One night this weekend I had what had to be the best cigar I’ve ever smoked. It was the God of Fire by Don Carlos. It’s a robusto cigar that packs a lot of flavor and smokes wonderfully. My pallet is not refined enough to tell you there was a hint of nutmeg with a dash of pepper in the cigar but I can tell you it was smooth and spicy. Plus it had a pretty band and you know how I’m a sucker for a lady in a nice dress.
See, isn’t she beautiful?
And last night I had a Maxx cigar that is named The Ego. “Why is it named that?” you ask. It’s nine inches long with a fifty ring gauge.
Quite frankly, I don’t think I’m going to get one that long again. It wasn’t overpowering or anything like that (I do smoke Fuente Churchills and they’re suppose to be medium to full-bodied). It was just too damned long. It took me about two hours to smoke that thing. I didn’t have to relight it (when one side is burning quicker then the other side I do put the flame to the lagging side but that really isn’t relighting. And I only had to do that a couple of times, which, I think, is good considering how long it was).
Seeing as it did take me two hours to finish up that cigar I’m glad I poured myself a generous helping of Wild Turkey. Wild Turkey may not be the smoothest drink out there (Hell, no one else I know will drink it) but it does have a lot of flavor to it. I’ve heard that bourbon goes well with cigars (as well as rum with cigars) and that is definitely true with Wild Turkey. I think that’s especially true with cigars that have a more complex flavor, which both of these cigars have.
If you don’t smoke cigars you probably think that I’m insane when I say that there’s nothing better then a cigar and some bourbon. There just isn’t anything better. It allows you the opportunity to relax and enjoy the moment after a day or, in my case, a week of hassle. This is important to me because I enjoy it so much. BigT
David Savona at Cigar Aficionado gives an update to the ridiculous rise in cigar and cigarette taxes thanks to SCHIP. Maybe thanks to the rise in the taxes kids will stop smoking and turn to dipping. Crossing my fingers!
Higher Cigar Tax Passes in House
Posted: Wednesday, September 26, 2007
By David Savona
The U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to approve an additional $35 billion in funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The funding would come from higher taxes on cigarettes and cigars.
The legislation has been vigorously fought by members of the cigar industry, including cigarmakers such as Rocky Patel and Christian Eiroa and prominent retailers such as Jeff Borysiewicz of Corona Cigar Co., as well as the Cigar Association of America and the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association.
The original measure called for a substantial increase in the cigar tax, from 20.7 percent of the manufacturer’s selling price with a five-cent cap to 53.3 percent with a $10 cap, and also called for a floor tax to be levied on companies with inventories of cigars and tobacco. A compromise was worked out earlier this week eliminating the floor tax from the legislation, but the proposed increase in the federal excise tax was kept largely intact, to 52.988 percent of the manufacturer’s selling price, with a cap of $3.
The increase is considerable. A perusal of the 12 corona gordas rated in the June 2007 issue of Cigar Aficionado shows that each now carries a federal excise tax of five cents. Under the bill passed by the House, three of the cigars would fall under the $3 maximum tax, and the least expensive would have a federal excise tax of $1.19.
The Senate is expected to vote on SCHIP later this week.
President Bush has said he would veto the legislation. The House vote was 265 to 159, not large enough to overturn a presidential veto.
“But I don’t smoke and smoking is bad and smokers put a strain on the health care system and, and, it’s just dirty, no one should do it.” Well, that’s what some people are thinking and saying anyways. Let’s take that visceral reaction apart bit by bit.
First, smoking is not “bad.” Yeah, it statistically shortens people’s lives. But what about carbon dioxide emissions from cars? What about a multitude of other activities most of us participate in, like drinking (occassionally heavy drinking), that shortens our lives? Smoking brings joy to countless individual’s lives becuase it allows them to relax and enjoy themselves.
The health care system will be even more strained when everyone is guaranteed health care regardless of how they live their lives. Unless, as is doubtless the aim of Hillary Clinton and other proponents of universal health care coverage, they build into the system rules and regulations about how you have to live your life if you want to receive any treatment. Smokers don’t have to be such a strain as long as they are charged more due to their personal choices or refused service until they meet the insurer’s requirements.
And don’t fool yourself, the most important part about this fight against discriminating against people who partake in a legal activity is that you’re next. Before the government has bled smokers dry they will turn their sites on another form of revenue because the dirty little secret is that taxes excised from smokers offer a lot of funding.
Who will they target next? People who eat the wrong things? Drive the wrong cars? Buy the wrong clothes? Have pets? The answer is that they will become more brazen in their lust for the power that extra money from the people they govern provides and will try to raise taxes on everything they can get away with.
They will tax everything they can think of in the name of “helping the children.” BigT
I reported yesterday in my evening Roundup that Virginia was getting a new immigration board member who believes that everyone should live under Sharia and that anyone converting out of Islam (apostasy) should be put to death. Well, no longer. He’s going to resign his post. Just thought you would want to know if someone who agreed with Osama was no longer going to be in charge of making immigration decisions. Good work from the guys at Little Green Footballs for breaking this story.
After last night’s announcement by the top three democrat presidential contenders that we won’t be getting out of Iraq by 2013 I didn’t think Hillary would go any further to the right. I was wrong. She voted for a Kyl-Lieberman bill that would allow the United States military to attack Iran in Iraq and it also labeled the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (Iran’s army) as a terrorist organization. Senator Clinton must think that she has the far-left in the bag because this is not being well received by her money supply in the left-wing blogosphere.
“What we think we know is that with North Korean help, both financial and technical and material, the Syrians apparently were putting together, and perhaps over some period of years, a nuclear facility, and the Israelis took it out. I strongly support that… there was evidence of a North Korea freighter coming in with supplies. There was intelligence and other kinds of verification.”
This sounds an awful lot like what she was saying about Saddam before the war in Iraq started. Maybe she is positioning herself to use Bush as the fall guy again: “He lied to me.” Maybe she really does see a threat emanating from the Middle East. It’s probably the former; whatever power needs power gets.
In The University Madhouse, a column by classicists Victor Davis Hanson, ticks off all the instances recently when colleges have or tried to prevent people from speaking or working at a university. For example, UC Davis rescinded an invitation for Larry Summers, ex-Dean of Harvard, to speak at its campus. Nary a peep about this instance of the destruction of free speech at the academy. But when a homicidal dictator wants to propagandize, come on in brother!
Here’s a story from the Washington Post via Jihad Watch that tells us who supported the terrorists in their failed plot in Germany. It seems that they got the detonators from Syria and their order from somewhere in Palestine. What did Germany ever do to either of these countries? I’m sure if you look hard enough you will find something but the lesson that we need to learn from this incident is that Jihadis don’t need a real grievance to attack us all they need is the knowledge that we are the hated infidels.
Maybe we could rely on a friend in the Middle East to help us bring these terrorists to justice. Maybe we should ask Saudi Arabia to lend us a hand. Ha! Bad idea my friends. They have not given us one ounce of justice since 9-11. Maybe they’re helping us on the intelligence side of the war but they aren’t doing anything else according to this editorial by Investor’s Business Daily:
According to the Treasury Department’s top anti-terror official, the kingdom has not prosecuted a single person named by the U.S. or the United Nations as a terror financier. Asked by ABC News how many Saudis have been charged with funding terror since 9/11, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey said, “There have not been any.” Not one? “No,” he asserted.
In a rare public rebuke of our alleged war ally, Levey pointed out that the Saudi government has failed to go after even men like Yasin al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom both the U.S. and U.N. blacklisted as an al-Qaida financier one month after the 9/11 attacks.
Al-Qadi remains free, still a prominent figure in the kingdom. “And he remains designated to the United Nations for his material support to al-Qaida,” Levey fumed. “When the evidence is clear that these individuals have funded terrorist organizations and knowingly done so, then that should be prosecuted and treated as real terrorism.”
We don’t need to bring our army into all of these countries but we need to put as much pressure against them as possible. Using resources in media, in the business world, in government, and any other channel we can think of we should be attacking these countries using are vast reservoir of soft power. I thought that this was one of the job descriptions of the CIA; oh, wait, they can’t find their way to work most of the time, what was I thinking?
One of the reasons that American black victimhood chafes me so much is that their lives are better than most other’s in the world. Could they be better, sure, everyone’s can. Do they have to endure discrimination, sure, but lots of people do. But the true underpinning of my chafing, it so hurts sometimes, is that it is largely predicated on historical slavery while there are still many n slavery.
Over 800,000 people are trafficked across borders every year. Half are minors and 80 percent female. Millions more are victims of labor and sexual slavery within national borders. Over 12 million people worldwide are caught in forced labor.
In some parts of the world, parents sell their children into servitude for a few dollars. In Africa boys work in fisheries, quarries, cocoa and rice plantations and markets. Girls work as domestic servants, bakers, in factories and as prostitutes.
Mark Kwadwo is 6 years old and weighs about 30 pounds. He is awoken from his damp dirt floor hut at 5:00 a.m. to help paddle a canoe out into Lake Volta. For hours, as others pull in the fishing net, Mark bails water.
Deprived of schooling and basic necessities, young Mark has been sold into indentured servitude to Kwadwo Takyi for $20 a year. Takyi frequently beats Mark and the other conscripts in his labor camp.
I believe that focusing on historical slavery and perpetuating black victimhood because of this historical blight on history is at least partially responsible for the poor state of the black culture. Additionally, focusing on historical wrongs that have largely been righted obscures the enduring institution of slavery all over the world. Everyone should be focused on ending this evil.
Saddam won’t change and will keep playing games. The moment of getting rid of him has arrived. That’s it. As for me, from now on I’ll try to use the softest rhetoric I can, while we look for the resolution to be approved. If some country vetoes [the resolution] we’ll go in. Saddam is not disarming. We must catch him right now. We have shown an incredible amount of patience until now. We have two weeks. In two weeks our military will be ready. I think we’ll achieve a second resolution. In the Security Council we have three African countries [Cameroon, Angola, Guinea], the Chileans, the Mexicans. I’ll talk with all of them, also with Putin, naturally. We’ll be in Baghdad at the end of March. There’s a 15% chance that by then Saddam is dead or has flown. But these possibilities won’t exist until we have shown our resolution. The Egyptians are talking with Saddam Hussein. It seems he has hinted he’d be willing to leave if he’s allowed to take 1 billion dollars and all the information on WMDs. Ghadaffi told Berlusconi that Saddam wants to leave. Mubarak tells us that in these circumstances there are big chances that he’ll get killed.
We would like to act with the mandate of the UN. If we act militarily, we’ll do with great precision and focalizing our targets to the biggest degree possible. We’ll decimate the loyal troops and the regular army will quickly know what it’s all about. … We are developing a very strong aid package. We can win without destruction. We are working already in the post-Saddam Iraq, and I think there’s a basis for a better future. Iraq has a good bureaucracy and a relatively strong civil society. It could be organized as a federation. Meanwhile we’re doing all we can to fulfill the political needs of our friends and allies.
Yet if the dominant narrative is correct–that Iraq posed no WMD threat–then why did Saddam stake his life on concealing information about the program? After all, he had to think that if he did not leave Iraq, there was every chance that he would be killed during or after the invasion. Why would it have been so important to hide evidence that merely confirmed the lack of any threat?
The only logical reason for making this a condition of his agreement to exile was that he believed the program was more advanced than it really was, or that he intended to augment it. In either case, it further bolsters the case that Saddam remained a threat to the region (at least), and that it was wise to depose him.
Saddam’s behavior before the invasion was what one should expect out of a tyrant who has always gotten his way. He had used WMDs before, had some when we invaded Iraq, and was on the path to more. Hussein just didn’t think we would actually go through with deposing his regime.
The problem with SCHIP is that it is attempting, by providing government health care to kids who are not poor, to promote the socialist philosophy that everything should be provided by the government. Liberals don’t really care about kids they just want to instill a sense of dependency in these kids and their parents. There is no reason why children who do not belong to poor families should get health care. And if you feel so strongly about helping provide for every child’s health care bills I think you should do the right thing and start up a private fund to pay for their health care bills. The government acts unconstitutionally when it acts as a charity.
But while the world may be watching, I doubt most Burmese are. The country’s communications infrastructure is incredibly limited. Seven people out of 1,000 own televisions, and they’re not getting BBC. They’re watching MRTV-3: all government propaganda, all the time. It’s difficult to get a license for a satellite or an internet connection. Cell phones cost thousands of dollars; even most expats don’t carry them.
In yet another reason why the feckless UN should be disbanded Russia and China have signaled they will strike down any UN Resolution against the ruling junta in Burma. It’s a tragedy that good men and women have to die there but it is a sin that some countries won’t even acknowledge their sacrifice.
