The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Preventions and Interventions

5.16.05 @ 12:01AM

CAMPION AND THE CARDINAL
Re: The Prowler's Clerical Losers:

Your May 11 article about Cardinal McCarrick is not entirely accurate when it states he "prevented the founding" of Campion College D.C.. Campion, should plans to create it come to fruition, would be an independent, lay-run two-year Great Books institution that voluntarily subscribes to Catholic principles. You rightly say that Campion would be a feeder school for other Catholic institutions, but we believe it would also give students who plan to finish their undergraduate work at a secular college or university a strong foundation in Catholicism and Western culture. It is true that Cardinal McCarrick has publicly expressed his belief that the Washington area does not need such a college. We hope that the cardinal or one of his successors may some day come to appreciate what we hope to do. But since Campion was never intended to be an officially Catholic college, the cardinal has not nor can he "prevent" its founding and operation.
-- Robert Royal
Campion College of Washington, D.C.

Thanks, great report, I imagine a few Bishops are a little nervous too, like the new hierarchy of the USBC who recently put on a Chicago style election that would have made old Mayor Daley proud.
-- G. MacAulay

END OF TOBACCO ROAD
Re: Doug Bandow's Smokeless Kennedy-DeWine:

Native American tribes got to love it. They own the casinos and, if the anti-tobacco grunts win, the Indians will own tobacco. Maybe that's poetic justice?
-- Nelson Ward
Ribera, New Mexico

Doug Bandow writes:

"The legislation has picked up one unusual endorsement: cigarette maker Philip Morris. The company cited the benefit of having clear rules under which to operate

"Critics noted that limiting advertising would help freeze industry market shares, protecting Philip Morris from competition. That was, in fact, one of the outrageous effects of the tobacco litigation settlement: it purported to bind even new firms, solidifying the lead of existing producers. Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs figured that the Kennedy-DeWine legislation would actually improve Philip Morris's bottom line."

That's right. Jeremy Siegel's The Future for Investors, which I reviewed last week, spends a lot of chapter space analyzing the most successful U.S. stock of the last 50 years: Philip Morris/Altria, with a near 20% total annual return for that entire period.
-- Lawrence Henry

If the anti-smoking zealots put as much time and effort into fighting the war on drugs as they do on smokers, the drug czars would have been out of business years ago. It is amazing that most of these SAME folks actually support measures that decriminalize or legalize the current illegal drugs.
-- Richard Woitowitz

Mr. Bandow paints Kennedy and DeWine as the opportunistic, micromanaging, top-down, central planning, never saw a reg we didn't love swine they are.

But he misses one likely result of passage of such tripe. FDA won't need that army of agents roaming the hinterlands. Just as the Clinton gang eliminated about half the licensed gun dealers in the nation via changes in costs of licensing, many retailers will cease selling tobacco as the costs of compliance grow.

Fewer sellers, no new agents needed. The nanny state prospers, personal choice is whittled away a bit more, and the slavering old pig from MA toasts his success with his new sty mate, DeWine.

All the best,
-- L. Lane
Humble, Texas

I don't care how much someone smokes as long as they don't exhale.
-- Elaine Kyle
Cut & Shoot, Texas

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, Business, Entitlements, Social Security, Catholicism, Abortion, Books, Constitution, Law, Founding Fathers, NATO, Immigration