...you got one. New courtesy of Chattering Teeth.
LANSING, Michigan — Jamal "Jay" Ghoneim, owner of Smoker's Kastle in Burton, said his customers come into his tobacco store and lounge for one reason.
"Everyone knows everyone. It's like 'Cheers.' No one's offending," he said.
The social atmosphere of Smoker's Kastle may change however, if a bill soon to be introduced in the state House of Representatives makes it to Gov. Jennifer Granholm's desk: It would ban smoking in all public places without exception.
Rep. Paul Scott, R-Grand Blanc, is making the smoke ban bill his first piece of legislation, along with a bill that would repeal the Michigan Business Tax surcharge. The smoke-free bill is expected to be introduced to the House on Thursday.
Note the R. As in REPUBLICAN. A Republican thinks this is a good idea. A right out of the modern liberal touchy-feely playbook bit of nanny stateism is considered by this Republican to be a good idea.
Oh it gets better:
"It's a health issue," Scott said. "People are dying from secondhand smoke. There's no doubt about it. I don't understand how you can make exceptions when it comes to public health. If you agree this is a public health issue, you can't then turn around and say we're going to make exceptions for people to be contracting cancer."
There’s no doubt about it? There’s no proof of it. People have been dying of lung cancer since there have been people, and suddenly in the later 20th century some very questionably motivated doctors, unquestionably selfishly motivated politicians, and the usual arrangement of busybodies and do-it-yourself epidemiologists decided that we should declare any lung cancer by a non-smoker to be the result of second hand smoke. WHAT?
I live in a fairly urban environment full of cars and exhaust there from as well as oil burning furnaces, wood burning stoves, and natural gas burning ovens to name but a few. When I was growing up in suburbia, NO ONE EVER claimed that the smoke that inevitably did not go perfectly up the chimney would give me cancer, yet that smoke exposure for me was far greater than that from parents and other family members who smoked.
Between barbecues, campfires, fireplace fires, and leaf burning, I shouldn’t have any lungs.
Oh, but only tobacco of all plant life on Earth magically gives you lung cancer.
The truth is that ANYTHING that gets into your lungs INCLUDING OXYGEN can trigger cancer. That means one little atom of radium in a mote of dust decaying. That means one oxygen molecule oxidizing a vulnerable molecule. That means one little piece of silica dust.
Do we advocate making children wear particulate filter masks to the beach? Do we make people wear respirators when they cook out? Do we put scarves around our faces in the summer walking past traffic?
A REPUBLICAN BUYS THIS.
This is why I say that we cannot hope to defeat (il)liberalism and leftism when we cannot even get on the same less government is better page. If Republicans are starting to believe that people who freely choose to go to a specifically for smoking establishment and expose themselves to other peoples’ smoke, and further that the second hand smoke is more important to outlaw than the first hand smoke they will get from the cigars they are buying, then we are well and truly fucked.
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