"So Clinton basically was eulogizing Koch by saying, 'Hey, he supported my agenda, and that's why I'm here.'"

"And he wasn't through.  Somehow Clinton worked Viagra into the routine."

CLINTON: He said, "You know, we've gotta do something to convince these young people to quit smoking, and there's just been a new study saying that it impacts virility."  And he said, "You know, this Viagra is a big deal."  This letter is hilarious.  He said, "Now, politicians don't like to talk about this, especially among young people, but young people are way more sophisticated than older people and they get this, and it doesn't work to tell people they're gonna get cancer or respiratory diseases, go after the virility argument."

Lip reader figures out what John Boehner said that made Michelle Obama roll her eyes.

In the conversation, with Obama and Boehner leaning back to converse behind Michelle's head: "Boehner asked President Obama — a longtime smoker who claims to have kicked the habit — if he’d had a chance to have a cigarette before the luncheon. The speaker, a chain smoker, then quipped, 'Somebody [Michelle] won’t let you do it.'"

Judge Michelle's famous eye-roll now.
	Totally justified and good for her.
	She should have appreciated the ribbing and laughed graciously.
	She should have been wary of the cameras and maintained a dignified demeanor.
pollcode.com free polls

"Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law..."

"... according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation."

The Affordable Care Act... allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1.

For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums.

Younger smokers could be charged lower penalties under rules proposed last fall by the Obama administration. But older smokers could face a heavy hit on their household budgets at a time in life when smoking-related illnesses tend to emerge.

I got there via the Isthmus forum, where Meade wrote:

Does that really make sense? Shouldn't it be reversed? Charge higher penalties/taxes to younger smokers as they will potentially have more years to cost society in lost production and "free" health care.

Charge older retired or retiring smokers lower penalties/taxes, encourage them to keep smoking and die sooner. After all, at their age, the older smokers are no longer contributing. The sooner they die, the less they cost the rest of us.

What are the voluntary activities that create the greatest risks for costing the insurance pool money? Why pick on smokers alone? To get the variable premiums concept started, because we're already into burdening smokers? By the way, "Among Americans, Smoking Decreases as Income Increases/Gradual pattern is consistent across eight earnings brackets." The least well-off people are hit hardest! But — what the hell? — kick the smokers now, and later we can tweak the system and raise the premiums for people who.... well, who would you like to hurt/nudge? How about the fat? Weigh in every year and get your premiums adjusted accordingly, scientifically. Here's a BMI calculator. Maybe we should charge you $1,000 a year in added premiums for every point above the "normal" range.

Where will this smoker premium surcharge lead?
	Maybe smokers will have to pay a little more, but it won't be that much.
	It will be expensive for smokers, a big problem, but only for them.
	It will move on to obesity and maybe a few other things, but it will only be mild nudging.
	It will move to many things and become more and more invasive and oppressive.
	They won't stop until they crush all individual expression and make us robots for the State.
pollcode.com free polls

"He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room..."

"... where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall."

Today's sentence, in the Gatsby project, where we read one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" each day.

What jumps out — bounces out — at me here is the dual light action: the lighting of the cigarette and the light bouncing in from the hall. The sources of light: 1. a trembling match, and 2. a gleaming floor. Both light sources go with -ing words. The light that has to do with a person doing something is trembling, and the light whose action has no human agent gleams and bounces. There's a big contrast between the emotional content of the 2 lights, the one — trembling — in the dark, in the intimate relationship between the man's hand and the woman's mouth, and the other — bouncing — off the floor from a shiny, bright place.

I've called attention to the light action that is human and that is not, but in this... light!, it's important to see what is not said. We don't get "trembling hand." We get "trembling match." The man is there in the "He" — "He lit" — but there's something cagey or removed about saying it's the match that's trembling. A trembling hand is only implied. That makes the lights more inanimate, but it also heightens the picture of light. We see the burning match, not the hand. And that puts the man-woman intimacy more deeply in the dark. They get as deep into the dark room and away from the light as they can. Good reason to tremble.

"In a funny twist, Ed whispers how the man at the table next to ours is feverishly working his prayer beads with his hand."

"The man hears us and laughs. Not prayer beads -- he says in decent English -- this is what we do here when we try to quit smoking. You know, keep your fingers busy!"

In 2010, Greece passed a law banning smoking in restaurants, bars and even enclosed outdoor spaces. Let me assure you, this law is completely ignored....

There are a number of good seafood tavernas lining the waterfront and we choose one that has the lovely "no smoking" sing on the door. Except that inside, we see there are ashtrays on the tables and both the owner and the waitress are puffing away. Still, the dining room seems free of smoke and so we settle in at a table that seems relatively protected, should someone choose to light up.

A good lesson about law. What makes people follow the law? Surely, a statute is not enough. There are cultural elements. Some law is passed in Athens, but who's keeping track of what's happening on all those islands? How many islands are there in Greece? Depends on how you count. It could be 6,000. It could be 163. The story above comes from the island of Lesbos. The man with the smoking beads was one of 90,643 Lesbians, who follow the law... who knows how assiduously?

"I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers."

What goes on in those sealed rooms where TSA agents look at X-ray images of passengers in screening machines? The agents are isolated where they won't see the in-the-flesh individuals being screened, but they will see them naked. How would you expect human being to act while doing a job like that?

I love the placement of e-cigarettes in the scenario, as if they make the TSA workers more disreputable and sleazy — in a high-tech kind of way that meshes with the high-tech way they are peeping at nudity.

Quite aside from the TSA and its awful problems, vaping e-cigarettes can be amusing way to do something with your mouth and hands. Here's a kind that doesn't even deliver nicotine.

"Birds Appear to 'Self-Medicate' With Our Cigarette Butts."

Headline at The Atlantic. What birds are actually doing, apparently, is using the butts in nest-building, and nicotine works as an arthropod repellent.

"We're all adults here, it's time we take our freedom back."

Fabulous slogan from ad — viewable at the link — for blu eCigs.

Most living Americans had never before seen a cigarette advertised on television - they were banned in 1971.

But the electronic cigarettes fall outside that law, since they contain no tobacco. That is just one way they fall into what one anti-smoking campaigner calls a regulatory "no man's land."...

Unless they make a therapeutic claim, for example that they can help people quit smoking, they fall in the cracks between federal tobacco regulations and rules covering drug devices like insulin pumps...

In the new commercial, Lorillard appears to have reached into the bag of advertising tricks that got previous generations of Americans hooked on cigarettes, tobacco industry critics say.

"It feels like what they're trying to do is re-establish a norm that smoking is okay, that smoking is glamorous and acceptable," says Cynthia Hallett, executive director of Americans for Non-Smokers' Rights.

Step back, nanny.

I'm waiting for the day when there will be legal THC-delivering eCigs. And here I am smoking a blu eCig. I've never been a tobacco smoker. So I think these things might be nice for people who want to play-smoke and have a bit of nicotine — which is a stimulant and a relaxant.

Nicotine appears to enhance concentration and memory... It also appears to enhance alertness.... Arousal is increased...  Pain is reduced... Anxiety is reduced...

Research suggests that, when smokers wish to achieve a stimulating effect, they take short quick puffs, which produce a low level of blood nicotine. This stimulates nerve transmission. When they wish to relax, they take deep puffs, which produce a high level of blood nicotine, which depresses the passage of nerve impulses, producing a mild sedative effect.

Anyway, watch the ad at the first link. When I showed it to Meade — who, like me, loved the "take our freedom back" slogan — he said that was the key to understanding the famous "smoking guy" ad for Herman Cain.

At the Kong Kafé...

... what are you sucking at?

(Need a Kong? Here! Need anything else? Here's the outstanding and mild Althouse portal.)

"Smoking 'rots' brain, says King's College study."

Says the BBC, and maybe my brain is rotted, but I can't find the scientific concept of brain "rot" in the article or any justification for using it here. It seems like goofball sensationalism to me. Smoking has well-known health risks that are "significantly associated with cognitive decline." Okay, but is the brain rotting?

Maybe I'm just not getting the British. I know these characters use the noun "rot" to mean bullshit. Here's the Oxford English dictionary definition #5:

slang. Ridiculous or nonsensical talk or ideas; nonsense, rubbish. Also: pointless or fatuous activity. Also as int. Cf. tommy-rot n. at Tommy n.1 Compounds 2.

1846 Punch 10 136/2 Peel and Potato-blight defy To make him hold his tongue, or try To talk aught else but ‘rot’!
1857 T. Hughes Tom Brown's School Days i. vi. 138 Let's stick to him, and talk no more rot.
1879 M. E. Braddon Cloven Foot iv. 96, I thought he despised ballet-dancing. Yet this is the third time I have seen him looking on at this rot.
1889 tr. R. Shilleto New Triposes in C. Whibley In Cap & Gown 228 Your Natural-rot, your Moral-bosh.
1894 G. Moore Esther Waters xxxix. 302 All bloody rot; who says I'm drunk?
1914 G. B. Shaw Fanny's First Play 158, I quite agree that harlequinades are rot.
a1953 E. O'Neill Long Day's Journey (1956) i. 35 It's damned rot! I'd like to see anyone influence Edmund more than he wants to be.
1977 C. McCullough Thorn Birds ii. 36 ‘What if it isn't the Eyetie girl?’.. ‘Rot!’ said Paddy scornfully.
1990 R. Clay Only Angels Forget vi. 78, I insisted on a church wedding. Mother said, ‘What rot, Isobel, you don't believe in any of that’, which was true but irrelevant.
2004 A. Hollinghurst Line of Beauty iii. 78 He talked a lot of rot at dinner on... the coloured question.

‘Rot!’ say I scornfully. It's the mark of bad writing to bolster your saids with adverbs, I say scornfully, brain-rottedly. Now, where are my cigarettes?

"Now that legal pot is here, will cigarette companies dust off their old plans for mass commercialization?"

NPR explores the coming of legal marijuana:

In the '70s... "there were high-level conversations about adding marijuana to tobacco, creating a line of marijuana cigarettes, and being ready to jump in and market this."

As recently as 1993, when it looked like France was poised to legalize marijuana, Philip Morris trademarked the name "Marley." But when the estate of Bob Marley complained, the company claimed it had nothing to do with the reggae singer.

"Philip Morris said, 'No no, it could be any kind of Marley,... like Jacob Marley, the cheap, cantankerous teetotaler from A Christmas Carol.'"...

Want legal marijuana? Write to the President:

"Country superstar Randy Travis walked naked into a convenience store to buy cigarettes, touching off a bizarre series of events..."

"... that ended with him being charged with threatening to shoot a state trooper in North Texas, police and sources said."

"Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes."

"She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road."

ADDED: "The New Yorker this week is publishing a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Thanks for the Light,' that it rejected three-quarters of a century ago.

Turning the story down in 1936, the editors said that it was “altogether out of the question” and added, “It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.”

It’s not hard to see why they thought so....

Obama's cookie controversy.

Asked by a girl to name his favorite Girl Scout cookie, Obama says "“I’ve gotta say that I’m pretty partial to those mint..." and somebody booed....

"I didn’t mean to create controversy here,” Obama responded. “Did you hear, there was somebody booing? What was your choice? Who was booing up there? He had a different opinion. What are you, oatmeal? Peanut butter is quite good too. But I’m going with the mint.”

But isn't it refreshing — as we fight about everything — to fight over something inconsequential? To play-fight. It's like sports and games. Keeps us from getting too frustrated and mean.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:

He's lying about the mint. He lies about everything.

Imagine if he told the truth:

Cookies! I don't eat cookies. You see how skinny I am? I was a pudgy kid [like you], and I ate plenty of cookies in my day, especially in those days when I was chooming. But now I smoke the right stuff: good old tobacco cigarettes. The kind of cigarettes that don't make you want to eat. The kind that keep you thin. That's the secret.

I know, you expect me to say "Thin Mints," because that's the favorite Girl Scout cookie, but I'm not going to lie to you. It's ridiculous to use the word "thin" in the name of a cookie. Cookies make you fat. I am skinny. I don't eat cookies. I smoke cigarettes. It's a choice you make, and I decided a long while ago that it was worth the risk, the risk of lung cancer, to control my weight, because weight'll kill you too. Plus, it's hell on your political career. The fat Barack Obama would not be President Obama. That's just the way it is.

And by the way, if I did eat cookies, I'd eat better quality cookies. I mean, I've got an executive pastry chef in the White House. This guy used to be the pastry chef at Montrachet Restaurant in New York City. Can you picture the cookies I have access to?

But good for you, little Girl Scout, good for you trying to better yourself by getting some door-to-door sales experience selling cookies to the bitter small town folks who cling to their Do-si-dos and Tagalongs. As they say in the Girl Scouts: Thank U Berry Munch. Barry Munch... would've been a great nickname for me, back in my chubby, chooming youth.

"Do you think that the man in line behind you and the lady behind him want to buy you your cigarettes?"

The 65-year-old cashier who scolded the 20-year-old with the EBT card and refused to let him buy cigarettes.

The next day, the 20-year-old’s “foster mother” showed up at the Big Apple to complain about how her “son” had been mistreated. Jackie Whiton talked back again.

“I told her, ‘Use the money you get from the state to buy his cigarettes.’ She said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”...

“He was very capable of working,” Jackie said, “so I told him to get a J-O-B.”

Whitton was fired.

Should Whiton have been fired?
	Yes, for talking to a customer like that, but her policy opinion is correct.
	No, she's a heroine, and all cashiers should do the same.
	Eh. It's complex. But don't fire her. Give her another chance, and fix the policy.
	Yes, and in fact customers should be allowed to buy what they want.
pollcode.com free polls

By the way, were you familiar with the term "EBT card"? Do you know what the letters stand for? (I didn't.)

Twas the night before Scott Walker Recall Day, at the Capitol Square.

Not a protester was stirring, but the media were there.
The microphones were set up next to the CNN tour bus...



In the hope local politicos would soon kick up a fuss.
When out by the monument, there arose such a clatter,
Meade sprang from his B-Cycle to see what was the matter.
He grabbed for his iPhone and opened the app,
Looked for the shutter and started to snap.



With a lovely lady driver, so lively and quick,
She was smoking what some folks call a cancer stick.



So up to Heg's statue the Freedom Van drew,
With flowers and angels and a militant capitalist smoker too.



It was Lynda all in blue from her head to her foot,
And these clothes were not tarnished with ashes and soot.



Her friend wore Clay Matthews' number 52 on her back,
Who is Clay Matthews? He's one of The Pack!

The stump of a cigarette Lynda held in her teeth,
And the smoke it encircled her head like a wreath.
She had a sweet face and a cute little belly,
That shook when she laughed, like a bowl full of jelly!



"The truth shall make you free," the van bumper said.
And that gave Meade to know he had nothing to dread.



"Vote Walker for Governor" — then, 'cause she's one of those jokers,
She wrote: "But Walker, please keep promises to smokers."
Meade sprang to his bike, and he rang the little bell,
And away Meade then flew like a bat out of hell.



Lynda heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight,
"Let Walker finish his term, and to all a good-night!"

Obama's "Choom Gang."

Everyone's reading this, so I thought you might like to talk about it.

Excerpts from David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

(The Maraniss book doesn't come out until June 19th. You can buy it here.)

ADDED: Here's a long excerpt from the book, covering Obama's college years:

Most of Obama's classmates could not see how hard he was working to reconcile the contradictions that life threw at him. They thought he was cool, smart without being pedantic, and seemed to have his act together. To Mark Parsons, who came to know him mostly because they both smoked and spent a lot of time together huddling outside the student union, Obama seemed "almost Zen in walking through all the chaos in our dorm". He displayed one trait that showed he wanted to be a player though: he wore a lot of "stupid hats". He usually wore them cocked, to look cool. Obama also had a peculiar smoking style, a little affectation. He turned his wrist up and cupped the cigarette between thumb and index finger. He smoked a cigarette the same way he smoked a joint. "I have a sense that he smoked because he was addicted, as I was," Parsons said. But, Obama told Parsons, there was another reason. "I remember him telling me he would quit after he got married. He didn't want to quit smoking because he said he would gain weight, but after he got married it would be OK to gain weight. I think it was mostly a joke."

"Smokin' the Competition."

(Somewhere in the middle of Texas.)

Nothin' Butt Smokes!

Light up, and settle in.

(Photo from a small town in Texas.)

Christopher Hitchens explores the history of the...

... blowjob. ("The three-letter 'job,' with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American.")

And here's his classic "Why Women Aren't Funny." ("Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men...")

And here's that time he subjected his body to all manner of fancy spa treatments. ("I also take the view that it’s a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life.")

All of these links come from this collection of Hitch-links at Vanity Fair.

It's so sad to have lost Hitchens! From that 3d link, above:

[M]ost of my bad habits are connected with the only way I know to make a living. In order to keep reading and writing, I need the junky energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply. To be crouched over a book or a keyboard, with these conditions of mingled reverie and alertness, is my highest happiness. (Upon having visited the doctor, Jean-Paul Sartre was offered the following alternative: Give up cigarettes and carry on into a quiet old age and a normal death, or keep smoking and have his toes cut off. Then his feet. Then his legs. Assessing his prospects, Sartre told Simone de Beauvoir he “wanted to think it over.” He actually did retire his gaspers, but only briefly. Later that year, asked to name the most important thing in his life, he replied, “Everything. Living. Smoking.”)

By the way, Jean Paul Sartre was way funnier than Simone de Beauvoir.