While I don’t always agree with Dr. Siegel, he is at least one that tries to present facts and not follow the cult movement.  It is high time that people ,{especially polticians)  wake up to the fact that these laws are based on a cult of eletist groups and not hard core science.  Smoking bans started with the EPA and they got caught rigging the game just as they have recently got caught rigging it on the topic of global warming.

Here is a recent McCarthyistic attack on Dr Siegel by tobacco control.

The letter states as follows:

“I am writing to you today to file a formal complaint concerning one of your faculty members, Michael Siegal. As you may know, Dr. Siegal regularly posts blogs on the internet that are critical of tobacco control research. Dr. Siegal was once a respected member of the tobacco control community, and I served with him on the board of the Tobacco Control Research Center. In recent years, Dr. Siegal’s critiques have become quite offensive to others in the field of tobacco control. He has alienated his former colleagues in droves, and as a result he has been banned from participation in tobacco control listserves, and to my knowledge, no longer serves on the boards of any tobacco control organizations.”

The fact is that the letter does not show anything that Dr Siegel that could be deemed offensive to a reasonable person, questioning the scientific results is in fact part of the legitimate process. You will never find Tobacco Control engaged in an open and honest debate on any of the so called science. You will not see tobacco control allow dissenting opinions on their blogs, as a matter of fact you will see very few comments as they are so heavily censored. (See Smoke Free Wisconsin) Then Take a look at Dr Siegel’s blog and notice he does not Censor his at all. He allows both the good and the bad and will defend his position. I leave it to reasonable people to decide who has the most integrity. Again I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but he is a man of integrity who is willing to publicly discuss the issues, that is more then I can say for Tobacco Control!

This is old news that has reared it’s ugly head yet again, this time with an anti-terrorist twist. Of course I am talking about internet sales of tobacco.

Senator Herb Kohl today reintroduced the Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking (PACT) Act of 2009 to provide law enforcement with the tools they need to crack down on black market tobacco selling. Cigarette trafficking has developed into a popular, and highly profitable, means of generating revenue for criminal and terrorist organizations. Hezbollah, al Qaeda and Hamas have all generated significant revenue from the sale of counterfeit cigarettes.

Will the bill stop the criminal element from trafficking in black market cigarettes? Of course not and if Kohl was honest he would admit this. All this law does is protect the states who abuse smokers with draconian cigarette taxes. It restricts free trade between the states and rewards states that would abuse its citizens through extortion. not only do some states abuse their citizens with excessive tax but they add insult to injury by applying a sales tax on the tax. Terrorist organizations like organized crime will have little incentive to abide by the law, like all protectionist bills would only punish legitimate tobacco sellers like Indian smoke shops and therefore increase the profit of the terrorist groups. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. So this will be too. The only way to beat the terrorist is to remove the profit and therefore the incentive to traffic in illegal cigarettes. How does one do this. Repeal the abusive extortion, I mean draconian tax and open up free trade. The free market does work. Protectionist laws never have and never will.

It has been suggested by a Democrat that we are a partisan group and that we favor one party over another. From the remember these legislators page.

Lenny Hand, on July 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 am Said:

As a long time member of the Racine city tavern league it was rare that the T.L.W. asked the members to vote for one party or another. Lets not start now. Haveing been involved in politics ,both as running campaigns and looking for candidates I think it silly we do this now.Lets do the best we can to work with the Dems.

While Lenny acted as though he was non-partisan he has been a very active Democrat for a number of years.

Lehman praised Hand’s activities on behalf of the community, unions and the Democratic Party, and noted that he has been involved in party activities so long, George McGovern crashed his wedding.

Now there is nothing wrong with him being active in the political process, we all have a right and a duty to get involved. I think the politicians are feeling the backlash from the draconian taxes and the nanny state laws striping business owners of property rights. Somehow they felt that taxing 20% of the population would put them in a favorable light with the 80%. What they failed to figure is that few elections are won by a 20% margin. So if the smokers unite there is very little chance of re election. Although the majority of the Reps and Senators on the list were democrats there were also republicans on that list. In my own district Republican Rep. Mursau voted both for the tax increase and the ban and will not be getting my vote in next years election. One thing is for sure, it is time to put partisanship aside and vote out any politician that would deny a property owner the right to decide what legal products can be used on their property or who use draconian taxes as an attempt at social engineering.

I think that these power hungry politicians thought that the smokers would just roll over and play dead. Nothing could be farther then the truth. Smokers are uniting all over the country and making a difference. The delay in South Dakota is proof of that. A warning to all politicians. Don’t think for a minute that because we are in the minority that we can be dismissed. We have not yet begun to fight!

Here is an excerpt from an editorial in Hawaii.

So we smokers, who are responsible for less than 10 percent of all health-care costs, get taxed out of our minds and shoved out of bars to boot. The recent federal tax hike increased “non-cigarette” tobacco by a Draconian 2,200 percent! Lawmakers pass unjust laws for one reason. They do not fear a particular voting bloc. For the first time in world history the smoker voting bloc unveiled itself right here in Hawaii, critically impacting what turned out to be the third-closest race in last year’s primaries (Alex Sonson vs. Clarence Nishihara in Senate District 18). We campaigned for Sonson, who was a big supporter of small business and exemptions. Smokers and bar owners are angry. We have had enough and we will vote in unity. Taxation for the purpose of social engineering should be called extortion. It seems the editorial staff of the “new and improved” Star Bulletin has taken their eyes off the ball in defending even more increases in tobacco taxes. The hundreds of millions of dollars our state already collects in tobacco taxes are obscene and ill-spent.

The Tea Party movement began in February when Congress enacted the SCHIP bill, grotesquely raising tobacco taxes to help pay for health care. As a protest, tens of thousands of smokers sent real or virtual tea bags to those on Capitol Hill just to let them know that we have had it. The movement has grown exponentially and now has incorporated millions who share the exact same core values of fighting excessive taxation and governmental intrusion. There are 40,000 registered smoker voters in Hawaii, and 15 million strong across the nation. We are slowly waking up and uniting. You can bet these uncooked numbers will really stir up some delicious damage to those of the status-quo mindset in many elections to come.

Smoke Free Wisconsin is bragging about the $0.75 tax increase on cigarettes putting us at the fifth highest in the nation. They know that the smoking ban is going to be devastating to the Tavern industry, the fact is they don’t care. Just as they don’t care that excessive taxes hurt the economy. They brag that we now have the fifth highest cigarette tax in the nation.

Lets look at the facts, the states that have higher taxes also have the highest taxes on everything else and still on the verge of bankruptcy. They also were the first ones to jump on the bandwagon at social engineering and promoting the nanny state. When Doyle took office our state had the 20 highest per capita income, every year since he took office we have moved down the list and now we are at 27. The bottom line is that excessive taxes and nanny state social engineering are not conducive to bringing in business and will hurt everyone. Look at the states that have higher taxes and they are the ones that have consistently had per capita income in the top ten. Can Doyle make that claim. No his policies have made the per capita income to go down and now he is going to punish the poorest of the Wisconsinites for not jumping on the Nanny State bandwagon.

Here is the taxes for all the states.

Smoke Free Wisconsin is whining about the budget cuts, Due to the fact that they have been caught in more lies then I care to count and the fact that tobacco control is a lobby group pushing to strip property owners of their property rights and therefore stripping the people of freedom of choice, I recommend that everyone contact their reps and demand that all taxpayer funding be denied all lobby groups including tobacco control. They are basically stealing our money to lobby against us.

Dr Michael Siegel points out in his blog The rest of the story that the ACS is caught in yet another lie.

As we know, the truth is that Philip Morris – the largest company within Big Tobacco and the company with the overwhelmingly highest amount of lobbying expenditures in Congress – supported the bill and lobbied for its passage. Thus, the “slick cigarette lobbyists” from Philip Morris were promoting the bill and any Congressperson who voted for this legislation was supporting, not opposing, the interests of these “slick cigarette lobbyists.”

Timothy Carney picked up on this type of act of deception in his Washington Examiner column on Wednesday, when he wrote that: “it’s misleading to claim you’re battling the “tobacco industry” when you’re siding with the industry’s 900-pound gorilla.”

What the American Cancer Society is claiming here is more than just deceptive, in my opinion. It’s not merely that the ACS is claiming that they were fighting Big Tobacco. They are making a specific claim that the “slick cigarette lobbyists” were opposing the bill and that it was the public’s expression of support for the bill which overcame the work of these lobbyists.

I would opine that this is outright false. The largest chunk of Big Tobacco lobbyists and Big Tobacco lobbying money went into supporting this legislation. If anything, the legislation passed because of the work of “slick tobacco lobbyists.”

Also as I pointed out in the comments section I challenged their statement “As it turns out, there’s one thing more powerful than slick cigarette lobbyists — the voices of real people from all across the country fighting for change?”, since I showed the other day that a recent gallup poll clearly shows the opposite.

Larry Mann, who represents the Video Lottery Establishments of South Dakota and at least 16,776 petitioners provided enough signatures to delay a new smoking ban which was scheduled to be implemented July 1, 2009 until voters can decide the issue on the November 2010 ballot.