Over the past many decades, the federal government’s own internal debate on its responsibility has changed in a subtle but very important way. Before the change, the federal government would act in the marketplace when people believed that everybody had a right to something. Now it intervenes even when it does not believe something should be guaranteed.

SFO banned electronic cigarettes earlier this month and now the city is in the first stages of banning them. The plan is to fold them into the current smoking ordinance, saying that anything that looks, feels or functions like a cigarette is a cigarette and has to be banned from public places.

Americans armed themselves to the teeth and paid through the nose to have a smoke, according to a U.S. government report released on Wednesday. The U.S. federal government collected $20.6 billion in taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms and ammunition in fiscal year 2009, up 41 percent from the previous fiscal year, according to the annual report of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. --- Remember, kids... "Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.

WASHINGTON — A US law banning the selling of so-called "light" or "mild" cigarettes took effect Tuesday, but some anti-tobacco groups say the makers are sidestepping the rules by using color-coding packaging.

The packaging says, "Your Marlboro Lights pack is changing. But your cigarette stays the same. In the future, ask for 'Marlboro in the gold pack."

Federal officials began grappling Tuesday with one of the thorniest issues surrounding the regulation of tobacco: whether to ban menthol, the most popular cigarette flavoring, which is smoked by millions of Americans every day