Cigarettes at the Duane Reade I stopped at tonight in Grand Central Station are on sale. They are $108.24 per carton. Normally they cost $110.12. Get ’em while they last.

I am 47-years-old, and the first carton of cigarettes I ever bought cost $5.  I could have bought 21 cartons then for the price of a single carton today, with money left over for a 12-pack of mints. Without the punitive city, state, and federal taxes — and punitive is what they are — a carton of cigarettes would probably cost around $18-20 today.

I quit smoking several years ago, and I don’t miss the things at all. But I do miss the people I used to huddle with in the cold. Some of them were absolute strangers before becoming fast friends. Such is the bond among pariahs. We weathered a lot of winds together, we hearty few, striking matches inside cupped palms outside fine and less than fine establishments — with extraordinary flair I might add. I have met no finer people since.

I thought of my old smoking comrades twice today. Tonight at Duane Reade, and earlier in the day while reading coverage of  New York City’s just-implemented outdoor smoking ban. (I still can’t get over that — an outdoor smoking ban.)

Most of the coverage focused on rebellious smokers lighting up in parks and sidewalks, feet from unperturbed police officers pointedly turning the other way, and I could not help but feel a tinge of pride for the disobedient spirit of everyone involved. Truth be told, I was a little jealous not to be there with them, not for the nicotine, but for the fight.

I hope my old friends all eventually quit, because cigarettes are killing them. But so is life, and as long as I can draw breath, I’ll support their right to do what they want with theirs.

President Obama Signs Westminster Abbey Guest Book Today *New York Mag

President Obama signed into the Westminster Abbey guest book today, May 24, 2008?

We’ve all done it…

http://youtu.be/yo5zH0Il8B0

The old country isn’t accustomed to stretch limos…

*City Journal

It’s not often that a Manhattan Institute scholar quotes a Drum Major Institute (DMI) report.  But there was Fred Siegel, a longtime contributor to conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, citing material just issued by the ultra-liberal DMI in today’s New York Post.

The DMI report warns that the only significant job growth in New York City — 80% of it — is occurring in the lowest paying industries — retail, hospitality, and the food services.  Siegel warns that middle-income jobs, and the people who hold them, are fleeing all areas of New York State because of high taxes, the scarcity of jobs, and the high cost of living here.

Taken together, that spells bad news for New York’s future, with an “hourglass” economy emerging – one featuring jobs only for the richest and poorest — Siegel and the DMI agree.

This is not news to most New Yorkers.  It is why the state has led the nation in outmigration for two decades.  Tens of thousands of New York families leave the state every year for easier lifestyles offered elsewhere.  They are being replaced by poor immigrants who consume more public services, adding to the burden of middle-class taxpayers remaining here. That’s not a good dynamic.

It’s no surprise then that, according to a Marist Poll cited in Siegel’s piece, 36% of New Yorkers under the age of 30 plan to leave the state within the next five years.  They do not have the opportunities here their parents did. In parts of upstate and western New York, there is virtually no opportunity left at all.

It’s too bad that the Left and the Right have such radically divergent prescriptions to save New York State. Because both sides see exactly what is happening. We all do.

My father-in-law makes an excellent suggestion whenever he hears about a dumb new bill being sponsored in the New York State Legislature. If you want to pass a law in Albany, you should have to repeal two others.

But a legislative proposal announced today by Assemblyman Rory Lanceman (D-Queens) is so asinine that he should have to repeal at least three laws just for uttering his suggestion.

Lanceman, in trying to capitalize on high-profile rape allegations made by a Sofitel housekeeper against former International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is drafting legislation that would require New York hotels to outfit employees with “panic buttons” in case future IMF chiefs decide to sexually assault them while they are cleaning rooms.  (Non hotel employees in New York are on their own under Lanceman’s bill.)

The assemblyman announced his legislation with a straight face Monday outside the Sofitel on West 44th Street.  He will get plenty of ink, and the bill will go nowhere. It is grandstanding at its worst.

Lanceman’s staff should keep newspapers away from the Assemblyman, now serving in his third two-year term.  One good look at the police blotter and we may all be wearing panic buttons under in future legislation. Our fellow citizens are dangerous people.

But which three laws to take off the books?  Some ideas here.

"You're Going to What?"

This little snippet out of the Golden Gate City…

It seems San Francisco voters don’t have enough to worry about these days.  Their state is $26 billion in the hole, businesses are fleeing while Governor Brown is raising taxes, parks are being shut down just in time for the summer season, and tens of thousands of state prison inmates are about to be let loose on the general population, the actual general population.

So what  are San Franciso voters being asked to focus on?  Penises.  Yes, penises — whether or not circumcision should remain legal in the city

The whole Judaism thing is irrelevant the initiative’s creator explains, “A lot of Jews have been turned away from their culture and their religion just because of this issue,” he reports.  By keeping wee ones off the chopping blocks, in other words, he is really doing one of the world’s oldest religions a favor. What a mensche.

The ballot initiative is par for the course in a city that last year focused its attention on another matter of pressing significance in banning “Happy Meals.”   That is, it prohibited fast-food restaurants from giving away toys with meals, unless those meals meet the local politburo’s nutritional set of standards.

Phew!  Those toys were a real public hazard. Kids might have actually played with them. Can you imagine?

I have to ask this question again today.  “What on earth is going on with California?”

The Supreme Court just ruled that up to 46,000 prison inmates in California must be released from jail because of over-crowding conditions. It sounds like one of those crazy court decision stories where news of the ruling is followed by the words: “today’s decision is sure to be appealed.”  But not in this case.  This is the Supreme Court.

Three thoughts:

1. What the heck is happening with California?

2. Those prisons must be really crowded for this Supreme Court to rule that way.

3. There are plenty of empty jail beds in New York.  Upstate communities are fighting to keep half empty prisons open. Hmmmm.

UPDATE:  The Court seems bitterly divided over this decision.  This quote from Justice Scalia is striking in its bite: “the coda is nothing more than a ceremonial washing of the hands — making it clear for all to see, that if the terrible things sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order do happen, they will be none of this court’s responsibility.”

And here’s a quote from Chief Justice Roberts: “The three-judge court ordered the premature release of approximately 46,000 criminals — the equivalent of three Army divisions.”

A New York Times story on the decision is linked here.

Mitch Daniel’s decision not to run for President is admittedly discouraging – a lot of people saw him as the perfect alternative to President Obama in political philosophy and demeanor – but I cannot help but remain sanguine about the Republican Party’s future.

I realize that puts me in the minority.  All I heard after Daniel’s decision became known today were eulogies for the GOP’s chances in 2012. Indeed, Taps was the empathic tune of the day for my side of the aisle, with both civilians and seasoned Republican operatives I spoke with blowing it.  But an item in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal murmured a catchier tune, and I’ve been dancing to it in my head since yesterday morning.

New Hampshire, The Journal reported, is on track to become the 23^rd state in the union to become a “right to work” state, meaning no Granite State worker would be forced to join a union.  New Hampshire would be the first state in a decade to become right-to-work, with Oklahoma being the last to set its workforce free in 2001.  The vast majority of right to work states are in the southern and western U.S., to which hundreds of thousands of jobs have migrated from the Northeast and Midwest in recent years.

Right to work would benefit both employers and employees in New Hampshire.  Companies wouldn’t face an automatic union shakedown  at every turn, but, at the same time, they would have to compete for the hearts and loyalties of their employees who could still choose to join a union if they believed they were not being properly compensated for their labor.

More importantly, though, it would be a boon to New Hampshire’s economy — and a challenge to its neighbors’.  It would become the only state in New England – indeed, the only state in the Northeast – to have such workplace freedom, and, coupled with its lack of a state income tax, it could set the region afire with competition.

“Passing right to work on top of not having an income tax could make us the Hong Kong of the region,” New Hampshire House Leader Bill O’Brien told The Journal.

If the measure becomes law, O’Brien very likely will be proved right, but not for long.  And that’s the best news:  If New Hampshire dramatically reduces its cost of doing business – and the cost of living for its workforce – it will have an immediate domino effect on the neighboring states of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine.  Businesses operating near the New Hampshire border or considering locating in New England will naturally be lured into the state with the best business climate– unless neighboring states ante up with reforms of their own. If Massachusetts follows suit to recruit and retain business, then won’t Connecticut have to do the same, and then, even, dare say, eventually, New York and New Jersey?

Just a few years ago things in New England were moving in the opposite direction.  Even conservative New Hampshire had become bluish.  There was not a single Republican congressman in New England, the birthplace of the Party of Lincoln, following the 2008 elections. And there seemed to be even fewer Republican ideas.

But now, the pressing issues on the horizon are custom-suited to the Republican Party – high income and property taxes; public service union over-reach; public pension debt, excessive business regulation; prohibitive business costs, and redundancies in government.  These all fall squarely into the conservative wheelhouse.

Conservative reforms already are occurring in the Midwest, because they have to.  That region’s economic decline has exceeded even the northeast’s, so states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania are doing something about it by changing union work rules and downsizing government.  They have tired of watching their jobs move south and west where taxes are lower and regulations are less onerous.  And now, in New Hampshire, with right to work, we see these basic conservative tenets spreading north and east into the heart of liberal America.

If this increasingly is the conversation in New England and the Midwest, the future for the GOP is bright.

It’s way too early to predict what will happen in the 2012 election, but it’s impossible to miss New Hampshire sounding like New Hampshire again — by necessity.  Live Free or Die, indeed.

Ouch.

My brother Gerry many years ago quipped that population control types might be systematically voiding their greatest asset: the person or persons who come up with the solution to overpopulation in the world.

A story in the current issue of the New Yorker validates his point.  Scientists are now successfully engineering in vitro meat — that is protein-rich meat genetically engineered in a petri dish for human consumption.   It is a startling development that could dramatically alter the future.  As this technology is developed and made cheaper — technology always become cheaper — it could feed the world, theoretically regardless  of the size of the population.  This could turn out to be the biggest development of our time, even bigger than the IPad.

Needless to say, we should all be pleased that the parents of these scientists copulated and stuck firm to the results.  But no one could be more pleased today than my brother. Just like those scientists, Gerry is “wicked smaht.”

And oh, when given the choice some years hence, stick with the animal crackers. Soylent Green is people! (For those of you who want a trip down memory lane.)