By Sara Noble
NYC Mayor Bloomberg is behind a secret cabal of neighborhood spies who run around convincing tenants and landlords to disallow all smoking by tenants, even within their own apartments. The community spy groups get a $10,000 bounty for their efforts. The bounty is coming out of a grant, in other words, our tax money.
This is ripe for corruption to say nothing about the whole stealth factor being unethical, sneaky, and communistic. It pits neighbor against neighbor and it demonizes people. But don’t worry, it is for the common good.
I’ve never smoked in my life and I don’t like being around cigarettes, but what right does anyone have to tell someone what they can do in their own home? Did our Bill of Rights disappear? Can’t Mayor Bloomberg look up our inherent rights on the Internet?
Did anyone doubt the government would enter our homes?
*The New York Times reported that more landlords are demanding that new renters promise not to smoke in their homes. Most are grandfathering in present tenants.
Kenbar Management, a local developer, is going a step further. When its new project, 1510 Lexington Avenue, opens in December [2009], smoking will be banned in all 298 units, in addition to private and shared terraces.
And the typical smoker’s refuge — directly outside the building — is also off limits; tenants must agree not to smoke on any of the sidewalks that wrap around the building, which takes up most of a block in East Harlem, according to Kinne Yon, a Kenbar principal.
The NYC Health Department produced a study that indicates 57% of new tenants might possibly have been exposed to secondhand smoke. That’s a study you can hang your hat on.
Kenbar is a private company and can do what they want but the government doing it is something altogether different. They want to intrude on our personal lives, especially now that they have put themselves in charge of our healthcare.
Public housing throughout the country is being encouraged to ban smoking and they are doing it. Laws are being passed against smoking. For example, all apartments and condos in Richmond, California must ban smoking by law.
San Francisco has banned smoking but won’t extend the ban to pot. Marijuana has been legalized in two states and is ignored in others while smoking is verboten. The fact that marijuana is a gateway drug is meaningless to the leftists. Disney banned smoking in film which is rich since no one is talking about banning vulgar and violent movies and video games.
The Pentagon has been considering a ban on smoking by soldiers. The left bans what they don’t like and the rest of us have no say in the matter. Is this really what people want? What will they ban next? The fact that many on the far left hate Conservatives, Republicans, Christians, religion, morality, salt, sugar, McDonald’s, baby formula, fuel oil and gas, et al should send shivers down your spine.