However, if you choose to light up your cancerous stick so I have to inhale the smoke, you’re violating my rights.

Offices are smoke-free. Airplanes are smoke free. Buses are smoke-free.

And if government wants to make restaurants smoke-free, except for walled-off smoking rooms, guess what? It doesn’t bother me one bit. I don’t smoke. My daughter doesn’t smoke.

Government makes a law that you can’t do cocaine. Guess what? I don’t care. I don’t do cocaine. Heroin is illegal, too. Guess what? I don’t care. I don’t do heroin.

You can whine all day about government, but I’m not gonna die on the hill of things that don’t affect me.

I like red-light cameras. Know why? I don’t run red lights. I don’t mind instant background checks for guns, either. I’m not a criminal.

I just never buy into the Chicken Little theories of the Libertarians that whether someone smokes in a public restaurant invalidates the Revolutionary War.

You want to smoke? Go outside. Go home. But next to me, my rights are as important as yours.

1.) a government ban that prevents terds from entering toilets;

OR THIS….

2.) a law that says it’s sexual harrasement to smell a woman’s perfume when she walks by;

Freedom to smell or not smell, Freedom to dump or not dump….It’s all about don’t tread on me.

the point is that smoking occurs in bars, that is the market, you don’t have to like it, it just is…and if you don’t like it, then don’t go into that bar, find another one who has a market for smoke free drinking…. The market dictates, not the government.

It would seem to me that Del. Cosgrove’s original bill from which this was fashioned considered the constitutional implications in a way the current bill hasn’t.

Maximus, a restaurant owner can tell a grown man anything he wants, unless you are now arguing against property rights.

FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS……..*lifts lit cigarette mockingly as if it were an AR22 ala charlton heston*

Whose gonna enforce this new law? Nobody….oops…maybe the mattress tag inspectors who secretly work out of the basement of the Virginia Office of Consumer Affairs?

*points at Brian using the “Slippery Slope” arguement*

What has been introduced is material that fails uniformly to so much as define or describe the smoking products in question. Some cigarettes may contain no tobacco at all. The target of law, tobacco smoke, is impossible from that. Other cigarettes may be highly processed and contaminated with:
* Numerous pesticide residues
* Dioxin-producing chlorine adulterants
* Added burn accelerants
* Radiation from certain tobacco fertilizers
* Any of about 1400 untested, often toxic, non-tobacco additives;
* Numerous kid-attracting sweets and flavors etc
* And, addiction-enhancing substances.

To call that “tobacco”, or the smoke “tobacco smoke”, is patently absurd and contrary to principles of medicine and science. To call that “tobacco” is to perpetuate the cigarette industry’s biggest deceit.

To blame the tobacco plant, and to also blame and legally burden smokers…the prime victims…and to burden non-complicit bar owners and the like… for the health effects is patent injustice.
It is biologically impossible for smoke from any plant, even tobacco, to cause many, if not most, so-called “smoking related” or “tobacco related” illnesses. For a knowing person to claim, under oath, that “tobacco kills” or causes such and such disease, may constitute criminal perjury. It may also constitute Obstruction of Justice and other violations if the intent is to evade charges and liabilities for the complicit industries.

It is also injustice…un-Constitutional, in fact….to allow judges and jurors in any smoking case to remain in decision-making capacity if they have economic links to any of the under-the-radar parts of the cigarette industry as indicated in the above list of non-tobacco cigarette components.
Other unacceptable links would be with insurers of, and investors in, cigarette manufacturing or ingredients, or with industries that compete with tobacco products.
And, it may further be a violation of Due Process if a judge or juror had a religious bias against “sinful” smoking.

Anyone who thinks that smoke-free restaurants rises to the level of jeopardizing 400 years of freedom simply needs to get out more.

It’s a beautiful weekend, Maximus. Enjoy some of it.

Speaker Howell is a good man, a decent family man, however, through the fog of compromise, Speaker Howell has thrown conservative principals under the bus for the sake of a solution. In so doing, Speaker Howell has:

1.) forsaken decreased regulation in favor of increased regulation;
2.) forsaken freedom of choice in favor of curtailing freedoms enjoyed in Virginia for over 400 years;
3.) forsaken lais·sez faire practices of Capitalism where the market determines new policies to adjust to market desires/conditions in favor of Governmental Dictation.

Who at the state level will enforce this new non Restaurant smoking policy of the Speaker and Governor Kaine? The Speaker does not tell us.

With public education and law enforcement being cut through the bone in this years budget, WHERE will Speaker Howell find the money to fund an Enforcement Program to support this ban? The Federal Bailout funds coming from the Obama Administration? If Speaker Howell does this, he would be diverting those funds from legitimate core functions of Virginia Government that are being cut or reduced due to the recession at the state level.

Is Speaker Howell’s ban on smoking really a core function of state government or just Nanny State Elitism gone wild? Under this Speakers watch, Maryland has now officially annexed Virginia.

For the uninformed, by definition, this is what Speaker Howell has really forsaken with his smoking ban compromise:

lais·sez faire also lais·ser faire (ls fâr, lz) KEY NOUN:
An economic doctrine that opposes governmental regulation of or interference in commerce beyond the minimum necessary for a free-enterprise system to operate according to its own economic laws. Noninterference in the affairs of others.