Wake me at that hour, and unless I hit Lotto or my favorite aunt died, you're history. But this news out of New City has me jumping. I even made coffee for my wife.

The vote against was 11-10. One county, one vote. To those of us who have been vainly fighting the Nicotine Nazis, it felt like Gettysburg.

Without scientific evidence — indeed, against the best scientific evidence — the Nicotine Nazis have turned brothers against brothers, sisters against sisters. In work places, smokers are forced into the streets to fight pneumonia.

Can this have been the battle that turned the war? It can't be true, but as the songwriter wrote, this time the dream's on me. And the dream is that we will wake up as a nation and put away the nightmare that poses as goodness and health but is nothing more than tyranny.

The justification is "public health." This was Hitler's excuse for banning smoking in the Third Reich. The Germans, who happily followed the Fuhrer's order to burn Jews, refused to stop lighting their cigarettes.

But Americans keep going like lemmings to the dictates of the Clintons of Washington and the Giulianis and Vallones of New York.

All on the basis of junk science. A few years ago, the feds told us that secondary smoke caused lung cancer in 3,000 people a year. Milk kills more people on better statistics. But this Environmental Protection Agency study gave the kosher label to the Nicotine Nazis.

In March, the World Health Organization, against its theology and against its will, produced a report that completely destroyed this, showed it to be nonsense. After spending millions on a seven-year study in 12 European countries to prove that secondhand smoke causes cancer, the WHO came up empty!

No connection between secondhand smoke and cancer. Zippo. But only if you read it here would you know. The media in America have censored this study, the only legitimate one ever conducted. Why? Because health never had anything to do with the ban on smoking; it's simply a matter of control by those who wish to run our lives.

And nothing proves this better than the reaction to statistics that showed that women who had abortions were at risk of breast cancer twice as much as women who lived with smokers were at risk to lung cancer.

Seven studies have shown this link between abortion and breast cancer. Did you know it? It certainly hasn't been page 1 in the papers. I discovered it by reading a new book, "For Your Own Good" by Jacob Sullum.

Sullum points out that the numbers on abortion and breast cancer are less than required by science. But whereas the public health authorities and the media have used this fact to discredit the abortion statistics, they have done the opposite with secondhand smoke.

Political correctness is the difference, says Sullum, and of course he's right. And of course that's why his book is unlikely to ever make the best-seller lists. Imagine anybody for abortion, any news media, running for Right to Life on these statistics? And yet these are the same people, or most of them, who want to kill smoking in saloons and stadiums and beaches.

Well, we won one in New City. In love, new is good. We'll see about law.

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