habit

John Kasich, who has been busy cutting social services, while increasing his governor staff salaries by a $250,000 per year, also loves using the state’s private planes:

It took Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) less than three months to use state-owned private planes more than former Gov. Ted Strickland (D) used them in 13 months, according to a new report from the Dayton Daily News. Despite unveiling a budget full of painful cuts to vital programs, including education and health care, Kasich has cost taxpayers $31,400 for 20 total trips in his first 81 days in office. In contrast, Strickland spent $31,849 in his first 13 months in office. Ohioans are spending $387.65 a day to support Kasich’s plane habit, compared to just $77.58 a day for Strickland.

But during his 2010 campaign against Strickland, Kasich, through spokesperson Rob Nichols, criticized the incumbent’s use of the plane and questioned whether funding the plane was justifiable at all:

Welcome to the double standard of John Kasich. Given his dismal approval rating, it’s really a shame that Ohio doesn’t have a recall law. We could be rid of this fraud once and for all.

A very good story out of Fort Wayne where a woman, who has smoked for 30 years, has been able to kick the habit by using an e-cigarette:

Hall smoked Winston Ultra Lights for 30 years. For a while, she tried to cut down on expenses by rolling her own, sitting down for an hour every other night and cranking out two or three packs using a little machine she bought.

Then she tried to quit, but nothing worked – not the patches, the gum or cold turkey. One day, skimming through a free magazine, she saw an ad for electronic smokes.

Hall ordered the kit and, after it arrived, laid it out on the table, looked at it nervously and smoked three regular cigarettes while she pondered whether to even try it. We were, after all, talking about some weird battery-powered doodad that comes with little vials of nicotine, a deadly poison.

But hey, she figured, I smoke cigarettes. What’s the harm in puffing on this?

Two months later, Hall is still puffing away on this gadget that imitates everything a regular cigarette does – a tube that looks just like a cigarette, a light that makes it look like a burning cigarette and a smoke-like cloud that contains nicotine.

Hall’s story is like so many other I have read about and can personally attest to. But that isn’t stopping the government from getting in on it. Here’s an article in today’s Washington Post: