November 2011

Yesterday,&nbsp; President Obama said &quot;Today some big tobacco companies are trying to block these labels because they don’t want to be honest about the consequences of using their products,&quot; said Obama.<br />
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President Obama was referring to a lawsuit filed by the tobacco companies against the FDA’s authority to mandate graphic images on their product and they won.&nbsp; President Obama is a constitutional lawyer and professor, he of all people should know that it is a slippery slope for all manufacturers, not just tobacco, to surrender their First Amendment rights. <br />
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Do you want to see grizzly scenes of car accidents caused by drunk drivers on your favorite bottle of wine or can of beer?&nbsp; Photo’s of grossly obese people on your potato chips?&nbsp;&nbsp; The health nannies never know when to stop, if they win, that is exactly what will happen.<br />

North Carolina study on heart attacks after a smoking ban in 2010 is nicely picked apart by Alex Massie and Chris Snowden.<br />
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<div>&quot;Even if we assume that secondhand smoke does cause heart attacks, smoking bans have so little effect on so few non-smokers (and have no effect at all on the smokers, unless it compels them to quit), that the kind of reductions in the heart attack rate reported by these studies defy both science and common sense. If there is an effect, it is too small to measure and would never show up in population-level statistics. Once that is understood, it is obvious that any studies which claim a dramatic effect on the heart attack rate must be flawed, cherry-picked or distorted. Sure enough, when such studies are examined, they prove to be&nbsp;flawed, cherry-picked and distorted.&quot;<br />
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Well worth the read!<br />
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<p>&quot;Studies have shown that like cigarette smoke, breathing wood smoke both indoors and outdoors can lodge cancer-causing particles in our lungs,&quot; said Dr. Jason Eberhart-Phillips, Marin County public health officer. &quot;On cold, still winter days &mdash; especially in some of the valleys where people live here in Marin County &mdash; the burning of wood has an impact very much like the impact of second-hand cigarette smoke.&quot; <br />
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Seriously?&nbsp; Are we going to ban fireplaces in the winter?&nbsp; These people need to get a life!</p>

The sponsor of smoking ban legislation&nbsp; pending at the County Council said he’ll seek a vote at the body’s next meeting Nov. 28 – even if it appears then that he’ll lose.<br />
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Councilman Joe Cronin, R-St. Paul, on Monday night lost a key ally&nbsp;when&nbsp;Nancy Matheny, R-Weldon Spring, announced&nbsp;she would oppose his new effort to put the issue the November 2012 election ballot.<br />
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Small business strongly objects to this new ban which would offer few exception.&nbsp; <br />

<p>&quot;In a marathon legislative session Monday night, the University of Massachusetts Student Government Association (SGA) Senate voted to create an alternative to a tobacco ban passed by the school&rsquo;s Faculty Senate earlier this year &ndash; which is slated to go into effect in 2013 &ndash; with a plan that calls for designated smoking areas on campus&quot;.<br />
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A better decision would be to have no smoking ban at all. However, a compromise is better than some campuses which have a total ban.<br />
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Chicago needs to balance their budget and the only items they can think to raise taxes on are alcohol and tobacco. The county estimates the new tax would generate around $11 million dollars in revenue.<br />
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The population of any major city consists of smokers, nonsmokers and people who do or don’t drink. Taxes should be increased across the board for everyone who lives and works in the city.&nbsp; Using behavior modification is not what government is meant to do, nor should they.<br />

American Heart Association, American Lung Association and American Cancer Society are asking the casino’s in Iowa to go smokeless on November 17.&nbsp;&nbsp; The casino’s are not expecting people to volunteer not to smoke for one day.<br />
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Neither would I.&nbsp; Shouldn’t these Association’s be spending money on finding a cure instead of sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong?<br />

Florida plans to ban the sale of matches and lighters to teens.&nbsp; Under the legislation, if a store clerk is caught selling a lighter or matches to anyone under 18 years old, they’d be slapped with a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail. <br />
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That’s going a bit far.&nbsp; How are you going to light the camp fire without matches?<br />

Frank Davis blog today, tells it like it is smoker’s are angry and they should be.&nbsp; The question is why aren’t you getting off the sofa yelling and screaming &quot;we aren’t going to take it anymore&quot;?&nbsp; Why aren’t you voting the bums out on the local, state or Federal level if they have voted for a smoking ban?<br />
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This is a must read.&nbsp; Get angry and do something!<br type="_moz" />

Karen Messer, professor and director of biostatistics at Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego recently published a study in the<i> American Journal of Preventive Medicine</i>.<br />
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The results published that people smoked at home (imagine that) especially with older children.&nbsp; Needless to say the health nannies are all over this.&nbsp; Now they want to &quot;promote smoke-free homes among smoking families are needed, and this study can help identify populations that would benefit from such interventions&quot;.<br />
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Just how soon will they be entering your house for a sniff?<br type="_moz" />