I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Outdoor Parks Smoking Ban In NYC?
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The Daily News is reporting today that Mayor Bloomberg is taking his crusade against smoking to public parks now.
His previous crusade against smoking in restaurants and bars has been in effect for a while now and although it was quite controversial when it first came out, smokers, libertarians, and other opponents allowed it to slowly slip into quiet acceptance.
That was a mistake.
Now that the bar has been moved, Bloomberg is comfortable enough to push this new legislation which, in my opinion, would never have even been entertained back then when the restaurant and bar ban was being considered.
Bloomberg is surreptitiously sweeping smokers to the sidelines with incremental bans and at this rate it probably won’t be long before he outlaws tobacco completely in NYC.
The problem with this parks ban is that it carries the same problem that the restaurant and bar ban carried: namely, that it throws out the baby with the bathwater.
The problem with this parks ban is…that it throws out the baby with the bathwater.
If when instituting the restaurant and bar ban, the ban was tailored to apply only to family-friendly restaurants, or to restaurants and bars of certain sizes or with certain ventilation limitations, very few people would object. Instead, it was a sweeping indiscriminate ban which even affected some cigar bars, the likes of which is now a rare find in NYC.
Here, too, if Bloomberg would target his ban at family-friendly parks, like soccer fields and ball parks only, he might not get too much opposition. But, to indiscriminately throw in every patch of grass controlled by the Parks Department, like Herald Square, which is hardly a children’s attraction (and is actually often full of tourists, many of them chain-smoking Europeans glad to find a place in NYC that they can actually smoke)… then it’s going too far.
And, apparently, I’m not the only one who feels that way. Judging from the poll conducted on the Daily News web site, so far (at the time of this writing), 82% of respondents agree with me. The poll is still active, but short of an organized targeted blitz campaign by anti-smokers, I don’t think that percentage will change much.
I guess people are finally starting to feel that the air in a smoke-free nanny state can actually feel more stifling than the air in a smoker-friendly state.