Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the airline smoking ban already covers electronic cigarettes — which do not smoke or burn in any way.

In a world where it depends on what the meaning of is is, all the government needs to do is interpret. Regulating interstate commerce includes forcing people to buy things they don't want to buy, and smoking includes not smoking. You can make anything you want be true, if you only believe. And "you" means "the government," and "believe" means "dictate."

E-cigarettes are plastic and metal devices that heat a liquid nicotine solution in a disposable cartridge, creating vapor that the "smoker" inhales. A tiny light on the tip even glows like a real cigarette. They have prompted debate over how risky they are and whether they're even legal....

Numerous videos on YouTube show passengers using the devices on airplanes. ... [S]ome passengers have interpreted flight attendant instructions to mean that the devices were only prohibited when other electronic devices were not allowed during takeoff and landing.

It sounds like the passengers are doing a pretty good job at interpretation. It's an electronic device, not a smoking device.

Many airlines already have begun informing passengers that the devices are not allowed on flights, but [Senator Frank Lautenberg, author of the 1987 smoking ban] said there had been confusion over their use and wanted to make sure officials were solidly opposed to opening the door to e-smoking on planes. 

Opening the door? How dare a politician talk to us like that! The doors are open until they close them with laws.

"I understand from an airline's point of view the hassles it could create," [said Jason Healy, president of e-cigarette maker Blu Cigs.] "It's not the actual product, it's the disruption and explaining to everyone else that it's not smoke."

Not smoking does not become smoking because you have to keep explaining that it is not smoking. If the disruption of people thinking these things are smoking is important enough to deny the physical needs and pleasures of the individuals who use them, then summon up the political will to ban them explicitly.  And quit lying.

People need to quit smoking and quit lying. If you're trying to quit smoking, maybe it will help you to have an e-cigarette that delivers some of the satisfaction you get from smoking. There is no corresponding device to wean you off your lying. Oh, but you say you're not lying, you're interpreting. Hey, your interpreting looks more like lying that an e-cigarette looks like smoking, and I'm going to grab it right out of your mouth with my blog. How dare you disrupt me like that!

[Correction.]

"We are broke in this state. We have been broke for years. People have ignored that for years, and it's about time somebody stood up and told the truth."

Wisconsin's new GOP governor delivers the harsh news.

Gov. Scott Walker said Friday thousands of state workers would be laid off if the Legislature does not adopt his plan to repair the budget that includes cutting benefits and taking away almost all union bargaining rights from public workers.

Walker also signaled that in a larger budget plan coming later this month he would cut aid to local governments and let local officials deal with those cuts at least in part through savings on their employee costs. Walker wants the Legislature - which is controlled by his fellow Republicans - to act quickly on the plan, approving it by Feb. 25. It could move even faster than that, likely going before lawmakers next week.

The governor also said the National Guard is at the ready to take control of state prisons if correctional officers strike or take job actions. No union official has endorsed such a job action, but Walker said he was prepared for any contingency.

At the Mystery Photo Café...

... I have thoughts of my own, and maybe you do too. Maybe you know what's special about that photograph.

Hey, look, I'm the "Alumna of the Month"...

... from NYU School of Law.

Are you excited about the new Lady Gaga single or did you feel compelled to hit pause and start singing Madonna's "Express Yourself"?

You can listen to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" here. And here's Madonna over at YouTube, where there are lots of new comments about "Born This Way."

Gaga is singing about self-affirmation in this form:

Rejoice and love yourself today
'Cause baby you were Born This Way

No matter gay, straight, or bi,
Lesbian, transgendered life
I'm on the right track baby
I was born to survive

Madonna's "Express Yourself" had you expressing yourself and demanding that your man express himself:

What you need is a big strong hand
To lift you to your higher ground
Make you feel like a queen on a throne
Make him love you till you can't come down

"Don’t think the Republicans’ move to get America’s vaginas back to cherished 50s-era restrictions will end with banning abortion and restricting contraception."

"After that’s done, the next step is moving us back to the god-fearing age when women wore thick pads and belts. Proper ladies know that menstruation is god’s reminder that we’re evil, and should be dealt with in a way that maximizes discomfort and humiliation."

Amanda Marcotte attempts some broad humor. The clip is funny:

Kotex Classic - watch more funny videos

"President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt turned over all power to the military..."

"... and left the Egyptian capital for his resort home in Sharm el-Sheik, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced on state television on Friday."

The crowd shouts "Egypt is free!" and let's hope that it's so.

"But what about Beck? Are his comments about Piven fairly characterized as having crossed some line into dangerous irresponsibility?"

Asks Peter Wood in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

What Beck does on the air is certainly not scholarship. He isn’t drawing careful distinctions, seeking nuance, or searching for contextual understanding. He is, rather, engaged in polemic. This is, however, a form that requires some mastery of the facts and considerable ability to frame a persuasive argument. He or his assistants have done their research. I doubt that he has factually misrepresented Piven’s statements. He has, however, offered a strong interpretation of what those mean, and his conclusion is that she is a deep source of intellectual mischief in American life.

Those who are culturally or politically more or less on Piven’s side resent this picture of themselves, and some have responded hyperbolically....

The left explodes in anger if you suggest it is the more rageful of the two [sides]. The right tends to laugh at the idea....

Higher education has no special immunity from the angri-culture. On the contrary, it is a privileged haunt for those who delight in scorn, derision, and wrathful dislike of mainstream American culture...

To claim academic freedom as a protection of one’s own diatribes while crying “no fair” when someone aims a diatribe back at you requires a clownish degree of self-regard.

Yes, and let's also question the assumption that what goes on in academia is certainly scholarship (and not polemic). Drawing careful distinctions, seeking nuance, or searching for contextual understanding...

"Is it all one?" "It would be all one if you weren't here."

A "normal" woman — tests have verified that she's psychologically normal — submits to a scientific study of LSD, in 1956:



I'm fascinated by how completely stereotypically hippie her expression becomes and by the odd situation of talking to a scientist while having a transcendent experience.

"[A]ny male at any time will be permitted in girls’ bathrooms, showers and change rooms as long as they have an ‘innate feeling’ of being female..."

That's what opponents say about Bill C-389 would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to forbid discrimination on the basis of "gender identity" or "gender expression."

The bill probably won't pass, but here's a column favoring it. Excerpt:

Society takes for granted that there are two distinct sexes, with two corresponding ways of expressing gender identity. And we have concocted a range of stereotypes to reinforce the supposed chasms of difference between men and women, boys and girls.
Despite the fact that biologists such as Brown University professor Anne Fausto-Sterling have demonstrated that “nature” itself yields not two distinct sexes but as many as five in a small but still significant number of cases, we still think male or female is something constant and unchanging. Sex is not only something viewed as uncomplicated and self-evident, but masculinity and femininity are tied to one’s birth-assigned sex.

Transsexual and transgendered individuals expose the shortcomings of our narrow categories. Because they trouble this vision of male and female, they have been “socially erased,” to borrow a term from Concordia Professor Viviane Namaste...

As faculty members teaching in the sexual studies minor program at Carleton University, we are not surprised by the comments offered by Charles McVety, president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto in The Globe. [see blog post title, above.] Mr. McVety’s use of the language of pedophilia, and other forms of sexual predation, criminal opportunism and violence within female-specific spaces serves as a perfect example of the pathologization, criminalization and fear-mongering that continues to mark the lives of those within the trans communities.

At the Taco Café...

... come on! It'll be fun.

"What is absolutely clear is that we are witnessing history unfold. It's a moment of transformation that's taking place because the people of Egypt are calling for change."

Maybe the world doesn't actually work according to the transformative moments visualizations of President Obama.

"I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. I'll let his wife call him that instead."

Said Sarah Palin about Rick Santorum.

Mubarak refuses to validate the news reports that revealed that Mubarak was going to step down.

Ha.

I knew it. I declined to link to the reports earlier today that said he was stepping down. He will step down when he steps down and not when the news media fall over each other trying to pre-scoop the news.

CPAC. Live feed + live blog.

At WaPo.

"Halle Berry may have chosen the wrong words but she makes the right point."

"It is important to read past her ugly custody case to have a larger conversation about race (one the baby's father apparently does not want to have). Her daughter will have to choose a racial identity, the way she had to choose a racial identity. In America, that means it will probably be chosen, at least in part, by the way people react to her. In America, her skin color (black or white) will be something that people use to define her. I applaud Halle Berry's courage, if not her choice of words. When she says, 'I believe in the one drop theory,' of course, she does not mean to endorse racism. But she does have the courage to do something so few Americans can: talk about race."

Either that or she's using whatever weapons she finds at hand as she fights for what she wants in her child custody battle.