And like my Illinois situation, the plaintiff's bar spent $2 million on a PAC organized in favor of the opposing candidate.

Perhaps you should investigate how the democrats planned to pay for the expanded CHIP. Just a hint, if tobacco sales plummeted, so would the revenues to pay for CHIP.

The situation prior to the ruling had two checks in place

I think there are a couple of additional checks: (1) multi-member panels. We keep focusing on the tie-breaking vote, but the litigants had to convince enough other members on the panel to get to that point; (2) appeals; I still think that if there were no law or facts supporting the result, the U.S. Supreme Court could have found some way to reverse on the merits without necessitating the creation of a federal recusal rule.

I understand the motivation behind the ruling, but this is a good example of why you don't want to legislate from the bench. The vagueness of the lines drawn is certainly one problem. Another problem is the game playing possibility that steve plunk raises in regards to poisoning the well. Combine that with bribery and you have a perfect system for thwarting justice. Any judge who won't take a bribe you just make substantial campaign contributions to. Unless they return the contributions (how likely is that?), you then can ensure your case is heard by a sympathetic judge (aka one who took a bribe) because the others must recuse themselves.

The situation prior to the ruling had two checks in place. One was the state bar ethics (or judicial ethics depending on the state) that would have looked at the individual case to see if there was undue influence. Second, and more powerfully, imagine running against this judge. You point out the campaign contribution made, the ruling and then you say that justice would not be for sale if you were the judge. The voters then get to decide.

The implication from this ruling to me is that whichever candidate won, the judge should not hear any tort cases as both judges received substantial contributions from the tort business. I think that's an astounding result, essentially targeted at the very idea of political appointment of judges.

But, naturally, if the Food and Drug Administration is signing off on the packing and allowing the product to be sold for public ingestion, it must be safe, right? I mean, the FDA isn’t in the business of allowing unsafe products to be sold, right?

If I recall correctly, James, you tend to be in favor of some sort of decriminalization and regulation of currently illicit drugs. Which organization would you suggest regulate them?

And if your preferred candidate loses, you can challenge the winning justice as biased against you and try to get them removed from any case to which you are a party.

I don't follow this statement at all. Justices are biased simply because they aren't your favorite?

I think there's a massive leap-of-faith in this argument, and to be honest I'm not even sure if I've identified it yet. One would presumably have to show that a given justice is biased against you for some given reason. Is the reason for his/her bias due to the fact that you gave money to one of his/her opponents? That's a big, big stretch to me.

I'm convinced that to many of the politicians who voted on the plan, this is a feature and not a bug. Just wait - in a few years we'll be hearing them get all outraged over this and trumping it up as a reason why the FDA should get harsher and move Tobacco to a higher schedule drug and take it out of the moronic public's hands.

This whole legislation has me feeling rather weird. On the one hand, I've always thought that alcohol and tobacco falling outside of FDA jurisdiction was rather idiotic. They're drugs as much as any other. On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to the marijuana legalization movement and I think we're wasting money controlling some of these things as tightly as we try to.

Ah well, our drug policy is already crazy. What's another notch of craziness among friends?

FWIW, I think the more interesting imlications are for things that have been on the market for so long that we accept their hidden risk.

Speaking of smoke, do you think smoked meats have lower cancer risk than boiled?

http://www.personalmd.com/news/a1999032206.shtml