Here’s John Raese, who is running against Manchin:
He’s talking about the newly established smoking ban:
Smokers can no longer light up in bars, restaurants and workplaces in Monongalia County. The countywide smoking ban goes into effect today.
Hookah lounges and cigar bars that meet the county Board of Health’s definition are the only exemptions to the new law.
Monongalia County Health Department staff will start routine inspections next week, said Jon Welch, program manager for public health environmental services.
This small government conservative wants the feds or the state to override the decision of the local community.
dr. bloor
So basically, Manchin is the best you’ve got.
gene108
Smoking bans are AWESOME!
I remember going to NYC to hang out with my brother about 10 years back, right after NYC introduced the first smoking ban.
We were at a bar getting drinks in the afternoon and chatting. I had some other plans that night, so I figured I’d have to go back to his place and change clothes because my clothes just had to smell of cigarette smoke from being in a bar. He pointed out to me there’s a smoking ban in NYC and a took a wiff of my clothes and no cigarette smoke detected!
It was an awesome and liberating feeling to finally be able to leave a bar and not smell like cigarette smoke.
Congrats to Mongolia County on their tobacco ban.
Davis X. Machina
Joe ‘Nighthorse’ Manchin, you mean.
I’m a firm believer in the ‘the only vote that really matters is the one you cast for Majority Leader’ school of Senatorship, but boy, Manchin is, as Wodehouse would say, the frozen limit.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
We can’t even “go Godwin” here, we’re already there.
Rosalita
A hookah bar? WTF
maya
Oh noes! A War on Butts. There will be hell to pay for this on FOX Litemifugotm.
Tonal Crow
I recommend that Republicans smoke as much as they possibly can to protest this outrageous invasion of their liberty to force nonsmokers to breathe their emissions.
Jewish Steel
@gene108: Touring Kansas (which had no smoking band at the time) with my band my gear returned all smoked up. It was a nostalgia provoking smell, but I don’t ever want to smell it again.
FridayNext
@gene108:
I remember what it was like before these bans were put into effect, too. Almost as bad as coming home reeking of smoke was sitting down at a restaurant before the previous dishes were cleared and have to look at a table full of half-eaten food with butts stubbed out in them.
On the other hand some of these bans go a little far imho. In this particular case I don’t see the problem in letting each bar/restaurant make its own decision and then enforcing some sort of labeling system of some sort. I just don’t see a problem with a bar or restaurant catering to smokers the rest of us can safely avoid. On the other other hand, if the local elected officials can pass such a law and get re-elected well, that’s how representative democracy is suppose to work and it is NOThING like the Holocaust and this level of hyperbole would even offend my smoking parents.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Barry Goldwater warned us about this: banning above-ground nuclear tests was just the start. And now look how far down the slippery slope we’ve slid: The Future is the heel of a boot stepping on a cigarette butt, forever.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
If said local community passed some ordinance categorically outlawing abortion and declaring zygotes human beings and somebody went looking for the state or the feds to overturn it, we can predict how he’d howl.
Just another example of the usual wingnut disconnect over “saving lives”. To quote Robin Williams “Assholes doooo vex meeeeeeeeee!!!!!”
FridayNext
@Rosalita:
They are all the rage here in this small college town. A place where you can go to smoke with your friends and puff away on fruity tobacco and tobacco like products. I life near one and you can’t smell it outside the building.
gbear
@gene108: I agree with you 100%. I used to play in a weekend band at a local bar. I don’t drink, but I used to wake up the next morning with a hangover from working in a room full of cigarette smoke for five hours an evening.
Smoking is banned in bars and restaurants in the Twin Cities now and it’s a great change, but it’s…you know… as bad as throwing smokers into a concentraton camp. Haha, I say.
J.W. Hamner
Even when I was a smoker I thought smoking bans were a good idea. It’s actually a fairly good way to chat up the wimmins at a bar… at least the ones who smoke anyway.
Atlanta Rhythm Method Man
@Davis X. Machina: I think you’re reading my mind, because I sometimes wonder if I’m the only person out there who thinks that if the Republicans win back the Senate, this guy will flip.
Maybe it will be some pet legislation of his that goes down in flames, or a GOP bill he favors that winds up being filibustered. That’s all it would take for him to rush in front of the cameras and cry about how “the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left for me.”
gnomedad
Also, they make us put license plates on our cars! Which show which state we live in! Just like the Nazis did!
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
First they came for my above-ground nuclear tests,
and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t own any weapons.
Then they came for my leaded gasoline,
and I didn’t say anything because I took the subway.
Then they came for my lawn darts,
and I didn’t say anything because I played croquet.
Then they came for my second-hand smoke,
and I didn’t care because I’d died the year before after breathing that shit for 30+ years.
catclub
@gene108: “Congrats to Mongolia County on their tobacco ban.
i thought it was Monongahela County.
I bet Mongolia County, a) is really out in the sticks
b) has some great throat singing monks.
ETA: The article is correct on spelling.
Ash Can
I’m with gene108. Smoking bans are the berries. M-80 and I can go out, wherever we want, whenever we want, with or without Bottle Rocket, without a second thought, because we never have to worry about getting asphyxiated, at least here in Illinois. It’s the very definition of freedom. And I’ll worry about the freedom of smokers as soon as it’s determined that the C02 I exhale is as detrimental to their health as their smoke is to mine.
Yevgraf
@Rosalita:
Basically, the local hookah bar has been the hipster “go to” in a lot of places for a few years now. I’m guessing that in about 2 years, there will be a lot of used hookahs from closed hookah bars available on the flea market circuit.
4tehlulz
If Auschwitz was a smoke-free environment, then many more Jews would have survived.
Therefore, smoking in buildings is just like the Holocaust.
biff diggerence
Another shitkicker short on history.
Around the Bohemian Corporal, smoking was also VERBOTEN.
MattR
I recently read a quote by some conservative (can’t remember who) dealing with homosexuality (I think) that basically said that there are times where too much individual freedom actually hurts the freedom of the larger group so it is justifiable to limit the freedoms of the individual. I wish I could find the exact quote so I could contrast it with Raese’s comment, “And I oppose that, because I believe in everybody’s individual freedoms, and everybody’s individual rights to do what they want to do. And I’m a conservative and that’s the way that goes.“
Villago Delenda Est
OT, but obliquely related:
Criminal dumbfick Eric Cantor figures out that there is a small issue with the fundie assholes in the House GOP caucus
Suffern ACE
I am not going to listen to this speech. But how is this at all like the holocaust? It’s clearly more like the Rape of Nanking with aspecks of the Mai Lai massacre and something like Fourth Crusade all rolled up into one. Where can I get the job where you get paid to sit in a room and come up with tortured analogies and justify them.
SenyorDave
I do see Raese’s point. I live in Howard County, MD and we have a similar smoking ban. From my house I can see the death camps that violators are placed in. The train carrying car after car of smokers packed like cattle off to the camps passes right by my backyard.
IN DC at the Holocaust Museum they are adding a wing to memorialize those who lost their lives due to those monsters who passed this ban.
kindness
Coming from CA I remember visiting my family back in NYC and being grossed out at people smoking in restaurants. Now when I go back it’s really nice. Well that and my brother finally quit smoking. It’s funny, growing up all my friends smoked so we used to have those Cheech & Chong car scenes with just tobacco and it didn’t bother me. I move away and clear out my lungs and what happens, I become a left coast commie who is against freedom. Well, except they’re on my side now.
Little by little we will hold the world to our will. Bwa ha ha ha.
Hey John, I scored Shoreline Furthur tickets on pre-sale today. You goin’?
Suffern ACE
@Villago Delenda Est: They won’t vote me leader. They won’t vote me leader. I’m a prick just like them. I’m an asshole just like them. Why won’t they accept meeeee!!!!
Tokyokie
A few years ago, the spousal unit and I had to get a motel room while visiting relatives. All that was left were smoking rooms, and the one we wound up in was next to the entrance to the hotel bar, which apparently was the town’s hot singles hookup site. By the time we’d figured out we had a room that not had an overwhelming stench of stale cigarette smoke (I think the hospitality industry’s “smoking room” designation means they’re not longer cleaned) but was too noisy to sleep worth a crap, we’d already changed our clothes and decided it wasn’t worth getting dressed again and getting a different room. Our bad.
Villago Delenda Est
This is a prime example of how moranic these twits are.
So, what happens when the right of a smoker comes in conflict with the right of others not to breath their second hand smoke?
Never mind the broader hypocrisies that can be drawn from this idiotic statement, how about the internal contradiction which assumes that HIS rights supersede those of everyone else?
Davis X. Machina
Outrage is like any other drug. You get habituated to it, and then it takes more of it to get you off.
These asshats are close to the point where the dose they need to get off and the LD50 are bumping up against each other.
Patricia Kayden
Manchin is a DINO, so shrug.
ruemara
Can we stop calling them Tea Party Patriots and just change it to “Angry White Whiners Club”?
daveNYC
Proof that Democrats hate fags.
Violet
I’m so glad smoking bans are as prevalent as they are. It’s so nice to be able to go to bars and restaurants and not come out of them reeking of smoke.
Culture of Truth
If it were up to me I’d ban smoking on the sidewalks and most public places. But I’m crazeeeeeeee
SteveM
Wonder if Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin will campaign for Raese this time, the way they did last time.
Culture of Truth
Illegal drugs still illegal, right?
MattR
@efgoldman: Yep. And that was why I was trying to find the article I read a few days ago where a Republican took the exact opposite position in order to justify his anti-gay marriage stance. IIRC, it was a slippery slope type argument which makes me think it may have been Santorum (not santorum, though there could be a slippery slope issue there as well)
Suffern ACE
@catclub: Mongolia county would also have had some very kick ass type bars at one point, until they were tamed by civilization. Or so I learned in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Raven
The smoking bans here are great except that the pushed all that nasty fucking shit out on to the sidewalks and outdoor seating. I used to take my dogs downtown and hang out with them but the smoking situation ended that.
Mnemosyne
@FridayNext:
Here in California, the anti-smoking laws in bars and restaurants are part of Cal-OSHA, because it’s not the customers who are most adversely affected by allowing smoking, it’s the bartenders and servers who have to work 8-hour shifts and breathe it in the whole time.
It’s so funny to watch the same lessons from California get repeated over and over again across the country: bar and restaurant owners hate the anti-smoking laws until they actually go into effect and they realize that they’re saving boatloads of money on employee healthcare and absenteeism. Now some of the biggest defenders of the laws are bar and restaurant owners. I don’t think you could pay them enough to bring smoking back.
Also, too, I realized how much cigarette smoke affects my asthma when we went to Las Vegas last fall for a wedding. I felt like I had a frickin’ anvil on my chest the entire time we were there.
Culture of Truth
Just like Stalin:
New York (AP) — Starbucks Corp. says it will stop using a red dye in its drinks that is derived from crushed bugs.
gex
@FridayNext: Well the problem with that is they will all become smoking bars and restaurants and non-smokers won’t have a choice. You don’t really think it was ILLEGAL to ban smoking in an establishment before government got involved, do you?
It’s like letting pharmacists decide whether they’ll dispense meds. The Christianists will just create an army of pharmacists to take over and essentially make those meds impossible to get.
Soonergrunt
Here in Oklahoma, the extremely Republican state Senate has just passed a law denying municipalities the right to set smoking ordinances. This was just as the OKC City Council was preparing to take up an anti-smoking ordinance that was expected to pass by an overwhelming majority.
The argument now is whether or not the state should strip those anti-smoking ordinances already in place in cities like Norman.
Because overriding local city government in support of your political donors is exactly what conservatism is all about.
Culture of Truth
Hiiiiitleeerrrr!!!!
The Alabama state alcoholic beverage control agency has banned Dirty Bastard beer because of profanity on its
label.
Jennifer
@FridayNext: As I understand it, the reason why most places haven’t allowed bars or restaurants to “opt out” is that their employees would be exposed to an unnecessary workplace hazard. Patrons can decide to go elsewhere if they don’t want to be around smoke; employees, not so much.
As a former smoker, I have to say I was never really bothered much with the bans, though it made going to a bar quite different, since drinking triggers the urge to smoke. But it really wasn’t a problem to step outside for a few minutes for a smoke.
That having been said, there’s a level of ridiculousness associated with the more recent bans – first it was go outside, then it was you can’t be within 100 yards of this door. Los Angeles had banned smoking in outdoor dining areas before the mid-90’s; this kind of thing is just stupid, since if you’re eating on a sidewalk in LA with cars rushing by 10 feet away, you’re already being exposed to more inhaled toxins than probably you would be inside a restaurant where someone was smoking. There are whole land areas now where smoking is proscribed – “tobacco free campuses” and the like. These types of restrictions are not about protecting the health of non-smokers; they’re about reinforcing to smokers that they are pariahs. I kind of think that if things are going to get that irrational, to where someone can object to another person driving through a campus while smoking a cigarette, that it’s time to just be done with the shaming and get on with the banning.
gex
@Villago Delenda Est: Yeah. For instance, what about our right to representative democracy and self-governing? These guys just HATE the results of democracy, preferring the DO AS I SAY! form of government.
Davis X. Machina
@Culture of Truth: Cochineal, what put the red in ‘Redcoats’? I didn’t know it was a problem.
Woodrowfan
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
well done! Where do you want your internet delivered?
Mnemosyne
@Jennifer:
Actually, in California you probably aren’t since we also have those very restrictive car emissions laws. At one point, everyone who brought a car into California that was manufactured out of state had to pay an impact fee to have it registered because that car didn’t conform to California’s air quality standards.
To me, the really ridiculous laws are when municipalities decide that landlords aren’t allowed to rent apartments to smokers. It’s one thing for a landlord to make that decision on his/her own, but it’s ridiculous to have it mandated by the city. Where the hell are smokers supposed to live, in their cars?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Jennifer:
The tobacco-free campuses are less about shaming, and more about no longer having to pay staff to pick up a metric-shit ton of cigarette butts litering the sidewalks and green spaces.
Raven
@Mnemosyne: Who cares, fuck em. I wouldn’t rent my rental to a smoker.
Rosalita
@FridayNext:
@Yevgraf:
Thank you. Man am I out of the loop. Or we just have a shortage of hipsters in my New England town…
satby
Ironically, this story has broken out all over on Yom Hashoah. Today is Holocaust Remembrance day.
Yes, just like those yellow stars. What a fucking dick.
Villago Delenda Est
@daveNYC:
I see what you’re doing there.
Cris (without an H)
Part of the war on caterpillars
catclub
@Davis X. Machina: Also mentioned in Emily Dickinson’s poem about a hummingbird.
A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel –
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal –
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –
The Mail from Tunis – probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride –
Tone In DC
@efgoldman:
That phrase has potentially devastating aftereffects with (im)proper usage, sir.
As for this pro-carbon monoxide guy and his Mongolia/mononucleosis/Magnolia (sp) buddies…
FUCK ALL Y’ALL.
honus
@<a href="#co@catclub: mment-3194424″>catclub: It’s Monongalia County. It’s the Monongahela River. Nobody ever said it was easy living in West Virginia, including the spelling. I myself am an alumnus of Magnolia HS, New Martinsville, not Matewan, which is near Iaeger (“Yager”) and used to live near Pocatalico.
Fax Paladin
As far as these folks are concerned, the right to swing their fist doesn’t and shouldn’t end at the bridge of someone else’s nose. Any restriction at all is tyranny. FREEDOM!
Mudge
I live in Monongalia County. It is not the first county in the state to go smokeless, so Raese has some homework to do (don’t they all). By and large Morgantown (especially its restaurants) has been smokeless for a while, the city council has been aggressive this way. This just extends it to the county (and remaining city pockets) and is an action by the county commissioners.
The most comical part is the effect on the so called “Hot Spots”, where certain gambling is allowed. Patrons will now be allowed to lose their paychecks in a smoke free environment. They have always banned nude dancers there, so they are now down to 2 vices, gambling and drinking.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Not quite; the fee was nominally because those cars lacked California smog equipment, not because they didn’t meet California air quality standards. Those cars still had to pass their smog test to register in California, so it was basically a big scam to bring in revenue. Eventually somebody sued and won, and California had to refund all the fees they had collected going back I don’t remember how many years. I remember in some detail because I was one of the people who got the refund. IIRC, it didn’t include interest.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I didn’t get the refund because by the time the lawsuit was won, the car was long since stolen and I couldn’t find my original paperwork. That was extremely annoying.
FridayNext
@Jennifer:
But can’t the employee just work someplace else? It’s not like any restaurant has total control of the working age population in a given area the way factories, mines, military bases and other industries do. Where there is one restaurant or bar there are usually dozens if not hundreds.
FridayNext
@Jennifer:
But can’t the employee just work someplace else? It’s not like any restaurant has total control of the working age population in a given area the way factories, mines, military bases and other industries do. Where there is one restaurant or bar there are usually dozens if not hundreds.
FridayNext
@Jennifer:
But can’t the employee just work someplace else? It’s not like any restaurant has total control of the working age population in a given area the way factories, mines, military bases and other industries do. Where there is one restaurant or bar there are usually dozens if not hundreds.
Mnemosyne
@FridayNext:
You must live in a very large city if you think every town has a restaurant or bar on every corner. Try heading out to someplace like Joshua Tree and let us know how many restaurant jobs there are.
FridayNext
@gex:
Except in “the bad old days” smokers constituted over 40% of the American population and now it is well below 20%. Even aside from those numbers I am old enough to remember a time when non-smokers were the ones shamed into silent suffering and that pendulum has swung far to the other side. I can remember having to argue with waitresses to remove ashtrays from tables in restaurants that had butts in it. I can recall times when it was a social faux pas to ask smokers to not throw their butts on the ground on my property, turn their head to exhale, or, my personal favorite, point out in a work place that smokers seemed to get three times the number and length of breaks as non-smokers. And don’t even get me started on chewers.
That just isn’t the case anymore. Smokers constitute below 20% of the population and it’s shrinking fast. I know a couple of smokers and they are sheepish, apologetic, and quiet about their habits. Bosses are now keeping smokers to the same number and length of breaks as non-smokers. Good. If left up to the businesses themselves I have no doubt non-smoking restaurants and bars would outnumber smoking ones especially if being a smoking establishment meant added costs of ventilation, cleanliness, and worker’s comp and health costs.
All that having been said, this is not a hill I am willing to fight for. My personal preference would for this to be up to the businesses, but if localities want to pass those bans that is totally up to them and not the most egregious violation of property rights in the country. And your comparison to pharmacists is ridiculous. Though not nearly as extreme as comparing these bans to the holocaust, I admit, comparing someone’s access to a draft beer or a bloomin’ onion to access to life saving drugs and treatments is not helpful to the overall battle for health care access. By your logic, since a town can ban smoking in restaurants can’t they also ban selling birth control?
Health care and medicine are completely separate from other consumer and retail decisions. Allowing them to get muddled with other industries and areas of the economy can only work against the progressive cause of universal health care.
FridayNext
Wow. I deeply apologize for those multiple posts. I did have a browser freeze when posting, but didn’t notice the glitch until after it was too late to request a deletion.
Again, my apologies.
Martin
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
It’s really unfair how the GOP keeps abridging our God-given snark freedoms.
Martin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Actually, it’s bigger than that. The real costs savings are on lower fire insurance premiums, lower health insurance premiums for staff, but also for students that are now required to carry insurance which the institution normally provides an option for, and they’ve found fewer sick days for staff after smoking bans have gone into place. I think people forget that most office buildings (which many classroom buildings effectively are) are big sealed boxes. You get someone smoking within 50 feet of the air intake for the ventilation for the building, and everyone inside the building will know it.
David Koch
first they came for the toxic carcinogens
then they came for the jews.
slag
Hooray for smoking bans! More more more smoking bans. For every public space!
That is all.
Mnemosyne
@FridayNext:
Huh? How does banning a workplace pollutant work against universal healthcare? Lowering those healthcare costs is good for everyone, not just the employer, since the employee has fewer asthma attacks, fewer sick days, etc.
If we had universal healthcare, should mining companies be allowed to start using carcinogenic chemicals again because, hey, the healthcare part is covered so it doesn’t matter if employees get sick anymore?