Big Brother keeps at it !

BUCKLE UP – HERE COMES BIG BROTHER; BILL PROPOSED CIGARETTES WOULD BE PRESCRIPTION-ONLY DRUGS IN OREGON: If you’re a regular smoker, you may want to keep an eye on a new bill in the Oregon Legislature.Rep. Mitch Greenlick, from Portland, is sponsoring a bill that makes cigarettes a Schedule III controlled substance, meaning it would be illegal to possess or distribute cigarettes without a doctor’s prescription. Under the proposal, offenders would face maximum punishments of one year in prison, a $6,250 fine or both.Other drugs and substances that are considered Schedule III controlled substances are ketamine, lysergic acid and anabolic steroids. Joke of the Day: Big Government Really Works The mobile homes started arriving sometime in October, pulling into a 282-acre site at the Hope, Ark., airport, one after another, row upon row. They kept on coming, week after week and month after month, convoys of sometimes 100 at a time lugged by trucks that clogged the roads into town, queuing up on a runway and on the adjacent gumbo-like soil, side to side, front to back. They were supposed to be shelters for the thousands of victims left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, waiting here to be shipped out, reflections of the goodwill of a nation. But they never left. Instead, they kept on coming, kept on piling up, like logs at a dam. Today, 10,777 of the units sit stockpiled in Hope, $300 million in taxpayer money gridlocked in bureaucracy, 450 miles from New Orleans with no place to go. And more than five months after Katrina hit, the scene has become a symbol to locals almost on a par with the Superdome of the federal government’s ineptitude in dealing with the most serious natural disaster in recent U.S. history. Part of the problem, it turns out, is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency spent millions on mobile homes to house hurricane victims, but its own regulations say they can’t be installed in the floodplain zones where the hurricane hit.