Important headlines for January 26th
Bottom Line: These are stories you don't want to miss and my hot takes on them...
Florida, raise the smoking age to 21 - Orlando-Sentinel
Excerpt: Ninety-five percent of smokers began their addiction before the age of 21. Tobacco sales to this age group make up just 2 percent of the market, yet it produces the overwhelming majority of lifetime smokers.
Delaying the introduction of nicotine — by increasing the minimum legal sale age for tobacco and electronic smoking devices to age 21 — is imperative if we want to help prevent lifetimes of addiction and save lives.
Hot Take: It's highly instructive information (that 95% of all smoking begins before 21), if not necessarily surprising. Altruistically, I can get behind the idea for the improvement of one's health. On the other the hand, the libertarian in me, it's government once again attempting to protect you from yourself. What's most confounding to me is the trend against smoking cigarettes in our society generally, alongside the simultaneous legalization efforts of marijuana. I'm not suggesting that the debate is equitable - whatever your perspective but it does strike me as sociographically interesting.
Nevertheless...If you really do want to make a significant dent in current smoking rates (which at 18% are near record lows) it makes perfect sense when you see than only 5% of smokers pick up the habit after 21. Here's the big but(t) though. Extra diligence shows that the average age of first time smokers is 17. So, what does that tell you about the effectiveness of the law in combating the habit? That leads me to my final thought. The libertarian side of my perspective wins out. While I'd prefer that no one smokes regardless of age...I'm struggle to once again attempt to protect people from themselves in a way that's generally been less than highly effective. Although... How about considering raises the voting age to 21? Just a thought
What Do We Do About Corruption in the FBI? Roger Simon, PJ Media
Excerpt: Suppose what many are now suspecting is completely true -- that the FBI, or parts of it, exonerated Hillary Clinton and her cohorts with a mock investigation, attempted to swing our presidential election against Donald Trump and then continued to undermine the new administration after they had won with illegitimate claims of Russian collusion orchestrated by sleazy political lowlifes?
Or just consider this...
Sen. Grassley: 'Who Was Actually Colluding With Russians?'
Or just cover up, as Robert Mueller did when Strzok and Page were caught, literally and ideologically, with their pants down. He simply shipped them off Soviet-style to FBI Siberia, not saying a word to the public, hoping no one would notice, hoping it would be ignored that those "secret societies" and "insurance policies" they referred to smack of exactly the kind of behavior that would open one to RICO charges in a normal FBI investigation. This coverup only came out by accident months later. (As Marc Antony might have put it, "And Robert is an honorable man." He might add now: "And Loretta is an honorable woman.")
Put another way, should "lying to the FBI" be a crime, when the FBI itself lies?
Hot Take: Right, so at best here's where we stand. A corrupt former head of counter-intelligence at the FBI colluding with a corrupt former ranking FBI attorney to fix the Clinton investigation with former FBI director leading a special council who attempted to cover up their corruption which, onto itself, would be corruption. That's the best case. The worst case takes you back to the first excerpt in the story which reads more like the KGB the FBI.
2016 Election Was Rigged--and Trump Won Anyway Wayne Allyn Root, Review-Journal
Until tomorrow...