Who is the government? You, me, my neighbor and all the neighbors in the U.S. are the government. Now if you want your neighbors passing laws telling you how you should live your life, fine. On the other hand, if you want your neighbors to stay the hell out of your life, then that's something else again. If the government has any information that would help me to make my own decision, fine. But when the government tries to force my behavior with legislation and higher taxes, then the smell of a fascist society is in the air. First nanny, then Nurse Ratched. Next comes black boots on the pavement.

That's the real problem here. Add to it, likely additional (future) incompetence.

Regulating it and even putting a realistic tax on it (if it wasn't high enough to encourage evasion, taxes that were rational in that they covered much or all of the additional health care and other costs that are truly attributable to tobacco use), okay. But these are the same people that are subjecting us all to their perverse motives as well as ways with the Detroit dinosaurs, after all…

Leave it to the lib-Dems in Congress once more to screw up any future Cuba-policy-reform measures…

Especially in the East with its higher population and many unfenced yards — why that's it! Let's have the feds require and _build_ those fences!

*** STIMULUS SPENDING MEASURE ***

And the Dems could demand identity-politics quotas for, and unionization of, the work force, too!

(And build such fences along our borders with Mexico and Canada and around all the Indian reservations to prevent smuggling of cheap contraband tobacco products.)

Oh, no. Just ask Jazz Shaw — instead, you go to the right “source” or “connection” at the Indian reservation Upstate somewhere, or over the line in Ontario or Quebec. (It's _that_ defiance that would motivate Democrats to seal the border with _Canada_ in the name of “immigration reform”!)

This was a long-sought-by-liberals victory (notably sought during the Clinton years). The public is preoccupied with the economy (and the extra-exploitable people, by the Obama traveling health care campaign, with local-group visits supplemented by the first campaign “town hall” by the Chief himself), and I doubt there will be an outcry about this, either in celebration or in alarm.

Much worse is the creeping fascism we're seeing not only in banking but with the taken-over Detroit dinosaurs, notably GM. We're in serious trouble if a “pay czar” extends his or her authority over other parts of the private sector or if businesses are given other forms of direction or involvement by the federal government in the months to come. This disturbing development overshadows not only the long-sought Victory Over Tobacco, but the openly transparent devious-incrementalist move toward federal health care.

Apparently so. Truly the level of pure spitefulness is astounding.

I may actually come to enjoy acquiring contraband level cigarettes as much as I have acquiring Habanas for the past 20 years.

By the way, Jazz, keep up the rebellious Yankee spirit here and I'll line you up to score your cartons for half that David Patterson price.