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A photograph of President Obama with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has whirred the long-dormant "Is Obama smoking?" conspiracy machine back to life. Posted to Instagram by Renzi's spokesman, it shows the two leaders standing on a balcony adjacent to an office, as one might if he didn't want to smoke indoors. And Obama's holding … something in his hands. Something roughly cigarette-pack-shaped, and he's picking at the top of it.

C’mon. He’s in Europe, he was talking to an Italian, and his ’08 image abroad as a global savior has been blown to hell by six years of foreign-policy drift. The guy had to do something to restore a little cool.Yesterday he had a beer at 11 a.m. By the end of the year, he’ll be puttering around the White House unshaven in pajamas at three in the afternoon, muttering about “red lines” between swigs from a bottle of Jack.Remind me again why he needs to pretend that he quit smoking. I know Michelle doesn’t like it, but she’ll learn...

By Morgan Little September 24, 2013, 11:52 a.m. President Obama has been burned again by a hot microphone, with an offhand joke that he had to quit smoking “because I’m scared of my wife,” captured during the U.N. General Assembly. “I hope you quit smoking,” Obama told U.N. Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai during a brief exchange Monday, with the president admitting that he still chews Nicorette gum. “No, no, I haven’t had a cigarette in probably six years,” Obama said. “That’s because I’m scared of my wife.” Scared or not, Obama’s timeline, which would place his last cigarette around 2007,...

It's none of my business what Barack Obama's LDL cholesterol level is. And I don't have to know that he is using nicotine therapy to attempt to kick his smoking habit. But all of this and more is dutifully passed along after the president's annual physical. Want to know his resting heart rate? It's available. And we're told that President Obama has been instructed by his physicians to "eat healthier" and "moderate his alcohol intake." What to make of this annual invasion of privacy? We've been privy to similar details about other presidents -- sometimes to an excruciating degree (President...

A public that wants to know everything about Barack Obama can thank Lisa Jack for a glimpse of what the future president was like when he was just another college freshman...with a partly unbuttoned Oxford shirt, a big Panama hat and puffs of cigarette smoke as his props of choice for projecting that coveted aura of post-adolescent confidence and cool... The callow kid kicking back on a couch in a living room near L.A.'s Occidental College, where he and Jack were students, may not have been the image the Obama campaign wanted to project. "I'm sure Hillary would have paid...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is set to sign into law an anti-smoking bill that will give the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented authority to regulate tobacco. Obama is scheduled to sign the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act during an event Monday in the Rose Garden. The law allows the FDA to reduce nicotine in tobacco products, ban candy flavorings and block labels such "low tar" and "light." Tobacco companies also will be required to cover their cartons with large graphic warnings.

It is still okay to discriminate against one group of Americans. This discrimination is not only legal, it is encouraged. You see members of this oppressed minority huddled outside in rain and snow, forbidden to seek refuge. No one feels sorry for them. And yet we may have just elected one of these pariahs as president. Smoking is a disgusting habit that can kill you and those around you. Barack Obama claims to have quit, but the evidence is ambiguous. And the media's lack of interest in this question supports the charge that Obama is enjoying a honeymoon with the...