Chippers Beware!!

GA of VA passes partial smoking ban. A lot less effective than it might have been but considering the where and when of this particular chunk of legislation, pretty impressive. Still, I really love the last line of this AP story...so true.

"I think it will be signed quite promptly, in the quickest-drying ink I can find," said Kaine, the Democratic National Committee chairman, who privately negotiated the bill with Republican House Speaker William J. Howell. Republicans had tried to dilute it but were unsuccessful.

The measure passed the House and Senate without debate in a state where tobacco is so revered that frescoes of the golden leaf are painted on the ceilings of the Capitol rotunda. The crop was a mainstay of the earliest Virginia settlements, dating to Jamestown in 1607. A few miles south of the Capitol, Philip Morris churns out Marlboros and Virginia Slims at the world's largest cigarette factory.

A coalition of restaurant and tobacco industry lobbyists argued the bill went too far and would hurt business.

"Every restaurant in Virginia already had the right to ban smoking on their own, and many of them did," said Phillip Morris spokesman Bill Phelps.

The bill also got a lukewarm reception from anti-smoking groups who felt it didn't go far enough.

Hilton Oliver, executive director of the Virginia Group to Alleviate Smoking in Public, or Virginia GASP, called it "a pretty good bill under the circumstances."

"It's not as good a bill as it could have been, but in this state with this legislature, nothing ever is," Oliver said.