December 6 - Big Lie - Once upon a time in America, it was non-negotiable that the two boldest towns in the country were San Francisco and New York. The Barbary Coast and Hell's Kitchen were bound together thumb-to-nose against prohibitionists, who were described by our patron saint H.L. Mencken as those who feared that "somewhere, someone is having a good time."

Then, nine years ago, San Francisco left our hearts smoldering in an empty ashtray. Of all the gin joints in all the world, San Francisco was the first to ban smoking. And guess who wants to come to that smoke-free dinner -- the reformed smoker, the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael M. Bloomberg.

All the time in his testimony to the City Council and his bombardment in the media, Mayor Mike cites San Francisco, in a turn on Sinatra's anthem: "If they could kill it there we can kill it everywhere, it's up to you, New York, New York."

As a New Yorker, Sidney Zion doesn't know that San Francisco was not the first to ban smoking.  In fact the city never did ban smoking in restaurants and bars.  San Francisco went "smoke-free" because the anti-smokers finagled the state legislature to preempt local regulations.  When given the chance to vote on smoking, the citizens passed a very mild law that mandated smoking sections in restaurants and established some reasonable restrictions in workplaces.  Bars were not touched.  A few years after passing this law, the citizens were overridden by the anti-smoking fanatics in Sacramento.  Even after the statewide, nearly total smoking ban the noncompliance rate is very high in San Francisco.  The local, and completely biased, "Tobacco Control Section" admits that 40 percent of the city's bars refuse, after five years of harassment, to comply with the smoking ban.

Beyond that, Zion's piece about the phoniness of the secondhand smoke scare is completely accurate.  Bloomberg, or any other lying politician, can go on and on about the hazards of secondhand smoke but the evidence just doesn't exist.  Repeating a lie over and over may work in the short term to advance a political agenda but the repetition cannot transform the lie into the truth.

November 15 - Smoke Ban Still Up In The Air - City officials said yesterday that lawmakers would almost certainly not vote today on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's proposal to ban smoking in all public spaces in New York, meaning the measure might be overshadowed by the budget issue.

Mr. Bloomberg views the smoking bill as the most important piece of municipal legislation he has sought since taking office, and he had hoped to have the bill wrapped up by the Great American Smokeout on Nov. 21. But passage is now considered highly unlikely by that date, as the bill will now take a back seat to the intensifying budget negotiations taking place between the mayor's staff and the City Council.  (New York Times, 11/14/02)

November 13 - Smoke Police Invade The Philippines - City councilor Bonifacio Militar wants to make Davao City smoke free.  To that end the police arrested 70 smokers in two days.  Their crime, of course, was to light up in places that, with the stroke of the pen, became off limits to smoking.  Restaurants, billiard halls, bars, hotels, even the streets, are under the control of the smoke police.

The Philippines is a poor country with many serious problems.  Davao City is no exception but one anti-tobacco dictator has decreed that public resources must be drained to fuel his huger for power.  Even the Health Reich of California doesn't indulge in mass arrests of smokers.  As anti-tobacco finds fertile ground in the Third World, expect the persecution there to become more extreme.  Another western import that will have dire consequences.

October 31 - No On Smoking Ban But They'll Be Back - Although the proposed smoking ban was defeated by a council vote of 5 to 2 in West Bend, Wisconsin, the ban's proponents used an obscure law to arrange another vote next week.  Those who thought the matter closed expressed disappointment.

The city's business people, including those who don't allow smoking in their restaurants, are opposed to unwarranted intrusion in their affairs and turned out in high numbers to urge the council not to enact a smoking ban.  They know that their profits will dive if smokers are not welcome in restaurants.  The mayor, a supporter of the ban, believes otherwise.  Lashing out at the chamber of commerce for strongly opposing the proposal to ban smoking, he let loose with the following:

"He [Chamber of Commerce representative]  said the ordinance would hurt these businesses, but he never gave any proof or facts to support it."

And what proof or facts, Mr. Mayor, did you give for the preposterous notion that cigarette smoke in a well-ventilated, or even stuffy, restaurant is hazardous to health?  Of course, he gave none because there are none to give.

The West Bend business community and the 5 council members who killed the smoking ban bill are to be congratulated for refusing to be bullied by the anti-tobacco pressure groups who have neither facts nor justification for interfering in matters that are none of their business.

October 31 - City Smoking Ban Getting A Second Look - Fears of paying out big cash settlements to tavern owners if Helena’s clean air ordinance doesn’t stand legal muster have most city commissioners wondering if they could amend the smoking ban.

“I think if the bars and casinos would have been exempt in the first place...we wouldn’t be in a lawsuit,” said Commissioner Marc Parriman. He joined fellow board members Tom Pouliot and Steve Netschert in lending support for a legal opinion circulated by area tavern owners stating the commission could, in fact, amend the smoking ban.

Anti-tobacco foisted a California-type smoking ban on Helena, Montana.  A vote by the citizens then confirmed what the city council had legislated.  Bars and taverns, to their credit, then challenged the draconian law in court.  The city council thinks the plaintiffs have a chance of wining and would like to amend the law to allow smoking in bars and casinos.  Because the smoking ban, no matter how increasingly unpopular it is, was confirmed by a popular vote, the council may be stuck with a law that could cost the city a lot of money if the bars win at court.

Wherever anti-tobacco goes, confusion and bitterness follow.  Instead of more business in restaurants and bars, attendance declines and the small businesses who opposed the ban are left picking up the bill.  All rancor could be avoided if politicians realized that the anti-smokers are a tiny segment of the population.  A tiny segment that cannot make up for the slack off in business.

October 11 - Safe rooms for smokers - Even in Australia the effects of the hate campaigns based on the passive smoke fraud are reaching their logical conclusions. In the Australian city of Victoria, humiliating smokers by kicking them out to smoke in the streets like whores (to “protect” non smokers from dangers that do not exist) is no longer enough. The hatred against smokers is aggravated by most smokers' own nature. In spite of the humiliation, in fact, they keep on smoking without physical rebellion for a variety of reasons – among them, cowardice and the effect of endless propaganda, which is indispensable to keep them guilty and subdued. Moreover, the number of smokers does not decrease at all! What can be done next? Simple, even more humiliation: remove them from the streets, and force them into “safe ingesting rooms” – right alongside with heroin addicts.

“Smokers would be forced off the streets and into addict-style ‘safe ingesting rooms’ under a radical plan by Victoria's top health authority. Sealed smoking rooms would be set up across the city under the VicHealth plan, with signposts directing office workers in need of a nicotine fix. Busy shopping strips could also get the designated rooms and smokers could be made to pay to use them, much like some public toilets.”

Dr. Ron Borland is the co-director of VicHealth's Centre for Tobacco Control. He says: "Just as we don't want heroin addicts shooting up in back alleys, so too we don't want to push smokers into those situations; I believe there will be moves to ban pavement smoking as a public annoyance issue. It is difficult to justify this ban on public health grounds, “ continues the criminal, “but in terms of the annoyance factor, people have to walk through clouds of smoke to get into buildings and stand behind smokers and this will become an increasing problem."

It is clear, at this point, that smokers are no longer part of “the people,” just as Jews were no longer “the people” after Crystal Night. Segregation is happening again, but this time it is based on lifestyle rather than race, thus the same thing is called "public health" instead of "racism". The antismoking criminals who still desperately deny, ridicule – and even take offence at! – the historical and the ever-growing contemporary evidence that the persecution of smokers is of clear Nazi matrix will try to find yet another excuse, yet another lie to dissimulate the abuses, and to get people to get used to smokers’ ghettos a little bit at the time – to help them, or course. But the behaviour of "public health's" criminal minds leave no more room for doubt any longer. The sad news is: this will continue to the (very) bitter end until smokers decide to take power in their own hands, and to physically destroy the machine that destroys them as people with any force necessary. To know the alternative, just read the history books.

September 27 - Has Hell Frozen Over? - The specific issue addressed in this editorial is a huge cigarette tax increased placed on Missouri's ballot by anti-tobacco interests that will benefit financially if it is passed by the voters.  The editors are obviously not sympathetic to smokers, quite willing to insult them, in fact, with a slanderous headline, nor do they know anything about the frauds that have delivered smoking to the public arena.  They do have, however, some rudimentary common sense that is almost completely lacking in today's media.

They oppose the cigarette tax increase, generally for the wrong reasons, but what makes this editorial noteworthy is its solution to the tobacco issue:

"Proposition A proponents say more than 100,000 Missourians die each year from tobacco use and 17,000 children in the state take up smoking on a daily basis. Those statistics make a stronger case for banning tobacco than taxing it."

Thank you editors!  If, indeed, smoking is such a scourge with absolutely no redeeming virtues then the only logical, honorable and moral course to take is to prohibit it completely.  If, as the proponents say, 100,000 Missourians die each year from tobacco use -- one quarter of all those who die from smoking in the United States -- why is debate wasted on tax rates? Ban it.  Doing less means that the tobacco control industry as well as government at all levels is contributing to the death toll.  Alluding to alcohol prohibition is irrelevant.  When faced with slaughter on the magnitude of smoking, doing less than banning it completely is cowardly and reprehensible.

September 27 - Public Places - Just another smoking ban but this time, the politicians are lurching to reality.  The location is Eden Prairie, Minnesota and, as usual, anti-tobacco special interests are leading the charge to ban smoking in "public" places such as restaurants and bars.  As always, the word "public" is referring to private places, generally those where the public can enter if it chooses to do so.

Minnesota has not been fertile territory for the prohibitionists and again, it appears that anti-tobacco has lost.  Instead of the slam dunk that occurs in less enlightened places, the city council is listening to the voters and seems poised to drastically change the proposed law accordingly:

Council members are eyeing regulations much less restrictive on restaurants and other businesses than the all-inclusive sample ordinance it pulled from the city Web site. Indeed, all signs point to the council opting against enacting a mandatory smoke-free workplace ban in restaurants.

As the council agreed last week, the proposed ordinance will ban all smoking on publicly owned property within the city such as parks and schools.

The second paragraph defines "public" correctly and, although prohibiting a targeted segment of the city from enjoying the city-owned property they help finance is reprehensible, leaves private property alone.  The correct distinction between public and private property drawn by the Eden Prairie city council is encouraging and should be emulated everywhere.

September 26 - Double Talk At The Reno Airport - With no warning the directors of the Reno/Tahoe International Airport decreed that smokers are no longer welcome.  Ignoring protests from smokers, non-smokers and the tourism industry, the airport board took its marching orders from the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights by announcing that the two glass-enclosed smoking rooms within the terminals will be dismantled to make way for gift shop that will probably sell cigarettes that people can't smoke.

Using the ruse of the expanding gift shop to justify its capitulation to the tobacco control industry, airport officials are claiming that expanding the gift shop will increase revenues for the airport.  That is laughable since they admit that the Reno airport traffic is down 10 percent from last year.  How expanding a gift shop that has been selling aspirin and newspapers to a declining customer base while simultaneously throwing smokers out to the curb where there are no airport concessions on which to spend money, is an economic plan that is begging for failure.

The Reno airport is bucking a national trend back to accommodating smokers.  The new Denver airport, which initially relegated smoking customers to the outdoors, established smoking areas within the terminals.  Boston is the latest of a series of airports that has announced that smoking areas will be reintroduced.  As the promises of groups such as the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights are proven to be hollow, owners of airport concessions, as well as airport governing boards, are discovering that treating smokers as second-class passengers is bad for business.

September 16 - Anti-tobacco Judge Sets Smoking Policy In Private Homes - A judge in Lake County has barred the estranged parents of an 8-year-old girl from smoking in her presence or allowing anyone else to puff around her.  Legal experts say the custody case ruling is a first because the issue was brought up by the judge. Typically, a tobacco-free parent raises concerns about smoking, either looking for a bargaining chip or because of a child's health problem.

But it was Judge William Chinnock who asked about smoking during a hearing on visitation. The mother, who has custody of the girl identified only as Julie Anne, admitted that adults are allowed to smoke in her home.  Chinnock pointed out the dangers of children's exposure to secondhand smoke to the mother and her live-in boyfriend. The couple told the judge their relationship would be severely strained if smoking was banned in their home.

This day was predicted long ago by anyone who recognized the totalitarian nature of anti-tobacco.  The long arm of an anti-tobacco judge plucks a child from her home to satisfy his hatred of smokers.  This ruling is a first in that smoking was not an issue in the case and only became one when the judge inserted his personal biases and ignorance into an issue that is not his business.  Smoking has been used in child custody cases during the past few years by disgruntled individuals who are using the issue as a weapon to punish their spouses.

Whether Judge Chinnock's decision stands or not, such overreaching will be seen more often.  Anti-tobacco has never been reticent in admitting that its goal of eliminating smoking includes hardball tactics that are purposely designed to ruin people's lives.  They are deliberately attempting to drive wedges between smokers and nonsmokers.  Their problem, which they will never solve, is that smoking is culturally accepted, legal and widespread across all segments of society.  Nonsmokers have parents, friends, children, siblings, co-workers, lawyers, doctors, auto mechanics, on and on, who smoke.  As nonsmokers' loved ones are discriminated against, ridiculed and discounted, their generalized and, so far, mild distaste for anti-smoking rhetoric and actions will harden into righteous indignation and hatred.

It appears that Judge Chinnock has been waiting for just such a case in which to push the anti-smoking agenda.  The parents don't have an attorney indicating that they may not have the resources to appeal.  The judge's decision is a thorough compendium of secondhand smoke junk science, fully footnoted, as though it were written not by him but by an anti-tobacco professional.  Chinnock is retired and was pressed into service because the jurisdiction lacks judges.  He has noting to lose by issuing laughably inane statements such as, "secondhand smoking kills about the same number of Americans each year as died in the Vietnam War."  Too bad his zealotry is tearing up a family.