Of note is the breakdown in the votes by the Supreme Court justices.  Those justices considered "conservative" voted for the First Amendment while those considered "liberal" voted to curb free speech.  Nothing more demonstrates that these traditional labels are useless in meaningful discussions.  What is called "conservative" more closely resembles the classical liberalism upon which this republic was founded when individual liberty was valued.  What is now called "liberal" or "progressive" signifies statism where an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent rule by elites holds sway.

The American people are the winners in yesterday's decision but the anti-tobacco enterprise will not give up its quest to control the tobacco industry and its customers.  Look for increasing strident calls for congressional action to override the Supreme Court's ruling.

Excellent article from Debra J. Saunders of The San Francisco Chronicle on the strange propensity of Americans to hand willingly over large chunks of personal liberty in the name of Public Safety.  Saunders also cites a study that will be useful ammunition when the time comes for the nannies to impose a Smoking ban for drivers.  Of all the listed distractions involved in driving, smoking rates dead last.

Carpel tunnel syndrome didn't exist until it was invented to explain the pain data entry personnel and other heavy users of computers experience.  It is a matter of debate whether the syndrome is real or whether it is another whipped up excuse for indulging in the hypochondria that many Americans adore.  What isn't a matter of debate is that smoking in this country has been an integral and beneficial component of the culture for around 400 years.  No reports of carpel tunnel syndrome from the legions of office workers happily puffing their cigarettes while typing on their manual typewriters before anti-tobacco hit the scene.

That anti-tobacco stooges behave like the con artists they are is understandable.  Everyone has to make a buck.  What is is offensive is that the writer of this piece of bilge claims to be able to write intelligently about technology.  Send her back to Junior High.

Proclaiming that Bill Clinton would never have intervened in the Korean dispute, former government officials wax righteous over the previous administration's commitment to address the "the potential global epidemic of diseases caused by tobacco use."  On his last day in office the former president signed an executive order that "agencies shall not promote the export of tobacco products or 'seek the reduction or removal of foreign government restrictions on the marketing and advertising' of tobacco products".

The media neglect to mention that this executive order has not - and probably will never - go into effect.  More egregious is the omission that Bill Clinton had no scruples in aiding the Communist Chinese government's tobacco monopoly or accepting thousands of dollars from Chinese tobacco executives.

The realization that kids need risk is not growing in the United States, land of the hysterical hypochondriacs.  Playgrounds throughout the country were neutered decades ago and the games kids have enjoyed for decades are now considered too rough and competitive for our precious darlings.  Ailments that were extremely rare like asthma and food allergies are epidemic in today's anemic and sterile environments.  Combine the safety paranoia with the politically correct indoctrination that passes for education in the public schools and a generation of whining weaklings is the inevitable result.

The British, at least, are beginning to recognize that smothering their offspring is not smart and are taking baby step in providing a more enjoyable environment for children.  With the trial lawyers firmly in control, the United States remains mired in the same old groove.

Be sure to savor the photo from the 1920's at the bottom of the article.  Those really were the days!

For a satirical take on America's risk-free psychosis check out John Leo's Simon Says Take Another Step Towards Mindless Inclusion

A dissent by Justice Breyer called into question the constitutionality of a federal program that requires tobacco companies to pay for anti-smoking advertising.

Not long ago anti-tobacco was shrieking that California's obnoxious anti-smoking campaign was a huge success.  The evidence?  Although smoking had declined everywhere in the United States, in California the decline was far greater than in those states not blessed by taxpayer-funded anti-tobacco education.  The benefit to society?  Lung cancer rates declined more in the Golden State than in any other state.  The message?  More money needed for expensive anti-tobacco education campaigns.

Yesterday the Wisconsin State Journal obliged the anti-tobacco enterprise by passing on a press release designed to extract anti-tobacco education money from the state government.  The thrust of the "story" is that lung cancer rates have risen in Wisconsin in the past 20 years!  That's right, the lung cancer rate has risen while smoking rates have declined, although the press release leaves out that significant fact.

"We're really quite shocked by the results," said Dr. Patrick Remington, associate director of the UW Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

What's shocking is that the press release states that lung cancer rates have increased on a national level as well.  How can this be when, for the past 30 years, the Patrick Remingtons and other drones in the anti-tobacco hive have promised that reducing smoking will reduce lung cancer?  

What's not shocking is the overt financial stake held by anti-tobacco and the blithely stated objective of this "study":

• "Announcement of the study was partially aimed at countering a proposal to cut funding for the Wisconsin Tobacco Control Board."

Remove "partially" and the statement is totally true. 

Anti-tobacco is presenting us with two equations:  

• Declining smoking rates equal lower lung cancer rates

• Declining smoking rates equal higher lung cancer rates

Both cannot be true if, as anti-tobacco preaches, smoking causes lung cancer but the contradiction can be understood by appending the following onto the equations:

• WE NEED MORE MONEY FOR TOBACCO CONTROL

NEW YORK BANS CELL PHONES WHILE DRIVING - Added June 27 - The Nanny State moves forward as New York passes a law forbidding drivers from talking on hand-held cell phones.  New York Big Mother beat out Big Mom in California which is expected to rush a similar bill through that state's legislature. The Big Mothers of Britain and Italy have also laid down the same sort of laws in those countries.

With no credible studies to back up the ban, proponents were forced to use anecdotal evidence to justify the intrusion of the state government into private individuals' cars.  It's "feel good" legislation that will not make the roads any more safe.  Worse, it sets the precedent of putting the government in the driving seat.  It won't take long before under worked legislators are exploring the possibility of banning eating, drinking, makeup applying, radio station changing, radio listening, conversing, fighting children and, of course, smoking from automobiles.

DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON'T - Added June 27 -A Vermont store owner is in big trouble for doing what he considered the right thing.  An underage youth attempted to buy some smokes where apon the owner cut to ribbons the drivers license offered as proof of age.  Shredding the document, the owner reasoned, prevented the minor from pulling the same stunt on other merchants.  Trouble is the youth was working for the state's Liquor Control on a tobacco sting and now the owner could face criminal charges for destroying private property.

No one comes out looking good in this incident.  The self-righteous store owner who destroyed the license "to stop a kid from doing the wrong thing" exemplifies an officiousness that is seriously annoying.  The underage brown shirt wannabe typifies an American type of thuggery that gives another black eye to the country's educational establishment and reveals the shallowness of the parenting ethos.  The state collaborates with anti-tobacco into initiating a crime just to get a few extra dollars from the tobacco settlement and then has the nerve to prosecute an owner for indignantly ending the tobacco purchasing plans of a minor.  Anti-tobacco is corrupting our society for the sole end of enriching itself.

This concise and powerful piece by Linda Bowles leaves no stone unturned in exposing the takeover of our personal lives by the government and its special interest hand maidens.  It's obvious that a government that can coerce us into behaving as it dictates can move easily to the next step of dictating how and what we think.

CALIFORNIA KIDS DISCOVER CIGARS - Added June 25 - "I've seen teenagers smoking cigars, not necessarily on our campus, but in front of movie theaters, supermarkets and coffeehouses," Naseem Ehsan, 17, says. "I think there's some type of consensus out there telling kids that smoking cigars is acceptable. Well, I think it stinks.  I was kind of surprised to see Leonardo firing up a cigar in 'Titanic,' . It's really a big impact on kids when the main characters are smoking cigars in movies like 'Titanic' and 'American Beauty.' And these movies are Academy Award-winners."

It doesn't matter what Naseem Ehsan thinks or says.  Losers never count, especially those trotted out by anti-tobacco to fulfill the "for the children" illusion that must be maintained to attack around 60 million American adults who enjoy tobacco.  The point of this story is to show once again that anti-tobacco's smoking campaigns are the primary reason that underage smoking rates are skyrocketing, even in California.  Since anti-tobacco's professed goal is such a failure, why are the politicians continuing to funnel millions into this futile effort?

HOW COULD HE NOT HAVE KNOWN? - Added June 25 - "...he could not have been oblivious to the surgeon general's warning.  Congress had ordered the nation's tobacco companies to emblazon it on every pack, carton and container of cigarettes they sold -- "Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.  Boeken chose to ignore that warning. He continued to enjoy his smokes for the next 35 years. And, in 1999, the Los Angeles County man was diagnosed with lung cancer."

Somehow the man who stands to collect $3-billion from Philip Morris managed to convince a jury that he had no idea that smoking might lead to ill health and, in his case, cancer.  Such willful ignorance is impossible to believe and yet the Los Angeles jury backed up his preposterous contention.  One issue of this case that is cause for alarm is that Americans seem to have a problem accepting personal responsibility.  That anti-tobacco wishes to suck dry, then destroy, the tobacco industry is easily understandable.  What isn't so easy to digest is that Americans are willing to suspend their own intellect to reward people who by their own words are the epitome of irresponsibility.

AD AGENCY SAYS NO TO ANTI-TOBACCO -  Added June 25- Complaints from the public have persuaded an ad agency to turn down billboard ads from Iowa's anti-tobacco program.  The ads purport to show the ill effects of indulging in chew tobacco.  The ads are repulsive and have turned off the public.  To its credit the ad agency does not want to be associated with such an unpopular campaign.

Anti-tobacco has no shame.  Without any evidence that gruesome and inaccurate campaigns have any effect on underage tobacco usage, the campaigns continue since the money must be spent and it's so fun to demonize corporations.  Those who run  anti-tobacco campaigns are unable to find productive work in the private sector and these ads demonstrate why that is.

ANTI-TOBACCO CROWD IMAGINES GOD ON ITS SIDE - Added June 25 - "If investment of a portion of state pension money in tobacco stocks can help secure the funds to provide state employees with a reasonably comfortable retirement, then Bush, Milligan and Gallagher stand on firm financial and moral ground.  As for the moral ground on which the pious anti-tobacco zealots are standing, it's been shaky from the start."

Moral outrage by gangsters flows thick in Florida over the state's decision to invest state pension funds in tobacco stock.  Beyond the absurdity of attempting to meddle in fiscal affairs in which anti-tobacco has no expertise, the hypocrisy of a gang that is filthy rich only because of tobacco is enough to make sensible people recoil in disgust.

USA: ANOTHER INSULT TO LIBERTY AND CITIZENS' RIGHTS - Added June 22 - "Anti-smoking activists think the Justice Department's recently announced effort to settle its lawsuit against the tobacco industry is an outrage, and they're right. The only honorable thing to do with this lawsuit is to drop it immediately. The federal government's attempt to extort billions of dollars from smokers (who would pick up the tab for any settlement through higher cigarette prices) was a transparent sham from the beginning."

The International Monetary Fund uses financial blackmail to force countries to go antismoking and embrace pharmaceutical products - Added June 22 - Antitobacco knows no boundaries as much as it knows no morality or ethics. Nothing new so far. But in case anyone's been wondering why so many Third World countries seem to be hopping on the antismoking bandwagon, the following feed from Reuters should clarify that international blackmail is how the international antitobacco cartel twists the arm of those who do not want to submit to its political agenda of control based on false medical information, and statistics, on smoking: "Turkey's parliament late on Wednesday passed tobacco sector reform legislation essential to payment of the next tranche of a billion-dollar IMF crisis lending pact toward the end of June."

More inside. The international White Shirts do not hesitate to use this type of coercion to open the doors to their pharmaceutical masters, and force countries with real problems to adopt antitobacco, and expand the market of the deadly smoking cessation products to the entire planet. So much for national sovereignty, when countries are forced to change their internal politics by international gangsterism. The World Bank's plans for this type of coercion have been exposed by FORCES International long ago, as the WB is onE of the "pArtners" of the WHO in the criminal antitobacco enterprise. See: WHO: Yet Another Fight Against the Pandemic of Corruption.

ANTITOBACCO PASSIVE SMOKE FRAUD GOES GLOBAL - Added June 22 - The fraud about passive smoke, leading to smoking bans based on false science and propaganda, is going global, and so are the false statistics about the mortality of smoking. It is clear that  greater and greater investments are poured into the promotion of disinformation by the WHO and its pharmaceutical masters, which are knowingly lying to the world about passive smoke, the Fraud of the Century. Here are links to some articles. The fight for honesty and integrity of science, as well as personal liberties, must go global as well. We cannot afford that corruption and disinformation becomes a planetary pandemic, corrupting institutions all over the world. No one seems to ask the health "authorities" for proof of their fraudulent assertions; no one asks how the health "cost" of smoking is calculated; finally, no one seems to demand to know where the funding for the "studies" is coming from. The mortality figures of the World Health Organisation are simply fraudulent -- obtained with disease association with smoking exaggerated by many orders of magnitude -- and there is massive evidence of that fraud already. The WHO is simply stating its figures, but it provides no hard evidence for its basic data, which are not made available to the public. Confounding public health with politics and economics was first a creation of the Nazis, rediscovered by their heirs, the White Shirts; the world is falling for it again.

Russia Passes Anti-Tobacco Bill
Hong Kong Wants to Clear the Air, Limit Smoking