Ban cigarette and political ads from TV

Once upon a time there were some pretty cool cigarette ads on TV.

Are you old enough to remember when it it was better to fight than switch and the smokers had the black-eye to prove it? The beautiful White Owl girls? Ever wish to go to Marlboro Country? How about the one cigarette that "taste good like a cigarette should"?

Then one day while on the way to the gas station to buy mom a carton of Kool for less than $5.00, the ads disappeared from television.

Doctors began to notice an increase in lung cancer and that correlated with increase in smokers. So, who did the doctors blame and target? The smokers? Nope. They targeted television ads. And they put their findings in the Reader's Digest. Oh, my God, the Readers's Digest.

Yes, the Reader's Digest, a publication that had at one time more clout and readership than Perez Hilton's blog. Ten years after that story ran, all television cigarette ads disappered, people quit smoking, and lung cancer has disappeared, too.

What we learned almost 50 years ago was that if something can be determined to make us sick, we should just remove it from television. We never learned that removing anything from TV worked, though.

Actually, that line of thinking has proved to be effective in some cases. How quickly was "Frank's Place," "Lateline w/Al Franken," "The Magic Johnson Show," and other short-lived television shows removed after viewers got sick?

So, the process can work. Which leads me to ask, why don't we ban political ads from TV? They make me sick. They don't promote anything remotely healthy or beneficial. And only the dumbest of the dumb even buy what they are selling.

I'm hoping for a committee to prepare a study of the correlation between sick, angry, depressed people and those who watch political ads and those who actually vote for the liars in the ads.

Maybe they can pitch that report to the Readers's Digest blog.