Is It Time To Kill The Penny?

Spot on.

EDIT: For some perspective on curbing street drug dealing by replacing currency with heavy coins, consider how much one million dollars (and a more manageable sum of ten thousand dollars) weighs in various forms:

$100 bills
$1,000,000 in $100 bills weighs roughly 22 pounds.
$10,000 in $100 bills only weighs 3.5 ounces

$20 bills
$1,000,000 in $20 bills weighs roughly 110 pounds.
$10,000 in $20 bills weighs just over a pound (17.6 ounces)

Hypothetical $20 coin weighing the same as a classic Morgan or Peace dollars (26.73g/coin)
$1,000,000 (50,000 coins) = 2,946 pounds
$10,000 (500 coins) = roughly 29 pounds

Hypothetical $5 coin weighing the same as a current CNC half dollar (11.34g/coin):
$1,000,000 (200,000 coins) = roughly 5,000 pounds
$10,000 (2,000 coins) = roughly 50 pounds

Would rather get chased down a street carrying a pound of paper or hauling at least 29 pounds of metal?

Honestly at this point I doubt that many people would even notice let alone protest the elimination of the cent. I'd even be in favor of eliminating the nickel at the same time. Keep dimes and quarters and bring back halves and dollar coins.

No nickels means inability to round to the nearest 5 cents, of course. I'd ditch dimes too and round to the nearest quarter.

True. Having no nickel makes it difficult to round to the dime with quarters. Of course, we could just ditch the quarter and bring back the doubledime.

Yep you buy 1 the state loses 2.5 cents. You buy two of them it breaks even. You buy three it comes to $3.975 cent which rounds up to $4 and the state gets and extra 2.5 cents.

The argument that merchants will round up or that the state will collect extra sales tax only works if no ever buys more than one item at a time. When buying multiple items since the rounding is applied after the purchases are totaled and the tax applied roughly 50% of the time it will round up, and 50% of the time it will round down with the net change in the amount of tax being collected is zero. And since the rounding is applied after the tax is applied there is no need to round prices up or down and can be left at odd amounts if you choose. The only excuse to round the prices up is to pad your own pocket. And as mentioned due to competition, if someone does he runs the risk of his competitors keeping their the same or rounding down and eating into their customer base. It will soon be known that prices at merchant B (keeps the same or rounds down) are cheaper than at Merchant A (rounds up to pad his pockets) and customers start going to merchant B.

No. We must have something for when we buy something for 2 Cents and use a Nickel.

There is no sound reason to keep making cents, but there are two good reasons to get rid of it. There is nothing worth having that a penny would buy today and each one costs more to mint than its face value. For those folks unwilling to part with Abe we could simply get rid of FDR and put him on the dime instead. I guess it doesn't matter what we think anyway because DC is going to keep making the coins anyway.