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HOLY SMOKES: Biker John's ministry offers church, cigars and rock 'n' roll  

For those who find traditional church a little stifling, Sunday morning services at Cork's Cigar Bar at 425 Old Main St. in downtown Bradenton could be just the place to get a good shot of Christianity.

It's called the Church of the Faithful Few, and when the preaching is over, attendees can hang around and enjoy a cold one and a smoke, no questions asked.

"We do things a little different here," said Jim "Cork" Miller, co-owner of Cork's. "We're not judgmental."

Church of the Faithful Few was started by the Rev. John Rogers, the father of an acquaintance of Miller's.

Rogers got the idea for Church of the Faithful Few after a near-fatal motorcycle accident in New Hampshire. At the time, Rogers was with the International Evangelists for Heaven's Saints, a motorcycle ministry started by former Hell's Angel Charles "Barry" Mayson.

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Kate Hudson: ‘Quitting Smoking Caused Pregnancy Rumors’  

KATE Hudson says quitting smoking caused her numerous problems in the media -- because everyone thought she was pregnant!

The Bride Wars actress -- who's currently dating New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez and already has a son, Ryder, with ex-husband Chris Robinson -- says giving up the cigarettes fueled rumors she was expecting her second child.

"Quitting meant eating more," Hudson said. "Then, there were rumours in the press saying I was pregnant.

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Corrie boss defends Street smokers  

Coronation Street's head honcho has defended the soap for having characters who smoke.

Executive producer Kieran Roberts told Radio Times: "While we have a duty not to glamorise the habit, it would be realistic to see nobody smoking - but only a few regulars do."

He added that the smoking ban in 2007 means characters such as Deidre Barlow (Anne Kirkbride) tend to smoke outdoors now, for example in the back yard of the Rovers.

He went on: "Just as in real life, that makes the habit more visible, but it's not actually more prevalent."

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Why Do So Many Baseball Players Chew Tobacco? 

Have baseball players always used smokeless tobacco?

Yes. In the mid-19th century—baseball's formative years—chewing tobacco was enormously popular in the United States. Early ballplayers likely chewed tobacco for the same reasons as other American men, but they soon discovered baseball-specific benefits. It spurs saliva production and lubricates the mouth in the dusty infield environment. When fielding gloves came into vogue in the 1870s and 1880s, players moistened the leather with spit. Pitchers used the juice from a chaw to prepare the notorious spitball, which was widely permitted until 1920.

It's not surprising that chewing tobacco has become identified with baseball. Both pastimes came of age when America was

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Scruggs Prosecutor Writes Tell-All Book 

The recently retired lead prosecutor in the case against Mississippi trial lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs has written an insider’s account of the sensational judicial bribery scandal that sent the billionaire tobacco litigator, his son and several associates to prison.

Veteran former prosecutor Tom Dawson teamed up with conservative Mississippi legal blogger Alan Lange to examine the Scruggs case and the conviction of another Mississippi trial lawyer named Paul Minor.

“Kings of Tort: The True Story of Dickie Scruggs, Paul Minor and Two Decades of Political and Legal Manipulation in Mississippi” will be published in December. . . .

In the 1990s, Scruggs teamed up with Missisippi’s Democratic state Attorney General, Michael Moore, to sue major tobacco companies. One of Scrugg’s adversaries in the tobacco wars was his former fraternity brother at Ole Miss, Haley Barbour, then chairman of the Republican National Committee and an ally of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a vigorous advocate of tort reform.

Barbour was elected governor of Mississippi in 2003, a position he still holds today. The state legislature passed a Barbour-sponsored law limiting the ability to file tort claims in the state.

Scruggs reportedly earned $1 billion in fees from the tobacco litigation, and his role was memorialized in a movie, The Insider. . . .

Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oxford continue to investigate Scrugg's former associate, P.L. Blake, a Mississippi Delta farmer who reportedly was paid $50 million for helping Scruggs in the tobacco litigation in the 1990s.

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David Hockney: portrait of the old master 

Talking to Hockney, you are struck by a kind of heroic optimism in that endeavour, one that goes defiantly against the grain of his innate scepticism. As friends and interviewers over the years will attest, he can get bogged down in particular irritations – the long-standing one is the smoking ban, against which he is a stubborn and passionate objector – but even while he is in the curmudgeonly depths of these obsessions, a smile dances around his mouth and eyes. It's that, as much as anything, that always makes his career feel like the best kind of lark. . . .

That thought, of course, sets him off in one of his intermittent rants against anti-smokers, punctuated by drags on his cigarette. "The cause of death is birth, and on your way there you might want to enjoy things…"

Can he recall his first drag?

"I was probably eight or nine. But I've smoked pretty regularly for 55 years. I don't see a reason to stop now. It's all gone dull, I think, Britain. We are being taken over by medico-fascists who want us all to live in germ-free clinics…"

Some of this anger seems to have a psychological root. He was, he says, watching a documentary the other evening in which four anti-smokers "were lined up to tell us they were saving lives, and I said to my sister: 'Don't they remind you of someone?' She said: 'Kenneth' straightaway – my father."

Hockney's dad was, among other things, a great anti-smoker, though all his five children smoked like chimneys.

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An Unwanted, and Inconvenient, Car Wash  

Living in Georgia for the past 13 years, I get tired of the boasting about Southern hospitality and the inevitable comparisons to my hometown, New York, as a cold, uncaring place.

At those times, I think back to my days as an N.Y.U. scholarship student in the ’80s, perpetually broke and, at times, feeling sorry for myself.

On one such day, I was walking to class through Washington Square Park and was approached by a homeless man asking for spare change. “Sorry,” I told him. “I don’t even have enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes.”

“Aw, you want a cigarette?” he said. “I got cigarettes.” And he held out a battered pack of Pall Malls.

Ah, the kindness of strangers, New York style.

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• Five nonsmokers’ paradises: a guide for globe-trotters  

The world's biggest tobacco-consuming countries that I profiled in my last post, including Greece, Russia and Austria, are also among the top travel spots, but the opposite isn't quite the case.

Countries with the lowest reported adult smokers, as you'll notice in the list below, don't all provide dream vacations. . . .

1. Ethiopia: This very well might be the first time that this landlocked African country was listed at the top of a travel guide. Just 4.3% of Ethiopians are tobacco users. . . .

2. Ghana: Adult tobacco use in this African country is at 5.5%. . . .

3. Republic of Congo: . . .

4. Nigeria: . . .

5. Cameroon: Nigeria's neighbor to the east has a similar proportion of smokers, at 7.4%.

If you'd prefer a trip outside of Africa, the United Arab Emirates is at No. 22 and Fiji is at No. 23 on the list.. Further down the list, Ecuador is at No. 28, Egypt at No. 33 and the Dominican Republic at No. 35.

Between Egypt and Ecuador is Jamaica

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John Luik  

John Luik has challenged the validity of smokefree policies since the late 1960s and has worked as a lobbyist, consultant, analyst, and advocate of "junk" and "corrupt science" for the tobacco industry worldwide since 1987. Luik - a philosophy and international studies theorist - challenges the science of secondhand smoke and the government's role in protecting public health through the passage of smokefree laws by publicly skewing ideas of personal freedom, ethics, and liberty in the tobacco industry's favor.

In 1987, Philip Morris's law-firms - Covington and Burling, and Shook, Hardy and Bacon - created a campaign dubbed "Project Whitecoat," which sought to single out independent scientists and analysts who would "go beyond the establishment of a controversy concerning an alleged ETS health risk but to disperse the suspicion of risk." Luik was an active player in Project Whitecoat. . . .

After Luik and Gori's book attacking the U.S. EPA's report was published, tobacco holdings in the Fraser Institute increased from 1.3 percent ($31,740 to $76,180) of the institute's total annual budget from 1996 to 1998, to 5 percent ($229,300) in 1999.2

Although a self-proclaimed staunch ethics analyst, Luik has been fired from numerous universities and teaching positions for repeatedly misrepresenting his own credentials since 1977.

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John Luik - SourceWatch 

John Luik is a Canadian philosopher with a history of vocally opposing government agency efforts to warn people about the health dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke. Luik was involved in a tobacco industry-coordinated attack on United States Environmental Protection Agency’s 1992 Risk Assessment on secondhand tobacco smoke.[1]

In 1993, the Confederation of European Community Cigarette Manufacturers (CECCM) hired Luik to write a paper attacking the EPA’s influential 1992 risk assessment, The Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking - Lung Cancer and Other Disorders. [2] (CECCM is a coordinating body for European tobacco manufacturers similar to the Tobacco Institute, and like the Institute, helped European cigarette manufacturers fight public health efforts to reduce smoking. tobacco.) [3][4].

Luik gave several tobacco companies editorial capacity over the content of the paper. . . .

Luik taught philosophy at Nazarene College in Winnipeg, Canada from 1977 to 1985, after which time he was fired for misrepresenting credentials on his resume. In 1985 he was accepted at Brock University where he taught applied professional ethics. In 1990 Brock discharged Luik citing "misrepresentation of his credentials" and saying he was unable to fulfill his duties there "since he has apparently engaged in a series of misrepresentations of his professional and/or academic qualifications to three separate employers, and had done so again, on several occasions, to Brock University." Luik has worked at several conservative Canadian think tanks including the Niagara Institute and the Fraser Institute.

In 1994 Luik was invited to a meeting at Rothmans Tobacco to discuss a proposal he had submitted to serve as managing editor for the book about plain packaging for cigarettes. [14] In 1995 Luik was commissioned to produce and edit the book.

The book, entitled Plain Packaging and the Marketing of Cigarettes, was published in 1998 by Admap Publications in Oxfordshire, England. It concluded that public health assumptions about the beneficial effects of plain packaging were defective, that plain packaging would cause problems with smuggling and threaten the values of a democratic society. It wasn't until June 21, 2001 that a report emerged (in the Montreal Gazette) that Luik was paid US $155,000 to edit the book. [Montreal Gazette, June 21, 2001] The total cost of the book project to the participating tobacco companies was US $240,000.

Luik also served the industry as an associate of the tobacco industry-funded group, Associates for Research in the Science of Enjoyment (ARISE), that was publicly active between 1991 and 1999.

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Attorney O'Quinn killed in car wreck  

Prominent Houston attorney John O'Quinn was one of two men who died this morning when their speeding SUV slammed into a tree on Allen Parkway after the driver apparently lost control, police said.

"I'm stunned. The community lost one of its biggest assets," said Rick Laminack, who worked with O'Quinn from 1987 until 2006. "He was a great lawyer who shared a lot of his wealth with people who needed help."

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Profile: John O'Quinn  

This story originally ran Jan. 11, 1998

. . .

Texas' lawsuit against the major tobacco companies, in which O'Quinn is serving as lead attorney, went on hold for several months, then added another major player, South Carolina tobacco specialist Ron Motley, with whom O'Quinn would have to share the stage. . . .

The great cases and big victories will return, one expects, assuming he does not lose his license. The tobacco case reportedly is on the verge of settling, leaving the plaintiff lawyers with $1 billion or more to split up. But the weight of the accusations and the headlines they've generated has been great.

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Morning Links: Schocking video shows Balloon Boy dad pushing cigar, beer on infabt son 

Just when you thought you couldn't have a lower opinion of Balloon Boy Dad Richard Heene, a video surfaces from 10 years ago in which he puts a cigar in the mouth of his infant son, Bradford, and lets the kid mouth an open bottle of beer.

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A New Old Freebie - Matches Surge as Restaurant Giveaways  

Ms. Savitsky's experience is echoed by a number of restaurateurs across the country, who concur that matches may be experiencing a fragile renaissance as the dining world's freebie of choice and its most cost-effective and appealing advertising vehicle.

If smoking was their sole raison d'être, restaurant matches should by all rights have disappeared by now. After being overtaken by the disposable lighter, they have run into smoking bans of varying severity. (Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia now have laws prohibiting smoking in restaurants, according to the American Lung Association, and local jurisdictions impose their own smoke-free rules.)

Yet matches appear to be struggling back from the brink to reassert their pre-eminence among the rabble of coasters, business cards, cocktail napkins and swizzle sticks charged with hawking a restaurant's good name. In an era of instant information access and viral publicity, logo-bearing matches may have the edge as ambassadors that convey distinction in their very physicality.

"When a state or municipality imposes a ban, we see a hesitation in reordering and a fall-off in new business," said Mark Nackman, the owner and president of AdMatch, an importer based in New York City. "Then the volumes start to creep back up, so that within a year or so we see some resurgence in statewide sales. Matches have universal appeal, and that's the mystery -- that one little package could resonate with familiarity, maybe beauty, and a feeling of value."

Jonathan Bradley, president of Bradley Industries, a manufacturer of promotional books and boxes based in Frankfort, Ill., said: ""When matches are gone, people miss them and ask for them to be brought back. They're collectibles.

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L.A. billboard owners squash 'Land of the Lost' anti-smoking ads  

But what the New York Times' Brooks Barnes reveals online today is that L.A. billboard owners, already enormously unpopular for shamelessly installing an ever-growing assortment of hideous video billboards, refused to accept ads from the AMAA publicly calling out the studio for its on-screen promotion of smoking. The AMAA had previously announced that the studio "found to be the biggest smoking offender would be publicly shamed on nearby billboards." But when the AMAA went to buy billboard space, every local billboard vendor refused to sell.

According to the AMAA, the billboard vendors, who take in a huge amount of revenue from (surprise!) movie industry advertising, weren't going to let their favorite clients be embarrassed in such a public way from an anti-smoking organization. It's yet another black eye for L.A., which has allowed billboard pollution to run rampant without even putting up a fight.

But let me give the last word to AMAA President Nancy Kyler, who says: "It's a sad day when movie studios can promote smoking to youth, but public health advocates cannot find a billboard in the whole city of Los Angeles that will run an ad to alert the public about the problem."

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