Funny, tobacco has taken the lives of countless millions and it took until today, June 22, 2009 for the government to finally say, in effect, “maybe the public should be aware of just what exactly people are killing themselves with.”

To be sure plenty of public health campaigns have come and gone. Kids and adults alike are well aware of the dangers of smoking. I am thinking of my own jr. high school science teacher Mr. Marcola, who held up a picture of an old woman, who, most agreed, looked like Freddie Kruger in drag, and told us if we lit up we would look like her, a haggard and mean insomniac undergoing some kind of gender identity crisis.

Not an effective strategy.

First of all, our parents smoked and they didn’t look that bad, and Mr. Marcola himself reeked of cigarettes and he looked ok for an old dude. Then of course there were the filmstrips of black lungs and giant hearts, but again, not applicable to the young and indestructible.

What worked for me, what made me never want to touch the stuff, was watching my own parents smoke.

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This editorial will appear in Tuesday's print edition.

Happy Days here again, no thanks to moratorium

Almost everything about the Happy Days Casino in Lakewood is new: new owner, new city business license, new state gambling license. The only significant link to the casino of the same name that went belly up in early 2008 is the building along Bridgeport Way Southwest.

As a new casino, Happy Days shouldn’t even be able to exist under Lakewood’s gambling moratorium, which aims to limit the number of casinos in the city to those that are already there. The fact that the new casino does exist shows how toothless that moratorium really is.

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This editorial will appear in Tuesday's print edition.

If a Tehran protester is shot in the street and no one uploads video of her last moments to YouTube, does her name – Neda – still become a rallying cry?

Put another way, will the Web prove the undoing of Iran’s hard-line leaders?

The answer depends in large part on whether Iran’s political uprisings ever develop into something more. Much has been made about the intersection of civil unrest and technology-enabled citizen journalism. Perhaps too much.

Twitter and its kin are the vehicle, not the genesis, of the unrest that has rocked that country since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared re-elected soon after the polls closed June 12.

The chief opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, counted among his supporters many young Iranians, who represent a potent political force. Half of Iran’s population is 26 years old or younger, and about a third of the eligible voters are under 30.

Many of them have taken to the streets in recent days to dispute the election and accuse the regime of election fraud. And they have taken their cell phones with them.

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Congress routinely writes checks for hundreds of billions of dollars, so a mere $250,000 is budget dust in the federal scheme of things.

But U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott is still getting razzed for seeking to earmark a quarter of a million dollars to fix the window sills on the Rainier Club, an exclusive enclave of Seattle’s elite.

Here’s the earmark language from the Seattle Democrat’s very long list of budget requests:

Recipient’s name and address:
The Rainier Club Foundation: Not For Profit Entity
820 Fourth Avenue
Seattle, WA. 98104

The Rainier Club window repair and limestone sill replacement; $250,000:

In 2004, The Rainier Club Historic Foundation commissioned a report to evaluate and define the infrastructure-related concerns of the Club’s 1904 building.

The engineer’s report detailed the damage to the exterior limestone window sills due to over one hundred years of exposure to water and pollution.

The report concluded that the sills require replacement to prevent water from penetrating into the fabric of the masonry. Water seepage into the wall fabric will cause deterioration of interior and exterior mortar.

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We recently published an op-ed from the Community Health Network of Washington warning that the state's strategy of cutting costs by increasing Basic Health Plan premiums could end up making the plan far more expensive for the state. The concern is that the healthy will choose to forgo coverage, thereby raising the price of insuring the pool of sicker people who stay on.

That might sound like so much scare-mongering given that most of the news coverage has focused on the average amount that monthly premiums will rise, which is just $25. Now the Washington State Budget and Policy Center is out with a more details in an attempt to underscore the real impact.

Using the pricing for a single enrollee aged 40-55, Jeff Chapman explains that premiums will double for individuals making less than $13,538. The bigger earners, those making between $20,036 and $21,660, will pay $2,408 a year, or about 11 percent of their income.

That might still be a relative bargain for someone who has a lot of health problems. But for a 40-year-old guy who is healthy and maybe visits the doc once a year, if that, the premium increases might serve as a big disincentive to staying insured. And as those folks opt out of health insurance, we all pay the price – because no matter how fit they are now, there will inevitably come a time when they need medical care.