I just knew that tobacco control freaks and anti smokers were a bunch of crafty bastards but how sneaky they can get never fails to surprise me:
AUSTIN -- A proposal to ban smoking in most Texas bars and restaurants was snuffed out Thursday by state lawmakers.
House lawmakers had tucked the ban into a spending and school finance bill, but Senate negotiators wanted it out and it was declared a dead. (My emphasis.)
Don't know about you but the kids in Austin must be a right bunch of tearaways, what with their drinkin' and a smokin' and all.
But I'm beginning to wonder if some the House Lawmakers were in the pay of Big Tobacco as...
Attaching the ban to a critical school finance bill also made it an easy target to be killed on a parliamentary maneuver by opponents of the spending plan, Deuell said. The smoking measure could have been found to violate legislative rules against bills that deal with more than one subject.
Now maybe people may understand why the likes of me do not understand political ideology and get sideswiped when voting.
Austin has one of those rarities in politics, and particularly in the Senate, Sen. Bob Deuell, a physician who opposes any such ban:
Deuell, a physician, also said he opposed the ban because he considers it an invasion of personal rights.
Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs! Personal rights??? Never heard of such a thing.
And business owners, well, they can go to f... Oh
Previous sessions have seen proposed bans beaten down by arguments favoring the rights of business owners and smokers to have the government intruding in their private affairs.
Spot the deliberate? mistake by the reporter in that last quotation, you can find the full story
here.
When it comes down to smoking bans then it inevitability comes down to money, whoever coined the phrase "follow the money" deserves a knighthood for their perception. And when it comes down to money and tobacco control/anti smokers then we see the same untrue warcry from them:
But in a session dominated by searing debates over a strained state budget, supporters argued that a ban would save the state hundreds of millions of dollars treating patients with smoking-related diseases.
Ah, that old red herring eh. No mention of how many millions the state gets in tobacco taxes nor how many non smoking patients benefit from those tax dollars eh!
When it comes down to smoking bans, or prohibition as I see it, not only American states fall prey to the 'they've done it so we must do it, we don't want to be
the nigger in the woodpile now, would we' syndrome, as we in the UK have found to our cost.
At least 29 states have adopted smoke-free laws and several more are considering them this year. More than 30 Texas cities have comprehensive smoke-free ordinances covering public workplaces and facilities with a patchwork of other regulations across the state.
So if I jump off the block of flats where I live tomorrow would anyone like to join me? If I can do it then you can. Truth is I want to live, If I was a business man I'd want my business to live also and I do not want government, local or otherwise, to legislate against either. My choice, my business.
2 comments:
Maybe things in Austin, Texas have changed since last I read about them, but when I read about Austin, Texas just a year ago, the city was extreme left-wing- progressive territory and smoking was banned indoors and outdoors, everywhere, within all of city limits and there were fines if caught smoking, including outdoors, including outdoors in your own backyard if it disturbed the neighbors who could call police and have you fined. That is my impression of Austin, Texas.
When I worked in the USA in the late 80s the joke was that it was illegal to have an open bottle of beer in your car, except in Texas, where it was compulsory. However Austin isn't like most of Texas. It is a little outpost of California. Texas thinks it's independent and the rest of the USA wishes it was, was another joke. I don't see a total ban on smoking in Texas coming soon. They really do value freedom and take it very seriously indeed; 'though I don't know whether they go as far as not requiring motorists to have third party insurance, which was, or even still is, the case in one of the southern states: Louisiana, maybe.
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