Summer and NO Smoke

Jacob Sullum notes an AP article that confirms that New York's draconian new anti smoking law will prevent smoking on stage. From the AP piece:

...curbing such public displays of smoking could go a long way to the kind of societal change advocates of the smoking ban say is needed to get more smokers to stop and more nonsmokers not to start.

"Now, the image we have of a smoker is the person standing in the rain having a cigarette, and that is hardly the glamorous image we had in the '40s and '50s," said Russell Sciandra, head of the Center for a Tobacco-Free New York. "That's going to have a tremendous impact on children's perception of smoking."

Mr. Sullum comments:

Hence the ban protects the public not only from secondhand smoke but from pernicious ideas, such as the notion that there is anything "glamorous" about smoking.

Isn't it funny how the health commissars are acting more like... well... commissars? It's almost like the good old Stalin days. Soon they'll be airbrushing the cigarettes out of well know portraits... like Jackson Pollock and James Dean. Oh yeah... they already did that.

No Apologies from Andrew Sullivan...

... or the United States. Andrew nails what's going on with the the far left wing of the Democratic Party (and their minions in the 4th estate) during the ramp up to next years’ presidential campaign. God... we have over a year to suffer through before GW Bush clobbers the Democratic sacrificial lamb.

There was something wonderfully strained about how various news organizations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable - if sternly repressed - dismay. One of the first headlines that the Baathist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: "US celebrates 'good' Iraq news." The quotation marks around "good" did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorializing on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not clear to the BBC that the deaths of two of the most sadistic mass murderers on the plant was in any way a good thing, especially if they redounded to the credit of Tony Blair or George Bush. And immediately, of course, pundits started to criticize the U.S. action as "extra-judicial," as a violation of the law against assassination, and so on. Their immediate impulse on hearing this terrific news was: how can we spin this against Blair and Bush?

Anyway... here's a sample... go read the whole thing.