Some supporters of the bill's current language on menthol have argued that, because menthol is widely used by many smokers, the effects of banning it outright are hard to predict.
Indeed, outright panic was hard to find over the weekend, except among the minority of investors who have bought stocks with borrowed money and are facing margin calls, or demands from their brokers that they put more cash into their accounts as collateral.
And the conversations with voters that are being logged and reported on by Labour activists in those kinds of seats, are a big part of the reason why - although Ed Miliband's team won't say it publicly - that the party believes it has some reasons to be cheerful, not about winning outright, but that hard graft may well pay off.
As the reader has hopefully gathered from my column by now, once one seriously scrutinizes the underlying economics of free trade, even if one is not disabused of the policy outright it becomes hard to deny that it is a legitimately controversial issue.
Accusations of outright misogyny are harder to stand up, at least on the site itself.
I tend to think that repealing the Democratic health care bill outright will be harder than many Republicans believe, but it's still obvious that the current administration's legislative victories will be entrenched if Obama is re-elected, and seriously endangered if he is not.
"If you can't outlaw abortion outright, just make it harder and harder to get," said Chrisse France, the executive director of Preterm, a large nonprofit abortion clinic on the East Side of Cleveland that performs about 4,900 abortions a year, mainly for low-income women.
But junking universal suffrage outright would probably be hard to get away with.
But trade experts warn that political pressure favoring restrictions, if not outright protectionism, will be hard to surmount.
In the meantime, soldiers will find it hard or outright impossible to share, say, vital digital maps, let alone synch their iPods or exchange pictures with their families.
