Imperial Entanglements

It's not easy always being right. Why, it wears me out sometimes.

Just a couple weeks ago I was ranting about the Big Brother-ish smoking ban in Louisville and lo and behold, the next thing you know, a circuit judge agrees with me and informs the Louisville city Government that their ban is - duh! - unconstitutional.

It's not easy for me to oppose Mayor Jerry. I've supported him on almost everything else he's done. I've even been giving him benefit of the doubt on the arena issue even though there's a lot about the matter that suspiciously stinks to high heaven. But the smoking ban is so fundamentally evil and un-American that the Mayor's eager support of it very nearly negates, for me, all the good will he's built up over the past zillion years.

The smoking ban was unconstitutional and they knew it. And yet they pushed it through anyway. Anyone who deliberately tries to foist such a blatantly unconstitutional law on American citizens should be groveling on their hands and knees right now apologizing to the people and begging forgiveness for what they did. Instead, the city council are not only unapologetic, but vowing to cobble together another smoking ban soon. Bad play all around, folks. This is a fundamentally divisive issue that isn't going to go away, and smoking bans have previously only worked in cities without the cojones to resist.

Louisvillians have cojones in spades, my friend.

Funny thing is, I don't even smoke, aside from an occasional good hand-rolled cigar after a meal. (And please, all you smoking-ban zealots, don't bother arguing with me that cigar smoking is no different from cigarette smoking, because - as usual - you're wrong.)

- - JSH.