Totalitarian Amerika

If he had survived in power instead of putting a bullet in his head in a Berlin bunker, Hitler, a fanatical anti-smoker, would have sent smokers to the camps.

Shickelgruber would have been right home in today’s Amerika — the name he chose for his personal train, by the way — where anti-smoking mania is rising to Third Reichian heights. Reports the SFChron:

[Howard] Weyers, owner of a health care benefits administrator in Lansing, Mich., gave his 200 employees an ultimatum in 2004: Quit smoking in 15 months or lose your job. He refused to hire smokers. Ultimately, he extended his smoking ban to employees’ spouses and monitored compliance through mandatory random blood testing….

“We’re talking about ending an epidemic. This is a global pandemic,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likening Weyers’ approach to controlling an outbreak of disease.

What a shame that’s going on in my native state of Michigan. I just turned 53, so I grew up there when my parents and all my relatives smoked. I remember spending a lot of time in a bowling alley/saloon some friends of my parents owned in Detroit, before the government destroyed that once-great city. Everybody was drinking and smoking and having a great time. I was about 7 and didn’t mind the thick tobacco-smoke pall over the whole place — what’s now called “second-hand smoke” and is supposed to be more dangerous than the radiation at ground zero on Aug. 6, 1945, at Hiroshima..

Every now and then, one of the adults would give me a quarter to go to the cigarette machine — remember those? — and buy a pack of coffin nails to take back to them. That was before 45 years of inflation destroyed the dollar’s value, along with our liberties.

Nowadays, if you asked a kid to buy a pack of cigs, the parents would be jailed for “abuse” and the kid shuffled off to a foster-care home until he became a delinquent, was tried as an “adult” for peddling dope, then sentenced to life in the state prison.

But back then, parents trusted kids, and the government trusted parents.

My father smoked 4 packs a day — a habit he took up only when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in World War II — until he quit around 1961, yet he lived to earlier this year, reaching 90. Mom smoked a couple of cigs a day until she died last year at 87.

All real journalists smoke, as shown by the picture of the great H.L. Mencken, at right. Nicotine fires the synapses of the brain. And a slight nicotine buzz makes tolerable the follies we describe with our words.

And who’s this Gerberding yapping that my stogies are a “disease”? Wrong-o, doc. My cigars are a pleasure. Something we don’t have much of anymore since our free America has become enslaved Amerika.

Arnold’s fascist anti-smoking law

Why did some of you ever voter for Arnold? Why didn’t you back McClintock back in 2003?

Now, we still have to put up with this steroid-bloated statist for another three years.

He just signed a law banning smoking in cars with children. The law totally usurps parental authority over their own kids. Why have kids if you won’t be raising them, but Arnold will? He’s not only Big Brother, but Big Fuehrer.

This is a law even the fanaticaly anti-smoking Schickelgruber didn’t think of while running Germany, 1933-45.

When such tyrannies occur, it makes me better understand why folks in foreign countries put up with tyrannies for so long. Governments just do what they want to and brainwash most people into thinking it’s “fantastic,” to use Arnold’s favorite word.

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Govt.: Spy on em if they got em

Has it come to this? The government spying on smokers like the KGB snooping on dissidents?

KnoxNews.com reports:

Starting today, state Department of Revenue agents will begin stopping Tennessee motorists spotted buying large quantities of cigarettes in border states, then charging them with a crime and, in some cases, seizing their cars. Critics say the new “cigarette surveillance program” amounts to the use of “police state” tactics and wrongfully interferes with interstate commerce.

This also is dumb. Let’s say you want to bring back a van’s worth of smokes from Kentucky. You don’t just go there and buy the smokes, then drive back to the Volunteer State. No. Instead, you get your buddy in Owensboro to buy the smokes and put them in his garage. Then you drive across Tennessee’s Checkpoint Charlie, make sure nobody is looking, drive to his garage, throw back a few beers while you load up the smokes into your van, give your buddy a few cartons for storage — then drive back to Tennessesee.

The Soviet Union, despite the KGB and the Gulag, had a massive black market. You just can’t shut down capitalism, especially for a harmless diversion like cigarettes.

The smoke smuggling will just get worse once President Hillary passes a new tax on tobacco to pay for more socialized medicine for — and government control over — kids.

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Rolling Stones under government’s thumb

Hey! think the time is right for a palace revolution!
— The Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man.”

40 years ago, the Rolling Stones got busted for smoking marijuana.

Now they’ve just been busted for smoking — cigarettes. Oh, the evil weed of tobacco!

So far this time, they’re not going jail, as they did in the 60s. But they have run afoul of Britain’s new fascist anti-smoking law.

Yet can you imagine Keith Richards without a smoke in his hand? If you see videos of him, he always has a guitar and a cigarette. When he plays, he pops the cig in his mouth, or somehow keeps the cig in his right hand while he’s also pickin’ his ax.

The Stones are right: It’s time for a “palace revolution” against the “Phony” Tony Blair/Gordon Brown dictatorship. Abolish the British “Parliament,” which resembles the Reichstag under Hitler, and give all political power to Queen Elizabeth II, a nice old lady who wouldn’t begrudge Keith Richards a cig.

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Anti-smoking fascism destroying England and America

The only time I visited England was in January 1982, just before I got out of the U.S. Army, after being stationed in West Germany for more than two years. A friend of mine was a student at the University of Oxford, and we pub-crawled across a couple of days, drinking and talking and smoking.

Now that’s banned as of July 1. You can’t smoke there. The country that had her “Finest Hour” fighting Hitler during the 1940 Battle of Britain — Churchill chain-smoked stogies while Hitler inhaled the smokless air of tyranny — now has taken up one of Der Fuehrer’s obsessions: banning smoking. Hitler was such an anti-smoking fanatic that he only would allow one person to smoke in his presence, fellow fascist dictator Mussolini.

The dictatorship of “Phony” Tony Blair banned smoking in public places, including pubs, and his successor, new dictator Gordon Brown, is continuing the ban. England’s Sovietized medicine bureaucracy, called the National Health Service, threatens in Big Brother fashion that the ban “includes places like cafes, bars, pubs, clubs, shopping centres, railway stations, garages, work vehicles, taxis, factories and staff rooms. Anyone who breaks the smokefree law could face a fine or end up in court.”

This is the kind of socialized-medicine Nanny State that Michael Moore and others want to impose on America.

A.N. Wilson, who has written many biographies of great writers, tells us:

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown’s Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.

The moment they popped their favoured cigar, cigarette or pipe between their lips and lit up, they would have been fined on the spot.

Practically every important British author was a smoker, going back to Milton.

When I went to Oxford, my friend and made a pilgrimage to the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings — C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others — gathered to smoke, drink, and read their latest creations, such as Lewis’s Narnia books or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. They couldn’t do it today, even though both Lewis and Tolkien were decorated World War I veterans, smoking their way through the trenches in their victory against the Kaiser.

We have a similar smoking ban here in California, imposed about a decade ago by dictator Pete Wilson. The state has been declining fast since then. No longer can writers gather in a bar, talk, and create. There even are proposals to ban smoking in apartments and even cars.

Somewhere in the deepest pit of Hell, Hitler is smiling.

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Democrats want to tax my cigars even more

Voters elected Democrats to run Congress for one reason: to end the Iraq War. The Democrats still haven’t done so.

Instead, they’re trying to increase the taxes on my cigars 20,000%. That’s not a typo. For each cigar, the tax would rise from the current 5-cents to $10.

Of course, that would only fuel a huge black market. There’s already a black market for Cuban cigars, thanks to the silly embargo on Cuban goods, a relic of the Cold War.

The money from the cigar tax would go to one of the worst programs in which the feds usurp parental power and take over the health care — and lives — of little children, SCHIP, for Soviet Children’s Health Program. Another tyranny.

At times like these, it’s worth remembering that the most famous anti-smoking fanatic in history was Adolf Hitler.