In Chicago, the city council has banned restaurants from selling foie gras. Some of the animal nuts in Milwaukee may try to do the same thing here. It’s the natural follow-up to banning smoking in public places. Ban this. Ban that. Indeed, in Chicago now that foie gras has been banned, some aldermen want to make it illegal to prepare food in restaurants with trans fat.

Foie gras is an expensive delicacy obtained from duck and goose liver. Critics say baby geese and ducks are overfed while boxed up in crates so that their livers become bloated, fatty and tasty. They find this cruel. Well, maybe it is. But Israeli children are being killed by Palestinian and Hezbollah terrorists, women all over America are killing their own babies and millions of creeps are prowling the Internet to try to seduce teenage girls. The crowd that wants to ban foie gras seems unbothered.

Likewise, the smoke banners have invented the secondhand smoke threat to rationalize their desire to not have to be around smokers. Whether secondhand smoke increases health risks a little bit or not, it hardly poses the same threat to civilization that we are facing from an Islamist movement bent on a jihad. Given the choice between having a cocktail next to a smoker or being incinerated by a dirty bomb, I’ll take the secondhand smoke.

The Islamist movement is huge. Estimates are that as many as 15 percent of world Muslims support a holy war to kill all "infidels." Even if we defeat al-Qaida in Iraq and Israel finally disarms Hezbollah, there are millions of others to take their places. They want to kill us. They’ll start with the Jews and move on to the European and American Christians. Any nonMuslim is a target. It is the greatest threat to survival the world has ever faced.

To, in the face of this, wring one’s hands over foie gras on a menu or smoke in a bar is to miss the entire point of life.

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While smoke-banners have prevailed in a number of American cities including some here in Wisconsin, there are signs of a pendulum shift. A proposal to ban smoking in Milwaukee died quickly and a Waukesha alderman abandoned his anti-smoking proposal because no other council member supported it. It’s a start.

Smokers don’t have rights but private business owners ought to have them. If somebody wants to let a patron smoke in a tavern, it ought to be the owner’s right. If somebody else doesn’t want to inhale the evil secondhand smoke, he can go to a place that bans smoking. It shouldn’t be the role of government to appease a punch of petty hand-wringers.

Saving the planet from destruction and confronting global terrorism? That’s why we have government and that’s something to be truly concerned about. The anti-foie gras/trans fat/secondhand smoke crowd needs to get some lives.

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It’s been a week and a half since Milwaukee County state Senate candidate Donovan Riley was exposed for voting twice in the 2000 presidential election and since then a grand total of one of his fellow Democrats has criticized him. Only West Allis Assemblyman Tony Staskunas has called on Riley to pull out of the race. The rest of the party, from Governor Doyle to Party Chairman Joe Wineke to every other Democrat has been silent.

Riley hasn’t denied double voting and offers the lame defense that he might have made a "mistake." I’ve argued for years that Democrats aren’t bothered by vote fraud because they are the beneficiaries of it. The lack of condemnation of Riley proves my point. They don’t think what he did is all that bad (and probably admire him for doing it).

Riley voted in both Oconomowoc and Chicago in the 2000 Bush-Gore election. He registered using his ex-wife’s Oconomowoc address the day before the election and, according to records from both cities, voted in both Oconomowoc and Chicago the following day. Both Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office in Chicago are conducting criminal investigations. Riley may well face felony charges in both states. What he won’t face is any disapproval from his fellow Democrats. In the meantime, liberals from Milwaukee’s east side all the way down to Oak Creek continue to proudly display Riley signs in their front yards.

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On the other hand, if some Republican was caught voting twice ...