Re: If you\'re causcasian you\'re in big trouble
The issue isn't just the immigration laws or lack there of...it's...I don't know what. A lack of common sense, ethics?As long as there are government officials like Tom Dash-hole being the self imposed tin god who overrules our constitution without any objections, then we're in for self destruction. Dash-hole is a U.S. Senator from the Dakotas...I didn't see him on the Pennsylvania electoral selection. Next, forget about stopping for a burger and fries;
A December 2001 report from former surgeon general David Satcher, a Clinton appointee. The report calls obesity "an epidemic" costing $117 billion in health-care costs and lost wages and uncritically accepts as fact the figure that obesity kills 300,000 people a year, despite an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine saying that figure is "by no means well established" and is "derived from weak or incomplete data."
To compound this, the IRS in April classified obesity as a "disease" for deduction of medical expenses.
"Basically, the state of New York or California could say, 'We've spent so many hundreds of zillions of dollars every year on heart attacks, we estimate that 38 percent of that is caused by obesity,' and then we can take 38 percent of that total cost," Banzhaf explained. "How could such a thing be possible? The best answer is by using the same strategy we used with regard to tobacco."
Right now what some call the professional health nannies are in high gear demonizing fatty and junk food the same way tobacco was demonized. Longtime self-styled consumer activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader asserted in the New York Times Magazine in June that "McDonald's double cheeseburgers [are] a weapon of mass destruction." Pop singer Moby recently said on HBO's Dennis Miller Live that "all the lawsuits" will force fast-food restaurants to become totally vegetarian in 25 years. In 1998 Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, told the Boston Herald, "There is no difference between Ronald McDonald and Joe Camel. … We need to start thinking about this in a more militant way
Just as cigarettes were subjected to "sin" taxes, Brownell has proposed massive new taxes on what he considers to be "bad" foods. The boola-boola fat-checker told U.S. News and World Report in 1998, "Hit junk-food junkies where it hurts: in their wallets" by "slapping high-fat, low-nutrition foods with a substantial government 'sin' tax."
Another group getting into the act is the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), called the "food police" by critics for its dire warnings about dishes such as fettuccine alfredo, which the group dubbed "heart attack on a plate." Margo Wootan, CSPI's director of nutrition policy, recently said on CNN's Inside Politics that "health advocates are looking at tobacco as a model." CSPI also proposes sin taxes on snack foods, soft drinks, candy and gum and a ban on advertising fast food on any TV program commonly seen by children.
Banzhaf, a professor of law at George Washington University who mounted some of the first lawsuits against tobacco companies in the 1960s and was instrumental in getting smoking banned in most public places.
