I received an email today from a newspaper editor, in response to a fake email invoice he received demanding payment for Garrison Center op-eds.
PUBLISHERS WILL NEVER, EVER, EVER BE ASKED TO PAY FOR GARRISON CENTER OP-EDS
If anyone “invoices” you for Garrison Center content, it’s a scam. All Garrison Center content is released to the public domain immediately upon publication. Anyone is free to use it in any way and for any purpose without payment of any kind.
I apologize to any editor or publisher whom these scammers, whoever they may be, have attempted to victimize.
Best regards,
Tom Knapp
Director
William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism
UPDATE: If you receive one of these invoices, do NOT call the phone numbers on it. They appear to be foreign “premium” numbers, sort of like US 900 numbers. The whole point of the scam is to get you to call those numbers … and run up a hefty charge on your phone bill that goes to the numbers’ owners.
On November 15, US Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced new measures regulating the sale of products that seem to reduce the negative health impacts of nicotine addiction — in the name of protecting children from those health impacts. Oddly, Gottlieb also announced a plan to dramatically increase the availability and variety of flavored cigarettes — in the name of banning them.
First, let’s talk about “vaping.” The jury is still out on long-term health effects of “e-cigarettes” — electronic devices that deliver a hit of nicotine in water vapor, without all the carcinogens found in burning tobacco — but pretty much everyone seems to agree that e-cigarettes are less unhealthy than tobacco cigarettes.
The FDA is demanding that these devices and the “juice” for them be sold only in age-restricted stores where kids aren’t allowed, rather than in convenience stores where getting them is more, um, convenient. Why? Because apparently millions of minors acquire and use them, even though current law already forbids them to do so.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Gottlieb that those same millions of kids will find various ways to get into those stores, or hector adults to make their purchases for them, just like they’ve always done to get tobacco and alcohol.
But assume for a moment that his plan does make it harder for kids to get “Juul” devices and so forth. What are they going to do? They’re going to settle for the stuff that’s still easily available at those convenience stores: Tobacco. As a practical matter, Gottlieb is pushing for American kids to smoke tobacco cigarettes instead of “vaping” something safer.
The other part of Gottlieb’s plan is to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. Again, his excuse is that kids like flavored tobacco more than the plain stuff. Maybe he has a point.
The problem with this part of his scheme is that markets work and entrepreneurs seize opportunities.
If the FDA bans menthol cigarettes, every convenience store in the country will quickly sport attractive displays of little plastic capsules, right next to the newly de-flavored cigarettes, and in packs of 20 just like those cigarettes.
Shove a capsule in the cigarette’s filter, squeeze the filter, voila — menthol cigarette! This isn’t new technology. At least one major brand already packs those little capsules inside its cigarettes right at the factory.
And if a company is going to manufacture menthol capsules for that purpose, why not manufacture vanilla, and grape, mango, and root beer too? In his passion to ban flavored tobacco, Gottlieb will just make it easier than ever to get tobacco in a larger variety of flavors.
Of course, the Food and Drug Administration might decide to regulate those capsules as food or drugs. In which case they’ll just be sold as air fresheners instead. Wink. Nudge.
Does tobacco kill people? Yes, it does. The more relevant question at the moment is why Scott Gottlieb is working overtime to guarantee that it kills more people at younger ages.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
On the evening of November 7, administration officials suspended CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s “hard pass.” A hard pass allows its holder “access to areas designated for journalists in the West Wing, on Air Force One, and in other secured areas during presidential trips, which are routinely covered by the White House press corps.”
The suspension followed a combative press conference during which US president Donald Trump repeatedly slammed reporters, referring to Acosta as “an enemy of the people,” and during which Acosta refused to hand a White House mic back to the intern who came to collect it when his haranguing — er, questioning — time ran out and either (depending on who you ask) accidentally brushed, or intentionally struck, the intern.
On November 13, CNN sued Trump and several other White House officials, accusing them of violating Acosta’s First Amendment (freedom of the press) and Fifth Amendment (due process) rights.
Insofar as the White House has specific and supposedly objective standards for granting hard passes to reporters, Acosta might indeed have a due process claim if yanking his pass didn’t conform to those standards. The First Amendment claim, on the other hand, seems pretty sketchy.
The First Amendment protects not only a free press but freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of peaceable assembly to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Does this mean that anyone who wants to report, speak, pray or just have a non-violent political get-together must be allowed to do so at the White House, on demand?
Well, maybe so. In Thomas Jefferson’s time, Americans could stroll the White House grounds at will and even visit with the president and first lady at lunchtime or after each day. Of course, things have changed since then, but I have no problem with the principle of the thing. The White House supposedly belongs to “the public.” Why shouldn’t we drop in any time we please?
That, however, is not what CNN contends. They’re not upset that you and I can’t plop ourselves down in White House press room chairs and start firing off questions at the president any time the spirit moves. Their lawsuit argues, rather, that because CNN is a popular cable channel and its White House correspondent is very special and important, Jim Acosta is entitled to a chair, a desk, and face time with Donald Trump.
I suspect a lawsuit on similar supposed First Amendment claims from, say, Caitlin Johnstone, Alex Jones, Chris Hedges, or the “White House Correspondent” of a small-town Kentucky newspaper would get laughed right out of court (and out of the “mainstream press”), even if they all agreed to hand the microphones back over when their time ran out.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
