Free Republic

With just days to go before two of Philadelphia's most prestigious hospitals refuse to hire smokers, the ban has relit a debate about the wisdom of regulating workers' behavior away from the workplace. Both the highly rated University of Pennsylvania Health System, which includes the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, named by US News and World Report as America's top children's hospital this year, will join dozens of hospitals across the country when they implement their policy on Monday, July 1. The move has generated criticism among civil liberties activists, hospital...

The hot new video at MRCTV.org is 1995 footage of Attorney General Eric Holder, when he was the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. In his remarks before the Woman's National Democratic Club, broadcast by CSPAN 2, Holder said people should be ashamed to own guns, just the way that cigarette smokes now "cower outside of buildings" to smoke. "What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that's not cool, that it's not acceptable, it's not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way...

Where are today’s rebels?  Where is the counterculture? Ear-budded hipsters, with their sheep-like devotion to Apple products and the Obama administration, sit in on the April 20 “Day of Pot” in Denver, content and satisfied with their free birth control and legalized maryjane.  Meanwhile SWAT teams descend on Watertown, Massachusetts, trampling Fourth Amendment rights in search of a “person of interest”– while a Saudi National is quietly sent back to his homeland.These hipsters champion the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado while the war on Big Tobacco rages on.  Since 1997 the FDA inherited control over the $365.5 billion global...

Companies aren't just singling out overweight employees. Staffers who smoke are under fire too. In small but growing numbers, employers in recent years have been refusing to hire smokers, arguing that coaxing tobacco users to quit with free cessation programs or cash incentives hasn't worked. Some medical experts back the bans, saying the end result of reducing smoking is worth it. But other health-care experts say the policy crosses an ethical line by singling out poorer and less educated groups who, federal data shows, smoke more often.

Oregon gun owners cheered by the demise of Sen. Ginny Burdick's proposals to ban large magazines and scary-looking semiautomatic weapons should leave the Champagne in the fridge for the time being. The Legislature's gun-control advocates are still hard at work, and the direction in which they're heading would create problems for law-abiding citizens over the long term and, perhaps, do nothing to enhance public safety. We're leery of slippery-slope arguments, but two concepts supported by Burdick and Sen. Floyd Prozanski, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, could grease the transformation of concealed-handgun policy into something resembling smoking policies around the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law, according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation. The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" to its detractors — allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1. For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums. Younger smokers could...

Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law, according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation. The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" to its detractors — allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1. For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums. Younger smokers could be charged lower...

The Kodiak Daily Mirror reports she slipped as she was texting on her phone at the same time she tried to toss a cigarette butt over the cliff edge. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/27/alaska-woman-falls-off-60-foot-cliff-while-texting/?test=latestnews#ixzz27lhu2uif

A US court on Friday shot down orders to slap graphic anti-tobacco messages on cigarette packs, saying the government overstepped its authority by trying to "browbeat" smokers into quitting. In line with campaigns in several other nations, the United States planned from September 22 to require images on cigarette packs including a man smoking through a hole in his throat and a body with chest staples on an autopsy table. In a 2-1 decision, the US Court of Appeals in Washington said that the images planned on cigarette packs were not necessarily false but they went beyond "pure attempts to...

It’s bad news for smokers and tobacco shops alike. Long regarded as a cheaper option for nicotine lovers, roll-your-own cigarettes are set to be a thing of the past as a new law is introduced by President Barack Obama. In coming days he will sign a federal highway bill with a section defining any business with roll-your-own cigarette machines as a tobacco manufacturer and upping taxes on the its products, the Chicago Sun Times reported. The move will come as a blow to smokers without brand loyalty who for years have been able to feed their habits at a fraction...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: From TheHill.com: "Two weeks after fighting for the survival of its signature healthcare reform law before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration will be back in court Tuesday to defend another part of the president's agenda to make Americans healthier." Do you love the way that's written at TheHill.com? Let me read this to you again. The headline: "Another Health Law Faces Court Challenge." But TheHill.com, total slaves to the Obama administration: "Two weeks after fighting for the survival of its signature healthcare reform law before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration will be back in court...

The federal government can require tobacco companies to “reserve significant packaging space” for anti-smoking warnings and graphic images on their cigarette labels, a three-judge appellate panel ruled Monday. “We return to where we began — the lack of consumer awareness of tobacco’s serious health risks resulting from the decades-long deception by tobacco companies,” Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati wrote in a ruling that was unanimous in some sections and 2-1 in others. Current tobacco-label warnings do not effectively inform consumers on these health risks, even though they include “the undisputed fact...

Lower-income smokers in Utah may soon have to pay more for a doctor's visit if they continue the unhealthy habit. That is, if a bill currently making its way through the state legislature passes. State Representative Paul Ray, R., is the author of the proposal to charge a Medicaid recipient a higher co-pay for doctor visits if he or she smokes cigarettes.

Health care provider announces that tobacco users will not get jobs. Smokers need not apply. That’s the message Geisinger Health System is sending to future job applicants. Starting Feb. 1, Geisinger will no longer hire applicants who use tobacco products, including cigarettes, cigars and chewing or smokeless tobacco, the health system announced on Wednesday. “Geisinger is joining dozens of hospitals and medical organizations across the country that are encouraging healthier living, decreasing absenteeism and reducing health care costs by adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants,” Richard Merkle, chief human resources officer, said in...

Ron Paul’s college-aged volunteer army — a core of the powerful ground organization that is the envy of rivals — is descending on Iowa from around the nation to coax people to the state’s Republican caucuses as he seeks to pull off what only months ago seemed like an unthinkable victory here on Tuesday.

A Maryland health advocate who fought successfully this year for an increase in the state’s alcohol sales tax is pushing for a tax increase on cigarettes. Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative, says the group will start a campaign next week asking the General Assembly to increase the state’s $2-a-pack tax on cigarettes to $3 and raise taxes on other tobacco products, including cigars and smokeless tobacco. Mr. DeMarco — a health lobbyist who has long championed so-called “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol — hopes to build on momentum from this year’s assembly, in which legislators...

BULLITT COUNTY, Ky. -- A proposed smoking ban in Bullitt County has been snuffed out. The Bullitt Circuit judge issued his ruling Thursday, saying the ban proposed by the health department is void and unlawful. The board of health had voted to enact a regulation to ban smoking in public places, but Wednesday's ruling stops the health department from implementing or enforcing the ban. In that ruling, Judge Rodney Burress said to allow the health department to regulate any matter relating to public health would "allow regulations prohibiting the consumption of candy because it is bad for a person's teeth,...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Rotting teeth and gums. Diseased lungs. A sewn-up corpse of a smoker. Cigarette smoke coming out of the tracheotomy hole in a man's neck. Cigarette packs in the U.S. will have to carry these macabre images in nine new warning labels that are part of a campaign by the Food and Drug Administration to use fear and disgust to discourage Americans from lighting up.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Coming to a store near you: nine more reasons not to smoke. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday is set to release nine new graphic health warning labels for U.S. cigarette packs, representing the most significant change to cigarette packs in more than 25 years. The new labels will take up half of a pack of cigarettes and also will appear on advertisements. Cigarette makers have until the fall of 2012 to comply. Mandates for new warning labels were part of a 2009 law giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco. The announcement follows reviews...

ANN ARBOR (AP) — Lights-out time is approaching at the University of Michigan, where a campuswide ban on smoking outdoors and indoors takes effect next month. The school says it is the first major university in the state to adopt such a ban, while Big Ten rivals Indiana University and the University of Iowa already have them in place. “We are approaching this issue with great respect for the difficulty in discontinuing tobacco use,” said Robert Winfield, the university’s chief health officer. “It is our expectation that this will entail a culture change that will take a number of years...