A Swedish woman has been banned from smoking in her own backyard.

A Swedish woman has been banned from smoking in her garden in a trial headed by the Environmental Court in Vaxjo.

The 49-year-old single mother from Akarp, Sweden, said she is enraged by the decision but admitted that she will obey the ruling to avoid having to pay a fine, The Local reported Thursday.

. . .The ban came after the woman?s neighbor, a lawyer with an aversion to smoke, contacted the Environmental Court over the issue after attempting to sue the woman for smoking near him.

Environmental courts, an attack on smokers, a complete disregard for private property…all this sounds a lot like the nanny vision for America.

Hat tip: Copious Dissent

Nothing gets to statists so much as freedom. People living life as they please without first getting the permission of busy-body government officials just gets their blood boiling. Filled with descriptors dripping with scorn, TIME documents how Colorado liberals struggle to deal with a growing scourge: nice homes.

As bloated homes and McMansions continue to sprout up across the country, Boulder, Colorado, may have come up with a lucrative approach to contain what detractors call the plague of Garage Mahals and Big-Hair Houses. At a July 10 meeting, where more than 70 citizens spoke, Boulder county commissioners preliminarily approved a system of development rights transfers that would extract mega-bucks from builders of mega-homes.

Not satisfied merely loading the first paragraph with childish scorn, the rest of the article is full of hysteric attempts at insulting nice houses, which comes across about as well as trying to insult someone for being too smart. The author, apparently still disheartened by the fall of the Soviet Union, then praises Boulder’s assault on freedom as an “elegant and egalitarian” solution to the problem of prosperity.

An appeals court has ruled against FCC fines for unintentional, “fleeting expletive” use during broadcasts.

Back in January of 2003, upon learning that his band had won the Golden Globe for best original song, U-2 lead singer Bono cut loose with an exuberantly enunciated expletive – a word not normally heard on broadcast television.

The singer’s outburst at the televised awards show was the starting point of a long-running battle over whether profanity should be permitted to air on broadcast stations, and if so, under what circumstances.

Four-plus years later, the issue is far from being resolved.

On Monday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York rejected by a 2-1 vote the Federal Communications Commission’s policy on how it polices indecent speech on the airwaves.

As the government ponders its legal options, the FCC is stuck, unwilling to act on an unending stream of complaints it receives from the viewing and listening public until the legal issues are resolved. In fact, the FCC hasn’t proposed a new fine for indecency since March of 2006.

Among those options: a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, an action urged by the chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the FCC.

Whether or not the decision is legally sound I can’t say, but the outcome is more in line with the principles this country was founded on. Where there is demand for profanity free television, it will be provided by the market. There’s no reason not to leave this issue to the free market, regardless of whether one wants or does not want profanity in television.

So most all of us have heard about the JetBlue bruhaha that occurred the other day where an airplane full of passengers was stranded on the runway for however long it was. Boohoo, fly with someone else and move on, right? Well, that’s not good enough for the government, they need an investigation!

At the request of the Transportation Department’s top official, the agency’s inspector general on Tuesday said he will investigate policies at JetBlue and American Airlines that led passengers to be stranded aboard planes for several hours this winter during storms.

“I have serious concerns about airlines’ contingency planning that allows passengers to sit on the tarmac for hours on end,” Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in a statement. “It is imperative that airlines do everything possible to ensure that situations like these do not occur again.”

Peters asked Calvin Scovel, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general, to examine why JetBlue passengers were stranded aboard a plane at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport during the recent Valentine’s Day storm, which caused the airline to cancel about 1,000 flights and sparked a massive corporate mea culpa campaign.

. . .Scovel said in a statement that his invesigation would provide “a thorough and objective assessment so that corrective actions can be taken by the appropriate parties to prevent such situations from happening again.”

Maybe I’m just a simple minded neandercon who hasn’t yet figured out that government is the answer to anything and everything, but I don’t see why it’s the responsibility of the federal government to waste time investigating bad business decisions. If people don’t want to be stranded for hours on end without recourse, they’ll fly with someone else who proves themselves capable of avoiding such problems. If they don’t mind, they’ll continue to fly with JetBlue. Ah, the wonders of competition.

We don’t need to spend taxpayer dollars to give JetBlue a “thorough and objective assessment” that they are perfectly capable of divining on their own when they see their next quarter earnings. Besides, if government wants to understand where the problem comes from, they should perhaps look at their own regulatory tendencies first:

Last week, the Air Transport Association, which represents most major passenger and cargo carriers, said the Federal Aviation Administration should allow delayed flights to come back to terminals so passengers can exit planes without forcing those planes to lose their place in line for takeoff.

What a novel idea.