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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

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from: Timothy Noah

Mind If I Smoke?

Posted Monday, July 20, 1998, at 10:49 AM ET

Dear Marjorie,

The most important news of the morning is that I finally nailed down our summer vacation plans in Vermont. The good news is we got a cheap rate! The bad news is that our cabin is closer to (but, the reservations clerk promises me, not all that close to) the interstate. Experience tells me I should let you know this up front, and also that they've got us wait-listed for fancier accommodations should they become available. I promise you will love it.

You're right about the Washington Post piece on Republican lawmakers' use of big tobacco's corporate jets to get to campaign events: It's a very nice new wrinkle on the Washington influence-buying story. House Democrats released the study, and are glorying in the fact that most of those being jetted around were Republicans; tellingly, the study focused on the period between January and May 1997. (If the study had gone back to the years before 1995, when the House and Senate were Democratic, I suspect the results would have been much more embarrassing to the Democrats.)

The Post also has a follow-up on its big scoop from the weekend, that a federal judge had voided the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that "environmental tobacco smoke" (i.e., "passive" smoke) is a class A carcinogen. The Wall Street Journal has this story today, too. Bafflingly, the New York Times does not have it (unless I missed it). Big decisions from the federal bench are easy for newspapers to miss because they get dumped en masse on Friday; since most of them aren't newsworthy, assignment desks occasionally forget to pass the important ones along to beat reporters, who in any case may already be headed out of town for the weekend (particularly when it's summer).

The ruling on the EPA finding is important because the finding spurred lots of lawsuits and local bans about smoking in public places such as offices and restaurants. Today's stories in the Post and the Journal quote plaintiff's lawyers as saying the ruling won't affect the lawsuits and the bans, which may or may not be true. But it's a badly needed victory for the tobacco companies, whose complaints about the EPA study got little attention because the companies have zero credibility on matters of science. What today's stories don't say is that while the EPA probably extrapolated a little too freely with its data, there is growing confidence in the scientific community that "passive" smoke will soon be demonstrated (without any sleight-of-hand) to be carcinogenic. (This approach to environmental problems--regulate first, do the science later--is considered irresponsible today, but it's what gave us the ban on lead in gasoline in the 1970s; we are now much surer about its dangers than we were when the feds took action.) Incidentally, a big problem with passive-smoking data collected thus far is that much of it has been collected by the industry itself.

Another factoid missing from the coverage: Although the EPA finding was released in 1993, it was not a product of the Clinton administration; William Reilly, George Bush's EPA chief, released it on his way out the door in January 1993.

Although I majored in English at a fancy college, I must now confess that I've never read Ulysses. How embarrassing. Also, I somehow got through high school without reading Brave New World. But otherwise I applaud Random House's top-five English-language novels. Also, I was pleased that Catch-22-- a book I've read four or five times--made number seven.

Ignorantly,

Tim

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