ANDREW CUOMO’S WAR ON TATTOOS:

Full disclosure: I’m not inked, and I have no intention of ever getting inked. But I can follow along on the tattoo artists’ arguments. Basically, in the quest to end the virulent outbreak of Hepatitis C among the population Andrew Cuomo signed a law mandating that all tattoo ink must come in prepackaged, single-use ‘ink shots.’ This stopped New York tattoo artists dead in their tracks, apparently because this is roughly equivalent to handing a professional portraitist a set of kindergarten crayons and telling him to go make a living, using only that. Not to mention the fact that there’s not actually a virulent outbreak of Hepatitis C going on right now. At least, not more of one than usual.

Two more points on this story. First off, the tattoo artists allege that state legislators neglected to talk to people actually in the industry before they passed this law (the legislators said that they did, for what it’s worth). Given that said legislators are acting genuinely surprised at the uproar that they caused, I suspect that there was, as they say, a failure to communicate.

I know tattoos are now a bipartisan phenomenon, but given the state the law was issued in and its largest city, reading Moe Lane’s post, I’m having distinct flashbacks to this Libertarian Party ad that ran during the Left’s Occupy Wall Street phase in 2012: