really prized scalps we'd like to see taken. Barbara Boxer in California must go. Her snotty demeanor during the Senate hearings, when she demanded to be addressed as Mrs. Senator should have been enough for voters to toss her out of office. But what is especially chafing to Californianos is her obvious East Coast accent. What a complete insult to the west coast.

Getting Senate Majority leader Harry Reid's seat would be simply marvelous. Voters in Nevada, a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, might want to think twice about electing a guy who would further kill the tourist industry there by ushering in smokefree casinos. He also carefully shepherded the SCHIP vote through the Senate.

In Illinois it would be poetic justice to capture President Obama's old senate seat. Reluctantly vote for Mark Kirk, as he voted FOR SCHIP and he is therefore a RINO. As a smoker himself, the President is well aware of the latest form of fashionable bigotry being directed at us by healthist doctors and junk scientists. He should have spoken out on this. He chose the low road and there he'll forever travel in the eyes of 46 million Americans.

Despite their purposeful silence on the matter, the Democrats are not your friends if you happen to smoke. Politics is like slow motion boxing. You've got to wait two years to deliver a counter punch to your opponent. Revenge is mine say the smokervoters of America.

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They put Goebbels to shame with their efficiency.

The great triad of public health, mass media and the Righteous of the world really know how to spin all things tobacco to the robotic, computerized plebes out there. A Yahoo News headline writer banged this out on the keyboard, told his crew to run with it, and here's what you got at Yahoo: [Dateline: TOKYO]

"Japan smokers happy to inhale tax hike"

They must honestly believe that rather than sharpening and focusing the thought process, smoking dulls the minds of its 'victims'. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be nice to see the economic study that produced a conclusion whereby any consumer, purchasing any product, actually welcomed an increase in the cost. It just doesn't happen, except in the fever pitch fanaticism of the tobacco control universe. Even those nicotine-deprived amongst us don't buy into this Bizarre New World proposition.

As you read your way through the article it gradually becomes clear that nowhere in the text is there any real mention of anyone actually being happy with the price increase of 40%. As a matter of fact, the first guy they quote takes the opposite track. That's the real world slipping through the cracks of this illusionary brave new world imagined and spun by the groupthink factories.


That is a far cry from saying you're happy with a huge tax increase. He goes on to explain that this simply puts the price of a pack of cigarettes on par with London. This seems to have been the yardstick the government used to set the increase at 40%; to bring Japanese prices more in line with the rest of the world. It is truly amazing that any party in power, anywhere on earth would risk the wrath of the voters in such a fashion. It is even more so when you consider that fully one-third of the population smokes in Japan.

In a world where most creatures exhibit instinctive self defense mechanisms, smokers are expected to react oppositely and reward their attackers, (i.e., whichever Japanese party is in power right now; they passed this tax), by patting them on the back and voting for them. This would seem to be the pattern in place, as somebody put these guys in charge in the last election, when presumably the same one-third smoking/voting rate existed. This must change and change soon, like the very next election cycle. Smokers must form a gang. A big gang. They need to vote with 90%+ cohesion. They need to duly note which party voted 'yea' and which voted 'nay' when this vote went down.

The government of Japan owns half the stock of JT, the largest tobacco company in the country also known as Japan Tobacco. It cashed in $29 billion yen ($354 million USD) in dividends last year. Our federal, state and local governments effectively own the tobacco firms here. They don't collect dividends, they simply take the income right off the top at the cash register, it comes out of the bottom line of the private shareholders.

Furthermore, in the Bizarre New World tobacco corporation shareholders are supposed to take joy in lower year-on-year sales figures. As per the terms of MSA, they're expected to fund entities like the American Legacy Foundation, whose stated goal is zero dollars in revenue for the firm. If a real world country adopted this macro economic model, they'd soon cease to exist.

At the very bottom of the article finally a tiny morsel of reference emerges which pretends to back up the blaring lead off headline:


A recent poll indeed, apparently slapped together on the very same day of this breaking story. An "insta-poll" with about as much credibility as a cup of instant coffee has to a java barista. Come now, ladies and gentlemen, does anyone in their right mind think that is going to happen?

There's another problem. If six out of ten smokers obediently set out to quit due to this tax increase, that doesn't mean they would succeed; 85% don't. That means if one thousand smokers suddenly chose to quit, roughly ninety would follow through. The remaining 910 will 'happily' pay a lot more for their cigarettes.

The topper was the contention by the Japanese government that this wasn't about revenue generation at all, it was about the public health of the nation.

Only in the Bizarre New World of the Healthist Elite.

There's no need to put up a link to this article, we pretty well summarized it for you. Instead, while we're on the topic of Japan, here's a link to what has to be one of the more affecting blog posts by Frank Davis with the title Two Restaurants in Japan. It's a fine piece of writing which sketches out some divergent modern day ripostes to the old Zippy question "Are we having fun yet?"

Pay special attention to the last two paragraphs; they frame in what we've lost and what we stand to regain if we're ever able to turn around this cheerless, stainless steel-on-Navajo White world.

OK, Let's go back to the top of the page now

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Underdogs Bite Upwards

LEG IRON BANNED IN CALIFORNIA

There's a beautiful old Spanish style building in town that is full of these odd things called books (remember them?) made out of paper. For the most part, the most recent copyright dates on the inner jackets are of 1990's vintage. Public libraries are the latest casualties of the digital revolution. There's a room right off to the side of the main entrance with twenty or so computers that are hooked up to the internet. It's a very nice gesture. Providing public access to the internet for those unable to afford it is a vital part of bridging the great digital divide.

For obvious reasons, libraries need to be careful about screening out adult content of the salacious kind from closely adjoining monitors. The legal parameters which govern such content have already been defined for us rather specifically. A renowned Supreme Court justice summed it all up with the statement "I know it when I see it." However, things get a bit trickier when you delve into intellectual and political content, where it's best to err on the side of freedom of expression. And that's especially true if you go around the globe bragging and lecturing to everyone else about how free your society is.

For example, you might find yourself seated next to someone viewing an offensive website exhorting its viewers to disrespect all humans who happen to smoke - they've got every right to do so. Al Gore has every right in the world to disseminate questionable scientific data on his 'inconvenient truth' page.

If you happen to delight in reading the Frank Davis blog "Banging on about the Smoking Ban" at this California library, you're free to do so. It popped right up on the screen. There was a great article entitled "Don't Visit Britain" wherein he addressed the loyalty-sapping effect a country sets in motion by downgrading the citizen stature of its smokers. Tourism likewise suffers the same fate as NOT WELCOME signs propagate in the form of hefty, larcenous fines imposed for smoking at parks and beaches. Vancouver, B.C. just did so. The city fathers there must be pretty confident in the economy. They're gambling against a 33% drop in visitors.

The next stop was a convenient link click away (by means of his bloglist off to the right) to read up on the latest literary opus served up by the wise and witty Leg Iron of Underdogs Bite Upwards fame. That's when this happened:

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How to Leverage Your Vote

The Incredible Potential Power of the 'Pariah Party'

Slightly over 135 million voters showed up and cast their votes in the election of 2008. The turnout rate was larger than usual. Typically a little more than half of the people (55%) who are citizens and over 18 years of age and not felons show up and cast votes for the candidates of their choice, who in turn occasionally become felons themselves while in office.

WARNING: This article is going to contain a little realpolitik arithmetic and a few of those dreaded facts and figures and percentages that we are literally drowning in these days. Ever since USA Today hit pay dirt by publishing charts and graphs and articles that led with X-percent of people think Y or do Z, it's really gotten out of hand. With such a profusion of numbers and percentages to recall and then authoritatively quote in your next heated political discussion with Commie Pinko Peggy or Neanderthal Nick, it's easy to get them mixed up. Was that 600,000 dead each year from secondhand smoking or was it 50,000 or was it just 5 ? [Maybe, 5 at most]

Okay, let's get some of the basic facts out on the table to get started here. We're going to round out everything to numbers ending in either zero or five so as to make them more recall friendly. Any blogger or MSM'er who bothers to include a number to the right of the percent point is wasting their precious time. Given all of the numerical bunkum floating around, they'd be lucky if their readership even approximately recollects the number to the left. Yet they do it all the time. You'll still see stuff like "52.3% of the 65.2% of people who responded to our survey thought that...blah, blah, blah". All right now, factoid numero uno is that there are about 215 million citizens of voting age in the country. Of those, about 135 million showed up and voted in Barack Obama, a Democrat Senate and a Democrat Congress, so much for the bad news.

This, of course, was a presidential election and they tend to have a higher turnout than mid-terms. Therein lies the crux of this little tome. When you register and show up and vote in a mid-term election while the other guy doesn't, your vote gets leveraged. Between now and November, on your way into the supermarket to buy your cigarettes, your soft drinks or your Cheetos, you'll probably walk right past someone seated at a little foldaway table attempting to register voters. If you're not registered to vote as you read this, might we respectfully suggest that you take the time to sit down and do the deed. And if any of the three aforementioned items are in your shopping bag, there's all the more reason to do so.

By the way, just to illustrate our point here, turn off your monitor for a second right now and see if you can recall how many people are eligible to vote and how many showed up in 2008.
See how you are. Even rounded to fives you forgot it was 215 million and 135 million respectively.

Here's the simple drill on how we're going to arrive at our numbers here, and no they won't be within a margin of error +5 or -5. We intend to break down three voting blocs here, all of them recently relegated to official social pariah status by the Healthist Gestapo and their parroting MSM trumpeters. In order of their size, they consist of soft drink devotees, the newly redefined obese and the smokers. First, we'll use some kind of widely reported and semi-accurate percentage breakdown and then we'll filter it down by the typical turnout of 55% and just go from there. We guarantee you the numbers are startling.

Let's start with soda drinkers. Since we couldn't find any hard and fast statistics, let's just all agree that almost everyone likes a carbonated beverage now and then. Let's just assume for arguments sake that 85% of people fall into this category. This may amaze you, but that means that somewhere around 180 million of the voting pool are Peppers or Mountain Dew'ers or, well - you get the drift. If you apply a 55% turnout multiplier to this you wind up with a nice round, easy-to-remember 100 million member voting bloc. Stand back and contemplate a combined fuming mass, 100 million strong, teaming up and pushing back together against soda tax motions hovering below the horizon, just past the visible spectrum of dawns early light. Just take a wild guess at which party, mainly at the state level, has begun quietly instituting soda taxes to save you from yourself.

The makeup of the next group, the so-called obese, is based on a highly disputable multiplier floating around that declares that 65% of Americans are in technical violation of the sacrosanct ideal BMI (Body Mass Index). Keep in mind that when the paltering health and wellness authorities capriciously lower the threshold to the Lance Armstrong (a virulent antismoking jerk) level, it's no surprise that they come up with that number. We'll use it nonetheless. Without boring you with the number crunching, it comes out to 75 million voters.

That's 75 million people tired of being called out by Michelle Obama, and tired of being labeled a drain on the health care industry and just plain tired of being called fat by anyone. Once again this many people voting in unison against whichever party seeks to demonize them, or force behavioral modification on them as part of a preemptive wellness regimen meant to 'bend down the cost curve', could spell disaster for said party.

Finally we come to the fine folks which this website has been seeking to galvanize since 2001, the smokervoters. This figure is suspect and all over the place, too. Given the ceaseless condemnation of their recreational diversion, it's quite likely that some smokers decline to admit to partaking. Does the commonly cited figure of 46 million include cigar smokers, pipe smokers and hookah smokers? Nonetheless, for the purposes of this article we'll go ahead and use this figure. Based on the above-mentioned turnout calc of 55% that means that there's 25 million likely smokervoters. That is a figure that is easy to remember, so please, fellow smokervoters, try committing it to memory.


Of course, this figure doesn't square up with the purple-on-green caption directly under the trusty, ancient "I Smoke and I Vote" mascot (who is that guy anyway?) who's graced this page since it's inception. It boldly proclaims that 34 million people smoke and vote, so maybe it's high time we corrected it. Okay, when Google changes the look of their familiar landing page, we'll follow suit - until then, it stays. Incidentally, that number represented 55% of the quite possibly 60 million people who actually may smoke, that is if they were willing to admit it to Gallup or Rasmussen or Nielsen. And yes, the graphic is horrible and amateurish. Hey, it was the best we could do with good old PaintShop Pro and besides that, we can't afford PhotoShop because cigarette taxes have drained all of our disposable income. So there.

The other aspect that doesn't appear to square up at first glance is the sum of 200 million voters that we arrive at when you add all three up. There's bound to be some overlap in these clusters. Some smokers also drink soda pops. Some rotund folks might smoke. Hell, some rotund non-smokers might even prefer organic carrot juice over fizzy pops. You get the picture.

The point is this, we live in a democracy here. The general idea is that voters will tend to vote in their own self-interest and we'll end up with rule by the people in the process. A fly in the ointment develops when people decline to exercise their vote, because registering is a bit of a hassle. Or when people inexplicably vote against their own self-interest, as is the case every time anyone who smokes votes for a Democrat. Likewise, soda drinkers not thrilled with the prospect of forking out $16 for an icy twelve-pack might want to think twice before voting for the so-called Party of the Working Man. Anyone exceeding the rejiggered BMI standard might not want to help elect the party that rammed through ObamaCare, with its inevitable forced weight reduction regimens contained in the fine print.
All of this could add up to a nightmare for the Democrats come November. We can't get rid of this vindictive, reformed ex-smoker president and his health-hectoring wife until 2012, but the House of Representatives is definitely in play and he'll be powerless if he loses the congress. As an added bonus, if we three potentially mighty voting blocs register and turnout in unusually high numbers, our power will be magnified by the typical low turnout of those other voters who tend to sit out the mid-terms.

Do stop at the foldout table in front of the supermarket and register, do call your polling place and ask them when is the least crowded time to vote, and do vote in your own self-interest. Let's get rid of this awful Nanny State.

Pass it on. Share this page with a friend.

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Turner Classics: Smoking and Escaping the New Normal

These are not the best of times. Economists are referring to the term "the new normal" and tossing around time frames like decades instead of years while discussing our present financial predicament. It's enough to make you want to just set the channel to Turner Classics and transport yourself back to the good old days for the entire weekend. Luxuriate, if you will, in the perfect camera angles, the thoughtful set decoration, and characters who cooperate and interact with one another sans the default self-importance of today. As an added bonus to anyone who has had it up to here with sterile Healthism, everyone smokes in the old movies. Almost all of the conversation between the players starts with someone offering up and then lighting a cigarette.

Smoking was and still is a great conversation starter. There's just something about the cryptic, relaxing yet stimulating, qualities of nicotine that gets people to crawl out of their little personal spaces and talk to one another. If any of the prosaic, study-crazy university sociological departments chose to do so, it's probable that they would find a direct correlation between the decline in personal relationships and cultural smoking acceptance.

Getting wrapped up in a weekend full of Turner Classics sure beats the pants off of ingesting the Saturday morning newsfeed from the all-but-dead mainstream media. The three major networks are on life support. They've got nothing to talk about anymore except the elemental subjects of food, shelter and clothing. They try in vain to spin a fresh angle on it, but it's a hopeless cause. It's pretty symbolic of how banal life has become when that's all there is to talk about.

We all know the drill by now. Eminently forgettable new host of the month comes on, oversmiling, and TelePrompts (much like our new Prez) her way through the upcoming interview on fatty foods. The exalted and likewise forgettable guest is a dietitian who, after a hurried along little onscreen factoid session, ends up telling us all to eat our vegetables. A dietitian is basically a person who needs to get a real job.

After a smattering of pharmaceutical commercials capped off with interminable hushed exit qualifiers, it's back to the inaction. The next installment will invariably highlight why it is all but impossible for you to sell your house, end of story. Having dispensed with food and shelter, it's on to the latest pair of shoes your kids are tugging at your sleeve to buy for them. Another trifecta of frippery is in the bag. It's a wonder the big three MSM networks still exist. NBC, the originators of "The More You Know" moral quickie segments, takes the cake as the worst. What does NBC stand for anyway, the Nanny Broadcasting Corporation?

Just in case food, shelter and clothing aren't thrilling enough for your mental stimulation, they might throw in a short bit about the latest trends in telephony - that game changing invention of Alexander Graham Bell, who died in 1922 ! These are truly exciting times we live in.

Don't despair, there's always those hula hoops in-the-making, Facebook and Twitter.

The antidote to all of this vacuity is to brew up a bon vivant cup of coffee especial, tear off the little gold cellophane leader on your cigarette pack, engage the flintwheel on your silver lighter (Bacall style) and relax behind a Turner Classic movie.

While this may not be the healthiest nor the safest way to spend your weekend, at least you won't die of boredom.

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CAN'T GET IT OUTTA' MY HEAD

Why are some people so obsessive about smoking? If you don't smoke, bully bully for you, as the famous crooning smoker Frank Sinatra once sang. Now go away, and get your nose out of my damn business. Really, even people who don't smoke have a natural born aversion to nosy, preachy jackasses. There was mention recently of a novel computer program that is supposed to help smokers quit by distracting them and tying up use of their hands for five minutes, just long enough for them to forego enjoying a smoke. The inventors of this program not only will meet with utter failure, but they've wasted a great deal of their time. What kind of sick obsession drives this kind of action?

Do these nutters have a life other than worrying into the wee hours of the night about whether somebody, somewhere on this big, blue planet is smoking a cigarette or toking up a cigar or tamping down a pipe load of Cherry Blend. It's hard to believe that they're motivated by their overwhelming love of humanity and their desire to save each and every life they can. Nobody is really that selfless.

As we've noted in several previous articles, OCD plays a big role in their psychosis. When they're not dwelling on your smoking, they're busy counting how many times they passed through a doorway, or checking their watch for the time every 15 seconds. OCD seems to have become almost epidemic, probably as a result of our increasingly perfectionistic culture. You don't hear the old saying "Nobody's perfect" much anymore. It's as if we've become convinced that you can strike out 27 batters in a row at every outing to the pitchers mound.

A good many of these creeps are simply your everyday control freaks. If you've ever had the misfortune of spending any time around a control freak you know that they're a despicable lot. Most people avoid them like the plague and they generally have no friends at all. Certain weak or sheepish individuals get stuck dealing with these commanding bullheads at length, but anyone with any dignity or strength usually ends up locking horns and then dispatching them either violently or verbally.

Others who can't seem to shake the thought of anyone smoking are of the anecdotal variety. They've lost a family member to lung cancer or maybe a popular kid in junior high once blew smoke in their face and they never got over it. Get over it is exactly what a stewing retentive needs to do to move on with life. They can jump up and down and tear their hair out by the roots, but a fair amount of the world's inhabitants will keep right on smoking regardless of anything they say or do.

And finally a substantial portion of these grouchy trolls are simply haters with a free pass to do so because in the mass hysteria spinning around tobacco usage, the crowd has overlooked the obvious. Pay close attention to some of the vicious things that come out of their mouths, substitute other words for smoker, and it all becomes clear. If it weren't smokers they were going after it would be someone else - like fat people, or ... you?

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Michelle Obama and the Nanny Broadcasting Corporation are joining forces to Save You from Yourselves.

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Generalissimo Practitioner

A Primer on Healthism

There's a new 'ism' on the block. As a general rule 'ism's' aren't good things. Think Communism, Marxism, Fascism, Totalitarianism and think aneurysm. We are speaking here of Healthism, that repulsive ideological bent that brings the word obesity to our attention every ten seconds or so these days. Every internet portal, every newscast, every talk show host leads with some story on what to eat and what not to eat in more detail than any of us care to delve into anymore. It's what drives the hand-wringing and needless death paranoia that defines daily life in the 21st century. Obesity, smoking and the deadly effervescent danger of soft drinks are all the rage in our cowering, nail-biting civilization, while monumental increases in life expectancy achieved during the past century are all but ignored. These are all examples of what Healthism brings to the game.

Healthism sounds like a good thing on the surface of things. What could be wrong with any movement that takes it name from that warm fuzzy, rosy-cheeked word health? After all, good physical health would seem to be in everyone's best interest. And is it not true that a healthy nation is a wealthy and wise nation, just like Ben Franklin said? Well, it's not such a great thing if you go back a few generations in history and find that Healthism has a creepy uncle related to a former health fad that was known as eugenics.
As you might expect, there are the usual assortment of heroes and villains. Like the united workers of the world and the vile capitalist pigs of Marxism, Healthism has its pink-lunged BMI compliant physically fit and its rotund fast food gorgers who smoke like chimneys and glug down countless Pepsi colas. These movements always have their enforcement squads and in this case it's a combination of doctors and scientists and public health agencies warding over the lifestyle choices considered unhealthy or even un-American in the new perverted scheme of things. The health police are on the prowl, checking ID's and setting up roadblocks. We recycled our old NYHP (New York Health Police) officer graphic from a prior article down the page featuring police chief Thomas Frieden and painted a little Hitler mustache on him to illustrate. Why the upper lip embellishment, you ask? Are we finally playing the Hitler card here?

Aside from a brief mention of the Austrian madman in connection with yet another great article down the page (you really ought to scroll down and read all the stuff we write, there are some great gems to be found here) we've purposely laid off the Nazi imagery because it seems a bit extreme to compare modern day health crusaders to anything the Third Reich came up with. Pointing out similarities to Hitler's manic aversion to smoking is just too easy. But in truth, Healthism does share a common thread with a nutty, old pseudoscience known as eugenics that took hold and gained real traction in sync with the emergence of the Third Reich in Germany. Uncle Adolph was a big fan of eugenics and it is said that he and Weimar Germany elevated it to new heights from relative obscurity by trumpeting its virtue and attracting money to the cause.

Adolph Hitler, as a vegetarian, a non-drinker and a non-smoker would have sat atop the pyramid of modern Healthism. It's clear he would have wholeheartedly adopted its premises and incorporated it into his master plan. If today's doctors, scientists and public health officials are comfortable in his posthumous company, maybe it's time for them to stand back and take a long look in the mirror. Public health agencies, bored with their ordinary role of controlling outbreaks of communicable disease and improving sanitation, are finding the aphrodisiac of mass political power overpowering. Swabbing floors at the clinics can't compare with the power rush of telling people how they must conduct their daily lives. A growing number of doctors are stepping up to the public soapbox to hector the masses on their life-shortening wicked ways.

Der Fuhrer vehemently hated smoking, as did the mad scientists and doctors who flocked to his side from the very get-go of Nazi craziness. He actually wanted to ban smoking within his war machine, but his military brass feared a mass mutiny if it were implemented. Not long ago, our Pentagon commissioned and then wisely shelved a similar Healthist-inspired proposal. Smoking on submarines is on the way out and Adolph surely applauds from his ashy, fiery grave.

Healthism, with its stress on wellness as a patriotic duty and a chauvinistic goal of culling the nation of derelict smokers and over-eaters, follows in the wayward footsteps of its eugenics forerunner. Eugenics received a big jump start via grants from big name corporate clients like Rockefeller and Carnegie and the then rising star Hitler's blessing. Derived of the massive MSA tobacco settlement and the sanctifying power push of a US president by the name of Bill Clinton, stacks of fresh working capital are building up in the vaults at the Bank of Healthism. Like eugenics before it, big money and big name politicians have made Healthism the monstrous battering ram we see today.

It's arrggh matey time for rapacious gentleman pirate crews of buccaneer doctors and scientists as they comb through rich treasure chests of sin tax booty commandeered from the defenseless subjects of their phony health claims. With every pack of cigarettes you buy, you're tossing a few doubloons their way as ransom. In actuality, it's more than you're paying the tobacco producers. And now soda taxes are right around the corner.

Healthism has proved to be a bonanza for the ivory tower elite. So-called bastions of infallible wisdom like Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton universities are jumping into the Healthist/behavioral eugenics craze with both feet, presenting their first class tickets to ride to the conductors of the Healthist Express. Also along for the ride are various public health agencies producing corny, catchy PSA's they think are getting through to the stragglers whose resistance they assume will ultimately prove futile. If you take for granted that any message containing Brought to you by the Department of Public Health at its baseline has automatic credibility you might find this of interest:

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

Healthism creates layered hierarchies of varying citizen scorecard values to the state, ordered by activities such as eating and drinking and smoking. All of these are legal activities as of this writing; let us hope that eating never becomes illegal or we've crossed a line into utter social insanity. Currently diet and tobacco consumption seem to top the frantic fixations of Healthist enumerators in determining a fitness quotient to be assigned, but other dangerous threats to the national wellness register may lie just beyond the horizon. We humans do a lot of different things and consume a lot of different things, so the sky is the limit for Healthism's ominous reach. This isn't tinfoil hat conjecturing, although we almost wish it were. Check this out from the Healthist hall-of-famer Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. Der Head Healthist President Obama seems to have a real affinity for RWJF alumni by the way. From a rwjfblogs.typepad.com section titled Pioneering Ideas:

At RWJF, we've had a hand in one of the first major apps - the County Heath Rankings - which plots community health characteristics - for every county in America. Go to the site and you can find both health outcome data, like premature death, and the social, behavioral and environmental factors that lead to those outcomes, like obesity, unemployment and air pollution. And you can see how each county ranks on any of those factors compared to other counties in your state. And the County Health Rankings data has even spawned an irreverent take on the data - the County Sin Rankings - winner of the Sunlight Labs Design for America contest for visualizing health data.

Here's a snapshot of the County Sin Ranking for Alaska's nanny town of Anchorage. They twice voted in a bar/ restaurant and bingo parlor smoking ban, apparently in an effort to improve their standing, with RWJF overlords, on the Healthist Leaders List.



Under Healthism the body shifts from being ones own temple to a state-owned physical asset balance sheet entry, to be controlled and maximized for the highest return to the shareholders of record - ObamaCare Inc, the pharmaceutical companies and University Inc. Personal autonomy over the quality versus quantity decisions of ones lifespan are delegated to secondary status under this political ideology. It matters little to your new Healthist overlords whether you happen to enjoy smoking or love the taste of Dr. Pepper or enjoy munching down on Big Mac's (supersize those fries, will ya'). It's all about stretching your life out as long as possible and keeping the drug companies fat and sassy. You can buckle down to the Healthists and live a dull boring life eating sprout sandwiches or you can pay through the nose in lifestyle penalties. The effect on the average citizen is roughly the same; that is, someone other than the sovereign owner of the temple calls the tune.

Just who is in possession of the key to the front door of your corporeal temple is what is at stake here, folks. Will it be you, or will it be your big, all-knowing, all-seeing, government in Washington DC (or the incumbent brainiacs enthroned at your state capitol) that holds admittance ?

Eugenics was a trendy false science that viewed the racial superiority of certain peoples as sacrosanct. In the crazy world of eugenics only the genetically strong (the wellborn) would breed; the weak the unfit, and the infirm would then be selectively culled from the gene pool and the nation. Healthism views certain superior behavioral qualities and wellness as sacrosanct, as the racial and genetic aspects of eugenics would run afoul of modern sensibilities. There's not much difference between the words wellborn and wellness. The non-smoking, alcohol and soft drink abstaining citizen with a low daily caloric intake ranks at the apex of The Worthy pyramid. The remainder of sinful, rugged individualist rebels and derelicts populate the base.

Healthism and eugenics are two different things. As rotten as it is, Healthism isn't calling for mass sterilizations just yet. There's dissenting end games at work with these two ism's. Eugenics seeks a smaller assemblage of superhumans for the planet. Healthism just wants more people living longer and longer and longer. It doesn't seem to have a good answer for how to finance the inverted pyramid it creates in the process. The question is: what happens when the people want to choose 'none of the above' with both of these losing propositions?

Most contemporary people using 20/20 hindsight, make the assumption that if they'd been there at the end of the Weimar Republic, they would have been among the few that resisted the urge to hop aboard the nascent Nazi bandwagon. They don't draw any parallel between going along with smoking bans, national wellness campaigns or buying into Healthist sloganeering. That was then, now is now, and never the twain shall meet. War, a failing economy, and a sudden decline in global influence led to the German reaction and none of those are applicable to the present situation. Right? And out of fashion eugenics, give me a break. Weeding out the obese, the smokers and getting rid of soft drinks has got nothing to do with it. It's just a function of bending the cost curve down for National Healthcare and nothing more. This is just knuckle-dragging Tea Party rhetoric. Just look who controls the legislative and executive branch. Exactly.

Doctors need to get back to healing the sick one patient at a time. They should also consider stepping down from their public soapboxes. They could use some self-examination of their new roles lest they wind of like latter day Mengele's. Scientists and educators as well could use some introspection regarding their participation in advancing Healthism.

When Barack Obama and the Democrats won the 2008 election, the passage of their National Healthcare proposal became Job #1 with the White House transition team. Several key members (William Corr and Nancy-Ann DeParle) of this team sported RWJF ties. They engineered a Cabinet structure designed to add impetus to the Healthist Blitzkrieg.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says President Obama expects all cabinet departments to leverage their resources in support of public health, a move she suggested is unprecedented. "One of the things that has happened in this administration, which I would suggest has not really happened in the past, is that the president has made it very clear to all of us at the cabinet level that while health may be directly in the portfolio of Health and Human Services, he expects all of the cabinet officers to spend some time figuring out ways that we can leverage their assets and work on this issue," said Sebelius in an April 8 speech on Capitol Hill. "Having this multi-agency focus on these [health] initiatives I think is an enormously important way to not only leverage our assets, but actually to look at the whole community strategy, which I think is so very important," she added.

You might want to go ahead, do a little searching and read this article on Kathleen Sebelius and decide for yourself where the current administration stands on the Healthist Manifesto sweeping the nation.

Whether Healthism survives or takes its rightful place in history alongside another discredited 'ism' that starts with a C (or an N, or an F) is up to you. One of the two major parties seeking your vote this November has lined up squarely behind this modern quasi-eugenic movement and the other voted 100% against ObamaCare.

If two-thirds of this nation's smokervoters turn out this November, and two-thirds of these vote for the party that has protected their vital interests over the past two decades, the net size of such a voting bloc would amount to 10.3 million. That is enough to have overturned the outcome of the last election. Think about it.

If you want to explore California's connection to eugenics and Hitler: http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/www.sfgate.com/

Want to check out Wikipedia's description of Healthism? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthism

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In an effort to demonstrate how timely and relevant we are here at smokervoter.com, we're placing a prior article on Elena Kagan back at the top of the heap for you to read.

If you happen to be following her confirmation hearings on the idiot box, please take note of her syrupy, self-congratulatory testimony detailing her lifelong dedication to the downtrodden and demonized of the world. You might take exception to this if you happen to smoke.

As has become de rigueur policy from the Democratic Party, she makes a great big, glaring exception from her otherwise beneficent beliefs when it comes to smokers. We won't spoil the gist of the article for you, but suffice it to say that as a smokervoter, you can thank her for diminishing your disposable income and for making your life more miserable.

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McCarthyism on the Left

President Obama has nominated Elena Kagan to fill the vacancy of John Paul Stevens and there's a whispering campaign quietly developing that she is....

a "known" ex-smoker (as a teenager) and current (?) occasional cigar aficionado

For heaven sake, that alone should be enough to torpedo this nomination in light of the universally accepted stipulation that anyone who smokes or has ever smoked is unqualified to do anything, including holding a job, renting a place or even existing in 21st century America. She is definitely on the "list" of people who have smoked for any suspicious Senate interrogator to dangle in front of the cameras during the upcoming confirmation hearings. How she'll survive this past cigarette smoking acknowledgment is anyone's guess.

Check out this little tidbit: "Liberals won't find much to object about, although the far left may think she isn't sufficiently prone to throwing firebombs. Her past as a smoker and her tendency to smoke a cigar now and then may put them off, liberals being who they are."

Evidently in their all-consuming hatred for human beings who smoke, the far Left just can't get past this overwhelming hurdle. They run out of compassion completely when the subject shifts to smoking. No doubt they wish Obama could have found someone as liberal as Kagan, but without this "forbidden foible". They will likely somehow manage to hold their smug, little noses and vote her up though.

There's a odd new twist on bygone cold war McCarthyism that's emerged from the antismoking movement's War on Tobacco. On this go around the perps are by and large of the L-word variety. The Democratic party has lined up solidly behind a take-no-prisoners approach in dealing with smokers. Tail Gunner Joe has been replaced with short and snappy Henry Waxman, grilling tobacco executives and threatening all manner of sanctions and restrictions on tobacco usage if they don't get with the program. The frothing indignation is there, the unassailable fact finding construct is there, and the adamantly unforgiving fight-back-at-your-own-peril tone is there.

Some smokervoters might feel encouraged by the fact the Ms Kagan has actually partaken of the sublime leaf. As such it's possible she won't approach her decisions with the mindset of a purist, never-smoker who finds even the thought of baccy smoke totally disgusting and therefore not worthy of any judicial temperance. As a former practitioner, she knows it doesn't really stink, hell she even reportedly likes the cigars, which represent the most odorous of tobacco delivery systems.

Alas, before entertaining any optimistic thoughts along these lines here's the big spoiler. She worked under the grand initiator and chief architect of the war on tobacco, Bill Clinton. She argued vociferously in favor of their whacky cigarettes-as-a-prescription drug idea. She was an instrumental player in the Master Settlement Agreement, which smokers indirectly paid for via an overnight doubling in the price of a pack of cigarettes.

One thing that's rarely mentioned but should be is Bill Clinton's awareness of the pass through effect the MSA was sure to cause. He's commonly described as possessing a high-ceilinged mind. He had Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin as economic advisers. There's just no way that Clinton didn't foresee that the huge MSA payouts would eventually be borne out entirely upon the backs of the nations smokers. Publicly he played out the punish Big Tobacco ruse, but privately he knew different. A general tax hike, affecting all taxpayers, would have cost him the newly (as per Hillary) smoke-free White House. Selectively sticking it to a handy minority cluster of smokers made much more horse sense.

This also marked a departure from the longstanding Democratic party platform of defending minority group rights. Not only were they no longer standing up for them, they were now singling them out for special fiscal and social maltreatment. In fact, the stacks of MSA cash that flowed into tobacco research think tanks in turn fed a growing cadre of singleminded (and generally left-leaning) opinion shapers who took to smokers with a zeal that matched the post-WWII McCarthy commie-chasers in both substance and style.

In the course of this furious smear campaign upon sitting ducks, smoking gradually went from an everyday pleasure and pastime to an un-American activity silently ruining the country from within. Hard working and patriotic tobacco farmers, simply carrying on the traditional cultivation of a crop that saved our nation at it's inception, were now portrayed as subversives. Like heavy-smoking Edward R. Murrow (he smoked way too much), we smokers know differently; it is they, the Dem-Nannies, who are dragging the American way down into the pigsty of credulous groupthink and political correctness. Until they're shown the exit by wised up voters, the great Smoking Scare will continue running amok.

If any smoker's rights issues, such as fair housing or employee rules, happen to wend their way to the high court in the future, don't count on Ms Kagan to lend a sympathetic ear to the proceedings. She's an ex-smoker and a hardcore Democrat first which translates, in the final wash, to the Joseph McCarthy school of thought and approach to the subject. To the mindset of the Left, smokers are the new Communists, threatening the national security and well-being of the country with their nasty habit of smoking Marlboro Reds.

It's not hard to imagine a staunchly anti-tobacconist hard-left Senator, like Barbara Boxer (D)-CA, reciting this: "Ms Kagan, are you now or have you ever been a smoker?".

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Quit Driving Your Car

Commodity Hatred

People love to vent their pent up hostilities. The world is full of annoyances that get under everyones collar and sooner or later it's got to explode, and explode it does, in those deplorable human traits of anger and hatred. There was a time when you could simply hate someone because of the color of their skin or the church they attended or even just their chromosome count, but those days are long gone. So what's there left to hate on? How about some commodities?

Commodities are just things. Things that grow or things that simply exist. They don't worship different gods and they don't wear skirts or leave the seat up on the toilet. Here's a short list of commodities that, we can all agree on, are ripe for venting on. Tobacco, corn, pork bellies and oil.

Let's all get worked up over tobacco - a little bit of dried leaf in a paper tube. Let's storm the headquarters of the company that dares to mix corn syrup with carbonated water, adds some flavoring and then has the audacity to sell it to John Q. Public. And how dare those clown-suited crooks cook up a patty of ground beef, slather it with ketchup and mayonnaise, and park it between two rounded pieces of bread.

Now we've got a new commodity to get riled up into a lather about - Oil. Horrible, smelly, gooey, oil. It's officially hate oil month now and don't forget to get furious with British Petroleum while you're at it. You despise that oil don't you? Of course, before the drilling rig exploded out in the Gulf, you probably welcomed the fact that BP was bringing new supply onto the market, thereby lowering the cost to fill up that car that you love so much. Admit it, you love your car. It develops a personality all its own. You wash it, you pamper it with oil changes right on schedule. It gets you to work on time. It delivers you to home-sweet-home at the end of the day. Sometimes you'd swear the front grille is actually smiling at you.

Although you probably consider yourself to be an upstanding, responsible citizen who cares about clean air and clean water, and you do your level best to live green - you temporarily put these admirable intentions on hold as you putter around the highways and byways spewing carbon monoxide in your wake.

You turn on the boob tube and there's Michelle Obama decrying the fact that childhood obesity is now reaching epidemic levels and something must be done, lest a whole generation of young people face an early demise. And you turn to your spouse and crack a little joke about how easy it is to lose weight - just stop putting so much food in your mouth. You back your local school board to the hilt when it decides to pull the Coke machines at your precious one's school. You've bought into the secondhand smoke myth and even the third hand one and you've got a simple, curt message for anyone who still doesn't get with the program - just quit smoking and do it now, do it today - because you said so.

Okay - no problem - no sooner said than done - as long as you say so - Mr. and Mrs. Perfect. Now might we ask just one favor of you in return, one that's got everything to do with the waddling lubricated pelicans in Louisiana. Would you please just stop driving your car? Hey, it's just as effortless as quitting smoking and eating less. Buy a bicycle or walk to work or invest in a horse if you've got to, but stop it with the oil. Join up with those of us who totally hate that evil slippery commodity, and BP and the harm done to the children emanating from that nasty secondhand CO trailing cloud of yours. Quit driving your car. Please. Do it for the children.

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Rand Paul wins in Kentucky Republican primary for Jim Bunning's Senate Seat.

With considerable Tea Party support Rand Paul, the son of Ron Paul, the noted libertarian leaning Republican congressman from Texas, just waxed his opponent in Kentucky. Way to go Kentucky. They grow great tobacco in Kentucky.

This fine southern state is known for bourbon and whiskey distilling, tobacco, horse racing, and college basketball. Let's see now, that's drinking, smoking and betting, hardly what you might call a Puritan's paradise. Sounds like our kind of place. It is the second largest tobacco producing state, second only to North Carolina.

Kentucky voters are a hard lot to figure out. They register Democrat but frequently vote in Republicans. Both of their current Senators are Republican. They also had a steady track record of picking the eventual presidential winners in every election between 1964 and 2004. When they went 57-41 for McCain in 2008, the streak came to an end.

The mainstream insta-pundits were downplaying the strength of the Tea Party movement not that long ago. They estimated the new alignment to comprise about 18% of the electorate, enough to register on the radar screen but, not enough to really effect things one way or the other. Wisecracking Democrat pols added their usual ad hominem criticisms to the mix and anyone who banks on MSM conclusions probably completely wrote them off.

You never hear much from the Tea Party movement about the war on tobacco. Their main focus is smaller government, fiscal responsibility and personal freedom, but not so much about what's been going on with smokers for the past twenty years. That's understandable, as four out of five people no longer smoke. They should take into account the fact that the loss of freedom can be contagious. It seems likely that a goodly number of Tea Partiers would be a trifle perturbed with suddenly finding their soda pops doubled in price due to a new tax.

Since we're about 30 million irate voters in search of the perfect party to connect with, how about some Tea and Cigarettes? That's kind of like the British version of coffee and cigarettes, which is truly one of life's most gratifying combinations. It just so happens that there's a British blog on Frank Davis's sidebar of links by the name of Tea and Cigarettes.

The blogs author, Pat Nurse, is a freelance writer and her user profile contains this tidbit "I rant about the nanny state, the smoking ban, and the constant assault on our lifestyle habits by powerful lobby groups. Their "concerns" are eroding personal freedom further at a time when civil liberties are already under grave threat." This sounds promising and it's becoming an increasingly familiar theme, too. Go check out her blog and take note of the fact that she weighs in on the UKIP party and the smoking bans in Britain. The more we learn about the UKIP the better they sound. Maybe we need a UKIP here, then again maybe we've got one already. Rand Paul would fit into the UKIP pretty well.

The two Republican stalwarts taking different sides of this primary were Sarah Palin and Mitch McConnell both of whom we like, so we'll just stay out of that aspect. We want to win, that is all, we want to win. We're not seeking second place here folks, we want the Nanny State to come tumbling down. It's looking more doable all the time.

Rand Paul is former Libertarian presidential candidate and currently Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul's son. He overwhelmed his opponent, Trey Grayson, garnering an almost mandate-level 60% share of the vote. Now it's on to November and hopefully a victory over his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway. There's an article on the harshly antismoking web site Stop Smoking Way that fawns all over Conway, so it's pretty clear where he is coming from. But, what else would you expect from a Democrat in the first place. It is abundantly clear that as an institution they are the American smokers sworn enemy, so we won't belabor that point any further for the purposes of this article. There'll be a link to the article at the conclusion of this piece.

While you might think of Sarah Palin as a natural born libertarian, and we'll admit it appears that's what she really is deep down inside, parts of her home state of Alaska have exhibited some disturbing freedom-stifling personality traits. Anchorage is a nanny town. This comes as a complete surprise, as you might think of Alaska as being one of the freer states of the republic. They voted in a bar smoking ban there and later on, after a young libertarian fellow gave a shot at repealing it, they voted to keep it intact. Then again Anchorage is urban Alaska and urbanites have a pronounced nanny tendency. New York, Los Angeles and Seattle are all puritan paradises full of uptight people and annoying rules and regulations. Rather than go into any great detail here, we'll opt for including a link at the conclusion of this article which fleshes this out more in greater detail.

In general though, the Tea Party is a good thing for the body politic of this country. Its major themes of smaller government, lower taxes and an end to creeping government intrusion certainly dovetail with the tripartite stand this web site stands for: the mitigation of smoker bashing, no soda taxes, and an end to the contemptuous new obesity crusade.

Like it or not, America operates on a two-party system and you've got to choose between one or the other of the main parties if you want your vote to impact anything. The generally accepted faces of the Republican party at this juncture are Rush Limbaugh and John Boehner. Rush likes cigars and has had our backs for a long, long time with his super-popular radio show. He pounced on the hypocrisy and big lies of the tobacco temperance crowd as far back as the 1998 MSA strong-arming by Clinton et al. John Boehner himself smokes and makes no bones, nor apologies, about it. He would be the natural choice of the frustrated American smokervoter. As of this writing he's made no moves toward running for president in 2012, but that could change.

On the other hand the Democrats have produced Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Henry Waxman, Al Gore and our current reformed antismoking President Obama as the dour faces of their party. Gore's global warming farce is like the antismoking crusade carried to its outer limits; he wants the planet itself, as an entity, to cease smoking. Fat chance of that, Al, unless you want to ban and overturn the laws of mechanical motion and physics somehow.

Since it is obvious we as smokers are better served hitched up with the Republican party, it is now incumbent upon us to hold its feet to the fire and insist upon it incorporating some libertarian values into its basic platform. Luckily, Republicans are genetically predisposed to the idea of transcendent freedom for the individual on the whole, whereas Democrats find it repugnant to their ultra-statist stance.

And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like....

As a media manipulation greenhorn, Rand Paul really tripped out of the starting blocks during a ill thought out interview with Rachel Maddox. Maddox is a snide, smug lefty tv journalist. She's the comedian who tells a joke to a packed house and gets maybe three loud boisterous laughs while the rest of the room sits in silence wondering what the joke was. His response to a 'gotcha' setup question regarding the 1964 Civil Rights Act was disappointing to say the very least. He later explained that he would have voted for it, but the damage had already set in and we truly hope he doesn't really have a problem with it. As all smokers are well aware of, discrimination and segregation is a painful and unjust experience.

Smokers come in all colors, all religions and all genders. If anything the trending new discrimination foisted upon them from the likes of the Maddox crowd has united, for the first time in recent memory, these various parts of the whole. It is a legal activity, rather than any of the three aforementioned factors, that is the focus of this iniquity. The bar owner has lost to right to choose whether or not smoking is to be allowed on the premises in her or his establishment. It is precisely this kind of overstepping by the government that has created movements like the Tea Party.

A sign at the tavern entrance informing non-smokers that they could easily avoid exposure to tobacco smoke by not entering would have been a simple enough solution. The power of the marketplace might have spawned bars that chose to operate a smoke-free atmosphere in order to attract this customer base. No one in their right mind would suggest that excluding anyone based on ethnicity has any place in this debate. We're talking an activity here - a legal activity.

Even in-between solutions, such as ventilation measures which could have satisfied both camps are precluded by the current crop of laws regulating bars. The secondhand smoke fallacy is used to justify these blanket bans, but the main attraction of a bar, alcohol, yet another activity, is incongruously given a pass. The oxymoron of an alcohol-free bar is rather obvious to everyone. Everyone, that is except for those who have an implacable trust in the government's wisdom to step in and supplant private choice in all matters. Design by committee from upon high takes ultimate precedence in their riskless, safe universe.

The brilliant professor Walter E. Williams, filling in for Rush Limbaugh, weighed in on Paul's media blunder and clarified in greater detail what was really said and what was disseminated for easy and quick digestion by MSNBC, an affiliate of those fine folks who bring you the nauseating "The More You Know" PSA's. See our little Brian Williams graphic from the Nancy-Ann DeParle article further down the page to see what we think of this worthless NBC product of the times. It goes way beyond stupidity. Dr. Williams warned listeners that tyranny knows no bounds. He spoke of the current Obama wave towards controlling salt content and it's similarity to the mission creep of the antitobacco drive.

Dr. Williams is an economics professor at George Mason University and a self-described "Madisonian liberal". He brilliantly and adamantly expounds the moral superiority of liberty and it's counterpart in limited government. He speaks emphatically of the medical community's newfound disposition towards forcing their advice upon those who don't want it. If you happen to count yourself among the crusaders for this healthist movement, you don't want to debate Dr. Williams, you will be devastated by his crystal clear, and totally sound logic.

As a matter of fact, a dream ticket for freedom-loving voters in 2012 might consist of either Ron Paul/Walter Williams or Williams/Boehner. Although Williams initially stated that he wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of running for president in 2008, he ultimately decided against such a run, and endorsed Ron Paul.

Although hypotheticals are generally worth the air they're floated on, the outcome of election 2008 would certainly have been interesting affair had Ron Paul and Walter Williams replaced the McCain/Palin ticket. Two groups of voters that turned out heavily for Obama could have swung quite differently with these two in the chase.

At this point in time, Rand Paul is ahead of Conway in the polls. Let's hope this trend holds up come November. Despite these two early gaffes, he's got the right idea and we surely hope he defeats Conway. If you smoke or like Pepsi's or love to eat nice, juicy hamburgers to your hearts content, register to vote and show up in November.

When Rand Paul takes his seat in the Senate, the cause of liberty and personal choice will have gained a clear new voice in a chamber that was hijacked by a pack of sanctimonious, hard-necked Salem witchhunters in the election of 2008.

In typical smokervoter fashion, now that you've read our words of profundity without the vexing interruption of link clicking interludes to distract and waylay your train of thought, here are the pledged links.

Here's Stop Smoking Way fawning over Rand Paul's opponent, Jack Conrad: http://www.stopsmokingway.com/kentucky-works-to-stop-teen-smoking.htm

Here's the "Tea and Cigarettes" blog: http://patnurseblog.blogspot.com

Here's why Anchorage, Alaska isn't very Libertarian, nor much fun if you like to smoke: http://www.smokersclubinc.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4244

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Our Dumb Yankee Post Election Analysis

Handicapping the 2010 British Election

The polls closed at 10 PM on Thursday and the UK Election of 2010 went into the history books. The result was a hung parliament, which to our hayseed Yankee mentality means "huh?" what's that mean? If you thought our Electoral College system was perplexing, try solving the jigsaw puzzle of coalition rule if you fancy being dazed and confused. There's plenty of intrigue and power drama at play right now in sorting out the grand question of just who won. We haven't had an exciting election, save for the Gore-Bush deadlock debacle, since Ross Perot shook things up twenty years ago. From the perspective of the American smokervoter, we'd be a lot better off here if the Republicans and Democrats were consigned to fighting over the scraps left over from a Libertarian party majority showing.

As you might have noticed over the past year, we have become big time fans of two particular British pro-smoking bloggers. They're Frank Davis with his "Banging on about the Smoking Ban" and the venerable Leg-Iron with his "Underdogs Bite Upwards" contribution. Truthfully, despite the fact that we emanate from the USA, these two overseas blogs have become our first stops on the daily online routine of checking out what's shaking with the politics of smoking, personal freedom and our never ending battle with the insidious Nanny State.

Following these two blogs has served as a wake up call to the fact that the persistent tobacco temperance crusade, like rust, never sleeps and is now a worldwide corrosive curse. What happens in England or Scotland effects us here and vice-versa. We're all in this battle together now, the health nags and the food police nannies have seen to this; we thank them for their galvanizing chest shoves. We'll all eventually rid ourselves of the Righteous, as self-preservation is a powerful human force and we're certain it's what will eventually drive us to win out in the end. Smokers, the BMI violators, and the free-willed of the world will coagulate into the majority. From what we take away from what just took place in the UK elections, it wasn't a good day for smokervoters. We had high hopes.

As is the usual drill around here, we'll put links up to both of these great blogs at the end of this article so that you can read their eminently more learned and informed distillations on what really took place. In the meantime, here is our 5,000 mile distant and completely amateur poli-sci 'reflection on the election'.

We were rather naively hoping that there would be a huge groundswell of support and votes for a party known as the UKIP. UKIP stands for the United Kingdom Independence Party. According to wikipedia (which is not the end all and be all it's sometimes cracked up to be) they're a Conservative and Populist party. What's not to like about that? It certainly worked for Ronald Reagan. They want to keep Great Britain out of the European Union and national sovereignty is paramount to their basic platform. Again, what's not to like about that? But above all, they're apparently the sole political party with the intestinal fortitude to actually reach out and touch the newly untouchable smokers of the UK. They're open to allowing pubs the right to decide whether to allow smoking on the premises and for this we salute them. In the new reality of Nicotine Nazism that's got the body politic of the world goose-stepping to the diktats of the antismoking SS, that takes a lot of guts.

Under our best case scenario, the emerging DIY network (we'll link to it) that Frank Davis articulately described in one of his earliest posts was going to succeed in getting at least 60% of what we calculate as roughly 9,500,000 likely UK smokervoters to vote UKIP. Our amateur poli-sci election arithmetic went thusly: Based on the last couple of elections, turnout is about 63% there, which is way better than our 55% average. There are about 15 million smokers in the UK, therefor: 63% of 15 million is how we arrive at 9.5 million. If 60% of those (which is the unofficial definition of a mandate) had voted UKIP they would have garnered 5,700,000 votes. When you take into consideration that the "victorious" Conservatives ended up with 10.7 million, that's no small potatoes. It seems to us that this would have put them squarely in the king maker seat. But alas, that's not what happened. Their vote total did increase by 50%, but all told they got around 1 million votes. It sounds like life for the smokers of the UK will continue to be pretty dreadful. Pubs will continue to close. The antismokers will continue the Big Lie and score scoundrelly victories against personal freedom. The Nanny's win another round - for now.

We'll admit it; we got caught up in our own little 'preaching to the choir' syndrome. It's easy to do when you start clicking on the links of their blog rolls and read all of the clever and illuminating comments therein. They're inspiring and invigorating and intoxicating and you can easily forget that there is still a lot of sheeple and Righteous out there to contend with, and a lot of them vote.

To further complicate things, when we searched to find out just how many votes they got (which was like pulling teeth - epic fail for all of the search engines out there) we came across lots of Tory comments that blamed the UKIP for denying them a majority. This sounded a little bit like some Democrat's contention that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election. (We, by the way, encourage die hard Progressives who smoke to vote for Ralph Nader. Anything to thwart the Democrats, anything. They are the sworn enemy of the American smokervoter). We however tend to side with those who opined that if the Conservatives had made a deal with the UKIP to loosen up on smokers and pub rules and allow a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty ***, it would have given them the majority. We intend to advance this idea of 'libertarianizing' the Republicans right here in the good, old USA in the coming months. You've got to wonder what would have happened to the youth vote if the 2008 contest had pitted Obama versus former Libertarian Ron Paul as the Republican candidate instead of John McCain. In a hopeful sign for the future, he was very popular with college kids.

Here are some tidbits from Frank Davis and Leg Iron's day-after analysis and a few comments we'd like to respectfully throw in the mix.

Frank spoke of how the Conservatives watered down their platform to come across as more liberal in order to attract fence-leaners. Who really wants a progressive Republican (cough, cough - $1.50/Pack Tax John McCain) or a conservative Democrat anyway. With the Dem's you would end up with a party that bans smoking and fast food and soft drinks and abortion.

We especially liked his take on Progressives. What is progressive about closing pubs with phalangist smoking bans while driving people apart who used to be friends? To which we might add: What is progressive (i.e. forward-looking) in our country about seeking to return to the 1920's and Carrie Nation and Prohibition while repeating that disastrous social engineering experiment again? What is progressive about going back to the days when Segregation was the order of the day? Don't tell us for one second that excluding smokers from jobs and housing and beaches and et cetera, doesn't harken back to those bad old days.

Leg Iron spoke of the tenacious quandary of the traditional vote, e.g., the smokervoter here who votes Democrat because his father did and clings to the outdated notion that they're the party of the working man. This even after they raised the price on roll-you-own tobacco by 2,000% to pay for childrens health insurance for people making upwards of $80K/year with the S-CHIP tax hike.

He also raised the possibility that smokers might want to turn to the Libertarian party to throw the Righteous rascals out. We agree that in a perfect world the Libertarians would run things, (or un-run things, if you will) but unfortunately they've become perennial one per-centers in the minds of the electorate. He spoke of the perceived power with voters of brand name politics and that is precisely the problem with the Libertarians. People equate them with highly principled also-rans.

Might we suggest the formation, from scratch, of the Smoker's Party instead. The brand name would be less ambiguous than Libertarian, which contains that damnable Lib-word within, which can confuse and turn off some. Ah yes, the Smokers Party, it's goal and use to the voter would be right there in the title. It could attract like a magnet and energize angry smokers to stand up and be counted unequivocally. It might prove easier for a tradition-bound voter to abandon the Labour party (goal and use in the title) or the LibDems (again) for the Smokers Party. Just a thought.

In the event that no coalition can be cobbled together, there is the possibility of a second round of elections looming. Our glass half-full, optimistic Rosy Best Case Scenario Two for the beleaguered British smokervoter might look something like this: In a palm to the forehead moment, Conservative political strategists suddenly wake up to the realization that there is a swarm of 9.5 million angry bees out there looking for a new hive to migrate to. They might consider adding a dollop of honey to their pie recipe, borrowed from the UKIP, in order to put them over the top.

As crazy as a do-over election might seem at first blush, it would have been preferable to the hanging chads and judicial shenanigans that dragged on endlessly in our 2000 contest. Of course, if the result had been a Gore victory, in light of his subsequent great Global Warming Scam, maybe that wouldn't have been such a good idea.

Here it is, Leg Iron's Day-After Take on the Election: http://underdogsbiteupwards.blogspot.com/2010/05/race-that-nobody-won.html

And here is the Frank Davis reaction fresh of the presses titled Election Night Progressivism: http://frank-davis.livejournal.com/#post-frank_davis-72820

Frank's DIY Network Post: http://frank-davis.livejournal.com/33784.html

Anyway, that's our foolhardy, semi-literate first impression. If they happen to read this, both Frank and Leg Iron will probably have a good laugh at our inexpert synthesis, but we're slowly learning who's who and what's what and then anteing up our two cents to the pot. We're just smokervoter.com, plugging away at it since 2001 and still endeavoring against all odds to dismantle the Nanny State piece by piece. And while we've become completely fascinated with UK politics, we know we've got no business whatsoever sticking our nose into their internal affairs. That being said, we greatly admire their blogs and wish them and all of the good people of the UK continued success and a brighter future. When you can savor a luscious crystal glass of Scotch and smoke a blessed cigarette (on par with the first cigarette of the day with a cup of coffee here) in peace again at the local pub, our work will be done.

PS: While researching the UK Election results we were constantly delayed and stymied by this:

Would you computer science geniuses and Web 2.0 developers of the world please do something about this ! It is annoying beyond belief ! Damn the javascripts to hell !!!

Oh, and one last thing while we're saluting the UK...the Yardbirds are the greatest band that ever walked the face of the earth. Thank you for the Yardbirds and Jeff Beck, too.

*** Footnote from Lisbon Treaty reference - dragged up from below:
As a Senator, Obama joined nine U.S. Senate colleagues in calling on former President Bush to send to the Senate for ratification the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world's first public health treaty.

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Life's Still a Beach for Golden State Smokers

Governor Arnold Vetoes Hateful State Beach Smoking Ban in California.

Here's some late breaking news for Californians who smoke. Our Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just vetoed a bill forged by our left of North Korea state legislature that would have banned smoking at all state beaches in California. The Governator makes no secret of his love of a good cigar. He even once set up a tent outside of his office at the Capitol to smoke stogies.

He said the bill crossed the line on government intrusion in his veto message. Arnold did throw the enviro-hounds a bone when he lent some undeserved credence to the ridiculous cigarette butt shoreline damage argument as an aside, but we'll forgive him for that, politics is politics. The bills author, a Democrat (naturally) from a greasy, grimy seaport near Los Angeles, apparently found cigarette butts to be more harmful to marine life than the discharge from ships that ply the waters in her port city.

What an outrage this would have been to the smokers of the Golden State, who kick in over a billion dollars a year to the state kitty through tobacco taxes, to have been effectively banned from the beach. Who wants to go to the beach and spend the whole time having a nicotine fit?

Banning smoking at the beach strikes us as just a tad far-fetched. The air constantly changes at the beach. To claim people are in danger of dying from a whiff of tobacco smoke while laying out in the sand is utterly preposterous and everyone knows it, including the people who advance such nonsense. But they run with it nonetheless and they get their little bans passed.

Once again a familiar pattern emerges, a Democrat controlled legislative body seeks to banish and segregate smokers and a Republican comes to the rescue. Unless you're engulfed in some kind of morbid guilt complex about smoking, do not ever throw your vote away on a Democrat. Due to the political realities of our times, while the GOP may not love you or officially condone tobacco use, they do, because of their inborn resistance to big government, often come to your defense.

Angela Howe, an attorney for the Surfrider Foundation in San Clemente CA, a fine beach town that once housed Richard Nixon, was very upset with the Governator over his veto. Perhaps she should go back and watch the 1960's classic surfing movie "Endless Summer" again. Everyone chain smoked through the entire flick. We're not sure how old Angela is, but these guys were quite likely riding waves before she was born. If a revisionist nicotine Nazi had attempted to retroactively airbrush out all the cigarette smoking in this movie, there wouldn't have been anything left to watch.

Please don't throw us that 'look what happened to all the guys in that movie' crapola either. Smoking had nothing to do with what became of their lives. Those were better times all around and they all looked pretty happy to us. Back then surfers weren't fighting 30 other people for a wave, nor did they have to do battle with a bunch of zero defect, OCD saddled politicos lecturing the world on how to live life according to their narrowly delimited terms.

She might also want to look at a historical graph of the Gross National Product and track the twin upward trend lines of tobacco usage and rising living standards that end right about the time legislating and regulating every single iota of daily life came into fashion. To hell with her, she should be ashamed of her subliminal hatred for people who smoke. It's nothing more than repackaged left-wing bigotry, pure and simple, and everyone knows it now. Angela and her ilk probably think they've got the wool pulled over everyones eyes, with their phony overarching concern with public health, but no one is buying it any more. They hate people who smoke and don't want them at their beach. That is what was really behind this horrid piece of legislation that met with a veto.

Coastal environmentalists have a big issue with cigarette butts. Most smokers don't want a beach that resembles an industrial ash can either. But as usual, the problem is overblown a hundredfold by the detractors. It would be a nice gesture for we smokers to bring an ash tray to the beach (kind of problematic) or, at the very least, to dig down a good foot into the sand to dispose of our filters. Out of sight, out of mind and only the most heavily afflicted OCD nuts will manage to lose sleep over it.

The local Girl Scouts may go out on a weekend cleanup mission with the local press in tow and dig down to find a few stray ones, so bury them nice and deep. They'll weigh them out on a scale and scream bloody murder, but let's face it, this is just another one of their many imaginary bogeymen, like global warming. Of course, they'll finally get to the one inch long butts after they've dealt with the Big Gulp plastic super cups and fast food wrappers that really spoil the view.

If you really want to be a thoughtful and gracious beach-going smoker, you might want to buy a nice, big 32-ounce soft drink on your way out to the sand. You can use it as an ashtray to properly dispose of your cigarette butt, assuming you smoke the filtered variety. When you're ready to leave, if there is a trash receptacle nearby, just toss it in there and everyone will be happy, even the environmental pressure group attorneys. If there isn't a receptacle to be found, just put it in your car and dispose of it properly at home. No harm, no foul. And don't worry about whether the foam cup will accommodate your little tiny spent butt. We did a little cylindrical area math, and came up with 1,568 as the number of butts that would fit into just one 32-ounce foam cup.

We're thinking the real underlying issue for these New Age green-robed klansmen is the usual suspect - the smell of tobacco smoke. The beach is a place where all kinds of smells waft around, that's just the way it is. The ambient salty air carries scents of coco-nutty suntan lotion, the hot dogs those people next to you are polishing off, the seaweed and all the rest of the trappings of a day at the beach. As hard as Progressive types try, they will never succeed in attaining the fat-free, smoke-free, salt-free, odorless world they seek - olfaction is here to stay.

Bringing health scaremongering to the sea shore opens a lot of doors we should definitely not be visiting, unless we want to simply shut off the beach to everyone as an unacceptably risky place for humans to congregate at.

Wayward tobacco smoke is just the tip of the iceberg when you stop and think about it. Swimmers drown at the beach. Sunbathers are exposed to dangerous levels of melanoma-inducing UV rays. The camp fires that serve to toast marshmallows are putting out more toxic wood smoke than a thousand cigarettes. All of these harrowing threats to life and limb are taking place atop a substance that causes silicosis - sand.

This made us think about a great, super-funny piece Frank Davis wrote about health nuts, beaches, sand, and silicosis in Dec of 2009. We originally intended to write our own article on the topic based on his hilarious tract and then link to it, but, like a lot of online literature projects it was never finished. The plan was to tie the story into Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, CA and Steve Jobs with his reneging on Apple warranties if the owner smoked, but it all got too disjointed and spread out.

This is one of the most humorous, but telling pieces he's ever produced. We're still laughing at the concept of sand-free beaches he advances at the conclusion. The link to it will appear at the bottom of this article - DON'T MISS IT - It is an absolute classic.

Also, in one of the older articles on this site, down towards the bottom of the page where a lot of really good writing sits waiting for you to read, there's mention of a domino-effect series of beach town smoking bans. This is a very old vintage piece that was probably penned five years ago. Use the Ctrl-F internal page search and type in NOT WELCOME if you're so inclined to do so.

The article was produced with good old FrontPage Express and it features a crazy little widget this trusty old Microsoft program sported that makes the word NOT WELCOME blink on and off. It might not work on all browsers, but if you're lucky, it's neat to watch. The NOT WELCOME, of course, refers to the door mat being placed out for smokers by some coastal cities. You're encouraged not to spend any money in these snot-nosed beach towns, which should result in a 20% decrease in retail sales therein.

Here is the link to "Welcome Sir Liam" by Frank Davis from his Banging On About the Smoking Ban blog.

UPDATE: FROM THE WEIRD TIMING, WE CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP CORNER OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE THIS:

China scientists find use for cigarette butts.
http://www.beijingtoday.com.cn/blogger/ahen/china-scientists-find-use-for-cigarette-butts

Did you notice the weasel words "can kill fish" in there? Anyone want to fathom a guess at how many trillions of gallons of water there are in the sea for some proper context? Do you really think that cigarette butts are even in the top ten list of fish killers on planet earth? Shall we ban all ocean-going ships, too? Shall we ban fishing?

Seriously, we're not making light of this. Please, please don't dispose of cigarette butts at the beach. That totally sucks. Bring an ash tray or a container of some sort to the beach. We love fish and we love seafood. Now if there was just some way to catch and eat fish without killing them in the process. Again, not joking...

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Inside the mind of the Humanitarian Progressive

Come November we've got a Nanny State to dismantle. Register your disgust at the polls.

If you're still not convinced that Progressives (read: Democrats) are out to do you harm if you smoke or like soft drinks, read this comment we came across posted on the Think Progress website. The article attacks Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks organization rejects the imposition of any Soda Taxes and cigarette taxes. A certain spencers mom lays out her agenda for paying for Obama's Healthcare in the comment section. She feels that she's got a real winner in that not only does she pay for healthcare on the backs of the obese and we smokers, but she punishes the Red States (read: Republican) in the bargain.

Here's her comment: "Just put a huge tax on cigarettes, and make it illegal to ship cigs from Indian reservations or from overseas.

Know who will get hit hardest? The Red States that grow the tobacco. I'd love to see a big tax on products containing high fructose corn syrup, too, since this addictive product has been used as the cheaper substitute for sugar.

If we're going to reform healthcare, we need to eliminate the things that lead to the most disease, and smoking and obesity top the list.

PEACE "

To which we would reply: You've just galvanized 64% of the adult population (the so-called obese) and another 20% of the population (the smokers) into a self-preserving voters bloc that in combination constitutes 84% of the adult population. We sure hope you succeed in getting your way this November with an overwhelming 16% of the people behind you - you disgusting, freeloading loser. PEACE - from smokervoter.com

Re-read our 'Delusions of Grandeur' article, which opines that the hard core, smoker-hating rabble probably consists of around 15% of the population, at best. Scroll down until you see the peacock graphic.

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Obama Health Czar on NBC

RWJF Insider Nancy-Ann DeParle on Meet the Press

Did you catch Nancy-Ann DeParle on Meet the Press on Feb 28th? Just to refresh your memory, she's Obama's health care reform czar. She's also one of his RWJF insiders. She repeated "solve those problems" at least 20 times. That was obviously her key talking points buzzword. David Gregory grilled her on the urgency factor relentlessly. She wouldn't concede, nor back down one inch. The people want healthcare and they want it now according to DeParle. And her name was hyphenated, which is always a good sign of someone to avoid like the plague. She looks awfully young to be lecturing this two-hundred+ year old country on the wisdom of adopting her health care plan. The folks at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation were likely on the edge of their seats, hoping she came across as credible to the vast audience.

We went back and did some more research on Czar Nancy and sure enough she's a big anti-tobacco zealot. We wanted to get this out while it's fresh, so we'll backtrack later and fill in more details on some of her past statements on tobacco control. For now, suffice it to say that if you just take her Meet the Press interview body language and overall demeanor, it's clear she's a control freak first and foremost and a glassy-eyed demagogue to boot.

Did you also notice that they threw in a loathsome "The More You Know" hit piece against smoking featuring Brian Williams right before the final credits rolled? Curious timing to be sure, a mainstream NBC public service ad and a RWJF guest slot hitting the airwaves like a one-two punch on smoking and healthcare at the same time.

Any healthcare bill fashioned by this consummate reformed-smoker President and his team of RWJF insiders will contain nothing but pain for smokers, people of size and anyone who feels that eating and drinking whatever you want is a fundamental right best left to the individual. Mandated bright and shiny model citizens will become the order of the day, enforced and backed up with soda taxes, fast food taxes and compulsory Chantix regimes. Make sure and watch out for those nasty little side effects they mention at the end of the ads.

President Obama and the Democratic-controlled legislature have been a disaster for American smokers. It is mission critical that all smokers in this country register to vote immediately and then make damn sure they show up, rain or snow, and vote this November. Ever respectful of your intelligence and free will, we won't even suggest who you should cast your ballot for. All we ask is that you review the history of the War on Tobacco from its inception on Day One of the Clinton administration in Jan 1993 to the present and compare the stances and votes of the two main political parties.

If you still want to vote Democrat after thinking it over, you do need your head examined. Sorry to be this scornful about it, but the future of personal freedom hangs in the balance. For the umpteenth time we will repeat that a coalition of smokers, the so-called obese and soda pop drinkers, voting in unison for the party (R) that values smaller government (at least on paper) over the big government alternative (D), can and will dismantle the Nanny State in our lifetimes.

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Does Tobacco Really Stink?

BRAINWASHING FOR THE GREATER GOOD ? OKAY ?

You hear it all the time from our glum, ubiquitous detractors - smoking stinks. The overpowering smell permeates their clothing and their hair and makes a few of them wrench. Nothing seems to thrill the blog reader who leaves hit-and-run blog comments more than using the stink word. You can just picture them snickering like an adolescent class clown to themselves after they've hit the submit button and the whole world is now informed of their little problem with cigarettes.

We have nothing but sympathy for the poor dears, shampoo costs about a buck a bottle and laundry detergent is a major expense. Wearing the same outfit on Sunday that you sported last evening while looking for the heart of Saturday night does save a lot of needless hassle.

Even those who've attained most favored status on society's health totem pole aren't guaranteed not to produce an offensive odor with some of their activities. Uber-salubrious joggers stink if they don't take a quick shower after their run. They wouldn't dream of going out in public dressed in their sweaty, stinky jogging duds. Jogging causes sweat and sweat stinks. Shall we all proceed over to the jogging sites and leave nasty little comments all over the place about what a filthy obsession jogging is?

You'll get a much clearer picture of primal human nature by going back 500 years in history, and there the facts speak volumes on whether we're preordained to dislike the smell of burning tobacco.

If tobacco does indeed stink you might expect the earliest disciples of this plant to have been repelled by its stench. Well, when none other than Christopher Columbus first encountered the Mayans on San Salvador Island in October of 1492, they brought out their most prized wares to show off to the strange new visitor. This was the all-star, top rung stuff they presented to the captain, and not what they considered some unappealing reeking matter. There's not much point in that if you're trying to score bragging rights. They showcased some dried tobacco leaves, something they obviously treasured for its splendid aroma. Any way you want to interpret this, it shows that people more than likely have a natural propensity to enjoy the olfactory sensation derived from burning tobacco leaves. So now that tobacco supposedly stinks to high heaven, it's apparent that someone or something is intervening with some mighty strong brainwashing here.

At one point in our history, not that long ago, hardly anyone seemed to object to the smell of tobacco. If more people were completely honest they'd probably admit to actually enjoying it. But being completely honest is a lost art form, done in by political correctness. It almost seems oxymoronic to use the term correctness when it results in incorrect sentiments. Our nasal receptors haven't evolved in fast forward mode, rather the brain attached to them has been thoroughly cleansed of any positive reactions by the brainwashing efforts of the tobacco control pressure groups.

Groups like the American Cancer Society and the Lung Association now wear their mind control accomplishments like a badge of honor. Raymond Shaw, the brainwashed assassin character in 1962's the Manchurian Candidate, is their poster boy now. The shadowy Chinese and Russian agents who got to him are now the heroes of the plot when viewed from the freshly minted perspective of the ACS. When things become fallibly flipped, remember that it only takes one more rotation to get back to the original place where things made sense.

It's a sad day when behavior modification and conditioning become okay as long as it's done in the name of public health or for the ever present Saving the Children purpose. Smokers, the overweight and the rest of us flawed-but- free souls should reject being artificially manipulated by anybody. We're not Pavlov's dogs here, we're the people - smoking or non-smoking, lean or plump. And we've got this little thing called a vote. If you're one of the politicians who favors banning everything that doesn't pass your finicky little smell test you can count on losing your next contest.

Anyone who has ever been around a Hav-a-Tampa cigar being smoked will wind up conceding that tobacco can and does produce a most pleasant fragrance. The secret to Hav-a-Tampa's delightful aroma is probably vanilla and just a hint of cherry. Hav-a-Tampa's had been a Tampa, Florida gem of a company since 1902 and employed 500 locals producing the popular cigar until the S-CHIP bill was passed by the Democrats. The bill increased the tax on cigars eight-fold and effectively raised the price to the end-user by 50%. This proved to be too much for the top line of the company and sales dropped 30% in 2009. To compensate and remain profitable under that kind of constraint they shut down the Tampa plant and moved the jobs to the Dominican Republic. What a sad ending for the people of Tampa, brought to you by the Nanny State and its main sponsor - the Democrats.

Admittedly, stale tobacco smoke is not exactly appealing, but then again neither is stale perfume. We're not even going to go there, the violating cologne zeitgeist has been whipped to death like a dead horse. It's just that banning everything that offends anyones sense of smell is a losing proposition. We suggest re-growing a spine and rejecting all propositions that ban smoking categorically.

Vegans complain about the smell of meat grilling in the cookhouse and steak-eaters complain about the awful, lingering transfer of patchoulie oil essence unavoidably emitted by the Vegans. Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. The bar has always been one of society's great mixing bowls and trying to shield everyone from one another along personal preference lines totally defeats its primary theme of open-ended amalgamation.

Where, oh where, are the graveyards full of ex-bartenders, waitresses and bar patrons, all dead and six feet under from laboring and partying at the local smoky dive for years and years? Don't worry, if they don't exist now, someone will create them for us in the form of yet another incontrovertible "scientific" study. For bar workers the very real threat to life came in the form of intervening in and quelling booze-fueled disagreements among the partying faithful.

A common sense solution to this problem would seem to be allowing a bar owner to designate and dedicate a separate area for smokers to congregate in. Put in smokeless ashtrays, ventilate the holy hell out of the area, and then remove what little escapes to the remainder with normal means. Don't split hairs or get down to unattainable infinitesimal quantifiers; remove the majority of the smoke and be done with it. Everyone is accommodated and everyone is happy. The bar stays open, employees keep drawing paychecks, life goes on.

Legions of bar owners are still waiting patiently for the promised droves of fun-loving health fanatic party people to magically materialize and boost their sales into the stratosphere. They're still holding out hope that untapped throngs of weekend warriors will temporarily put their OCD on hold and saddle up to the barstools vacated by their old smoking clientele. The problem here might just be this little enigmatic factoid we'll drag up from a prior article down the page regarding OCD symptoms - [Persons with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder often become uncomfortable in situations that are beyond their control and have difficulty maintaining positive, healthy interpersonal relationships as a result.] Sorry, but that's not exactly the profile of the model bar customer. All of the touted studies, including one by Stanton Glantz and company, predicted increased saloon receipts once they all went odorless and smoke-free.

Unfortunately this isn't what's happening as of now. Due to the newly conditioned public perception that tobacco stinks, bars are closing here and, as Frank Davis laments over on his great blog, pub culture is being systematically destroyed in Great Britain. Everyone has retreated to their respective, lonely little corners and social interaction is on the wane. Part of the admission price of a night out on the town was to come home smelling of tobacco and Old Spice or Chanel No. 5. and at one time people somehow managed to carry on. The sure cure was a quick hot shower and a change of clothes.

This has now become too much to ask and that is what truly stinks.

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MICHELLE OBAMA UNVEILS CHILDHOOD OBESITY CAMPAIGN

When we heard that Michelle Obama was planning on unveiling her "Let's Move" childhood obesity campaign, we sighed profoundly in anticipation of what was coming for our "people of size" friends out there. We watched it on the PBS Newshour first and then on mainstream NBC to get the full ultra-left to medium-left spectrum of her sales pitch and follow-up interviews. Let us start by saying that we are not of the Now-It's-Their-Turn school of thought on this topic. That is a short-sighted position to take and doesn't serve anyone well. There's a beating heart in our chest and, after what we've been through in the War on Smoking, the last thing we want to see is another segment of our society tied to the whipping post. We grabbed the keyboard and took some notes as we watched and here are some reflections of what transpired.

The first thing that hit us was the fact that, as hard as she might try to come across as an Everyday Jane, Mrs. Obama possesses the aloof glower of a stayed-in-college-too-long-to-relate elitist. She talks in pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped boilerplate as a general rule. She's probably not very good at poker either. When interviewer Jim Lehrer surprisingly put the word scold into a question, you could literally see the wheels cranking in her mind to come up with a soft sell answer. Surprisingly we say because for the most part, although PBS has a lot of fine programming, it often comes across as a publicly-subsidized arm of the Democratic party media machine. It also receives a lot of funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

What really leaped out from the interview was her dropping of the phrase "lifestyle overhaul". The last time we looked there wasn't any reference in the Constitution to lifestyle overhauls. There is mention of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, but no life overhauling. Does she mean that a youngster of size should pull into Michelle's little service bay with their inborn, fat-seeking id and, after a good brainwashing and cajoling session, emerge with a new outlook on life that includes favoring only organic vegetables from the White House garden while summarily rejecting Pepsi's and Cheetos. All in all, it struck us as a very ominous term, and it was starkly revealing of her statist mindset.

Read between the lines of the interview and this entire initiative and you'll find it was actually the opening salvo to the eventual introduction of either A.) A Soda Tax B.) A Fat Tax or C.) Both. Her husband hinted around about a soda tax in an interview with a men's fitness magazine. The word is that they're going for a levy of somewhere between a penny per ounce to a nickel. While we certainly aren't happy about this and we're totally against playing the tit-for-tat card (that is so counter-productive and just wrong) it could mark the beginning of the end for the Nanny Government trend. A nickel per ounce basically doubles the current price of a can of soda pop. There's bound to be a lot of pushback when this materializes. There's definitely enough pushback there to completely topple the already teetering Democratic party regime, whose leadership hooked up their horses to the nanny state bandwagon in earnest long ago.

Just take one look at the quantity of soft drinks consumed yearly by the populace and you'll see that a soda tax changes everything. This isn't your ordinary tobacco sin tax. Gone is the Clinton-Reiner blueprint of pitting the majority against a helpless, captive minority. We wrote about this in a column twelve years ago. Clinton saw it as a stealth tax that would raise revenues while harming his re-election chances the least. With California's Prop10 in 1998, Rob Reiner out and out pulled a gangland-style plundering of smokers billfolds in broad daylight to fund his pet project. Doubling the price of soda pop won't go unnoticed, it's the kind of everyday irritant that voters will take into the booth with them.

Now that the First Lady of the United States has taken up the cause, childhood obesity will be elevated to widespread discussion fodder at the nation's schools. The insults and insinuations towards rotund kids will multiply, as if they needed any more than they've always received, if what's happened to smokers is any indicant. The obesity prevention missives will ratchet up to the intensity levels we're seeing now against tobacco use. The onus of impotence, lower earnings potential, social isolation, and anything that will stick to the wall will be engaged in by the calorie-counting crossing guards.

Now on to the MSM (mainstream media) coverage. NBC spun the story without any attention to the other side of question such as; what business is it of the government to intervene in what you choose to buy at the supermarket in the first place? Interestingly enough, Michelle's textbook media massage was followed by a piece on third hand smoke. This is where Brian Williams' poker face failed him. As he was reading the story you could see the gears grinding once again, he was announcing it, but he wasn't buying it. Third hand smoke is yet more stretching of the credulity barrier to it's absolute breaking point. There will be more on third hand smoke later, we promise. We found a real doozy on this one from a blog by a fellow named Uncle Marvo. The setup he used to make his point was nothing short of brilliant. The obesity news was coming fast and furious on this night.

NBC then carried the story of the Hollywood director who was unceremoniously and cruelly bumped from a flight on Southwest airlines for weighing too much. The guy went ballistic on Twitter and the backfire to Southwest was swift and certain. It was good to see people backing him up for a change, rather than automatically taking the side of the airline on the grounds that if he just consumed fewer calories, none of this would have taken place. That is such a vacuous argument, it just screams of intolerance and ill will. We're better than that aren't we?

You just have to wonder how much extra cost is involved in transporting a passenger who weighs in excess of the statistical average. We'd love to know the actual number. If the number is as small as we suspect it is, and even if it meant raising ticket prices by a dollar or two, it wouldn't mark the end of airline travel. The policy in place is discriminatory and downright insulting and should end.

Finally, Michelle promised us all that she would be doing some public service announcements on the childhood obesity issue. We'll be waiting with baited breath for these. This is just what the world needs now: more sappy, idiotic PSA's to click off with the remote when they appear on the television. Now picture this: your corpulent child sitting around watching television with some shoolmates and feeling stigmatized when the First Lady of the United States comes on and starts scolding her/him for not measuring up to the perfect BMI.

It's plain to see that The First Lady has had some serious public persona coaching. She didn't let any major gaffes loose like the time she blurted out "I Hate Smoking" in response to a question about her husband's smoking habit. We're sure she meant it in the old 'hate the sin, love the sinner' context, but you've got to be really careful in tossing around the h-word. Anyone not listening closely enough could easily have misinterpreted this as "I Hate Smokers", which is probably not far from the truth of the matter.

If you happen to like soda pop or your kid weighs a little too much right now, you are cordially invited by we smokervoters to join us in voting for any party other than the Democrats in the approaching mid-term elections. Overhaul the Congress this November and then the sin tax happy executive branch come the year 2012. Give these relentless health nags the heave ho.

OK, Let's go back to the top of the page now

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Here we go again, globe-trotting around the planet aboard a cyberspace rocket ship while gazing upon a selection of websites put together by fellow freedom addicts around the world. This go round has us visiting our good neighbor to the north - the vibrant and majestic country of Canada.

One of the many preceding articles Exporting Nouveau Puritanism on this page dealt with America's most unwanted foreign export - Nanny Statism. Reading up on a few of the Canadian websites, it's clear that the War on Tobacco (and junk food and soda pop, et. al. ) has opened up another front up north. All apologies are in order from smokervoter.com, it certainly wasn't our intention to infect you with our Nouveau Puritan political movement. Once it digs in its heels and starts spreading, it's hard to halt. The solution is the same on both sides of the border. Ascertain which political party has hooked their horses up to the bandwagon of extreme government intrusion into places it doesn't belong, and vote them out of office.

Defeating the Nannies isn't as daunting as it might seem at first glance. They've alienated and ostracized everyone who smokes, who weighs more than the acceptable BMI (fat-o-meter) Index and those who quench their thirst with a soda pop. That list alone adds up to a lot of potentially aggravated voters. And there's more, there's a fair amount of folks who just plain don't cotton to being told what to consume by faceless bureaucrats, period. Let's face it, almost nobody likes a messianic busybody in the long run.

Separately none of these groups constitute a majority, but when combined into a voting bloc of citizens against government encroachment, citizens for personal choice, and citizens against prohibition, they most surely do. We fully support our Canadian friends in their efforts to protect civil liberties for all.

Here are three great pro-freedom Canadian websites we came across. Check them out, they're outstanding.

	This is an excellent website. The initials stand for Citizens Against Government Encroachment. It's in English and French and there's a lot of well thought out content on it. Visit it often and bookmark it. It's frequently updated. Highly recommended reading for the smokervoter.
	They've got an active and interesting Forum on this site. Their Guiding Principles are very sound and admirable. Great Site from our Good Neighbors to the North.
	Prohibition was a monstrous failure. Why anyone in their right mind would want to revive it is beyond imagination. But the tobacco control lobby persists in their dream of a tobacco-free world. This site is a must join. Fight the neo-prohibitionists to the bitter end - or suffer the consequences of apathy.

Invariably on these jaunts a brand new factoid will pop up out of nowhere. During our visit to the International Coalition Against Prohibition website, we gleaned this disturbing little piece of information by way of an article we linked up to authored by Michael L. Marlow, one of the scheduled guest speakers at their upcoming March 15th convention. The article by Marlow on the economic effects of smoking bans on bar owners cites a Gallup poll article wherein it states that more Republicans than Democrats, by a 62% to 53% margin, support banning smoking in restaurants. Here is just a short blurb: "The groups showing the greatest movement toward banning smoking are Republicans, frequent churchgoers, and nonsmokers -- though even smokers show some movement in that direction as well." If this is true, it's not good news at all. The poll is five years old and consists of phone interviews of 1,006 people. It certainly doesn't square up with a cursory reality check that anyone can make by looking back at recent history. Most of the sin taxes and lifestyle restrictions have been the result of Democrat votes.

You've got to wonder how valid the opinion is of anyone who agrees to spend fifteen minutes on the phone with one of Gallup's telemarketing-like canvassers. Most people either hang up immediately or decline. One thousand people represents .00046 of the 215 million Americans of voting age. Statistics and polling is a weird and somewhat suspect science. It's frequently wrong and sometimes right. We're in the process of putting together another article based on yet another poll (this one is a Rasmussen) finding we came across that claims that more Democrats smoke than Republicans.

If this is the case, there are definitely more people into masochism than commonly meets the eye.

Here is a link to the aforementioned Gallup article.

We would be remiss if we didn't mention Thomas "Snowbird" Laprade, the lightning bolt out of Thunder Bay. We're longstanding members of the Illinois Smokers Rights Yahoo Group, and if you're a booster of this fine assemblage of smokers (370 at present) you're familiar with his steady stream of apropos postings there. He keeps everyone there abreast of the latest news from the battlefront on a regular basis.

The moderator at Illinois Smokers Rights is Jason Douglas AKA Jay AKA cooljay. Jay's got an entertaining phonetic style of writing that packs a lot of street cred. He votes, he writes letters to politicians, he's the consummate smokervoter. Jay's got his own blog with the motto Respect Freedom of Choice. Jay smokes Newports, Jay loves Newports, don't try and get between Jay and his Newports.

The Snowbird is also not afraid to take out a pen and write to the newspaper editor and defend our inexorable positions when they're attacked. You can find a collection of his writings, many of them these Letters to the Editors, over at his Tripod website. In addition the Snowbird's Tripod page does a great job of breaking down the ponderous Smokers Club website into readily searchable topics.

Tripod was the Lycos flavor of Yahoo's GeoCities free web hosting platform. Before there was a MySpace, before there was a Facebook and before there was an overly-hyped Web 2.0 with the its questionably game changing social networking emphasis, there was GeoCities and Tripod. The smokervoter.com page began life as a GeoCities page. GeoCities went bye-bye last year, Tripod is still around.

Getting involved and sticking your neck out by voicing your opinion and standing up for basic freedoms can be a lonely pursuit. Not enough of us do this, and we salute the Snowbird, as he certainly doesn't shy away from stepping up to the plate. The very least the smokervoter can do is to register to vote and show up on election day and cast a vote.

The opening ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics was truly outstanding, what a great job. It was such a colorful and visually spectacular feast for the eyes, you did yourselves proud Canada. NBC has been highlighting Canadian life and history and culture with their coverage and we come away wishing they'd done more of this in the past, here's hoping they'll do more in the future.

Anyway, here's to Thomas "Snowbird" Laprade, Illinois Smokers Rights, Jay and Canada. In the words of Canadian musician Neil Young, Long May You Run.

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Leg Iron Alert

What Smokers Want in 260 Words or Less

No one should mistake being unrepentant about smoking with promoting it. The Nicotiana tabacum plant doesn't need a marketing department to gain popularity with the masses. First the Mayans, and later on the rest of the world became attracted to its amazing aroma, taste and calming-focusing properties all by their little selves. Over a billion people now partake of the sublime leaf. Smoking is not going to go away. So what do smokers want?

The venerable Scotsman Leg Iron has just blogged up another gem that succinctly answers that question. Leg Iron's got a great minimalist writing style which gets the point across without wasting any words in the process. Here in about 260 words are what we smokers want.

We could just put up a link and let you read it for yourself in context, but we've chosen to isolate this particular section because it just speaks to the heart and soul of the matter so well.

Here's the setup: Sheila Duffy, is the chief executive of anti-smoking charity ASH Scotland. ASH stands for Action on Smoking & Health (Scotland) and it's a registered Scottish charity that is analogous to our American Legacy Group or the tobacco control arm of the National Institutes for Health. Cute little acronyms like ASH are about as far these as guys go in the humor department, after which it drops off into infantile crapola like the currently airing Become an EX public service announcements we featured a couple of articles down the page.

Without further ado, here's Leg Iron on what we smokers want:

"Sheila, the only thing that needs to be done is to take you to a quiet place and pound your face into hamburger over a period of some weeks, using the gentle but regular application of a potato masher. Perhaps that will bring home the one and only thing that smokers demand in this life. Leave us alone. That's really the sum total of what we want, you know. We don't want to get all evangelical and promote smoking, we just want to be left alone to get on with it. Have no-smoking places, fine. No problem. Just let us have our places too. Otherwise, there are many non-sharp kitchen implements in the hands of inventive smokers who are reaching a level of blind fury and guiltless rage you cannot conceive.

What we like is the action of smoking. We like the smoke. It's relaxing to watch it billow into the air. It's fascinating to watch it level into a thermocline that looks like the laser layer over the eggs in the first 'Alien' film. We blow smoke rings and watch them dissolve.

We just want to smoke.

In peace. Without being treated like shit. That is really the sum total of our demands. You can be somewhere else if you don't like it and we won't mount a guerrilla operation to smoke you out. We don't care about you at all. Do whatever you want, live however you want, die in any manner of your choosing. Up to you.

Just leave us alone. Otherwise, the potato masher awaits."

Oh, the wit and wisdom Senor Iron exhibits with his posts. And prolific too, sometimes two in a day. We're doing well to pop out one a week. The nanny staters love to portray smokers as uneducated, lower wage dullards as part of their Goebbelesque smear campaigns. Let em' dig into Leg Iron's stuff, they can just read em' and weep. They've got sparkling Stanton Glantz, Carrie Nation and sourpuss Sheila Duffy. We've got Leg Iron. We'll smoke and laugh until we die, they'll end up in the old quandary of "dying of NOTHING".

What Sheila and her ultra-learned, well salaried pontificates put out is Saharan in its content and dull as a butter knife. Have you ever read any of their wearisome compositions verbatim? Better double up on that expresso or be prepared to grab your eyelashes by the tips. When they try to "do funny" they customarily lapse into insipid kids stuff. In their fervor to rescue the children they've become the children.

In a new high in the art of navel contemplation, a tobacco obsessive, writing in one of their beloved journals on the exhilarating topic of whether smokers block the little ventilation slits found on filters, wrote this - "In 1980, Kozlowski and others described a stain pattern technique (SPT) for unobtrusively detecting the occurrence of vent blocking with fingers or lips. Basically, this technique evaluates the tar stain on the mouth end of the filter, a stain spreading toward the edge of the filter indicating the presence of vent blocking. In cases of extreme blocking, one will note a fairly uniform tar stain across the filter. Trained raters are able to produce reliable and valid scores using this technique."

The lines are forming as we speak for this position: Depleted cigarette butt condition Inspector/Rater. Will Train.

You really didn't think we'd leave you without a link to the full Leg Iron post so that you could read it in proper context now did you?

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"don't give me that do-good buuuulll...shit"

Pink Floyd said it a long time ago in the song Money. For the American Lung Association, Citizens for a Smoke Free America and all the rest of the so-called public health advocate do-good groups, the gig is up. It's not really the tobacco companies nor the hapless tobacco plant doing it's thing growing in the sun you hate. It is the people, the human beings that smoke cigarettes that you hate. You're not fooling anyone with half a brain with your do-good bullshit anymore. You've become organized hate groups now. You are out to deny jobs, housing, recreation and income to any person who dares not kowtow to your demand that they cease smoking immediately. Your obsessive hatred of smoking is turning you into hate-mongers and bigots, plain and simple. You should seek out psychiatric help.

In the meantime you're creating a lot of enemies with your wrath. Even people that don't smoke are astounded by your actions to push the envelope of curtailing personal freedom to its limits. What else can you expect when you carry on like you've been carrying on for the past twenty years. Smokers that considered you an annoying nuisance now see you as a lynch mob out for their blood. Take a gander at the blog that was created to gather opinions by USA Today on their article detailing a ban on smoking in apartments and condos by the Belmont, CA City Council. You were detested by smokers and non-smokers alike. Believe it or not Americans take their freedoms damn seriously. You would have more success in China, Russia or Nazi Germany but not here guys.

The communist-like Nanny State that you seek has hit its zenith. You had it your way for quite some time as you turned up the pressure bit by bit on smokers. Now people have absolutely had it with you and your tactics and your hate campaign. The ballot initiatives you use as weapons are either winning by slimmer margins or they are failing now. People started to realize that if it was the smokers losing their rights today it might be something else tomorrow, like fat for instance. Sure enough the food police started in and now no one is buying this public health overkill anymore. Look for mayors and councilman who are fond of curtailing the citizens precious freedoms to begin losing their seats.

It's like this:

Citizens for a Smoke Free America or Rob Reiner, people do not like to be told what to do! Nobody likes piety nor holier-than-thou lecturing. People don't appreciate anyone who imposes their will on other folks. People don't like intolerance and hatred in this country and this is what you're all about. Your Taliban style ain't cutting it here pal. In a nutshell, don't give me that do good bullshit anymore. Give it up, go away, disband, and mind your own business because the tide is turning and it's doesn't look favorable for you anymore.

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Editors Note: You may notice that some of the articles below this point refer to Hillary Clinton as the probable Democratic presidential nominee. This is because they were written awhile back. Smokervoter.com doesn't have an archive section. Archive sections are kind of dull - who wants yesterdays papers? Besides that it's fun to see how prescient we were in our prognostications. Go ahead and read all of them, we promise they're all edifying and informative snippets of unvarnished truth.

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Smokers should consider hiring a James Carville or Karl Rove

The two preeminent political mathematicians of our times are James Carville and Karl Rove. Karl Rove was known as "the architect" and he indeed engineered two victories for George Bush Jr. Both were incredibly close squeakers, but a win is a win nonetheless and to the victor go the spoils. James Carville was the obnoxious, garrulous and barely discernible character who got Bill Clinton elected with his famous mantra "It's the economy, stupid". It was indeed the economy and we got Bill and Hillary Clinton and their War on Tobacco for eight long years.

One can only wonder why the beleaguered smokers of America haven't ponied up some major cash to create a fund for the employment of a major league political mathematician to defend their interests. No political demographic segment has taken more hits in recent history than they have. The only excuse would be that they're financially tapped out from the taxes they've had to absorb.

The next best thing to do is to give smokervoter.com a chance to advance a game plan that is feasible, doable and realistic, with a good prospect of denying Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2008. As they say, let's do the math...

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We're going to throw a lot of numbers at you, but please bear with us. About 120,000,000 people came out and voted in the 2004 election. Using rudimentary analysis it is pretty safe to assume that around 20% of those votes came from people who smoke. Twenty percent of 120 million comes out to 24 million votes, no small amount indeed. The election turned out to be a pie sliced right in half, so let's just say that 12 million smokers voted Republican and 12 million smokers voted Democratic. We need to focus on those 12 million Democrat voters like a laser beam. If we could persuade just one-third of these people to vote for Ralph Nader, the Green Party or Peace & Freedom that would constitute a 4 million person swing vote. Four million votes would have been enough to change the outcome of the last two elections. Despite the pre-anointment by media circus political pundits of Hillary Clinton in 2008, she has huge negatives and this election could prove a lot closer than one might suppose.

Of course one can only daydream of a 100% solid, monolithic voting bloc of 24 million smoker voters totally calling the shots in America from now on. Just imagine how the candidates would change their tune with that many votes at stake. But historical analysis suggests that is not really feasible. What is feasible is a one-third shift on the left side of the ledger. That means that two out of three Democrat smoker voters will still cast their ballots for Hillary (they are definitely masochists) in the voting booth.

What can you do to help convince these critical voters to change their minds you ask? For one thing, you might have noticed how smokers tend to bond together nowadays. We're forced to smoke outside the restaurant or the bar and we start a lot of conversations as a result. In a friendly and courteous manner, ask your fellow smoker what party they are affiliated with. If the answer is Democrat, this is the time to engage in some gentle persuasion. Let's not be like our enemies in the anti-smoking klan and be deadly serious or harsh and vitriolic in the approach. Use humor and warmth and even take no for an answer, but do plant the seeds of thought, they might just grow.

Getting a lifelong Democrat to vote Republican would really be a hard sell and quite frankly it might not be the right thing to do anyway. There are lots of good people in this country who happen to vote Democratic. Union workers and middle class folks have had good reason not to vote Republican in the past. Asking your Democrat-voting smoking brethren to vote for Ralph Nader or for the Green Party or for the Peace & Freedom candidate is an entirely different proposition. If more people voted with their real inner conscience, third party candidates would gain more power and influence and our blessed democracy would improve drastically.

When you combine the solid Republican base of smokervoters with the aforementioned four million swing votes you arrive at a voting bloc of sixteen million votes. That works out to about 14% of likely voters, a factor Carville nor Rove would ever dream of ignoring. These guys are used to trying to attract microscopic piechart slices of one or two percentage points to their candidates. Thankfully, because this is America, there also exists a large contingent of non-smokers with the Freedom Gene who tend to see through and dislike candidates who spew the neo-prohibitionist (and segregationist) smoking ban rhetoric.

So far we're talking big picture presidential politics but once a trend, the likes of a fourteen percent voting bloc, starts hitting the radar screens it's a safe bet the congressional and statehouse contests will follow suit in short order. A great deal of the damage to smoker's rights and income streams comes in the form of state ballot initiatives and local ordinances. To counter these onslaughts only voter turnout and registration drives will work. Start working on your non-voting smoking friends to register and get out to vote!

One last thought on hiring a political math pro. The ideal guy to hire might just be James Carville, yes, that James Carville. He knows Hillary Clinton inside and out and he's acutely aware of her vulnerabilities. He figured out how to get her despicable husband elected and he's probably capable of figuring out how to defeat her. Carville is an enigmatic fellow, married to a staunch Republican, and one could envision him reveling in the challenge of greasing the skids of her downfall.

BACK TO THE TOP AND ALL OF THAT AFOREMENTIONED EXCELLENT CONTENT

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Are there no limits to their hate?

The hate group known as TobaccoFreeCA is running an expensive series of television ads in California in which a smoker is juxtapositioned in split screen with a rat. If you thought smokervoter.com was stretching the truth by labeling the anti-tobacco klans as bona fide hate groups this should leave no doubt. The Ku Klux Klan in their heyday never bought television time to spread their hate messages. The Skinheads probably don't have that kind of money to spend. It's doubtful that the networks would run ads for either anyway. We want to know who the ad executive is that pre-screened this abomination and saw nothing wrong with it.

They couch their ad-hominem attack with some references to Big Tobacco purposely hooking smokers like lab rats, but it's not a corporation next to the rat image, it's a flesh and blood fellow human being smoking a cigarette. This is not an accident, it is by design. The purpose of this ad is to equate smokers to rats in peoples minds. This is sick and it is hateful, period.

Did TobaccoFreeCA screen old Joseph Goebbels footage to get in the mood for this ad? Hitler's Third Reich was also really down on smoking, so they're in good company with old Joe. If you think this kind of hate propaganda is justifiable in the name of public health, you need to check your mental health. You've got a dangerous obsession that has overcome you like the mass hysteria that overcame Germany in the 40's.

They're also running ads which basically call on smokers to be denied housing. They show cigarette smoke flowing through baseboards and electrical outlets and they carry on with the shopworn toxic second hand smoke drivel. Ask any carpenter about the likelihood of this being possible. It shows the extreme paranoia that has gotten to these folks. They're coming to take me away, hah, hah...they can't sleep because there's a smoker somewhere enjoying a cig...check under the bed, there's a smoker under every one.

So there you have it folks, smokers are rats and they should be forced to live in caves and you still think it's a stretch to call anti-smoking activists well-disguised hate groups?

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Bush Vetoes S-CHIP

Pelosi's S-CHIP Press Conference

Smoking Linked to 9/11

Business Owners Perspective

Celebrity Look-alikes: Lenin and Rob Reiner

To come back to this index just click on the cherries at the end of the article!

SOAK THE POOR, SAVE THE CHILDREN

Whenever a hot potato issue such as national health care becomes hopelessly insolvable, due to the various competing factions such as doctors, lawyers, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies, politicians throw in the towel and reach for the expedient solution to everything these days...tax the smokers. Smokers represent only twenty percent of the constituency at best and are easily sacrificed. They come "pre-demonized" by twenty years of social slander by the mainstream media and the untouchable public health organizations (hate groups) like the American Lung Association. However a big huge right hook could come out of nowhere and send the unwary Senator to the canvas for the ten count. That would be the galvanizing of this twenty percent of voters into a potent voting bloc. The tendency for human beings to group together in a common defense posture for their literal survival portends this eventuality. Payback is a five letter word that starts with a B.

Once again we're witnessing another example of taxation by segregation in a new bill introduced by Senator Grassley (R-Iowa) wherein the twenty percent of voters that happen to smoke are going to pay for healthcare for the poor children of this country. This technique was pioneered by Rob Reiner in California with his $5/carton tax initiative and was quickly latched onto by Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Teddy Kennedy and others. Notice how notorious "friends of the poor" like Clinton and Kennedy suddenly changed their tune by adopting this hideous strategy in their campaign to tax smokers for everyone else's healthcare. It's a well established fact that cigarette taxes impact disproportionately on lower income citizens, but that appears to be okay with the Clintons and Kennedys. They're quick to point out that once taxes are raised the poor will be forced to quit smoking or go broke paying for cigarettes, but we all know how that goes. Case studies indicate that very few people quit smoking but apparently well educated people like these folks and their large research staffs missed this readily available information. This goes to show how these leaders really view the poor, as a class of citizens that need to be forced into behavioral adjustment for their own good by sanctions initiated by the educated and wealthy ruling class. This same sickening patronizing attitude was used to "civilize" the Native Americans during early United States history.

This entire taxation by segregation strategy is inherently dangerous to our system of government. Tax policy has always been designed to spread the pain equally throughout the populace in a nod to basic fairness and improved compliance. Once you start purposely segmenting the tax burden by demographic slice you've destroyed this principle. You end up with one grouping of taxpayers, invariably a minority cluster of the whole, paying for the pet programs of the rest. The temptation to use this strategy is rather obvious, the political math is perfect. Candidates promise government benefits to the majority (the coin of the realm for politicians) and send the bill to the few who didn't vote for them for prompt payment. Large gain and very little pain.

The fact that Senator Grassley comes from the right side of the aisle is a rather new twist. Before his current disastrous Immigration Bill Folly (which cost him any chance at the presidency), John McCain once teamed up with Ted Kennedy during the Clinton administration to raise Federal cigarette taxes. Only the valiant efforts of Bob Dole (R-Kansas) killed this legislation, which would have cost the average smoker a lot of money. Had the smoking voters managed to vote in sync in the election of 1996, perhaps as gratitude to Mr. Dole, Clinton would have been the one term President he so deserved to be.

These are two examples of Republicans resorting to the demonize, separate and tax stratagem, but overall Republicans have the better record of the two main parties. The Democrats have definitely taken the lead in the great war on smokers. If smokers ever hope to join together to make a difference in the next election, anomalies like the two noted examples should not be given too much weight.

You might find the Republicans to be repugnant for their Chickenhawk contingent with armchair warriors like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney leading the charge to Baghdad with a Texas Air National Guard pilot at the controls. One might find themselves perplexed by the pious preaching of the born again Senator who is then caught with the prostitute. There are times though when, in the name of self preservation, you've got to hold your nose and pull the lever for the lesser of two evils. Given the overall track record of the last twenty years, it would be a disastrous mistake in the long run for smokers to vote for a Democrat. The anti-smoking political lynch mob got their start during the Clinton White House and pretty much came to an end when Bush took over the reins, at least at the federal level. This much should be duly noted. As an alternative the Democrat who smokes and votes should vote for the Green Party or Peace and Freedom candidate. You remain true to your conscience, you're not voting Republican, but you are denying the presidency to Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton will seriously deplete your disposable income if she's elected, this is for sure.

And so we now add the name Grassley R-Iowa to the SMOKERVOTER SHIT LIST for defeat in his next election. He will be joining John McCain R-Ariz and former Republican Michael Bloomberg, the Nanny Mayor of New York City, on the right side of the ledger. Orrin Hatch R-Utah earns a place with his appearance as one of Nancy Pelosi's carnies at the media circus press conference following Bush's veto of the S-CHIP bill.

SEPARATELY WE ARE DOOMED TO BEING TAXED OUT OF EXISTENCE

TOGETHER WE WILL DECIDE WHO THE NEXT PRESIDENT, SENATOR, CONGRESSMAN, GOVERNOR, MAYOR AND COUNCILMAN WILL BE.

REMEMBER HOW CLOSE THE LAST FEW PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS WERE?

NOW PICTURE TWENTY PERCENT OF THE ELECTORATE VOTING IN UNISON. PICTURE YOURSELF AS A MEMBER OF SMOKERVOTER.COM, AN UNAPOLOGETIC AMERICAN SMOKER WITH THE POWER AT YOUR FINGERTIPS TO DECIDE THE FUTURE OF AMERICA and PUT AN UNCEREMONIOUS END TO THE NANNY STATE ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!

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If you're fed up with the ever increasing cost of smoking, head on over to ryomag.com (RYO = Roll Your Own) and spend a couple of hours on Dave Brown's magnificent website. He covers everything you will need to know about rolling your own tobacco products and saving a ton of dinero in the process. But there's a whole lot more than that to this page. On top of some excellent content on Astronomy and RV'ing, there's Dave's thoughtful and insightful opinions on the anti-tobacco lobbies and personal freedom. Mr. SCSI (his moniker) employs all the delicacy of a 28-ounce carpenters framing hammer to drive home his excellent musings on the neo-Prohibitionists and New Segregationists intent on turning our beloved country into Moscow West.

Warning: this page is huge and there is so much great content that you might want to get out your rolling machine, cigarette tubes and tobacco bag and prepare to roll a pack or two as you peruse the Musings of a Desert Rat @ ryomag.com...

Here is the link to Audrey Silks website. Support her all the way. She's been fighting for our rights for a long time now. Her site is officially titled NYC C.L.A.S.H. which officially stands for Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment. Click Away---> http://www.nycclash.com

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Leg Iron's utterly fantastic blog from the UK. This is an absolute MUST READ: Underdogs Bite Upwards

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Frank Davis: Yet another great blog from Great Britain: Banging on About the Smoking Ban

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Thank you Mr. President for your veto of the S-CHIP Bill and for recognizing the humanity and existence of over twenty percent of the people.

Once again a Democrat, Charles Rangel of New York, has decided that taxpayers who happen to smoke should be singled out to pay for a huge spending program with the familiar refrain of "It's for the Children". If you smoke do not vote for any Democrat!!! And watch out for some of those Republicans too, as the bill was co-sponsored by Senator Grassley (R)-Iowa.

George Bush has vetoed the SCHIP program and this is the hot topic of the moment on the talk show circuit. Bush vetoed the bill on many grounds including the fact that it represented a tax increase. One couldn't help but notice that at the press conference announcing his veto, one reporter tried to score kissy points with his nanny state colleagues by asking the president if the problem was specifically with the increase in cigarette taxes. Bush responded that he was against " a tax increase", thus acknowledging that the 20% of the populace that smoke do indeed exist, have heartbeats and would soon find their disposable income dropping if this passed. Thank you Mr. President, thank you. This reporters attitude reflected an ongoing trend which seemingly says that a tax increase on the demonic creatures that smoke is not really a tax increase, because smokers are not really full fledged citizens. Had this tax increase been evenly distributed throughout the general population there would have been political hell to pay. This attitude has got to stop, and Charlie Rangel and the Democrats would be eating their words at the polls if all smokers would unite into a voting bloc.

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Say it ain't so, are there really that many naive suckers in the USA?

The traveling snake oil circus show known as a Democratic Party press conference is a benumbing spectacle. The mother hen Nancy Pelosi, with the oversize pearl necklace a la June Cleaver, is always front and center. Strategically placed below her are the saucer-eyed innocent children as she delivers her sales pitch. The carnies are always standing to the left and right shaking their heads in unison as she pleads for universal health insurance for the children and accuses the Republicans of not caring about poor children (whose parents earn a paltry $83K/Yr). The whole thing is just so patronizing and sappy. It amounts to an incredible insult to the intelligence of the average American to think that they can't see through the whole staged affair. Apparently a whole lot of people eat it up and line up in droves to buy bottles of snake oil elixir went it's over. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House.

Incidentally, that isn't one of the saucer-eyed children off to Nancy's side, it's Paul Garfunkel (or is it Art Simon, who can remember!?). The great Mr. Peace and Love, the guy who penned "Bridge Over Troubled Water" has now signed on to help stick the knife into a captive minority group.

The traveling circus was common at the turn of the century when most people were lucky to get past the sixth grade. To think that this kind of shtick still flies in the year 2007 is scary.

Not mentioned nor ever asked about by the reporters with their microphones and popping flashbulbs is how Nancy and the carnies plan to pay for the children's medical bills. Read between the lines (or the fine print in the legislation) and it will perpetually be the smokers of America stuck with the invoice. The stealthy omission of this fact is crucial, as the Dem's are intent on not appearing to be the tax and spend party of old. In a sense they are avoiding a general tax increase by sloughing the whole thing off on the twenty percent of the electorate that smokes cigarettes.

These are the same Democrats who claim to be the champion of all minority groups. The same Democrats who carve out their current majority status by splicing together all of the various minority voters. Although they've apparently written off a minority group of around 20% (the smokers), they're still compelled by the political math to accept their votes. The real question is why do people who smoke cigarettes ever vote for these guys? They must truly relish the pain of being taxed out of house and home. Have they become so intimidated and self-loathing from the ad nauseum media assault on their character that they no longer mind having their bank accounts drained?

Actually this may end up as a backdoor way to get health insurance for the kids of some lower income citizens. Somewhere around 53% of tobacco taxes are paid out by people earning less than $30,000 per year. The S-CHIP bill would be paid for with a sixty-one cent increase on each pack of cigarettes. A one pack per day smoker would end up paying an additional $223 per year under the provisions of the bill. If they get a healthcare policy for their kids in the process, that's a pretty good deal. As a matter of fact, they might consider putting that on the pack right next to the Surgeon General's Warning.

The line for Pelosi's Magic Healthcare Elixir forms to the left of the circus tent folks, get yours now.....

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Smoking linked to 9/11 and Global Warming

Can this headline be far off? The disinformation syndrome of the smoker-haters seems to know no limits. No doubt some Clintonesqe kook will link smoking to 9/11. Hey, maybe Bin Laden, as a devout Muslim, so hated tobacco that he ordered the planes into the Twin Towers. Al Gore's legions will somehow link a mythical thick layer of secondhand cigarette smoke ringing the earth to global warming. Those who drive cars or operate coal fired power plants belching exhaust fumes will all be magically absolved when it is suddenly discovered that it is actually cigarette smoke that's causing world temperatures to rise. No matter that if you put two people in two rooms, one with ten people chain-smoking and the other with an idling automobile, one would emerge slightly irritated and the other would be dead on arrival. Let's not let facts get in the way of mass hysteria and groupthink misinformation.

Smoking is the only cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Life is ultimately fatal. Listen to the smoker-haters long enough and you might come away with the notion that, if not for smoking, everyone in this country could live forever. This is part and parcel to their irritating mindset that conveniently ignores every other means of dying on this planet. Obesity, which incidentally smoking can help lessen, is yacked about but you never hear much about seriously taxing fat. Certainly not to the extent of the present doubling and tripling of tobacco taxes and future plans to quadruple and quintuple them. No, my friends, supertaxing fat content would be goring the oxen of too many people and would never fly. It's the Machievellian thing to do to single out a minority group (20% in the case of smokers), and nail them. That way the rest of the folks can go right on with their couch potato lives of gorging on fast food with complete inpunity and living forever and a day in the process. In the perfect world of modern day America, death is preventable as long as you don't smoke, got that kids?

Watch out for Universal Health Care

Believe it or not everyone eventually dies. Unless you die in a car crash, on the battlefield or are murdered, you'll probably succumb to a disease of some kind. With this in mind, Universal Health Care is making the rounds on the campaign trail. Now you might think that since everyone dies and everyone needs healthcare, that everyone might want to kick in some cash to the kitty. But watch carefully because if things continue as they've been going, smokers will get stuck with the entire bill for Universal Health Care.

Take a look at the current squabble over the S-CHIP legislation. Can there be any link to smoking and health care coverage for poor children under twelve years of age? How many twelve year olds smoke? Could it really be that in some cases the majority of the benefits (reportedly 55% in New Jersey) are being used to cover adults? So it's another free ride for the majority (non-smokers) placed on the backs of the 20% of the people that smoke. Meet the new political math of the day. It all began on Day One when the Clinton's moved into the White House, Hillary banned smoking and Bill started his War on Tobacco. Bill incidentally continued chewing on cigars and didn't inhale when he smoked pot in college, yeah, right Bill. And he didn't have sex with that lady, too.

As the campaigns progress and the candidates are probed deeper on how to pay for this healthcare, you'll likely see the tobacco tax emerge as the magic elixir to the problem. The politicians have completely discounted the smoking voters' potential to swing the election. However, if you punish a big enough group (let's say 20% of the electorate) of the people for too long, you shouldn't be surprised when they take action and retaliate against you. Are you listening Mr. and Mrs. Candidate?

Is this website a shill for the Republicans and the Tobacco Industry?

Sorry folks, wouldn't that be expedient for all the smoker-haters to believe and spread around like so much secondhand smoke nonsense. The fact is Democrats and Bill and Hillary Clinton are the founding fathers and mothers of the War on Tobacco. Before they got into the White House can anyone remember smoking being such a pressing issue? How much did a pack of smokes cost before they came along? Watch any movie produced before 1990 and you'll see a completely different attitude toward the personal choice of whether to smoke or not to smoke. You might also notice that the person on the receiving end of a puff of cigarette smoke didn't immediately drop dead on the spot.

Despite all of their kum-bai-yas there is no one more intolerant than a convinced Democrat. Notwithstanding the blue meanie characterization of the Republicans as the 1984 party, it is much more likely that the Democrats will bring on Big Brother, in the name of love, of course. Be especially leery of anyone who overuses the word appropriate. Watch out when the term behavior modification slips into the national lexicon as an appropriate use of governmental power.

The agenda of this website is focused more on voting out of office anyone who discounts you, the American smoking public, as an entity. Let's say that you smoke and are a long time Democrat or that you dislike George Bush or the Republican Party in general. What can you do to keep your rights and disposable income intact? How about voting for the Green Party candidate or maybe the Libertarian candidate instead? What is imperative is that you don't vote for the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, or you will get stuck with the bill for Universal Health Care. Pat Buchanan mentioned something the other day on Meet the Press about the Democrats favoring a Federal law banning smoking in public during their latest debate.

Will Barack Obama become a typical ex-smoker?

By now everyone knows that Barack Obama used to smoke. Eleanor Clift, the woman on McLaughlin's Issue One, dropped this bombshell on the show early on in the campaign and was simply aghast when she learned this. She predicted this would be such a big issue that it might cost him the nomination. Talk about style over substance. Obama might be the best man for the job and extremely bright and honest, but if he smokes it all goes out the window.

Now the big question here at smokervoter.com is if Barack ends up winning will he turn out to be the proverbial ex-smoking hypocrite and pass all sorts of laws taxing and banning it? It would be nice to see a reporter probe this at one of his press conferences.

On the other hand Obama, as a former recipient of the smoking demonization propaganda crusade, might even show some political courage and call off the dogs. How poignant would it be for him to be the guy to expose the anti-tobacco people for what they truly are; a bunch of well-disguised hate groups parading around as public health advocates.

OK, let's go back to the article we were reading before being so rudely interrupted by this link.

The American Cancer Society: Looking for the cure or the latest hate group?

The once proud organization looks to have degenerated into a common garden variety hate group. Why don't they use their power and money to search for THE CURE? Is lung cancer the only cancer left on the planet? Apparently so, as this is the ACS's main purpose nowadays. Lately they've fallen in with hate-mongers and do-gooders and as a result have lost all of their former credibility. You might think that they would pick up the tab for expensive Nicorette gum for all smoking Americans if they really wanted to do something constructive. Instead they're on the gravy train created by tobacco sin taxes and they study, study and study some more on the smoking habit and collect, collect and collect filthy lucre in the process.

The American Cancer Society has become a cancer on the body politic of this country. Personal freedoms are dying in their wake. Do more than just hang up when they call asking for donations, tell them what you really think of them. Tell them their white hoods are becoming clearly visible under the white smocks. Ask them what ever became of finding the cure.

The circular semantics debate of what constitutes a hate group

You might find yourself going around and around with your progressive friends on whether anti-smoking activists are becoming the New Segregationists of America. They'll claim it is not a race, creed or religion they're going after but a human behavior they so hate. The fact is that when one group of people get together with the expressed purpose of making another group of people's lives miserable--you've got a bona fide hate group going. They'll usually counter with the argument that people band together against murder. Then they'll throw in the ridiculous simile of smokers as murderers with their second hand smoke killing 50,000 people a year. This is when you might inquire how they get to their jobs or to the store. If they get there with a carbon monoxide spewing automobile they become fellow murderers. By this time you've become dizzy with the endless semantics game and it's time to excuse yourself and go have a cigarette to calm down and clear your head.

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If you're an American business owner and can afford to lose a lot of business from one in five of your customers, don't read on....

Tobacco taxes or sin taxes, as they are otherwise known, have been draining disposable income from smokers for the past couple of decades. For example, the S-CHIP legislation, which the President recently vetoed, was slated to siphon off $35 Billion in purchasing power from smokers and send it down a non-productive sinkhole called a government program. Rob Reiner out in California had to step down from his commission that had so far collected $6 Billion from smokers. It appears that he passed out $23 million to his showbiz friends to produce PSA's (public service announcements) in favor of yet another initiative that would have drained even more disposable income from wealthy Californians. A couple of billion here and a couple of billion there adds up.

Coastal cities all played catch up with each other to ban smoking on their beaches last year. Needless to say, anyone who smokes will think twice about visiting these towns in the future as a result. When you hang out the NOT WELCOME sign don't be surprised when retail sales drop.

Of course, the mainstream media will produce the anecdotal business owner whose sales have actually increased for your purview, but it would be wise to do a reality check of your own. Does anyone really believe that you can go on removing spending money from wallets and purses endlessly with no ill effect on sales? Does irritating and chastising one in five of your customers seem like a good business plan?

Personal income rises three or four percent in a really good year. If cigarette taxes go up forty or fifty percent, which is common, in that same good year your smoking customers won't be able to earn their way out of this income hit. That purchasing power is gone, down the drain and into the coffers of the government, never to be recorded on your sales ledger.

Jot down the name of that mayor or councilman who brought up an anti-smoking ordinance and do what you can do to make sure this is their last term in office. Think twice about and ponder the hidden outcome of the next statewide voter initiative that taxes tobacco products. One in five of your customers will thank you.

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THE SIMILARITIES DON'T END THERE

Rob Reiner and Lenin have a lot more in common than just their looks. First of all, Archie Bunker despised both of them. They both put the interests of the State above the interests of the individual. They both find early indoctrination critical in molding good model citizens (as in Rob Reiner's FIRST 5 pre-school education pet project, which he funded on the backs of California smokers). Reiner's First 5 is the neo-hippie counterpart to Hitler's Youth brigades, except that it substitutes Corporate America and smokers for the Jews. Both men felt that behavior modification was an appropriate role for the State. They're equally amenable to state planning for the economy. Neither had much respect for private property. Reiner fought some property owners tooth and nail in Southern California who wanted to build on their own land. And finally both mentor and disciple believe strongly in the redistribution of income. Wait a minute !!!...Reiner redistributed the income of California's working poor with his Proposition 10 cigarette tax, headed the commission set up by the bill, and then proceeded to distribute the income to his wealthy showbiz friends in Hollywood --- something Lenin certainly would not have approved of.