What do NY's Smoking Ban and NY SAFE Act Have in Common?

Simply put, they are both egregious infringements on individual rights to own and use property as seen fit.

Smokers have lived with numerous assaults on their personal decisions for years, but the smoking ban rose to another level and attacked small business owners throughout the state effectively denying them use of their personal property, that they worked hard for and built, for a specific purpose as if they were nothing more than caretakers of public property.

This is certainly not a partisan party issue.  The final votes in the Assembly and Senate were greatly mixed showing both parties infiltrated with control freaks.

Democrats:    Assembly  84 yes - 11 no  ~  Senate  20 yes - 4 no
Republicans:  Assembly 13 yes - 33 no  ~  Senate  37 yes - 0 no

Assemblyman Daniel Hooker’s comments made on the floor of the Assembly during debate on the smoking ban, Wednesday, March 26th, 2003:

I am from a rural district as well, and while we don’t have any cities, we do have a lot of restaurants, taverns, and diners, and this bill will hurt their business. We also have a lot of VFW Posts, American Legion Posts, and Marine Corps League Posts. I can’t help but think of the irony of the situation where a soldier or Marine comes home from the war, goes into a local VFW for a beer and a cigarette, and the bartender says "I’m sorry, young man, while you were overseas fighting for freedom, your State Assembly was quietly legislating it away here at home."

However, Mr. Speaker, I am chiefly opposed to this bill because it presumes that people are incapable of thinking and acting for themselves without the government telling them what to do.

At present, people are free to choose to work in an environment that is smoke free or not. A lot of waitresses who smoke choose to work in a bar specifically because it is a smoke-friendly environment. This bill would limit that freedom.

I don’t smoke but believe that others should be free to smoke if they choose to.

I am not insensitive to the health hazards of smoking. My Dad smoked, and he died of lung cancer. Cause and effect? Probably, but he died a free man who made his own choices.

My general philosophy is that our government spends way too much time telling people what to do and this seems like a good example of that practice.

I am opposed. 

Even though I wasn't from his district, I had written Mr Hooker to thank him for his stand, and he replied with a hand-written and personally signed note providing me with the full text of his speech.  All I got back from my own two representatives were form letters praising the great courageous stand they took standing with the majority to figuratively lynch a minority constituency.

 

We don't want to merely die like Dan Hooker's dad as free men, we want to live our lives as free men, unmolested by tyranny.

 

Why am I writing about this long dead issue now?  Well, first of all, it's NOT dead, it was just a lost squirmish in the never-ending battle for liberty.  And when it was a raging battle, we were severely chastized during that crusade for even insinuating that this assault on individual property rights would snowball down the slippery slope.  Yet today, we have Mayor Bloomberg assaulting individual rights nearly every day with stop and frisk and even denying your right to choose how big of a soft drink you'd like to buy.  Bloomberg rules NYC with an iron fist, but his crusades, especially against the 2nd Amendment are affecting people outside his jurisdiction.  We also have Gov Cuomo, rushing through the ill-conceived NY SAFE Act to attack another group of citizens to deny them their 2nd Amendment rights to own certain property to defend themselves, their families, and their property.

 

The assaults won't ever end until enough people wake up to just say NO!  We must honor the Constitution's legal framework that was set up to defend individual rights against usurpations of the collective and the tyrannical majority.  And just saying no once or twice here or there isn't enough.  We must demand that all such laws be reviewed and those that infringe on individual liberty must be rescinded or repealed.  A single such law makes a precedent for others to follow.

 

There's a reason for the many levels of government and the central powers are enumerated and severely limited.  Even statewide laws should be extremely limited.  Where freedom of association comes in is at the local level.  Don't like the colors your neighbor may paint his house, then join a local homeowners association and dictate away to attract like-minded people to your neighborhood sort of like what's going on in Kiryas Joel.

 

I can go on and on comparing the smoking ban and the NY SAFE Act to a myriad of social issues pertaining to individual rights such as one with the Defense of Marriage Act and the individual right of a citizen to marry whomever he or she pleases that is essential to maintain your right of free association.

As I continually stress, if you petition the government to limit the rights of any other individual to do anything you personally dislike, you empower them to come after you to limit yours.  Think long and hard about it and please ~ Help stop the madness!

War on Smokers Still Smoldering

Good afternoon, Cattle.

Ann Althouse reminds us that the war on smokers hasn't ended.

The latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, Raising the Excise Tax on Cigarettes:  Effects on Health and the Federal Budget, reminds us that the government looks at us all as cattle.   They raise us for our 'milk', but only keep us around as long as it's profitable for them to do so.  They've been doing this for smokers for the past two decades.  The war on fat has started.  After full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, they'll be monitoring all of us in a similar fashion and charging you accordingly.

May I remind you that the 1998 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, Who Pays for the Health Costs of Smoking? determined that smokers do not appear to impose net financial costs on the rest of society.  They estimated that tobacco taxes have apparently resulted in net financial gain to both the federal and state governments at the prevailing tax rates at the time.  Governments save on old-age medical care, social security, and nursing home care due to the estimated earlier death of smokers.  And that was done at the prevailing tax rates in '98 which were much, much lower than they are today.  And they still want MORE.

Wait til the full effects of Agenda 21 hit and they start moving the population to the gulags.  Much more on that to come, so stay tuned.  Or if you want to do a little research yourself, a good place to start is looking up Rosa Koire and her site, Democrats Against UN Agenda 21.

They've sold our children into perpetual slavery.  Now they want our guns.  Our liberty is under a multi-pronged attack.  When do we make a stand?

Update: 

It appears the CDC isn't done with the shakedown.

Uncle Joe's Shack

We have a strange slang word , Uncle Tom, in our language that has come to be a slur to mean according to on-line Merriam-Webster: 

1. : a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals)
2. : a member of a low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women … Some of them are regular Uncle Toms— Jane Fonda>

That certainly was not Harriet Beecher Stowe's intent, but that is lost on the prevailing attitudes of the heavily indoctrinated minds of today.  Joan Hedrick discusses a little of how it has come about:

Grafted onto the minstrel tradition, the stage versions of Stowe’s novel often portrayed Stowe’s hero as a shuffling, humorous Sambo. 

The Christ-like pacifism that ennobled Stowe’s Tom appeared to many in the increasingly confrontational racial politics of the twentieth century as subservience, or as James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1912, “foolishly good”—behavior that became branded as “like Uncle Tom.”

Stowe’s literary reputation, very high in the nineteenth century, was also declining as modernist critics viewed the work of Stowe and other politically motivated women writers as “melodramatic” and "sentimental.”
 

Such critic's views and the slur that gained acceptance are pure poppycock.  Uncle Tom's overt subservience was simply a survival technique in the face of an unbearable situation.  It's no different than people today swallowing their pride, integrity, and opinions to please their masters and keep their job.

Marriage, the Chick-fil-A debates

What a delight to see the outrage erupt from both sides over the relatively benign comments of Chick-fil-A's CEO, Dan Cathy.  Cathy said in his now famous interview in the Washington Times article, "Chick-fil-A chief’s views on marriage alienate gays, Muppets":

“We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles,”

Nothing wrong or particularly inflammatory with that, simply a man expressing his views.  However, this simple statement caused such an uproar in the gay community that several prominent Democrat office holders stepped up the dialogue proclaiming disdain towards Cathy for daring to speak publicly what was on his mind and threatening that they would use their "power" of office to make it difficult for the company to conduct business in their cities.  "How dare Cathy speak his mind?!?" is their message to us all.  Indeed the Mayor of Boston and Chicago both came out with scathing words against not only Cathy but the entire Chick-fil-A enterprise, which as far as we know, has broken no anti-discrimination laws.

Public Unions, the War on Smokers, and ACORN - What Do They Have In Common?

Daniel Bice over at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Online informs us that, "Firefighters union throws cold water on 9-11 float".  (h/t Bot for spreading the news)

The reason behind this union decision is the sponsor of this particular float, Matt Gorniak, has opted out of the union as allowed by a provision in his contract in that employees may elect to pay only their fair share of the union dues which are used for the associated costs of negotiating contracts.  Under Wisconsin state law, employees do not have to pay the portion of dues that funds the union's political lobbying, social, and ideological activities to the labor organization, but may instead donate that portion to a charity.  This applies as long as such a provision is approved by referendum under the bargaining unit agreement with the employees.

I've said before that we shouldn't judge all teachers (or cops or firefighters for that matter) by the spectacle of the union protests in Madison.  Many were silent for obvious reasons and it's a good development to see some start opting out and speaking out.  It warrants repeating: