Politics As Usual

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by sgtclub [trollish Noonan crap]

Democrats are all for government regulating stuff. You all are the ones trying to federalize everything, in contradiction of your stated federalist "states' rights" position -- the right to define marriage, the state regulation of the insurance industry, and who pushed through the biggest (and probably worst-designed) entitlement program in history.*

*I heart hyperbole.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by sgtclub [pulmocentrism]

You cannot compare smoking to drinking because when you drink, you don't cause alcohol to ascend into the air and infringe other's rights to not breath in carcinogens.

You can compare smoke-less tobacco use, like snuff and chew to drinking. If I were Noonan, I would use those as examples that make the left seem hypocritical.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
Name another body part whose self-destruction loves company.

The fetus

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
That explains restrictions on place of use. It does not explain confiscatory taxation to reduce use altogether.

Because Democrats are always the ones pushing "sin taxes." Republicans would NEVER do such a thing.

Why do you people feel I shouldn't be allowed to watch porn, and why do you get so pissy about men fucking each other in the privacy of their own homes (or, hey, someplace outside while cheesy music is playing and some people are filming them for my later viewing pleasure)?

Burger, you know better than to go down the road of "only Democrats try to limit people's rights!"

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by sgtclub
The fetus

I think I need you to clarify for me whether you regard a fetus as a non-necessary body part (like, say, the appendix) or an independent human life.

Or are you talking about miscarriages (medically known as spontaneous abortions)?

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
That explains restrictions on place of use. It does not explain confiscatory taxation to reduce use altogether.

Your insistence that socially negative conduct may only be countered to the extent it is negative to others is cute, it really is. If you're going to bang the Dems for tobacco policy, wanna explain the GOP's drug policy?

ETA: Sorry, I'm whiffing here. Obviously banning possession of an organic substance, and imposing 50-year sentences for its cultivation, is within a government's discretion, but taxing the shit out of it is beyond the pale.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
That explains restrictions on place of use. It does not explain confiscatory taxation to reduce use altogether.

The taxation thing is supposedly necessary to reduce use to reduce the expenses to society that smokers cost us all and also to reimburse for these costs. Medicaid and VA health expenditures are certainly increased because of smoking. It is debatable whether Medicare expenses are increased because studies show that on whole smokers reduce their life spans significantly and many never reach the age to collect Medicare benefits or at least reduce the amount of time they will collect Medicare benefits. However, most pay into the system.

Now for those of us who have our own private group health insurance, the smokers do increase our costs because they increase the costs of insuring the group. If you are a non-smoker with an individual plan, you do not pay more because of smokers, but those with a group plan do.

So taxation is not just about discouraging use, but about reimbursing society for the costs to society of the personal choice.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub

When did the left change its stance on what it calls personal freedom regarding cigarettes and cigars? I missed the memo.

Is this really a left/right issue, or is it a tobacco-state/non-tobacco-state issue?

Speaking personally, I don't like it when smokers' infringe my personal freedom to breathe clean air by forcing me to breathe their smoke. I particularly dislike taking a cab home after a smoker has been in it, and getting out smelling like an ashtray. It never struck me that this was a liberal point of view.

eta: Also, the phenomena of addiction causes conceptual problems for those with a free-market perspective. Or should, anyway.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
Your insistence that socially negative conduct may only be countered to the extent it is negative to others is cute, it really is. If you're going to bang the Dems for tobacco policy, wanna explain the GOP's drug policy?

ETA: Sorry, I'm whiffing here. Obviously banning possession of an organic substance, and imposing 50-year sentences for its cultivation, is within a government's discretion, but taxing the shit out of it is beyond the pale.

No, you're whiffing because you offered a defense of Noonan's attack on the democrat's focus on the liver as opposed to the lung, and I merely offered a reason why your defense was non-responsive.

Why you and fringey jump to the conclusion it's partisan is beyond me, particularly when my views on sin taxes, as opposed to taxes that internalize external costs imposed by activities, have been made quite clear here.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by ltl/fb


Burger, you know better than to go down the road of "only Democrats try to limit people's rights!"

Point out to me where I went down that road.

If I did, it's only after you yanked the wheel to turn off of the toll road.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
No, you're whiffing because you offered a defense of Noonan's attack on the democrat's focus on the liver as opposed to the lung, and I merely offered a reason why your defense was non-responsive.

Why you and fringey jump to the conclusion it's partisan is beyond me, particularly when my views on sin taxes, as opposed to taxes that internalize external costs imposed by activities, have been made quite clear here.

Her criticism was expressly partisan, causing a rebuttable presumption of partisanism. If you had expressly noted non-partisanship, it would have been respected.

ETA at least my criticisms of what she said were expressly partisan, too. Don't remember whether others' criticisms were.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Maybe the forthcoming Senate report is going to relate these facts:

• During the summer of 2002, Democratic Florida Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Tenet in a private meeting to provide him with everything the CIA knew about Iraq's WMD, its ties to Al Qaeda, and the consequences of a war. Tenet had gotten along with Graham far better than he had with Shelby, and, before the end of the August recess, Tenet delivered to Graham a classified 25-page paper, with no cover or letterhead, answering Graham's questions on every item of concern. According to an official who read Tenet's classified responses, "It was a reasonable document," candid and balanced, summarizing what the CIA believed to be the threat from Iraq and the repercussions of using force to redress it. Since this report and a DIA assessment on chemical weapons that the committee received in early September 2002 were completely at variance with what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other administration officials were saying publicly, Graham and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin called on Tenet to provide more information, including an NIE.
  
  But Tenet didn't deliver another balanced assessment. Instead, in mid-September 2002, he and the CIA produced a classified document described by several officials who have read it as written, one recalls, "to take the most aggressive view of all available information." According to a source who saw the document, the assessment was indeed aggressive--it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" and detailed every known or faintly rumored contact between Saddam's regime and bin Laden. What Intelligence Committee members found particularly objectionable was the document's treatment of the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. According to a former CIA official who read the document, "They put everything that they found for the last twelve years and put it all into one document. It was a joke. It had eight hundred disclaimers in it. It basically said nothing, [but] they put it together anyway."
  
  Stunned by what they read, Graham, Durbin, and others on the committee intensified their demand for Tenet to produce an NIE on the Iraq threat. It was not a request that Tenet could easily fulfill. "The White House didn't want it," says a source with direct knowledge of the effort. "They wanted to draw their own analytical conclusions." Faced with escalating and conflicting demands from the Bush administration and the committee, Tenet turned to the national intelligence officer who fended off the dogs the last time: Walpole.
  
  Walpole produced an NIE by the end of September 2002, taking less than three weeks to complete what is usually a painstaking process--less time, jokes a longtime intelligence official, than it takes to coordinate "an interagency bathroom pass." Just as he had done in 1999, Walpole constructed an artificial consensus within a community that was sharply divided over the threat from Iraq. There were dissents, but they were relegated to footnotes and appendices. On some issues, the intelligence community indeed had reached a rough consensus. Practically all analysts agreed that Saddam had produced unaccounted-for chemical and biological weapons; the disagreement was over whether the programs were ongoing and whether they had yielded recent stocks. On the question of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, however, Walpole's NIE far outpaced what the analysts were concluding. The NIE claimed that Iraq was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs"--a determination that earlier CIA statements had elided and that INR, along with most DOE analysts, continued to reject. It further claimed that Iraq was trying to acquire aluminum tubes to use for enriching uranium suitable for a nuclear bomb. INR and DOE analysts, who knew the most about nuclear weapons production, adamantly rejected the charge. And the classified version of the NIE reported that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger and other African countries--a contention that CIA and INR analysts alike had found laughable and that would later generate so much controversy. On the basis of these highly unreliable claims, the NIE concluded, "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material."
  
  Notwithstanding these distortions, the Walpole paper was still less overheated than administration rhetoric. For example, when presenting intelligence on the aluminum tubes, the NIE presented analytic opinion as "kind of a fifty-fifty split, take it as you will," according to an intelligence official who read it--a sharp contrast with what senior administration officials were telling the public. As a result, Graham requested that Tenet issue a declassified version of the NIE so members could use the document to inform their upcoming votes on the war. In early October 2002, Tenet delivered--only in this new version, he wiped clean the qualifiers, alternative explanations, and dissents. Whereas the DIA had told Congress its analysts had "no reliable information" about whether Iraq was producing chemical weapons, the declassified version of the NIEdeclared that Iraq had "begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents." An outraged Graham insisted that more be declassified, but Tenet sent only a single-page letter. Echoing the empty claims of the "aggressive" white paper that the agency had delivered to the committee in September, Tenet's letter spoke of "solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade"--quite in contrast to what his analysts had actually found. These reports didn't "go back" a decade; they were a decade old and didn't reveal any current contacts between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda.
  
  In his response to Graham, Tenet conceded that there was a "low" likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack on the United States. But, when Bush, in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, suggested that Iraq posed an "urgent" danger to the United States, Tenet insisted that he had fact-checked the president's speech. Tenet issued a further clarification, saying, "There is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or our allies ... grows as his arsenal continues to build." In this statement, in his letter, and in the findings he provided to the Senate that fall, Tenet had already stopped acting as the head of a quasi-independent intelligence agency charged to deliver unvarnished information. As one former intelligence official put it, "He seemed like a man who had collected information that his bosses wanted to collect."

from a 9/03 article by Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Not Me
The taxation thing is supposedly necessary to reduce use to reduce the expenses to society that smokers cost us all and also to reimburse for these costs. Medicaid and VA health expenditures are certainly increased because of smoking. It is debatable whether Medicare expenses are increased because studies show that on whole smokers reduce their life spans significantly and many never reach the age to collect Medicare benefits or at least reduce the amount of time they will collect Medicare benefits. However, most pay into the system.

Now for those of us who have our own private group health insurance, the smokers do increase our costs because they increase the costs of insuring the group. If you are a non-smoker with an individual plan, you do not pay more because of smokers, but those with a group plan do.

So taxation is not just about discouraging use, but about reimbursing society for the costs to society of the personal choice.

The studies I have read indicate that smokers, because they die younger, actually pick up a greater percentage of the group insurance tab than non-smokers, so the tax is actually counterintuitive. We should be incouraging people to smoke.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
When did the left change its stance on what it calls personal freedom regarding cigarettes and cigars? I missed the memo.

Is this really a left/right issue, or is it a tobacco-state/non-tobacco-state issue?

Speaking personally, I don't like it when smokers' infringe my personal freedom to breathe clean air by forcing me to breathe their smoke. I particularly dislike taking a cab home after a smoker has been in it, and getting out smelling like an ashtray. It never struck me that this was a liberal point of view.

eta: Also, the phenomena of addiction causes conceptual problems for those with a free-market perspective. Or should, anyway.

She was writing in the context of the proposed ban on smoking on the beach - given the above, I assume you wouldn't have an issue with that.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by sgtclub
The studies I have read indicate that smokers, because they die younger, actually pick up a greater percentage of the group insurance tab than non-smokers, so the tax is actually counterintuitive. We should be incouraging people to smoke.

The pulmonologists in my family do that. They also made sure to take their kids (pre-HIPAA) on rounds with them. Every time a kid would ask why a patient had a tube in his throat, the response was always "smoking." None of the kids smoke.