The Third Street Promenade is a three-block long outdoor pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown Santa Monica, California. It features upscale shops, upscale restaurants, an AMC and other movie theaters, topiary sculpture of exotic animals, street musicians, craftspeople vending their products from carts, and a mix of tourists and locals in various states of cavort.

It also contains people smoking cigarettes, poisoning themselves and everyone in their vicinity. This is something that they are allowed to do, under existing law.

Marc Strassman, former schoolmate of both President George W. Bush and his Democratic Party challenger, Massachusetts Senator John Forbes Kerry (but not himself, as they both are, a member of Skull and Bones), and now the publisher of the Etopia Media News Networks web sites, as well as a reporter for its flagship California Politics Today site, wants to change that law.

As the first step towards doing so, he addressed the Board of Directors of the Bayside Corporation, the organization that administers the Third Street Promenade in cooperation with the City of Santa Monica, near the start of their regular meeting on Thursday, September 23, 2004.

Keeping within the five-minute time limit set by the Board, he asked them to accept his proposal to ban all smoking of cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and pot anywhere within the Third Street Promenade area and to pass it on to the Santa Monica City Council with their recommendation that the Council pass an ordinance implementing this proposal.

He pointed out the benefits of such a ban for everyone who might come to the Promenade, "especially for children, and even more especially for children with asthma." He said that making the Third Street Promenade a smoke-free zone would allow it to more effectively compete with indoor malls such as the Beverly Center and the Westside Pavilion, where, as enclosed sites, smoking was already not permitted.

Mr. Strassman mentioned that, as he was speaking, the United States Government was in Federal Court prosecuting a $280 billion dollar case against the tobacco industry for lying for decades about the lethal effects of second-hand smoke, something from which his proposal was designed to protect people.

He referred to recent steps taken in other jurisdictions to limit outdoor smoking, including a ban on smoking on the beach in Newport Beach, a pending proposal in the California State Legislature to ban smoking on all the beaches in California, and a ban on smoking on the beach recently instituted in the City of Santa Monica itself.

He concluded with an appeal for Santa Monica to continue and expand its own very progressive record in looking out for the people within its boundaries by the judicious application of the law.

One member of the public responded immediately afterwards by saying he had himself been thinking of such a measure, and praised Mr. Strassman for making his proposal.

He was followed by another member of the public who said that people were already prohibited from smoking in so many places that they needed the streets of the Promenade to be a place where they could, saying that if they weren't allowed to do this, they would "vote with their feet, and stay away."

Another member of the public said that this proposal was just another example of why the City of Santa Monica was widely thought to be "the Looney Tunes™ city of the world." He asked, rhetorically, "Why not ban smoking everywhere in the City?" causing the proposer of the more-limited plan to ban outdoor smoking merely in the three blocks of the Promenade to smile approvingly.

A report on Mr. Strassman's presentation to the Bayside Corporation Board of Directors was featured on the front page of today's edition of the Santa Monica Daily Press.

The article, which ran without a byline but which sources at the Santa Monica Daily Press said was written by back-up reporter Geneva Whitmarsh, had a few errors in it.

One paragraph said that:

"This is blooming excessive," argued Santa Monica resident Karl Schober, who owns property downtown. "It's just another example of why Santa Monica is described as the pontoon town of the western world. This is what they mean. "Why the hell not make the entire town smoke-free?" he added, sarcastically."

Unless you consider the Santa Monica Pier, which juts out a few hundred feet into the Pacific Ocean, and where outdoor smoking was recently banned, except in designated areas, to be some weird type of pontoon bridge, there's really no way this can be an accurate transcription of Mr. Schober's views. In fact, as reported above, what he said was that Mr. Strassman's suggestion was the kind of thing that makes people everywhere consider Santa Monica to be the "Looney Tunes™ city of the world."

One incorrectly-reported quote from his remarks was all the speaker got, so let's correct it here. Ms. Whitmarsh writes:

"No one smokes cigarettes in the mall area, so people can breathe as freely there as they do in their own homes," he said. "I think the people on the street deserve the same privileges."

The point would have been clearer had the reporter more accurately reported that he actually said:

"No one is allowed to smoke cigarettes in a mall, so people can breathe as freely there as they do in their own homes. I think that people on the street deserve the same privilege."

Ironically, juxtaposed by chance or whimsy immediately to the left of the jump-page section of the report was an ad with a big headline "STILL SMOKING?—Life is Short—Why Make it Shorter" and the name and number of a local certified hypnotherapist.

A further irony resides in the fact that Mr. Strassman, while waiting in line three days later in front of the Laemmle Music Hall movie theater in Beverly Hills to buy tickets to see the sparklingly depressing Gloomy Sunday, needed to break social convention in order to ask a woman standing in front of him in line to put out her cigarette, so he could avoid being forced to inhale her secondhand smoke.

The very next day, in the Santa Monica Daily Press article about his presentation to the Bayside Corporation Board of Directors he read that:

"Other California cities like Davis and Berkeley have made it illegal to smoke at all public events, outdoor restaurant areas, and in lines for anything from movie tickets to ATM machines."

"If that's right," Mr. Strassman told this reporter, "I'm e-mailing them right away for copies of the ordinances that protect theatergoers in these towns from second-hand smoke. Moviegoers in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles, where movies are created, ought to have the same rights as moviegoers in university towns like Davis and Berkeley, where they are merely consumed, even if critically and with pleasure.".