First a little reminder of the EPA’s role in promoting tobacco hysteria:
The EPA Report
In December of 1992 the EPA released it’s now famous report on second hand smoke. The report claimed that SHS causes 3,000 deaths a year, and classified it as a class A carcinogen.
Note: Although the official date of this report is December, 1992, it is commonly referred to as the EPA ’93 study, probably because it became widely available in ’93.
This was, and remains, a powerful weapon in the anti-smokers arsenal. If a smoker is only hurting himself, he can argue that it’s no one else’s business. But if he is hurting everyone around him, all kinds of restrictive legislation can be justified.
Did this study show SHS is deadly? Let’s examine the facts carefully.
Fact: In 1992 the EPA issued a report which claimed that Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) caused 3,000 deaths per year.
Fact: ETS is commonly referred to as Second Hand Smoke (SHS). The two terms are interchangeable.
After reading each of the following facts, ask yourself “Does this fact make the study more credible, or less credible?
Fact: The EPA announced the results of the study before it was finished.
Fact: The study was a Meta Analysis, an analysis of existing studies.
With this in mind, I was delighted to read this yesterday:
It’s almost been a week since Donald Trump was elected president, and still the left can’t stop crying. Those who aren’t out physically assaulting Trump voters have taken a more emotional approach by sinking into a state of depression and taking time off of work. Like EPA employees, for example, were actually offered counseling and some are threatening to retire early.
Many government employees are in a state of panic, and they have every right to be there. But they knew this was coming. When you spend eight years lying to the public and reach the point where you even have yourself convinced, you should know that a reckoning is coming.
Under the Trump administration, EPA employees will most-likely see the most drastic changes. Trump has bowed [vowed?] to repeal some of the rules that have been put into place under the Obama Administration, including the Clean Power Rule, which is was created to cut the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Trump has even gone so far as to suggest cutting the agency altogether. But fear not, they can’t be that close to doom, if he’s appointed somebody to be in charge of it. He’s selected Myron Ebell, a top climate change skeptic to lead this new transition. Though, employees aren’t exactly comforted by that notion.
Can you imagine them all in their “safe spaces” with their blankets and fluffy toys and counsellors? Doesn’t the thought of it just fill you with glee?
These people have been fully complicit in evicting smokers from pubs and restaurants, without a care in the world for any of them. (Where was my safe space, blanket, and fluffy toy on 1 July 2007? Where were the counsellors?) But as soon as there is any sign of the same thing happening to them, they start howling and screaming.
These people have an immense sense of entitlement to whatever they want. Nobody else matters. Just them. Hillary Clinton had the same immense sense of entitlement to the presidency. It was, as Bill Clinton said, “her turn”. And the entire Democratic party is no different, it seems. They throw a fit when they don’t get what they want.
That said, I’m very far from sure that Trump is going to do anything much for smokers: Hillary would have been far worse. He may even agree with the EPA’s claims about SHS. What he objects to is their claims about carbon dioxide and global warming. It could be that the only reason he isn’t cutting the agency entirely is because he may want to beef up the SHS regulations – and only Mike Pence can stop him.
But with luck the EPA will soon be DOA . Dead On Arrival.
Bring it on. I can’t wait.
Frank Davis 
http://www.gwhatchet.com/2016/11/20/staff-editorial-anti-smoking-education-would-better-than-ban/
This is in Banzhafts own backyard………….he is commenting on it if the comments will show up on your computers.
Anti-smoking education would be better than ban
Issue: November 20, 2016 | Opinions
The irony of the smoking ban on campus is obvious everywhere from Kogan Plaza to the entryways of residence halls where signs that read “Welcome to our smoke-free campus” become hazed in cigarette smoke.
When officials first instituted the smoking ban in 2013, they had good intentions. But we knew that a ban on an integrated city campus – a campus built within the city with no defining gates or enclosures – would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. Many people who are not students, faculty or staff pass through the Foggy Bottom campus every day, and we can’t keep them from smoking.
The ban operates on a self-policing method and sends violators with multiple infractions to the Office of the Provost, the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities and University Human Resources. Enforcing the ban when there are no set policies for violating it in place is unrealistic.
Frank Trumps Pick of Pence knowing his stand on smoking and the junk science says volumes!
He threw Chris Christy under the bus just because he might become a liability over the bridge gate case………..Yet Pence remains with his pro smoking stand
I thought he threw Chris Christie under the bus because he brought in a whole bunch of lobbyists.
That too but stories were breaking about Christy to the bridge scandal and his close associations
Christy also vetoed the NJ parks and beaches ban,but it was christies close ties to Obama over the years that also was an influence Im quite sure.
On California voting to pass the tax increase heres from way back when
Since the first state cigarette taxes were imposed in the 1920s, black markets and related criminal activity have plagued high-tax jurisdictions. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) admitted there is ALREADY a huge black market for cigarettes in California. It is estimated that nearly 20 percent of the cigarettes sold there are sold on the black market…………………http://www.smokingaloud.com/black-market-cigarettes.html
Now go figure how much bootleg will go up in Calif.
Hope they dismantle the Dept of Education too.
I do not like the fed govt being involved in what kids must learn.
“You don’t have to be a fan of smoking to agree that the EPA is a regulatory renegade spinning wildly out of control on this issue. Even several veteran career employees of the agency have gone public recently to protest its “junk science” and its irrational environmental zealotry.”
“Judge Osteen determined that the EPA had “cherry picked” its data and had grossly manipulated “scientific procedure and scientific norms” in order to rationalize the agency’s own preconceived conclusion that passive smoking caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. In addition, Osteen ruled that the EPA had violated the Radon Act, which was the agency’s authority for disseminating its “de facto regulatory scheme” that intended to prohibit passive smoking. The agency responded, embarrassingly, with an ad hominem attack on the judge, not on the cold logic of his arguments.”
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/secondhand-smoke-charade
The Second-Hand Smoke Charade
September 1998
Judge Voids Study Linking Cancer to Secondhand Smoke
1998
“Judge Osteen found that the composition of the study panel was flawed because, among other things, none of its representatives were drawn from industry. But in a far more damning finding, Judge Osteen held that agency researchers, rather than rigorously proving their case, frequently shifted theories and selected the data they wanted in order to reach a preordained conclusion.
“In this case, E.P.A. publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun,” Judge Osteen wrote. ”
The Osteen Decision in full
http://archive.tobacco.org/Documents/980717osteen.html
Scientists Report Political Interference
2008
” More than half the Environmental Protection Agency scientists who responded to an independent survey made public yesterday said that they had witnessed political interference in scientific decisions at the agency during the past five years.
The claim comes from a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group that sent questionnaires to 5,500 EPA scientists and obtained 1,586 responses. Among the scientists’ complaints were that data sometimes were used selectively to justify a specific regulatory outcome and that political appointees had directed them to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information in EPA scientific documents.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303074.html
Environmental tobacco smoke.
Rodgman A.
1992
Abstract
In 1992, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a “draft” assessment of ETS and lung cancer in adults and respiratory disorders in children. Relying on weak and inconclusive epidemiological data, the supposed similarity between ETS and MS, the presence of “known or suspected carcinogens” in MS and by extrapolation in ETS, and the “biological plausibility” of an adverse relationship between ETS and health, the EPA recommended that ETS be classified as a “Group A (known human) carcinogen.” Fundamental physical and quantitative chemical differences among ETS, MS, and SS and human exposure to each smoke were disregarded: The three are not equivalent nor is ETS exposure a quantitative variant of cigarette smoking. A substantial difference in retention percentage overlays the huge dosimetric difference between exposures. As a result, the “dosage” of ETS retained is miniscule relative to MS. Also, conclusions reached by the EPA and the use of tenuous relationships as bases for Group A classification are unwarranted because of failure to consider the data upon which the “tumorigenicity” of the ETS components was based, questions on the presence and/or levels of these components in MS, and data indicating that a 25- to 30-fold decrease of a high-level dose of MS or MS condensate diminished the effects observed in bioassays from pronounced to zero, i.e., a threshold was demonstrated.
Finally, EPA overlooked the more than 100 tobacco smoke components known to inhibit the tumorigenic action of many of the listed “tumorigens.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1293640