Persist. how long until we get these out of the hands of smokers. will they just turn to other products? we have to put alternatives in front of these people. there are drugs, cognitive therapies and vaping is a good tool for smoking cessation. not to veape continually, but t get off smoking. people like al sharpton take money from the tobacco industry. he is lobbying against this rule. and i challenge him to put all the money into education programs to get people off of these cigarettes. and this is not punitive, that this is about public health. is the infrastructure there, is the biden administration engaged on this issue? i don t know. i think that if you look at past circumstances, president biden has got his eye on a variety of issues. this will take time. i think what the president has to signal right now is that he is for this ban, it will go through, and he does not want to
Other concerns. the package that biden is asking there congress, that is also going to be a test. congress has asssupported the administration s efforts so far and will it continue to support it. it is quite a lot of money. and so this will be tested on a continuous basis. we know that putin won t stop until he stops. and we can t predict when that will happen. we have to keep supporting ukraine until such time putin reaches that decision. and now we re nine weeks in to this and what was an initial bloody invasion is a grinding long term war it could be here. and the worry is this war in ukraine spills over into other countries. you ve seen russia use energy as a tool, cutting off russian gas to poland and bulgaria. you have the concerns about the russian separatist region between ukraine and moldova.
That. so what comes next for paul whelan? that is a good question. the administration has said that they will continue to press for the release both of paul and other americans who are detained in russia, including brittney griner. the u.s. ambassador to russia john sullivan was on our air yesterday and said that he has had vow indicated for paul s release since he was detained in late 2018. on he called ro reed s release a first step in the process and he will continue to advocate for whelan s release. but it does remain the case that prisoner swaps are rare and this is how trevor reed was able to be released. the administration said that it was a difficult decision for the president to authorize the release for yaroshenko to get trevor reed home driven by a number of factors.