December 7  - And the winner is......Dr. Chris Carruthers!   Ottawa Hospital Chief of Staff  and medieval alchemist.

Attempting to sell a highly skeptical populace on the joys of prohibition, the high priests in white coats cast a hand-full of dried chicken bones onto the examining table and summoned up a study.  Banning smoking in restaurants and bars, intoned the study, will save $50-million in medical costs per year.

That's enough, said the white coats, to buy 17 MRI machines, fund 6,000 hip replacements or pay off the hospital's debt 2 and 1/2 times over, but don't count your chickens yet warned the High Priest Dr. Carruthers.  It could take years before the financial benefit from the anti-smoking bylaw accrues to the hospital.  Asking the owners facing financial ruin to be patient and have faith, the doctor expounds on the inscrutable mysteries of the study world.

"Studies don't show how quickly you can get cancer from smoking," he said. "It may be one cigarette, it may be one month of smoking. It's not conclusive."

One cigarette and it's curtains.  Smoking ban and it's millions of bucks for health.  Care to have this sawbones give you a physical?  For trying to turn statistical junk into gold and for scaring his patients nigh to death, Dr. Carruthers is a faith-shattering Jackass Of The Week.

November 30 - And the winner is.....Mark Rosen!   Seething Councilman from Garden Grove, California and portly potentate.

On an outing with his children to see the Harry Potter movie, Rosen was fuming as he waited in line.  People were smoking!  While standing in line with their kids!  In affluent Garden Grove!  Didn't they know that only the scum and riffraff smoke?  The promiscuous smoking so inflamed the bossy councilman that he plans to correct the lousy parental behavior with yet another law.

"There were these adults smoking cigarettes in these lines, around kids who are basically captive, and if adults don't have sense enough to not smoke in those confined quarters, then we ought to have a law that enforces it.  I call it my Harry Potter ordinance."

What about a law that protects the captive children of a city councilman from exposure to a ranting, raving, lunatic who uses an outing to the movies as an excuse to badger his constituents?  Call it the Daddy Dearest ordinance.

For confusing himself with Moses and for ruining an outing with his kids, Mark Rosen is a self-centered Jackass Of The Week.

November 16 - And the winner is...Gwyneth Paltrow!  Movie star and angst-ridden dodo bird.

Nearing the ripe old age of 30, Gwyneth dons the hair shirt and joins the health Nazis in ritual masochism .  Embracing the dusky joys of self-flagellation, the movie star purges first the tobacco and then the booze that have so cruelly ravaged her good looks.  She then turns sadistic and tells us all about it.

"As I get into my later 20s, I can't eat whatever I want anymore! I'm like, 'What happened to my metabolism?' . . . I used to drink vodka tonics all the time, but I found that my kidneys got really hard because of it, and I noticed that my liver wouldn't drop down in my yoga back bends." 

"I was doing a big film a few years ago and I'd just quit smoking. And I'd just turned 25 and I started to gain weight from quitting smoking, and my skin was breaking out from the detoxification process."

No writhing on the floor in unspeakable agony, screaming for a whiff of tobacco smoke?  Girl, you were lucky!  What's a few zits compared to the heaving, sweats and delirium tremens most people suffer when quitting the evil weed.  You might, however, check into whether any brain damage occurred.

For hyping a rash into a Hollywood detox tale and for working without a contract for Big Health, Gwyneth Paltrow is a stellar Jackass Of The Week.

November 9 - And the winner is...David Goerlitz!  Mr. Winston and born again nag.

Working 26 days a year and collecting an annual salary of $100,000, David Goerlitz did very well as Mr. Winston, representing R.J. Reynolds.  His seven year modeling stint came with a heavy price; big time guilt which he ardently exorcizes by preaching to school kids.

He fulminates against the horrors of smoking, although he smoked three packs a day for 24 years and is as fit as a fiddle.  He decries the addictive power of tobacco, far worse than heroin, yet he quit with little fuss.

His mission now, as corporate spokesman for the anti-tobacco enterprise is to set the record straight.  Those evil tobacco companies are using you and lying to you.

"You plunk down your $4 for a pack, it costs them about six cents to make it, and they laugh all the way to the bank" 

Not quite, Mr. Winston.  In 1999 for each $3.50 pack sold in New York City, the federal government took in 43 cents, the tobacco settlement cost 41 cents, 4 cents went to the lawyers who shook down the industry, 77 cents to state and local government and, after production costs and corporate taxes are figured in, a grand total of 28 cents was pocketed by the cigarette makers.

For filling his audiences with lousy math and for pimping for some real sharks, David Goerlitz is model Jackass Of The Week.
 

November 2 - And the winner is...John F. Timony!  Philadelphia Police Commissioner and cheerleader for style over substance.

When the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a photo of a cop helping to lift a man in a wheelchair over a fire hose, the commissioner saw red.  The photo showed the brawny cop smoking a cigarette and we just can't tolerate that image of a man being a man.  Henceforth, Timony decreed, uniformed police officers, whether on duty or not, are forbidden to light up.  After all:

Smoking may be perceived as unprofessional and is potentially dangerous to both the officer and the public.

Unprofessional to whom?  Dangerous how?  Blankout from the commish.  The police may put their lives on the line every day and are certainly the most useful and needed of civil servants but the quaking Timony treats them like girls in a convent school.

For disrespecting the people that protect the public while kowtowing to the pantywaists in tobacco control, John F. Timony is a turncoat Jackass Of The Week.

October 26 - And the winner is...Thomas L. Friedman!  New York Times columnist and psychic conduit to the president.

So enamored is Friedman by his zany analogy, penned Sept. 14, that links terrorism with smoking, he puffs out his jowls and and spits it out again in this week's New York Times.  Friedman's conceit is that terrorists, so beyond the pale, must be confined to the smoking section while the good folks reside in the non-smoking sections.  As a metaphor the notion is bizarre and offensively ludicrous since many of the victims, as well as those who formed the rescue parties and who now sift through the rubble were and are the people who demand smoking sections in restaurants all over New York.

In this week's column Friedman shuts his eyes, places fingertips to forehead and channels his perspicacity to President Bush.  What results is a letter, masquerading as a deep think piece, from the president to Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat exhorting them to kiss and make nice.  Friedman-Bush writes:

As for you, Yasir, you say you want to join the world's non-smoking section — those who oppose terrorism. Well, then don't come near me smoking cigars.

What this exercise in psychic tomfoolery has to do with the current situation is anyone's guess but conceiving George Bush as a prissy hot-house flower, similar to a New York Times pundit, approaches libel.

For not being content to make a fool of himself once, Thomas L. Friedman is a persistent Jackass Of The Week. 

October 19 - And the winner is ...Christie Todd Whitman!  Director of the Environmental Protection Agency and debutante enforcer.

Early this year the patrician Whitman was elevated from the governorship of New Jersey to director of the most corrupt bureaucracy in Washington, DC.  She departed her state under a cloud when a photo of the grinning Christie frisking one of her working class constituents, later exonerated from any wrongdoing, surfaced.

As Director of the EPA, Whitman continues her mission to compel the riff-raff to behave themselves.  Smoking expensive cigars may be de rigueur in the social set she inhabits but tobacco for the common folks must be discouraged most firmly.  Cavalierly ignoring that her own agency's secondhand smoke report was invalidated by a federal judge, Whitman lays down the law:

"The message is simple and very clear: People who smoke inside their homes or anywhere around children have two options, quit or get outside.''

Or what, Christie?  Is it up against the wall, cuffed and shuffled off to jail they go?

For confusing Director with Dictator and for making life meaner for struggling parents, Christie Todd Whitman is a snooty Jackass Of The Week.

October 12 - And the winner is ...Steve Holmes!  Windward Oahu councilman and addled armchair soldier.

While the Hawaiian tourism business reels from a severe economic downturn, the dim bulbs in Honolulu choose to tell one third of  potential visitors to go to hell.  Travel is down, expendable cash is tight so the logical response to demands by anti-tobacco zealots is to flush them down the toilet.   Since logic is in short supply in anti-tobacco circles, the Honolulu City council finds itself at war with the local hospitality industry.

Shuffling through his anti-tobacco talking points, Councilman Steve Holmes, the dimmest of them all, finds the metaphor that crystallizes the need to keep smokers off the island:

"It's time we started thinking of them as a terrorist organization," he said of the tobacco industry. "It's time that we started having some moral outrage about the impact on our economy of the deaths that are caused by tobacco-related disease." 

Let's see.  The tobacco companies are not tourists but those who enjoy its products are.  Banning smoking in Honolulu's restaurants won't hurt the tobacco industry but will hurt the citizens when smokers vote with their feet to vacation in more tolerant locales.  Direct hit on the local economy from those elected to protect it.  Who exactly is the terrorist?

For indulging a taste for loopy metaphors while assaulting the taxpaying base, Steve Holmes is a misguided Jackass Of The Week.

October 5 - And the winner is ...Jan Perry!  Los Angeles Council Critter and naval contemplating lotus eater.

Regaining consciousness after days of intense meditation, Councilwoman Perry, from atop her ivory tower, directed her gaze outward.  Her serenity was shattered as she observed a haze of secondhand smoke obliterating downtown Los Angeles. Furrowing her brow and stamping her her birkenstocked foot, Perry's vision of Los Angeles as Nirvana was born:

To prevent the harm secondhand smoke poses to park visitors each year, smoking must be banned from the 385 city parks.  Eliminating smoking from these 15,600 acres will end the fire hazards and pollution caused by discarded cigarettes.

For presiding over a city sinking into third-world status, but without the charm, while Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley itch to secede and for hating one quarter of her constituents, Jan Perry is a lofty Jackass Of The Week.

September 28 - And the winner is ...Beverly Boettcher!  Servant of the people and advocate of extreme tough love.

Bev is a member of the city council in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and was among the majority who decided that the constituents are too feeble minded to make their own business decisions.  As a nonsmoker not in the restaurant business, Bev found it easy to forbid smoking in in other people's establishments.  She also remains aloof to pleas by restaurant owners to soften the ban to prevent them from going out of business.  

She kept her cool at a public hearing where restaurant owners pled for a softening of the ban to forestall bankruptcy.  Unmoved by their distress, Bev let fly the following:

"No one wants to see anyone go out of business but how can you resist a plea from a child to please keep our air clean?"

Bev, King Solomon of Eau Claire, what a verdict!  Weighing the well-coached whine of an anti-smoker's brat against the livelihood of parents whose survival directly affects the well being of their children, Bev doesn't flinch.

For pummeling Eau Claire's productive entrepreneurs while offering an empty platitude as a booby prize, Beverly Boettcher is a heartless Jackass Of The Week.

September 21 - And the winner is....Ken Salazar!  Colorado attorney general and constitutional nincompoop.

This week the attorney general threw the book at some itsy-bitsy cigarette makers that dare to sell their legal products in Colorado without vetting their business plans before Salazar.  Worse, they had the unmitigated gall to undercut the price of Salazar's patron, Big Tobacco.

Braying that the small tobacco companies, unencumbered by the artificially high prices voluntarily assumed by Big Tobacco, must not be allowed to offer their cheaper smokes to the citizens who rashly elected him, Salazar demands a tribute from the entrepreneurs.  The tribute, amounting to the difference between the cheap prices offered by the small companies and the inflated price that Big Tobacco charges, will be placed in a state escrow account in case Colorado decides to recover damages for hypothetical malfeasance in the future.  What sounds like a protection racket and a sop to Big Tobacco's monopoly status is actually good public health according to Salazar.

"These enforcement actions are part of ongoing necessary efforts to realize our goal of decreased tobacco use." 

Huh?  Deeply embroiled in a scheme that shuffles billions into state coffers by hobbling the free enterprise system, by enacting price fixing schemes and by violating federal anti-trust provisions Salazar is worried about tobacco use.

For abdicating his duty to protect the consumer while insulting the state's citizens with his stale platitudes, Ken Salazar is a derelict Jackass Of The Week.

September 7 - And the winner is... Richard Peto!  Top notch Oxford University statistician, implacable tobacco industry foe and witchdoctor.

Admitting that he went into the statistics racket because "I was never going to be much good as a mathematician", Richard Peto held forth in NewScientist.com on how to end the tobacco scourge.  Acknowledged as "one of the worlds' leading experts on why smokers die prematurely", Peto cuts through the medical uncertainties and lays the blame on one factor: Advertising.

A world without advertising would be a world without smoking which would be a world without premature death.  According to Peto every ailment known to man is caused by the humble tobacco leaf.  From heart attacks in the industrial nations to tuberculosis in India, smoking causes it all.

"We don't know," confesses Peto, lapsing into veracity, when asked how smoking causes all this slaughter.  He does know that the government can end it all by forbidding tobacco advertising.

"Half of British smokers believe that since the government allows advertising, smoking can't be all that dangerous."

That all governments cover cigarette packs with their tax symbols, collect a share of the profits and license the cigarette makers isn't a message to the people that smoking can't be all that dangerous but allowing advertising is.

For serving his own self-interest in keeping the grant system flush with tobacco taxes and for discovering the true cause of tuberculosis, Richard Peto is statistically a fool and a worthy Jackass of the Week.

August 30 - And the winner is.....Jo Jeter!  Small town city councilwoman and thwarted anachronism.

Temple Terrace, Florida attained its 15 minutes of fame by hitching a ride on a time machine back to the bad old days of job discrimination.  In a muddled experiment of social engineering, the city council forbade the hiring of smokers for city jobs.  Instead of the bouquets promised by anti-tobacco, the council was reaped a whirlwind of bad publicity and indignant condemnation.  Belatedly coming to its senses, the council repented of its discriminatory ways and reversed it ban on smokers.  Not all voted to rescind.

Councilwoman Jo Jeter remains an unreconstructed bigot who is mightily displeased that her colleagues' better natures reappeared and believes, moreover, that reversing course makes the council look silly.

"Why do we keep doing things if they're just going to be undone?''

A surprisingly good question Councilwoman Jo, and one more politicians should ask themselves.  To find the answer, make a trip to the Temple Terrace public library and ask for the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence.  Ask the librarian to wrap them in a plain brown wrapper to spare you any embarrassment should you run into any of your progressive friends.  Take them home, read them closely, then base your legislative initiatives on those documents.  You likely won't have to "undo" any laws in the future.

For ignoring history and for forgetting what country she lives in Jo Jeter is a time-warped Jackass Of The Week.

August 24 - And the winner is.....Neal Boortz!  Chattering talk-radio nabob and pseudo libertarian.

Early this month Boortz, who eviscerates statists, weepy liberals and control freaks on a daily basis, made the accurate observation that the American Medical Association is stumbling down the politically correct path of social-engineering advocacy by waging war on private gun ownership.  He ridiculed the AMA's fondness for the loopy anti-gun studies cranked out by the Centers For Disease Control upon which it bases its gun-grabbing ways.

Taking leave of his senses, Boortz then himself stumbled over his distaste for those who smoke by endorsing an equally loopy study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association that finds secondhand smoke causes heart disease.

Calling smokers "pathetic drug addicts", Boortz rants on and brings out the heavy artillery:

"..it is time for a wholesale ban on smoking cigarettes in public places and in the workplace. You certainly wouldn’t allow anyone to walk through a public place or a workplace spraying a harmful biological agent out of an aerosol can. Why allow them to do the same thing with their lungs."

Property rights; trashed.  Science; perverted for politically correct purposes.  Freedom; irrelevant.  With libertarians such as Boortz, who needs socialists to lambaste?

For rightly objecting to the goring of his ox while mindlessly slaughtering the oxen of those whom he holds in contempt, Neal Boortz is a Jackass Of The Week who needs to go back to school.

August 17 - And the winner is .....Richard Corlin!  Concerned citizen, anti-tobacco operative and president of the American Medical Association.

This week Dr. Corlin interrupted the crying jag induced by greedy politicians hell-bent on squandering tobacco settlement money, pulled himself together and put on his most chipper bedside manner to provide the country what it sorely needs: an anti-tobacco awards ceremony.

With all the fanfare that a gang of medical bureaucrats can muster, Dr. Corlin nominated the  jurisdictions where plans for spending the tobacco money most wantonly deviate from the desires of the pharmaceutical industry.  The most egregious examples of wasting money include reclaiming filthy waterways (North Dakota), improving open spaces and children's recreation centers (Los Angeles), repairing lousy roads and pot-holed streets (Stanislaw County, California) and attaining financial order in cash-poor rural counties (Upper New York).  

Rather than throwing away the settlement money on projects the tax paying citizens feel are important, Dr. Corlin knows best where the billions should go:

"The money is supposed to be used for anti-tobacco campaigns to reduce tobacco use"

Let's see.  Anti-tobacco campaigns financially benefit The American Lung Association, The American Cancer Society, The American Heart Association, a gaggle of anti-tobacco ideologues, big drugs and the American Medical Association.  The above projects benefit long suffering taxpayers who vote.  Not a hard choice for ambitious politicians.

For forgetting what makes the world go round and for shamelessly shilling for his patrons, Dr. Corlin wins the Jackass Of The Week hands down.

August 10 - And the winner is....Rael!  Intergalactic anti-smoker and self-proclaimed god.

Rael hit publicity pay dirt this week when The New York Times and network news gave lots of ink and national air time to an acolyte of the Raelian Movement to trumpet the virtues of human cloning.  This savvy bit of media manipulation stimulated interest in Rael and his kitschy cult. 

In a nutshell, 20 years ago Rael, a humble French journalist known then as Claude Vorilhon, was visited by extraterrestrials who clued him into the mysteries of human genesis and charged him with carrying their message to mankind.  That message involves human cloning which makes Rael topical fodder for the shallow journalism that passes for news.  The Raelians offer a smorgasbord of cloning services, up to and including human replication.  Rumors that anti-tobacco operatives Stanton Glantz, David Kessler and Donna Shalala are early clone experiments gone horribly awry appear baseless.

Rael's utopian vision, where a benevolent elite rules with an iron fist gloved in velvet, is one in which the World Health Organization and anti-tobacco activists would be very comfortable.

"The only desirable fanaticism is the one of liberty," proclaims Rael.  "Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and coffee are forbidden."  

Liberty is supreme but NO SMOKING.

For constructing a heaven where petty nannyism rules and for embarrassing the French yet again, Rael makes a cosmic Jackass of the Week.

August 3 - And the winner is....Carole Migden!  California state representative and Harpo Marx' missing twin sister.

The Los Angeles Times reported July 28 that, due to the death of the Republican party which renders California a single party state, scads of Democrats are now on the receiving end of the tobacco industry's munificence.  Righteous Democrats, who not long ago regarded tobacco political contributions as beyond the pale, stumble over themselves to snatch the cash from the formerly scorned merchants of death.

None are more pious than San Francisco's Carole Migden who embodies that city's high moral caliber and dignified decorum.  In vote after vote she has socked it to her constituents who smoke while reveling in the smoke-free frenzy infecting her state. Yet even she has joined the cigarette gravy train, although she wrestled mightily with her conscience before inducing Philip Morris to become the second-largest contributor to her campaign kitty.

Accepting tainted funds was "not my proudest moment", says she but with the high costs of campaigning she reluctantly cashed the cigarette company's checks.  The times have also changed. "They [Philip Morris] involve themselves in a lot of civic good works."

Cynics note that Migden could swathe herself in endangered animal furs, tattoo a swastika on her shoulder and fire bomb abortion clinics and still be elected in her 80 percent Democrat district without spending a cent while the good works of the tobacco industry didn't prevent her and her party from excoriating any Republican who dared take tobacco money.

For salving her guilt with phony platitudes and for treating the tobacco industry better than the people who vote her into office, Carole Migden is a political Jackass Of The Week.

July 27 - And the winner is......Roberta Andresen!  Death obsessed author and ugly American.

Seeking respite from writing books on how to explain death to children, Roberta voyaged to Europe.  There she was distressed to find lots of smoking going on, so unlike her progressive village of Raynham, Massachusetts.  So fed up with one restaurant in the wicked old country was she that she ate her entire meal outside.  It was raining at the time.

"One of the waiters came out and held an umbrella over my head as I ate, and as people left they applauded," Roberta reminisces.

Perhaps the applause was directed at the waiter whose sheltering umbrella prevented Roberta from germinating and taking root as a permanent monument to ditzy intolerance but most likely they were applauding the spectacle of a crazy American making a fool of herself.

In any case, Roberta returned to our shores with a mission.  She will eradicate smoking everywhere in Massachusetts and will not take no for an answer.  As Raynham wantonly resists enacting a restaurant ban, Roberta makes cookies for the city council, then sprays them with ammonia before inviting them to take a bite.

"No one in his right mind would eat them. That's the point. So why would you allow second-hand smoke? I want to bring to their attention we're talking about health," she said.

For making people miserable on two continents and for being too stupid to come in out of the rain, Roberta Andresen makes a trans-Atlantic Jackass Of The Week.

July 20 - And the winner is......Ken Kay!  Prissy aviation columnist and connoisseur of airports.

In a recent column Kay gave a cautious thumbs up to the recently redone Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood airport.  He's happy with the carpet, "soothing", artwork, "pleasant but not overbearing", and the automatic urinals.  Generally satisfied with the shops, he chides a chocolate shop which doesn't stock sugar-free candy since some people want the stuff.

He's very pleased that the airport, including the bars, is completely smoke-free but very displeased that smokers persist in flying.

"...smokers still puff large clouds just outside the terminal entrances. That means all us nonsmokers still must inhale a lot of second-hand smoke as we come and go. Can't we just banish all the smokers to some centralized park area?

Dainty Kay, when a plane takes off the equivalent of smoke from over 3 billion lit cigarettes falls upon your head.  The circling cars engulf the air with far nastier residue than the organic tobacco plant can possibly produce and you want to ban smokers to some "centralized park area".  Centralized like a jail?  Or like a concrete wall before a firing squad?

For ignorance unbecoming an aviation expert and for squealing like a sissy at the sight of smokers, Ken Kay is a hysterical Jackass Of The Week.

July 13 - And the winner is......Alex Gallagher!  Wisconsin high schooler and budding anti-tobacco warrior.

Having learned all there is to know about life, Alex is on a mission to bring the truth to his peers.  Marching lockstep to the Pied Piper's anti-tobacco flute, Alex joined a mob of teenagers at the Wisconsin Tobacco Control's "Kickin' It!  To Big Tobacco Bash" at the university in Madison.  Jazzed by the Neurenberg of the Plains rally, Alex preaches the gospel of FACT (Fighting Against Corporate Tobacco) to the heathen back at home in the Chippewa Valley.

"FACT talks about just that - facts," intones young Alex.

He then gets the facts completely wrong by reciting, as an example of Tobacco Co. perfidy, the old chestnut about the insidious introduction of that rascal Joe Camel which led to kids taking up Camel cigarettes in record numbers.  Not true, as sales data reveal, but "facts", as Alex's trainers know, are fluid things, subject to the whims of who has the loudest megaphone.

Alex thinks restaurant smoking bans are neat.  He plans to recruit more youth from the Eau Claire area and indoctrinate kids at the middle school about the "facts" he learned at the Madison bash.

For skipping out on real life and garbling the facts on his maiden interview, Alex Gallagher makes a robotic Jackass Of The Week.

July 6 - And the winner is......Liz Smith!  Professional gossip and confidant of the beautiful people.

Departing from the gossip which makes her column a must for the clueless in search of a life, Ms. Smith devotes four paragraphs to hyping a TV special hosted by pharma-shill Dr. Nancy Snyderman.  Rashly labeling Snyderman "excellent", despite the TV doc's unsavory connection with an insider trading scandal involving drkoop.com, Ms. Smith touts the special which focuses on the most pressing problem of our time: starlets who smoke and the bimbos who ape them.

"I'm not a crank on this subject," asserts Ms. Smith as she stolidly proves just what a crank she is on this non-subject, culminating her piece with a teary-eyed threnody about a dear relative whose life is at an end because of smoking.  In column after column, week after week she deplores smoking and clucks over the rich and famous who, although making it to the top of the heap, are so slavishly helpless before the seductive weed.  Just days ago she dwelt upon the heart-breaking story of a B-level actress whose demands for smoke-free sets are falling on callous ears.

For hawking the anti-tobacco enterprise without a lucrative contract and for confusing personal, irrelevant stories with reality, Liz Smith makes a dishy Jackass Of The Week.

June 29 - And the winner is......Molly Ivins!  Yammering columnist and phony liberal.

Long ago Molly discovered the joys and financial rewards of playing to the elite rubes by assuming the role of a salt-of-the-earth Texan populist who cuts through the BS.  Underneath the wise-cracking, tough-broad persona, beats the bleedingest heart and the jerkiest of knees.  She even smokes, just like the real people.

This week she sheds tears over portents that the Justice Department may settle its case against the tobacco industry without an Auto da Fé worthy of these diabolical merchants of death.  Her sharp eye takes a dim view of this deal and out plops a sob story of helpless smokers done in by lying, ruthless cigarette companies.  She demands justice.  She demands recompense.  She demands comeuppance for "Murder, Inc".  She demands an anti-tobacco campaign.

"The government was suing to recover the cost to everybody else of treating smoking illnesses and would then have used much of the money to educate young people about why they shouldn't smoke. Given the amount that the tobacco companies spend on marketing their poison, it makes some sense to have a counter-force out there..."

Oh, salt-of-the-earth Molly.  Oh, tough-talking-broad of the masses, surely you, pulse taker of the little people, have observed the incessant barrage of tedious, supercilious, artistically bereft and just plain annoying anti-tobacco ads on television and on the ponderous billboards that pollute the freeways from coast to coast.  One thing the people are fed up with is nagging from the guv'mint and bossiness from pursed-lipped do-gooders.

For talking the populist line while shilling for the elites, Molly Ivins is a two-faced Jackass Of The Week.

June 22 - And the winner is......Tom Rossin!  Florida Senate Democratic Leader and pretzel logician.

During the legislative debate on providing tax breaks to the citizens, Senator Rossin, West Palm Beach, embodied the low expectations, held by many, regarding the intellectual stature of Palm Beach County.  From confusion over election ballots to tolerating representatives such as Senator Rossin, Palm Beach County epitomizes muddled thinking.

In response to a plan to fund a particular form of tax relief with funds from the tobacco settlement,  Senator Rossin, at the behest of the anti-tobacco heart, lung and cancer gang that want the funds for themselves, let fly the following:

"I think it's very ironic that the very Republicans who opposed suing the cigarette makers are now getting enough money through the settlement to provide tax breaks."

Grab a pencil, Senator, and listen very carefully.  Stop chewing your gum and we'll speak very, very slowly.  Write down the words you don't understand for clarification later.

The money from the settlement, ill gotten though it may be, is the people's loot.  The people want a tax cut and their representatives have obliged.  Your constituency, the body parts gang, doesn't have any votes, therefore they lost.  You may put the pencil down and resume chewing.

For confusing the actual people he represents with the anti-tobacco goons who actually have his ear, Tom Rossin is a stultifying Jackass Of The Week.

June 15 - And the winner is......Lisa Post!  Civics class drop out and mayor of Medford, New Jersey.

In an ill conceived foray into regulating personal behavior, Mayor Post attempted to ban the hiring of fire fighters who smoke.  The measure, ostensibly to shelter the town from medical costs, was shelved because in New Jersey tobacco use cannot preclude employment anywhere for any reason.  While beating the drums for government discrimination, Mayor Post, a former smoker herself, delivered the following:

"I really embrace the issue of health and well-being of the individual"

Sound of an exploding joke cigar.  You weren't elected to "embrace the issue of health", whatever that means.  Please cite the source in the New Jersey or U.S. constitutions or any civics text where denying smokers their rights as citizens and taxpayers is conducive to any individual's "well-being".  Sacrificing liberty on the altar of health is a concept that would make your Revolutionary ancestors turn over in their graves.

For speaking before thinking and for scoring an "F" in Civics 101, Mayor Lisa Post is a remedial Jackass Of The Week.

June 8 - And the winner is......Jack E. White!  Columnist for Time magazine and moral invert.  

This week during one of the innumerable political chat shows clogging the airwaves, White and his fellow pundits were mulling over the political implications of the Bush daughters' foray into underage cocktailing.  For behaving as college kids tend to behave, the Bush girls now are now metaphors of all that is wrong with the Bush administration and are providing the opportunity to whitewash the squalid behavior of Bill Clinton.

"The larger question to me is how Republicans had a great, jolly-good time during the previous administration talking about the lack of family values.   ...now these two and we also read in Lloyd Grove’s column this week that maybe the First Lady sneaks a cigarette in the White House once in a while. Shame, shame, shame."

Let's see.  In the Clinton White House we witnessed presidential adultery with an employee young enough to be his daughter.  Blow jobs in the Oval Office while on the phone with foreign political leaders.  Creepy ejaculations in an aid's washbasin.  Kinky sex involving a huge cigar.  In the Bush White House we have a First Lady enjoying a cigarette at home.

For confusing duplicity, national embarrassment, presidential lies and really tawdry sex with a normal pleasure enjoyed by millions, Jack E. White is an addled Jackass Of The Week.

 June 1 - And the winner is......Rhea Chiles!  Merry widow and keeper of the Old Coon's flame.

Rhea Chiles is the widow of Lawton (the Old Coon) Chiles, the plutocratic governor of Florida who successfully shook down the tobacco industry, snatching billions of dollars from the wallets of smokers and funneling them to politically connected lawyers and the anti-tobacco enterprise.  He died prematurely, peddling away on an exercise bicycle thereby proving that bad deeds are occasionally punished. 

Scorning the pleasures of the bridge table and luxury cruises common to her social set, the Widow Chiles spends her time grimly doing good.  From providing direction to the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies to accepting the Empty Ashtray Award from the state of Maryland, the Widow Chiles is constantly on the go, relentlessly polishing the ever-tarnished image of her husband.

When Florida broached the heretical notion of reintroducing tobacco stocks into state controlled portfolios, the Widow Chiles, stamped her exquisitely shod foot, snapped her manicured fingers and summoned a press agent:

"If the decision to invest in tobacco is simply one of dollars and cents, why in the world would the state of Florida continue to feed the demon that will cost our taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in future health care costs?"

Careful, Widow.  It's mighty risky conjuring up a demon who steals money from taxpayers when the biggest heist in Florida's history was the product of your husband's backdoor legislative coup that stripped a legal industry of its ability to defend itself subsequently costing taxpayers billions of dollars.  Better not to invoke the image of a demon.  You might be meeting the Old Coon sooner than you wish.

For not enjoying her affluent widowhood gracefully and for poking her nose into matters that are none of her business, Rhea Chiles is an officious Jackass of the week.

May 25 - And the winner is......Mike Thomas!  Columnist, Orlando Sentinel and anti-tobacco cover boy.

For reasons known to him alone, Mike Thomas really hates smokers.  His column this week was an explosion of bile the like not often seen in today's press.  Picture this: A day at the beach; white sand, blue sea, splashing children under the eyes of beaming parents.  Paradise to some, but not to Mikey.

Contemplating a loving father sprawled next to his little girl, Mikey is annoyed to see the man smoking a cigarette.  The minutes pass and his annoyance erupts into a full blown snit which duly finds its way into his May 22 column.

"Shouldn't this daddy at the beach have been hauled off to jail and dumped in a cell?  What we need to do is haul a few parents off to jail.  Hold them overnight and release them on their own recognizance in the morning.  This would teach them a lesson."  

On and on he rants, veering from outrage that parents would dare to smoke in their own homes to demands for brutal, physical punishment and public humiliation.  Neither fact nor common sense intrude as he stamps his foot in pique.  Such a petulant hissy fit over smoking is unusual for a man but considering the physical repulsiveness of most of the anti-smokers, Mikey may be auditioning for spokesbimbo of the nanny brigade.

For prattling pernicious anti-smoker lies and for venting his hatred on devoted and loving daddies, Mike Thomas is a pretty but completely empty-headed Jackass Of The Week.

May 18 - And the winner is......Christine O. Gregoire!  Washington State Attorney General and anti-tobacco gun moll.

Known best by her mob moniker of Christine, Queen of Nicotine, Gregoire carries the water for the anti-tobacco enterprise in her state and beyond as she helps shake down American industries, loot consumers and push drug company nicotine delivery devices.  Aspirations of being the bestest, toughest and cutest little operative money can buy often rock CQN's tenuous grasp on reality 

Investigating the eruption of small cigarette makers who are not party to the tobacco settlement and whose success threatens to diminish the tobacco settlement pile of cash, an astonished CQN let loose with the following observation:

"It was a surprise to me that it really doesn't take a lot of capital to start a cigarette company." 

Oh Christine, Queen of Nicotine.  Of course you are astonished.  After decades of feeding from the public trough and participating in a heist worth billions of dollars, the millions invested in starting an honest business do seem like small potatoes.

For hobnobbing too long and too intimately with extortionists and for dissing entrepreneurs, Christine Gregoire is a worthy Jackass Of The Week.