War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State with Theodore King

[TruthBrigade]

War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State with Theodore King

Listen to the archive here:
http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/archive/Truth_Brigade_32k_121109.mp3
http://TruthBrigade.com/radio/12-11-09_WarOnSmokers_RiseOfNannyState-TheodoreKing_32k.mp3

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=1424720356&ref=ts
http://www.oklahomaconstitution.com/ns.php?nid=171&commentary=1

http://encyclopedia.smokersclub.com/261.html

Theodore King has done a yeoman's job assembling evidence that the success of tobacco zealots has become a useful template for those who want to use health issues to control our lives. The War on Smokers is not only a story about the attack on tobacco users but a story about how decent Americans can be frightened, perhaps duped into accepting phony science, attacks on private property rights and rule of law. One need not be a smoker to be alarmed by the underlying hideousness of the anti-tobacco movement.
Walter E. Williams
John M. Olin Distinguished
Professor of Economics
George Mason University

About Theodore King
Theodore J. King is an Oklahoma native who graduated from Northeastern State University in 1996. He spent a summer at the Republican National Committee in 1994, worked at the National Right to Work Committee, and spent time working on the Hill in Washington D.C. In 1999, he was a temporay employee with Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas and later worked for the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Virginia. He served as our Washington D.C. correspondent for our From Washington page before returning to Oklahoma in 2001, and continues his reports with The Federal Page.



Chapter 10

Reflections of a smoking tourist

"Her Majesty is a confirmed non-smoker, but she is also a great libertarian and has no time for political correctness." - An unnamed Buckingham Palace source.

In early June of 2007, I went off to England and Ireland for a holiday, as they call it over there. This was my first trip abroad. I had always wanted to visit both countries, and this was the time to go since in England smoking in all public places including pubs was soon to be banned. When I arrived at Gatwick airport outside of London, the customs officer asked what was the purpose of my visit? I responded, To beat your smoking ban. He chuckled, stamped my passport, said that was as good a reason as any, and welcomed me to the UK. I stopped at the little area at Gatwick airport that is set aside for smokers and lit up from a pack of State Express 555. It is an English cigarette I purchased back in the States. I can remember the seal of Great Britain on packs of 555s years ago. And next to the seal was the message: By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen. That was no longer the case. The British government no longer allows tobacco producers to be the official vendors to the Royal Family. As I was sitting there with the other smokers, a man walked by saying, Smoke up, folks, because on July 1 it will all be over. I felt the love. July 1, 2007 was the date the smoking ban would go into effect. Given the fact that Parliament banned fox hunting in 2004, an activity that seems to cause harm only to the fox, it should not have come as a surprise that smoking would one day be banned.

READ MORE:
Buy at Amazon
The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State
By Theodore J. King

http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000110741

Scheduled Time:

http://americanfreedomradio.com/
Date: Friday, December 11, 2009
Time: 7:00-9:00 PM Central

Call in:
512-879-3805

Text chat:
http://truthbrigade.com/

[TruthBrigade]

Smoking bans and Sarah Palin

by Theodore J. King


In Going Rogue, the best-selling autobiography of the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, there is a paragraph that is of special interest to smokers, and I'll quote it for you.   

First, though, I should state that I didn't vote for her or, God forbid, Joe Biden because the choices at the top of their tickets were choices between bad and worse.  So I chose not to chose.  Also, in my column in The Oklahoma Constitution, a conservative opinion quarterly, I told my readers that Sarah Palin will not be 
elected to higher office because she resigned as Alaska governor this past summer rather than serve to the end of her term, which would expire in 2011.  I have no hidden agenda behind writing about Sarah Palin.  I believe she is through as a future presidential candidate.   

      On page 75 of Going Rouge, she writes about her time as mayor of Wasila, Alaska and her Friday morning breakfasts at a local restaurant where she would have feedback from the citizens of Wasila regarding the running of that city:

            I finally slowed down on that Friday-morning routine when I was pregnant with Piper [one of her daughters].  Nearly every pregnant woman has something that can make her instantly ill, and the cigarette smoke inside the cafe kind of nauseated me.  Instead of supporting a much-talked-about smoking ban at the time, though, I just stopped going to that restaurant.  It eventually went smoke-free on its own, which is the way things like that should work. [Emphasis mine.]
 
      So-called "conservatives" like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty signed smoking bans into law in their
states.  Instead of siding with the rights of private businesses, these men chose to go along to get along with the Nanny State control freaks.  Since the Nanny State extends to so much more than smoking, I fear any of these three men who may be running for the presidency would be loathe to scale back
the encroaching Nanny State I may not be voting for president in 2012 - unless I am wrong about Sarah Palin's future.

[TruthBrigade]

Reviewed by Mark Irwin (mark@afinemess.org)

http://www.naspc.org/Archives/waronsmoking.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
"When people begin to accept dictates from governments of what they are not supposed to say and do, for their own and collective good, they begin to forget all the liberties that previous generations knew.   The Nannies are out to remake our society, and smokers are their lab rats" ( The War on Smoking , p. 61).

            Theodore J. King describes himself as "an avid pipe smoker" (p. 103) but he obviously smokes cigarettes as well.   In his profession as a political journalist and newspaperman, he's in a unique position to size up what's going on with smokers' rights across the globe, and the news is, to say the least, disheartening.   In easy-going, bright and humorous prose, he piles on story after story, all thoroughly documented, as he gives us a brief history of anti-smoking laws (including some interesting references to the Third Reich), followed by who the anti-smokers are, the effects of smoking bans on business world-wide, the sad state of smoking in Europe, and finally some possible solutions that are already in place in various parts of the country.

            "Nannyism," of course, has been around for a long time in one form or another as long as there have been governments big enough to be infected by it.   I first felt its razor claws back in the 90s with the first big push of the PC crowd.   At no less a citadel of democracy than Thomas Jefferson's own University of Virginia, there was big talk about the health hazards of--I kid you not--coffee!   Now the cupojoe is on a fairly equal footing for me with the sacred pipe, and I remember having several conversations about the possibility of life on other planets, because I sure wasn't going to stay on this one without coffee.   Caffeine was proclaimed one of the great killers, and people who used it were held in a special kind of abhorrence by quite a number of faculty members and students.   For a time, it even looked like the student canteen was going to quit selling this elixir of life.   Fortunately, at about that time, there was a little coffee company from Seattle that became huge when they decided not to sell just beans, but coffee drinks as well, and whether it was their economic clout or just the common sense of John Q. Citizen, the mania against coffee subsided.

            As King's book hummed along, I began to get a Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegutish sci-fi feeling rising in my gorge.   I could almost hear him with Rod Serling accents--like reality had just moved into the Twilight Zone.   And I think that is part of the point King is making: to preserve individual liberties, not for the sake of cigarette smokers, but for all of us, we need to be pro-active.   We can't be the fabled frog-in-the-pot who plashes around as the temperature rises, scalding us and our hobby to death: "We are giving government too much power over how we live our lives.   The war on smokers is a big part of that rise of government intervention, and it is the one that enjoys the most public support or apathy because it affects a relatively small percentage of the population" (90).

            I suspect that, like King, most pipemen are more interested in being morally correct than politically correct, and I think the day has arrived when we need to find our voice and be pro-active about our hobby.   One of the premises of the book, as King repeats time and again, is that "the people who want to ban smoking are not going to stop with banning smoking.   They are always going to look for and find an 'emerging health threat.'   If they don't, they will be forced to close their doors and look for work in the real world" (p. 82).   

            We first need to promote the genuine health facts surrounding the pipe and dissociate them from the legitimate health hazards of cigarettes.   Simultaneously, we need to promote our hobby's documented health benefits: responsible use leads to lower stress and longer life, to name but two of the most important. 1   But we also need to take ideas like International Pipe-Smoking Day ( www.ipsd.edu ) and flesh them out so that our hobby is seen as something healthy, positive, and American.   If you want to see how this can be done, take a look at what the American craft-beer movement has done since the late 1980s.   We now have the absolute finest craft-beer industry in the world, routinely making beers far ahead of what's happening in England, Germany, or Belgium.   I don't see anyone lobbying against Samuel Adams on Capitol Hill.

            Part of the problem we face is that, as pipe smokers, we tend to be (excuse the stereotype) a quieter and gentler lot than either cigar or cigarette smokers.   But we need to take our cue from King, "a thinking man" who not only smokes a Peterson pipe (p. 99), but is working to effect solutions to preserve our liberty to do so.   We need to begin using our collective wisdom to preserve what unites us--our passion for pipes and tobaccos.   To that end, hats off to Theodore J. King for bringing the issues into focus.

See Kevin Boyd's "Summary Notes from the lecture of Henri P. Gaboriau M.D.," March 2002 (Seattle Pipe Club, www.seattlepipeclub.org ) and the famous US Surgeon General's report, "Smoking and Health" (No. 1103, page 112), available for download on the internet.