As HUD's public housing smoking ban goes nationwide, Duggins and his merry elves pre-sign a ream of eviction forms.

Taking into consideration the ongoing absence of ordinance enforcement in so many different areas, and recalling Team Gahan's hostile takeover of the New Albany Public Housing Authority in early 2017 (speaking of banned substances, let's not forget the relaxation of mandatory drug testing for NAHA employees, as implemented somewhat curiously just as David Duggins came bounding up the front steps to assume his six-figure salary), it should be obvious that previously unattainable zealotry as it pertains to the junta's local enforcement of this nationwide public housing smoking ban might well result in displaced former residents and unoccupied units.

Or, Gahan's goal from the very start of the putsch. We don't have a compassion gap in New Albany. Compassion Chasm is more like it.

BANNING SMOKING IN PUBLIC HOUSING IS CRUEL AND UNNECESSARY, Michael Waters (The Outline)

... The ban, which was first rolled out in 2016 under the Obama administration, also follows epidemic-level eviction rates. In cities like New York, 25,000 families are vying to find homes in the only 1,050 available public units. In Los Angeles, residents have waited as much as 13 years to even apply for public housing. Meanwhile, HUD has slashed $8.8 billion from its public housing budget, meaning that people kicked out of their homes for smoking cigarettes are unlikely to find a place to live elsewhere. Because people who smoke are also more likely to be elderly and mentally ill, the smoking ban seems to target the most vulnerable people in public housing.

Jamey Aebersold is wrong about street safety. Evidently facts are for non-smoking campaigns alone.

13 Simple But Factual Ways Biking Is Better.

Ask musician/favorite son Jamey Aebersold about smoking, and he will bombard you with reams of research.

I've seen and heard him do it.

Ask Aebersold, and he'll readily tell you that it isn't merely his opinion on the matter of tobacco. He has gathered facts, and he'll go fetch before-and-after lung graphics from the trunk of his car to illustrate the point. He deploys factual anti-smoking information like a general wielding his legions.

In short, it is fitting and proper to use facts when making an argument.

However, when the topic turns to the proper use and management of city streets, Aebersold seemingly no longer is interested in facts. In short order, Aebersold becomes just another tone deaf guy pounding Bud Lights in a smoky bar, opinionating.

Jeers

I don’t know why any biker would want to ride on Spring Street or Charlestown Road in New Albany. It’s way too dangerous. Those streets are for moving vehicles, not bikers. I think it’s a terrible idea to make bike lanes on those two city streets!

— Jamey Aebersold, New Albany

Think about it.

These streets are dangerous, so rather than make the streets safer by addressing the conditions that make them dangerous, the obvious solution is to remove all non-automotive elements from the streets -- you know, just like on the interstates.

That's shortenedbreathtaking.

There is no thought of the health of the city, through which these dangerous routes pass.

No mention of contemporary urban transportation trends.

No examination of the way that road design impacts property values and quality of life.

No evidence that Aebersold has researched the issue at all.

Perhaps Aebersold would be more convincing when pontificating on streets if he chose to embrace the same fact-based approach he uses to denounce smoking (did you know that his latest campaign is to convince the Harvest Homecoming committee to make its open-air street festival smoke free?)

I bet Aebersold has a few facts to back his "no smoking" request. What's more, he always has used his well-earned celebrity to advance his non-smoking agenda, and that's fine with me, because his smoking positions actually are factual.

When the facts evaporate, so does the credibility of his soap box. Of course, he's fully entitled to his own opinions -- just not to his own facts.

If Aebersold intends to become an advocate for street grid status quo, isn't he obliged to to operate under the same fact-based regime?

Perhaps Aebersold might begin by bringing himself up to date on concepts like this: Road diet. Believe it or not, the internet is filed with a wide range of ... (wait for it) ... facts about the topic. Heaven forbid, he might even read this important work, seeing as neither Bob Caesar nor Irv Stumler have bothered: Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal.

Or do good ol' boys get an automatic Irv Fact Pass?

Ed Clere instrumental as "Bill adds smoke to high-end cigar bars in Indiana."

Both Tom Uhl (Office Cigar Lounge in Floyds Knobs) and Jeff Mouttet (Riverside Cigar Shop and Match Lounge in Jeffersonville) have had to deal with more than their share of niggling laws that don't correspond with reality as we know it today.

Jeff says it best:

“We sell an experience, we don’t just sell cigars. We’re like 21st century barbershop. We’re a gathering place.”

Precisely. A doff of the chapeau to Rep. Ed Clere for being receptive and diligent in this and other matters of legislative tweaking. An exception to the statewide smoking law already was in place, and it made no sense for a grandfather clause to tilt the competitive table.

Bill adds smoke to high-end cigar bars in Indiana, by Maureen Hayden (CNHI)

INDIANAPOLIS — Inside the cozy Office Cigar Lounge in Floyds Knobs, you can buy a rare $60 Arturo Fuentes Opus X cigar, lounge in leather chairs and watch sports on big-screen televisions.

But you can’t light up.

For that, you’ll have to step outside and move at least eight feet from the door. Outdoor heaters help ward off the chill. This past winter, smokers looking to come in from the cold could repair to a Winnebago in the parking lot.

It’s not the setup that owner Tom Uhl envisioned when he opened the cigar lounge two years ago in this affluent suburban community north of New Albany.

“It’s like opening a Wendy’s and being told your customers can’t eat their burgers inside,” he said.

That’s about to change. In the waning days of the legislative session, language slipped into an obscure tobacco bill clears the way for smokers to light up inside Uhl’s establishment. And it opens the door for other cigar bars, as well.

Time for spell check: NA eatery now smoke free.

It's only news because I'd like to know which high school the logo designer attended.

Runyon on attitudes toward smoking.

The uses to which his writing skills have been harnessed sometimes have been highly annoying, but nonetheless, Keith Runyon always could write quite well, as he does here. The tobacco-free move by CVS functions as mere aperitif to Runyon's recollections of what it meant to exist in tobacco-pervasive society.

The Changing Attitudes Toward Smoking in Louisville and Beyond, by Keith Runyon (WFPL)

The announcement Wednesday by CVS pharmacies that, as of Oct. 1, they will no longer sell cigarettes in their 7,600 locations is another step in the long march that began 50 years ago this winter, when the Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco and cancer was first issued. (CVS operates 14 stores in Louisville, and is preparing to open a new one on the first floor of the old Stewart’s Dry Goods building at Fourth and Muhammad Ali.)

I've never smoked cigarettes, and have vastly reduced my cigar consumption. Given that the Public House went smoke-free only in 2010, and I was away from that building much of the preceding year in the run-up to Bank Street Brewhouse, this places me at five years smoke-free in the sense to breathing the second-hand smoke all those preceding barroom decades.

Even if he had not smoked, we kids were exposed to it everywhere else, including (and particularly) in the restrooms of public schools, where young teenagers of my era were slipping away to puff away between classes, at lunchtime and after school. Of course it was against the rules. But despite occasional “busts” the school administrators generally looked the other way. And why not? Most of them puffed away in the teachers’ lounges.

Indiana’s Smoke Free Air Law goes into effect on July 1, and here's how it affects NABC.

(Expanding upon a preceding post)

You're recall that the state's "revolutionary" 2012 smoking law is riddled with exceptions, exclusions and vivid testaments to endemic political cowardice, sad topics sufficient to provide hours of worthy discussion -- but the whole issue has come to bore me intensely. The long and the short of it remains: The legislature has decreed that some employees are more worthy of workplace safety than others. So be it.

As this new law pertains to NABC’s two on-premise locations, nothing much will change.

At the Pizzeria & Public House, we chose of our own volition to go smoke-free in January, 2011. It’s old news. About the only question raised by the new gobbledygook is the distance from the two entry doors to the benches outside where smoking is permitted, but although my raging disinterest precludes taking the time to actually measure, my guess is they’re a safe eight feet away.

At Bank Street Brewhouse, it’s a bit more complicated, even though it shouldn’t be, and none of the complications are related to the new law. Rather, they have to do with shaky communication and a dollop of jurisdictional confusion among competing bureaucracies.

From BSB’s inception in 2009, we chose to be smoke-free at the bar and in the dining room, and also at the front outdoor patio area facing Bank Street. Many times since, I have been asked: Why the front patio area? It’s because when the garage doors are open, smoke comes straight into the dining room, defeating the purpose.

When the side patio on BSB’s north side was added later in 2009, we allowed smoking there because it was open to the elements, and a wall and two doors separated it from the dining room.

However, in order to make this patio suitable for altered alcoholic beverage licensing (primarily, being given permission to serve beer from taps protruding from the walk-in cooler), it had to cease being a patio, and start being a building. Having been rendered a building, the way was clear to begin the clearing of the parking lot and the build-out of a new patio.

(At this juncture, note that the Alcohol and Tobacco Commission, the Floyd County Health Department, the New Albany Building Commissioner and even the local fire department have differing definitions of many of the words I’m using here. What is a patio, a building, a wall or a door? Verily, it depends on which bureaucrat you ask.)

Q. What happens when those definitions differ?

A. That’s a very good question. We find out, some times on a weekly basis.

In effect, BSB’s side patio ceased to exist when it was enclosed and weatherproofed in early winter, and it now must be treated as an indoor dining room. Accordingly, before the statewide smoking “fudge” was even enacted, we declared the former patio to be a non-smoking area, in keeping with our own previous smoking policy as well as balancing as many competing bureaucratic definitions of reality as possible. In this sense, the state’s new smoking rules merely added another thin layer of existential juggling to the morass already in place.

For several months, our “no smoking on the former patio” policy has confused some patrons and angered others. Of course, I always regret misunderstandings, but as of July 1, it is rendered moot, because the area falls under the parameters of the new state law. There can be no smoking there, irrespective of the garage doors, which some might say should allow flexibility. Very gently, allow me to say: Perhaps in the ideal world, but when four separate bureaucratic regulators cannot agree on the definition of exactly what constitutes a door, it’s best for all of us (myself included; I’m a cigar smoker) to get over ourselves and just move on.

It was our original plan to put a covered (not all-weatherized) smoking area in the square nook where the bicycle rack previously stood, but the eight-feet-from-the-entry rule precludes this. So, as we proceed with building out the future garden in the current parking area, we’ll do what we can with the walk-in’s outdoor north face and provide a place there. The future garden itself, which I’m not calling a beer garden because according to the ATC, it will be licensed as a patio (see?), will smooth over some of these rough spots. There’ll be places to smoke, places for dogs, and places to lounge in the sun with a beer in hand.

And, finally, the future outdoor area likely will be referred to as Lloyd’s Garden, in honor of the late Lloyd Wimp. We hope to begin soon.

Aroused by legalese? Read the smoking law in its thrilling entirety.

Dr. Tom, who seeks to "reduce some of the drama generated by the uninformed,"   provides the Floyd County Health Department's point of view.

Indiana’s Smoke Free Air Law goes into effect on July 1.

You're recall that the state's revolutionary smoking law is riddled with exceptions, exclusions and vivid testaments to endemic political cowardice, topics sufficient to provide hours of worthy discussion -- but the whole issue has come to bore me intensely. The long and the short of it remains: The legislature has decided that some employees are more worthy of workplace safety than others. So be it.

Aroused by legalese? Read the law in its thrilling entirety.

Dr. Tom, who seeks to "reduce some of the drama generated by the uninformed,"   provides the Health Department's point of view.

Our new smoking ban that is not. Is there a purpose?

The Indy Star has details of the exemption-riddled smoking "ban" now being hailed by Indiana legislators as supreme evidence of their constructive abilities -- think of Neville Chamberlain's "peace" in our time for the current, non-achieving age -- when in reality, a group collectively huddling somewhere beneath baseball's "Mendoza Line" seems a far better analogy, at least to me.

I'd been speculating as to how the new "ban" would finesse existing statutes, and the answer is here:

Bars or taverns that aren't located in restaurants and don't employ anyone younger than 18

Yep. Because there frequently is a designated bar area within the same building as a restaurant with family seating, with an approved separation to delineate them, defining language like this is necessary. At the same time, to my knowledge there isn't a single type of alcohol permit available in Indiana for licensing a bar that does not require a food component to accompany beverage alcohol service. In short, to serve alcoholic beverages in this state, one must have food available at all times. Why is this condition not viewed as being that of a restaurant? Restaurants serve food, right? Isn't every bar a restaurant (although, to be sure, every restaurant is not a bar)?

It's entirely senseless, and that's the whole point. In the end, trying to use logic to analyze Indiana legislative activities is like deploying a slotted spoon to slurp clam broth, as in the following, in which it isn't easy to tell which Republican, Gard or Leising, is more absurdly out of touch with the world of ideas.

Bill sponsor Sen. Beverly Gard, R-Greenfield, said she had hoped for broader smoking restrictions, but knew that the exemptions were needed in order for it to clear the Legislature.

“It will result in the protection of the health of hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers from secondhand smoke,” Gard said in urging senators to support the bill ...

... “I can’t think of anything that pleases me more because this bill really will save lives,” Gard said.

Except, of course, for all the lives that it does not save (casino employees, anyone?), seeing as Gard and her colleagues have now ruled with finite wisdom on which humans are deserving of protection and which are not, which means they're playing God, ineptly, which renders this whole discussion even more useless than before -- but it could be worse, as with Leising's baleful lament:

“If we really don’t want people to smoke there must be a better way,” said Sen. Jean Leising, R-Oldenburg. “There must be a way without infringing upon the rights of individuals.”

Does a worker have a right to a safe workplace, Jean? Yes or no? It's a simple question, so please try to answer it for us. Would a little drinkee help to clear the fog? If memory serves, Leising was the geriatric legislator who voted yes to the mandatory all-age ID checks, then became outraged when she was asked to produce her license to buy a bottle of Riunite at Wal-Mart.

ONE THE AVENUES: Smoke rings and political hypocrisy, again.

ON THE AVENUES: Smoke rings and political hypocrisy, again.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

There are so many exemptions in the Orwellian “smoking ban” approved yesterday by the Indiana Senate that it is difficult to discern whether any single enclosed location in the entire state that doesn’t already outlaw smoking might be faced with the looming of forced compliance.

After all, the vast majority of workplaces already are smoke-free by choice or previous governmental fiat. Perhaps a few lonely greasy spoons without alcohol permits would be affected by this toothless “ban” if it is enacted, but the relevant points remain these:

When is a “ban” genuinely worth referring to as such, without running the twin risks of hypocrisy and absurdity – and speaking of both, how unbearably strong are the twin cravings for nicotine and cold, hard lobbying cash when these miserable addictions compel our fumbling collection of lawmakers to ignore the stated wishes of the state’s single most venerated political idol, Governor Mitch Daniels, who’d requested a bill with as few exemptions as possible?

Indeed, the Senate has littered this year’s “ban” model with more exemptions than spent butts on the sidewalk just outside the doorways of the smoke-free Statehouse. Now there’ll be attempted reconciliation with a slightly less watered-down measure approved by the House, and a Frankenstein regulatory monster will emerge amid rampant disgust.

---

Last week, the Courier-Journal’s Harold Adams posted a video of his chat with Sam Anderson, founder and operator of New Albany’s venerable Sam’s Food and Spirits.

Listening to Sam’s comments, and generously conceding that it took quite a few years for my own restaurant business to convert to 100% smoke-free status (at the beginning of 2011), it seems to me there are a few unexamined premises therein.

Sam’s main point is that during hard economic times, a restaurateur cannot afford to alienate a single customer. I’ve always questioned how far this way of thinking really goes, especially when it comes to the invasive act of public smoking.

Sam seems to be suggesting that his restaurant’s smoking area is essential, because the smokers accustomed to using it might go away at a time when every dollar matters to his operation. However, the converse is just as likely a scenario: Those who object to smoking actually might visit Sam more frequently than before if the smoking previously annoying them no longer is permitted.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon personally. As noted, NABC’s original location on Plaza Drive went smoke-free during the recession, and yet business demonstrably increased, even during the bridge closure. By Sam’s logic, this outcome was impossible, but it happened, and I can prove it.

Also, Sam notes the proximity of the county line to his establishment, and posits that any ban must be statewide and not subject to messy local autonomy, because there would be a distinct competitive disadvantage to any no-smoking policy in a geographical sense unless there are no exemptions to the policy within easy commuting distance.

Really?

When’s the last time you saw an all-smoking restaurant created for the express, stated purpose of providing alternatives to the proliferation of smoke-free venues? It plain doesn’t happen. Furthermore, as already noted, the converse to Sam’s viewpoint is equally plausible: Clark County residents might cross the county line in greater numbers, and more frequently, to visit Sam’s and have an accessible smoke-free dining place.

To his credit, Sam is willing to say aloud what most bar owners and restaurateurs won’t: As long as there’s someone else to blame (the state legislature), then it’s all good; until then, individual operators cannot possibly accept the existential burden of being pro-active about banning smoking on their own initiative.

Unfortunately, this is the weakest argument of all, and I respectfully disagree with it. I strongly suspect if Sam were asked whether in other conjectured regulatory instances, allowing state legislators such a degree of participation in his business decisions would be a desired outcome, he would express considerably more doubt about their ability to regulate effectively. My hunch is that he would decry legislative interference -- but in the case of smoking, he welcomes it, because fingers can be pointed at “big government,” and it lets him off the hook.

My words to Sam: You are a giant among local establishments; a legend. We did it, and you can, too. It’s far easier than you think.

---

Unsurprisingly, the rumors we kept hearing to the effect that this year, at long last, a statewide smoking ban with few exemptions would pass through the legislature have been duly negated by the gutted legislation, as currently riddled with the usual lobbyists’ caveats. I must oppose such conceptual Swiss cheese, precisely owing to the tilted-playing-field favorites it cynically enables, especially Indiana’s loftiest of sacred cows, the casino industry.

Non-smoking legislation only makes sense if employee health is the objective, and if employee health is the objective, exemptions simply cannot logically be made – if exemptions are in fact illogically made, then Indiana lawmakers are implying that workplace safety matters more at a solitary breakfast-only diner with twelve employees than at a casino with two hundred.

Not only is this sort of non-thinking pure drivel from the get-go; given the Indiana Senate’s recent record, it’s impossible to believe it is populated by officials capable of arbitrating matters that require the application of science, logic and ethics in roughly equal measure without inducing grand mal seizures in the general populace.

Since tobacco remains a legal product, albeit it one very heavily controlled, there is only one exception I can imagine sanctioning – and even then, it’s a tough call. Perhaps tobacco purveyors should be let off the non-smoking hook, but in this instance, I believe they cannot also be in the business of food and drink, so as to preclude their conveniently ceasing to be tobacco emporiums and becoming de facto taverns instead, which would fulfill Sam’s fears of competitive disadvantage.

Because retailers like New Albany’s Kaiser Tobacco and Billow are not licensed for alcohol sales, they would ease through such an exemption.

But in truth, as much as I appreciate and patronize both these businesses – I remain a cigar smoker, albeit one who cannot puff in either of my company’s two buildings – the mere thought of rationalizing exemptions for them and not others transforms me into a drooling hypocrite.

Alas, in the end, perhaps hypocrisy is unavoidable whenever the talk turns to topics like to tobacco use, personal responsibilities and societal freedoms.

But for the love of Lucky Strikes, does the discussion really have to be as hypocrisy-ridden as the Indiana Senate has made it?

Matt Nash on what the Indiana State Legislature is and is not doing.

Matt doesn't mention the current round of education "reforms," but does manage to touch on the statewide smoking ban that isn't, along with proposals to create taxing districts for Floyd County's parks and Clark County's airport. His conclusion is worth noting.

NASH: Our government at work

... Republicans control the entire Statehouse and have vowed to change the way government is run. If these “changes’’ so far are indicative of what we can expect we are all in a heap of trouble.

Potpourri: "Everybody Knows that Smoking Ain't Allowed in School."

The backlog keeps getting bigger, so here's a sampling of recent links and news items, some mine, some sent to me.

---

Constitution, schmonstitution … what’s it have to do with St. Daniels and his plan to establish charter re-education centers for the state's misspent youth? The Perry County News takes a look, and we breathlessly await the Tribune’s editorial take on the matter, in which we're betting the best and brightest will be asked to step forward and teach school for a while.

It always gladdens my heart to note that taken as a group, Indiana’s legislators remain as cowardly and hypocritical as I’d always imagined they are. A partial list of exemptions to the Indiana state legislature's ballyhooed tough statewide smoking "ban" now includes casinos, taverns, bars, nursing homes, bunco clubs, VFWs, American Legions, pay toilets, chicken shacks, bandstands in public gazebos within 100 feet of a flower shop, and cigar bars, but only if populated by 50% or more lobbyists on Wednesday nights in June.

The bill’s annual sponsor, Charlie Brown, quoted while lying prone after Lucy yet again yanked away his football, politely characterizes these carvings as “compromise,” and while probably not a single legislator would compromise when it comes to his or her own health and well being, the health and well being of workers is now being “compromised” all the way down to where the bill itself has been rendered nonsensical.

Perhaps the legislature might helpfully specify the actual places where smoking is to be banned, which presently number five or six vegan juice bars that never allowed smoking in the first place. Read all about it here (Facebook thread here), and know that to his credit, our Rep. Clere voted against the latest round of dumbings down.

In other tidings from the DingDong Chamber in Indy, Mike Ladd, executive director of the Urban Enterprise Zone Association in New Albany, asks if the war has been successful, and he's not talking Afghanistan Taliban Blues. Rather, Mike lets us know that the Danielsist cadres see a power-grab opening in the gentle art of municipal bankruptcy.

The essence of this bill is that a community’s creditor, or two or more creditors combined, that fall into the criteria above, would be able to request three people in state government to declare a city bankrupt, followed by what essentially amounts to a state take-over; while removing certain appeals processes.

Bankruptcy's nothing, Mike. Just wait until St. Daniels sends in the teams of partisan GOP commissars to whip us into prime Gitmo shape, maybe even literally. No doubt they'll help the medicine go down with plenty of help from their Facebook pages, because even Maureen Hayden (!) has noticed that legislators are using social media to make "friends" with their constituents.

Maureen -- let me get this straight -- you mean that some legislators view social media as means of facilitating communication? Wonders never cease. Friends? I don't have the heart to tell you that down here, in the wide-open, fenced-in spaces of the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness, some legislators are content to use social media to make enemies.

Speaking of the inner workings of the Open Air Museum, how is it that this fellow from so far away can provide such an accurate depiction of life in a place where Steve Price is our leader: Just The Same Old Dumb. Pitt should be made an honorary New Albanian, although I bet he'd pay double to avoid it.

Finally there is good news and bad news: A bill would form New Albany-Floyd County parks district, and "remove" our parks from politics. Let's hope. The Clere Channel Network is poised to take full re-election credit for introducing the parks district bill, although the CCN hasn't had much to say about Ed's support of this "bad news" repugnancy, as Bluegill covered it at Facebook:

In response to my local state rep and the Indiana House passing a xenophobic "English only" bill yesterday, I'm trying to to figure out if I'm going to pay my state taxes this year in quetzals, birrs, riels, or Belarusian rubles.

online.com/article/20110124/NEWS01/110124026" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Indiana House passes 'English only' bill (Journal and Courier)

State documents would have to be published in English only under a bill that passed the Indiana House today by a vote of 63-26.

Casinos can't do without them?

File under hypocrisy.

It's the end of an era and a new world order on Friday at the Pizzeria & Public House.

(Edited from yesterday's posting at my PC blog)

I will be at the NABC Pizzeria & Public House at lunchtime today (December 31, New Year’s Eve) for the express purpose of smoking a cigar, because when we reopen for business on Monday, January 3, ours will be a newly minted smoke-free facility. We first made the announcement in August …

The NABC Pizzeria and Pub will be smoke-free as of January 1, 2011.

… and now the appointed time finally has arrived, although in an odd, seemingly premature way. The impending change also was the subject of my Wednesday Weekly column at Potable Curmudgeon last week: Wednesday Weekly: Sadness at the passing of a regular habit?

Transitions of any sort are challenging, and I think way too much – always have, and probably always will.

Just the same, the overwhelming motifs in my consciousness as we prepare to move forward into a new year are elegiac images from the past, which are becoming increasingly dim in the rearview mirror. That’s largely because in 2011, NABC will be doing its level best to reinvent itself in a future tense, and to some extent, history will be both made and relegated. I've never been as disgusted with the old year, or more excited about a fresh beginning.

Those who know me best always say that it isn’t necessary for me to perpetually spin my wheels in an effort to explain myself, as it invariably gets me into trouble (as with the Wednesday Weekly mentioned above), but it’s something I can’t turn off.

As much as I might like to qualify it, the fact remains that the beer business with which I’ve been associated for almost twenty years always has been an extension of my own personality -- crusading, campaigning, heart pinned to sleeve, forever flapping my jaws and being forcibly rejected every now and then -- and so when it comes to making policy changes like implementing a smoke-free workplace and radically reforming the guest beer program, and doing both of them simultaneously, there is a rigorous self-examination preceding and prefacing the public’s knowledge of new direction.

Which is to say: These matters impact me, too.

It took years to come to grips with both of the biggies on the business horizon.
A seismic shift in my professional “beer life” commenced about three years ago, and the aftershocks finally have awakened me to the next phase, to where I need to be, and where I hope many of us are heading. It seems to me that a full circle has been traveled, and I’m grateful for the wake-up call.

If you are out and about at lunchtime today, I’ll be smoking a cigar at my own bar for the last time, so come and join me.

---

As a postscript, the smoke-free workplace may soon be a statewide phenomenon. In his most recent column in the New Albany Tribune, State Representative Ed Clere had this to say:

CLERE: Session will require resolve from all

... A statewide smoking ban seems inevitable. Indiana is among a dwindling number of states that do not have some type of statewide ban. Support for a ban appears to be growing. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce has made a total ban on smoking in the workplace one of its 2011 legislative priorities, and earlier this month, Gov. Mitch Daniels said he would sign a ban. First, of course, the legislature would have to pass one, and the Senate has snuffed out recent attempts.

Indiana House hypocrisy: No smoking = Workplace safety. Unless you work in a bar, club, casino ...

... then, your health really isn't that important, after all.

It's all about protecting workers, unless you have the misfortune of working in an exemption? If the empirical data is correct, then it's "all or nothing" -- or nothing at all.

House passes smoking ban that exempts bars, casinos, by Lesley Stedman Weidenbener (Courier-Journal)

INDIANAPOLIS — Smoking would be banned statewide in most restaurants and other workplaces under a bill the Indiana House passed 73-26 late Tuesday.
But House Bill 1131 exempts bars, private clubs, casinos and tobacco businesses. It also allows smoking in the private areas of small businesses in which all employees are family members ...

... As introduced by House Health Chairman Charlie Brown, D-Gary, the bill would have banned smoking in all public places — including bars, restaurants and retailers. Only casinos and horse tracks would have been exempted.

But last week and again on Monday, House members whittled away at the ban, carving new exemptions until it was a bill that Brown barely supported. Still, he asked House members to support it Tuesday, pledging that he'd be back to seek something more comprehensive. “If any one of you were to do a survey of your constituents, overwhelmingly they would support no smoking in the workplace, no smoking in public places.”

Maybe it’s beating a dead horse ... but ...

House Bill 1213, otherwise known as the statewide Indiana smoking ban, has been approved in a form that no longer pretends to make any coherent claim to protecting the health of captive workers. Rather, as with our local (and since vetoed) version, the horse trading for exemptions has yielded the usual hypocrisy. Casinos and taverns are excused, the health fascists vow to toughen the standards in the Senate, and I am struggling to suppress a contemptuous yawn.

Perhaps some of the bailout money can trickle down to those of us who'll have to spend money to reconfigure our businesses.

Just for the record, with no opinion implied (just weariness), our District 72’s Ed Clere voted with the 70-26 majority. He had referenced his poll results on a smoking question in a Tribune column yesterday, but did not indicate how he would vote.

Crushed butt of New Albany smoking ban in LEO's Loserville 2008.

There's a marvelous year-end wrap in today's edition of LEO, most of which is devoted to news and personalities in Louisville and Kentucky.

Loserville 2008

Yes, but New Albany scored a point, too. Gee, wonder who wrote this one?

New Albany smoking ban

Even before the global financial meltdown, New Albany was looking forward to a year of tough choices, ranging from rental inspections to sewage rates, and from street repairs to downtown revitalization. Predictably, the city council prepared for the very worst by ignoring it, instead squandering time by enacting an unenforceable smoking ordinance that was immediately vetoed by Mayor Douglas England. New Albany’s summertime smoking debate careened off the scientific
rails, divided the city, fulfilled its reputation as an open air museum of political dysfunction, and in the end, all of the city’s important issues remain, orphaned, unaddressed, and ignored … just like always.

Penance: Bum a smoke?

England vetoes smoking ban, Tim Filler packs up lies in carpetbag and moves on.

While we await a more complete report, I'll leave an open thread so that all the ban apologists can further adopt big tobacco tactics in their quest to prove them diabolical. It's entertaining in a masochistic sort of way.

11:37 a.m. update

Thanks, Bluegill.

I'm back from the scene in front of the City County Building, where the first salvo in the Jeff Gahan for Mayor 2011 campaign was fired earlier this morning.

In other news, the the sitting mayor also vetoed the smoking ordinance, as reported above, and councilman Dan Coffey made as hypocritical a public statement about council priorities (and persistent failures) as I've heard uttered in four years of writing this blog ... but I need to be at work, and it will have to await a future posting.

Mayor England seeks three exemptions to the smoking ordinance, which if implemented would "garner (his) support":

(1) bars
(2) private clubs
(3) restaurants with bars that serve and employ only persons who are 21 years (of age) or older

Here is the mayor's closing statement:

"In conclusion, I am really trying to heal our divided community via compromise. I have heard snokers and non-smokers alike speak in favor of and against the bill. This is not 'black and white' as the activists on either side of the issue would have you believe. I believe that my proposal strikes such a compromise. It is time for the Common Council and the activists to strike this balance, as well."

Let the games begin.

Anger management? No, thanks. I’ve had all the placid acceptance I can stomach.

I’ll begin this essay with a promise. This is my final posting on the topic.

And, an observation.

Thanks to New Albany’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08, I know conclusively that in spite of numerous personal differences, which I’m only now, this year, in the process of resolving, I am in fact my father’s son.

It may not seem like the sort of revelation designed to hang one’s rhetorical hat, but considering the year I‘ve had, it’s huge.

And if it means parting ways with my progressive brethren by sneering at orthodoxy, so be it. It’s healthier to sneer at orthodoxy than it is to dip snuff or smoke cigars, wouldn’t you think?

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Several hundred people visit NAC on a daily basis. Among regular readers of this blog, there is a smaller, select group composed of true friends. Among this group, there are fewer still with whom I’m very close, and they know what a challenging year it’s been in my world. I’ll leave it at that, as background information.

Looking at it objectively, during the past month I’ve expended a disproportionate amount of time and energy in vigorously and vociferously contesting the city council’s smoking ban decision, and yes, that fact may seem counterintuitive to casual acquaintances, given that I’ve never smoked cigarettes, am not enamored of the odor they generate, and have little desire to be a pariah on my own side of the fence.

It’s just that the effete stench in this case isn’t emanating from an ashtray.

Furthermore, it certainly isn’t that I have ample time to devote to this particular struggle. Like many other people, I’m working two jobs: I’m helping my partners run our existing business, and I’m trying to start a second business. I’m serving on two volunteer boards. I’m married, and we own a home, and there are four cats and a 25-year-old truck in need of an oil change. The list goes on. Quite a few people out there have it far worse than me, and because I know that’s true, I’m not going to make it into a federal case, but if you haven’t owned a small business, you have no idea how difficult time management can be.

Or how much it pisses you off to be told that you obviously don’t know how to manage your own affairs.

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Recently, the Bookseller asked me about my frequent disparaging of “out-of-towners” during this discussion. His unspoken question has been, “Why are you taking all this so personally?”

Fair enough, and I’ll try to explain why the professional cessation lobbyist’s comments during the last city council meeting grated on my nerves so thoroughly with each passing moment (lest we forget, many moments past the previously mandated “one”) that I felt compelled to speak aloud from my front row seat with reference to the unfolding travesty, and to remind the pusillanimous council president to follow his own stated “rule” … and to be ejected as a result of my insolence … and, just for the hell of it, what all this has to do with my father’s life.

At its most basic, I reacted the way I did out of pure instinct, because just like my father before me, I simply can’t resist throwing in my lot with the underdog, and as the smoking spectacle has stupidly proceeded, it’s become increasingly obvious that the truest underdog is the dude sitting on a barstool smoking a cigarette I’d never smoke, and drinking a beer I’d never drink, and probably watching a NASCAR race that I’d never watch.

Why do I so resent the presence of the paid professional anti-smoking lobbyists, the carpetbaggers from afar, and the associated health fascists who’ve descended on the city, then decamped just as quickly for further adventures in expense account living in other unfortunate burgs down the lonely Interstate from here?

It’s because they don’t have to do more than one thing at a time, while I don’t have the time to do anything, and what they’re being paid to do is intolerable from a standpoint of basic human fairness.

To me, they’re the health fascist obermenschen, these nannying, passionless people who are paid to perform one task and one task only sans the endless multitasking that fills my days, and that task is to demonize cigarette smokers, to the exclusion of anything and anyone else, and it infuriates me, because my fellow bar owners, who by the admirably frank admission of prime anti-smoking campaigner John Gonder must now cope with ground unexpectedly “shifting” beneath their feet, don’t have the luxury of spending 40-hour weeks defending their interests from predatory attack.

They’re peasants armed with mere sticks, squinting through the clouds at bombers cruising 20,000 feet or above … and the cluster bombs are hurtling through the air.

These bar and restaurant owners have next to no time to take away from their labor-intensive business creations, and no kneejerk lobby to level a playing field tilted against them from the start. They must scramble during rare off-hours to protect conditions that they genuinely perceive as important to their livelihoods, to rally their workers and customers (who’ve no time, either) to fight against something that was sprung on them without substantive warning, with not a solitary soul on a suddenly non-reactive council preparing them for the unexpected.

Just deft politics?

Pfui.

The speed of the council’s smoking represents cowardice by any reasonable definition.

Frozen in the headlights, with indignity piling atop indignity, and in the almost complete absence of clear public communication from the pro-ban bloc (how long will Jeff Gahan use his president’s chair as a shield from scrutiny?), these hard working business owners attended as many of the incredibly scant public hearings as possible, and were compelled to limit their comments to one minute, graciously complied in the main, and then were forced to listen with mounting frustration as they were lectured like dawdling kindergartners by Tim Filler, the carpetbagging cessation lobbyist from another city, who of course couldn’t possibly have any clear notion of how to run the businesses these people have operated on a daily basis, in some cases, for decades.

Want to respond? Sorry, suckers – you already had your minute … and by the way, Mr. Filler, just keep talking. Keep demeaning. Keep insulting. To hell with science. Just make these redneck bar owners look bad.

Mr. Filler, you can have as many minutes as you like to call honest people liars, to dispute their professional acumen, and to denigrate their comprehension of their own business, of their own interests, of their own customers – including that non-confrontational fellow on the barstool who wants above all else to have a few minutes away from it all, and can’t understand why we’re yelling about smoking when the street outside remains unpaved.

Detecting a wee bit of anger?

I won’t deny it.

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It should make you angry, too, to have two sets of rules, and to have someone you’re never met speak with a theatrically straight face about your own inadequacies as an operator. Gee, how did I ever keep a business open for 16 years knowing as little as I do?

Anyone possessing a shard of empathy and a trace of solidarity with people engaged in the same pursuit as yours would feel the same way as I do, but this is different. This is the smoking “debate,” which manages to muddy the scrum comprehensively without my tossing buckets of water on the pitch.

So tell me, fellow fair-minded progressives, what part of any of this is fair to these extremely hard working people?

I may be a progressive, but what part of importing a for-hire suit to tell people they don’t know how to run their own businesses makes sense to you?

Why must smokers and operators be demonized in such a manner?

Wasn’t it supposed to have been about workplace safety?

Why did Jeff Gahan permit the “debate” to devolve into anarchy?

Why is John Gonder the only council pro-ban advocate to have basic human respect for the other side, while the other four remain as ziplocked as the barbecued bologna sandwich in Dan Coffey’s Bazooka Joe lunch box?

Take your time before you answer – but no more than a minute, because another important point that we’ve been taught by the smoking ban debate is that when it comes to social engineering campaigns undertaken by ward heelers, debate really isn’t necessary at all. Lip service to disposable principle is it, and nothing more.

Perhaps this oppressive absence of meaningful discourse will go down in history as the King Gahan Doctrine, and maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and the council will retain some semblance of a “progressive” bloc to enforce limited debate on slumlord abatement to the barest minimum necessary to appear civilized, but somehow I doubt it. Coffey will scurry when the time is right ... and then what?

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Why did it come down this way?

You see, neither that quiet guy on the barstool, nor the bar owner serving him, have anywhere near the lobbying clout that rental property owners have, and in the end, that’s why the pro-ban council bloc decided to schedule them first for the ritualistic ostracizing. It’s because sitting there, minding their own business, they couldn’t see it coming.

They were easy marks, and at a low, low price.

It’s because the out-of-towners would do the heavy lifting, the council members voting in favor would have three and half years for people to forget about it, and the socially unacceptable smokers with no organized resistance would be chased into the street to pitch their filthy nicotine-stained pup tents in the unrepaired pot holes that this council hasn’t had the guts to address, primarily because there’s no money, just like there’s no money (and likely, no will) to enforce the non-smoking mandate.

Y’all feel better about yourselves now that you've solved a purely cosmetic problem by disenfranchising people who did nothing to provoke it?

Not so fast, Jeff, John, Pat, Dan and Bob.

That question is aimed at my fellow progressives, not the council.

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And what of my dad?

My father spent his life chasing populist windmills, and most of the time he got burned, but his instincts were noble. He looked at any problem from the perspective of the guys like him, and guys like him were the underdogs, and yeah, while it’s true that I’ve spent most of my adult life distancing myself from getting hurt by believing in something so much that losing it would matter to me, sometimes I guess blood is thicker than water.

I asked the council why this, and why now? Gonder tried, and I appreciate it, but in truth, there has been no answer. Yet.

The Bookseller asked, why this issue and not another?

It’s because there’s something so repugnant about this, and that cuts at such a deep level, that I’m forced to do something I seldom sanction, and that’s douse the lights and start swinging. Sorry if it offends you. Like my dad before me, I'll get over it ... but not before I'm finished having my say.

We didn’t always get along, but my dad taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right. In my view, a smoking ordinance that purports to protect defenseless workers has achieved its aim only by targeting and vilifying business people and their customers, because in the end, at closing time, no one really wants to talk about science at all.

Science simply can’t be trusted to assuage individual prejudices, to scratch irrational itches, and to make us fear dying any less. At the same time, substituting one prejudice for another strikes me as hypocrisy of a very high order. The hypocrisy is what I'll remember when I'm standing outside the building I own, smoking my cigar, and wondering if Sam will run again for the sixth in 2011 ... and whether redistricting will have been achieved by then for the first time since 1992.

This hasn’t been a fair fight, and my dad taught me that fights should be fair, even if the outcome is preordained.

And that’s why I’m angry about it.

Thanks for asking.

Yes, I’m being feisty, prickly, disputative and contrarian about something that the majority of my own friends and acquaintances would prefer me to let lie and peacefully move on to other issues, but damn it, the more you see rigid orthodoxy enveloping you, the more someone – anyone -- has to try to state an opposing viewpoint.

That is what I’ve tried to do. At least I’m open and fully transparent about it. Jeff Gahan and the council pro-ban bloc has chosen opaqueness and subterfuge. Let history be the judge of which has shown more integrity in the process … and I accept the verdict.

Just don't limit me to a minute. That's just plain insulting to an intelligence seldom valued in this town.

Health fascism, healthism, and other purely amateur renderings from an unpaid homeboy.

I’ve been asked to explain my previous references to “health fascism.”

To the best of my recollection, I first encountered this term in the late 1980’s. I believe I read it in The Nation, as used by Alexander Cockburn in one of his “Beat the Devil” columns.

To Google “health fascism” is to find numerous British Isles references. To judge from the Wikipedia entry on “healthism,” the latter carries equal weight, too. Here's an excerpt.

(Petr) Skrabanek: the threat of health fascism

According to Skrabanek, "healthism" begins when the government begins to use propaganda and coercion to establish norms of health and begins to attempt to impose norms of a "healthy lifestyle." All human activities are weighed in the balance of their real or imagined effects on health: all human activities are divided into "healthy" and "unhealthy", prescribed and proscribed, approved and disapproved, responsible and irresponsible, based on this measure.

In Skrabanek's view, "healthism" goes hand in hand with what he calls "lifestylism", another neologism, which Skrabanek uses to describe the view that most diseases are the result of unhealthy habits or behaviour. Skrabanek notes that while "lifestylism" is ostensibly founded on a basis of mathematics and statistics, it nevertheless has a strong moralistic flavour. Skrabanek cites a British epidemiologist, Geoffrey Rose, as expressing the belief that most people live "unhealthily" and constitute a "sick population". But since (according to Skrabanek) this message would lead to a fatalistic rejection of the lifestyle doctrine, it must be recast to be socially and politically acceptable, quoting Rose for the view that the "sick" society must be re-educated in its "perception of what is normal and acceptable."

Ultimately, Skrabanek claims that "healthism" either leads to, or is a symptom of, incipient totalitarianism. Skrabanek claims that healthism justifies racism, segregation, and eugenic control; for the healthist, what is "healthy" is moral, patriotic, and pure; while what is "unhealthy" is foreign, polluted, and impure. The doctrine of "lifestylism" suggests that state actions to prescribe what is healthy or forbid what is unhealthy are limitless in scope, and offer no grounds for privacy.

That’s a lot to digest. Luckily, I believe the following comment, made on councilman John Gonder’s blog earlier in the week, actually makes the case for the existence of “health fascism” with little additional testimony required.

I freely admit to being condescending toward smoking ban opponents and their "reasons" because I have facts and evidence on my side and they have none.

That's even more frightening than second hand smoke, don't you think?

Veto the smoking ordinance, yer Honor. You’ll survive squawking that primarily comes from afar.

Here it is: The resident contrarian’s case in favor of mayoral intervention in the Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08.

(After all, I wouldn’t want to use the word “veto” … so, sticking to my principles, I’ll happily persist in doing so.)

I’m told that Mayor Doug England will hold a press conference next Tuesday morning circa 10:00 a.m. to reveal whether he’ll put the kibosh on the city council’s controversial smoking ordinance, or permit it to stand on its wobbly feet.

None of us on the outside will ever know the full depth and range of Mayor England’s thought processes in making this decision. I imagine he’s being pelted with advice from all angles (see below for mine), and predictably, outside interests already have weighed in with a full page advertisement in the Tribune, as referenced in today’s Courier-Journal:

Opponents and supporters have continued to lobby England in an attempt to win him over.

One of the latest efforts was from the American Heart Association and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, which took out a full-page ad in today’s New Albany Tribune.

The ad said second-hand smoke causes heart disease, cancer and other health problems, that bar and restaurant workers are at greatest risk and that most area residents support the ordinance.

The ad, which asked if England would stand for “all workers and the public” or “big tobacco and its allies,” urged people to contact the mayor and ask him to sign the measure.

The money spent on that ad alone might have purchased a working toilet or two for a rundown rental property, don’t you think? But I forget so very quickly that the professional public health lobbyists don’t have a dog in the slumlord abatement fight.

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Me?

I believe the mayor should veto the ordinance, primarily because there has yet to be a telephone poll that asks the truly pertinent question: Would you rather the city council ban workplace smoking, or take action to pave the streets?

I’m guessing that such a poll would return a majority in favor of smoother driving surfaces, and one well in excess of that portion of the populace favoring a smoking ban in the absence of substantive progress in other areas.

I believe the mayor can make a perfectly logical case that far from being a measure assisting in the furtherance of public health, the ordinance in fact is little more than frivolous in nature – that it is yet another in a series of unfunded mandates of the sort that usually emanate from Indianapolis or Washington, D.C., except that this time around, it comes from our own council. The ordinance as written is unenforceable, and as such, frivolous isn’t too strong a word to describe it.

I believe that the mayor can plausibly connect the smoking issue with economic development by noting that the city council, having established a changed condition of daily business operation that will require fair and equitable enforcement, has made no provision for such enforcement apart from expecting the businesses that stand to be hurt most by the ordinance to pay for its accommodation by constructing elaborate outdoor smoking areas that surely will be the next target of an insatiable (and perpetually carpetbagging) anti-smoking lobby.

I believe the mayor can accurately decry the transparently shambolic nature of council president Gahan’s somewhat less than deft guidance of the smoking “debate,” which in the end comprised a solitary and inadequate public meeting and two catastrophically truncated public “speaking” allowances, all of which amounted to the council’s pro-ban bloc honoring the need for discourse only in the barest of minimum permissible breaches, and not in such a manner as to allow anything remotely approximating sufficient discussion pertaining to a topic destined to divide the citizenry.

Yes, these may be viewed in some quarters as procedural technicalities. I’m not a lawyer, but it is a regular, recurring and fully justified feature of the American system of governance that we expect important decisions to be made in a way – in the “right” way -- that involves people, and not excludes them, and yet the unprecedented speed with which an eternally dormant council moved to facilitate legislative action that was nowhere to be seen or sighted in any council candidate’s platform during the last election.

This largely underreported aspect of the current situation is perhaps the most annoying of all.

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Does anyone else wonder why an issue now being portrayed as critically important did not produce a blip on last year's electoral radar screen?

Does anyone else remember when King Larry Kochert, then the council president, announced that 2007 would be the year when his cherished smoking ban finally came into effect, and the same reactionary who did so much for so long to keep New Albany rooted in the 19th century would suddenly leapfrog the moribund experience of long decades by the magically simple act of chasing smokers from their bar stools, into the streets, to disappear into unrepaired pot holes?

Remember how the smoking ordinance unceremoniously died almost on the spot, and how none of the council members at the time – and none of the candidates challenging them – uttered so much as a peep about smoking as the 2007 election loomed?

How not one of them campaigned on a platform of smoking as the issue most deserving of immediate action in 2008 -- for that matter, was it even in the Top 10 of any candidate's published list of aims?

Was it ever mentioned publicly on the campaign trail one single time?

Actually, to be fair to the candidates, not a one of them offered a decipherable platform of any sort, smoking or otherwise, but I digress.

Which brings me to the primary reason I hope Mayor England vetoes the smoking ordinance. As my high school baseball coach was known to say, the covert way all this has come down, and the timing of it coming down, is chickenshit, plain and simple, and I’m not using that word because I want to spare Steve Price the indignity of being the only potty mouth hereabouts.

Rather, this legislative spectacle was transformed into political theater early on, and it has been bereft of political courage from start to finish. Why this, and why now? No one has provided a satisfactory answer, and until they do: Mayor England, muddy the scrum and veto this ordinance.

Give ‘em a year under strict supervision to do something genuinely progressive, and to undertake it sans the subterfuge that has been such an alarming aspect of the smoking travesty, and I’m quite willing to visit the smoking issue again, but not under the current discredited terms.

I know that quite a few of you disagree with my thoughts, and that’s fine. In the end, given my personal interests and my chosen vocation, perhaps I’m overly sensitive to the historical atrocities wrought by the prohibitionist instinct in America. They’re documented, and they’re real. Given that experience, the legislative bar needs to be higher, doesn't it?