Nutter butts out on butts, more buttering up Council next two weeks
Philadelphia City Councilperson and neo-Prohibitionist Michael Nutter agreed to a postponement of a vote on his draconian anti-associative smoking bill today. Nutter needs 9 nattering nabobs of negativity to vote for the ‘Let’s Try to Be a Poorer Manhattan’ bill, and at the moment he has but 8. I would have loved to have seen a public humilation for Nutter’s attack on the city’s ethnic taprooms on St. Patrick’s Day, but alas he turned tail. Again we see the anti-democratic nature of the Smoke Crusaders, not wanting the issue to go to referendum (as it did even in Jeb Bush/Katherine Harris Florida for tar’s sake!), nor to come to a vote of any sort within council until moralists like the ACS have a couple of more weeks to screech and pressure their way to victory.
One can expect another round of slick mass mailings and outright lies from the likes of the American Cancer Society, who see no apparent irony in mailing me a full-color glossy pamphlet, destined straight for the landfill, discouaraging me from supporting the individual’s right to smoke ensemble in a voluntary capacity while drinking.
Allow me to share this dispatch from a discussion group I particpate in, from a clever poster known to me only as Sparks:
Now let’s be honest
this really has NOTHING to do with the health of the employees. If
it was a real workplace health issue OSHA would be stepping in. This
is a loophole in public health code so people can feel good about
themselves and following a trend. You ask somebody why they won’t go
to a bar they say "I don’t like the smoke" not "I can’t watch those
poor bartenders suffer in all that smoke". Theses are the same people
who also drink crappy drinks cheap beer and leave lousy tips and wave
money at the bartender when they can’t get fast enough service. If
smoke is a way to keep them out I say "light em up"As a former bartender I quit bartending before the ban hit in New
York State because I knew that our business would go down. The idea
that people who didn’t go to bars/restaurants because of smoke will
come back is like believing in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or Iraq
had WMD’s.With a little luck the bill will be shot down and people can
complain about something else. The next big bill may be a ban on
cheesesteaks. Since if you eat enough of those over a lifetime you
could die too. I wonder what is worse for you? Smoking a pack of
smokes a day or having scrapple every day for breakfast?
Well said, sir. Remember folks, call the City Councilrat for your district as well as all of the free-range At-Large members in order to have any impact. Stand up for the Bill of Rights and let folks light up in private! (Full disclosure: I don’t smoke cigarettes. I’m a civil rights junkie.)
