Around the Web

• Pat Buchanan actually writes something worth reading (even if Stephen Moore wrote much the same column only a few weeks ago).

• An anti-tobacco activist says New York City's health czar, Dr. Thomas Frieden, manipulates the science of second-hand smoke in the tradition of the infamous Tobacco Institute.

• Robert Gates continues his audition for the next Clinton Administration.

• The Center for Consumer Freedom's Rick Berman reports: "During the same time that health officials have placed increasing emphasis on obesity rates, the incidence of eating disorders has nearly tripled."

• A Johns Hopkins professor says claims of an obesity epidemic are "wildly exaggerated" and hurt children.

• A British editorial says a proposed regulation that will "warn" parents of obese "seem to assume a level of stupidity among the general public." It also has an intriguing suggestion for remedying obesity: "eat less and exercise more."

(hat tip to my pops & the Center for Consumer Freedom)

Selective Health Paternalism

From today's Best of the Web:

The Associated Press reports, "[San Francisco] health officials took steps Thursday toward opening the nation's first legal safe-injection room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs under the supervision of nurses."

Meanwhile in Portland, Maine, the AP reports that "school officials on Thursday defended a decision to allow children as young as 11 to obtain birth-control pills at a middle-school health center."

In both San Francisco and Portland, however, smoking in bars is strictly prohibited. It's bad for your health, after all.

Meanwhile, in other health news:

-- Hillary Clinton makes fun of Americans for being fat.

-- New York City's Health Department will be visiting homes in Harlem to ensure nobody is smoking around children.

'It was time, I felt, for an Agonizing Reappraisal of the whole scene.'

My colleague Steve Couzzo took to the pages of yesterday's Sunday Post (in the brand new Post Script section) to offer the definitive account of Bloombergism -- the "independent" form of governance wholly preoccupied with busybodying even as core responsibilities (infrastructure, power, civil services) suffer -- in all its messy infamy:

The city's still in sound shape, and Bloomberg is entitled to a share of the credit. Crime is at record lows and the town is more bustling and cosmopolitan than ever.

But are we having fun yet? Not enough for the mayor, who wants us to take our medicine and be happy about it. He's left the Republicans and the Democrats behind to forge a new kind of political philosophy: Benign Billionaire Knows Best.

For him, our waistlines, our sex lives, even the behavior of our pets are fair game for improvement. Just as rezoning will produce a more sleekly contoured New York, so will tinkering with our everyday habits yield a bountiful future where no one need be fat -- or even, God forbid, stuck in traffic.

In Mayor Mike's ideal metropolis, the town would be cleansed, not only of cigarette smoke, but of a lengthy hit list of real and presumed urban evils -- among them, dogs that bark too loud and fast-food restaurants that fail to warn you of every calorie.

If you read one piece today, read this one.

Extra Credit: Anyone know where the hed for this post comes from?

Isn't This What the Soviets Did?

Nanny-state operatives make kids rat out their parents' illicit behavior.

At what point will people say enough, I wonder? Ever?

I Want To Be Anthony Bourdain

I'm not one to watch a lot of TV. The only show I'm currently watching with anything approaching regularity is Flight of the Conchords, mostly because it's the greatest new series since Married with Children.

I did, however, happen to randomly catch a show a few weeks back that seemed potentially awesome. It's called "No Reservations" and is hosted by Anthony Bourdain, a guy I've since learned wrote the book "Kitchen Confidential." Suffice it to say, it's a great show if you're comfortable nursing pangs of jealousy. Bourdain visits obscure parts of the world, eating the best/weirdest dishes his hosts have to offer, and narrates with often surprisingly intelligent social commentary. In other words, it's the ultimate way to make a living.

As a chef in New York City, Bourdain -- now a "chef-at-large" for Brasserie Les Halles -- is well-placed to provide on-the-ground coverage of the war being waged on food lovers' gastronomic liberty.

Columnist Franklin Harris explains:

For Bourdain, food is a social, even cultural experience. Snubbing the local cuisine isn’t just rude, it’s antisocial. That’s one reason Bourdain hates militant vegetarians and, as he puts it, “their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans.” If you don’t eat meat, you’re turning your back on the vast majority of the world’s cultures.

Bourdain dislikes all of the right people. His attacks on Food Network chef/talk show host Rachael Ray — he calls her a “bobblehead” — are a joy forever. He also has unloaded both barrels on actor/raw food evangelist Woody Harrelson.

But the main reason I admire Bourdain is he is a champion of freedom. He stands up to activists who want to ban foie gras, as Chicago has already done, and government busybodies who outlaw food that is commonplace in the rest of the world, like unpasteurized cheese.

Yes, my fellow Americans, unless you leave the U.S., you’ll never (legally) know what truly wonderful, stinky, delicious cheese is like. But, hey, at least you’ll still have Velveeta.

During an episode of “No Reservations” set in Paris, Bourdain observed that almost everything done in one French restaurant he visited would be illegal if done in a kitchen in New York. Yet you don’t see Parisians dropping dead of food poisoning. And they’re not as fat as we are, either.

How rotten that in order to indulge certain culinary preferences, Americans must first flee for freer locales.

Which reminds me. My dealer hasn't been returning my pages for a week now. Hope the feds didn't nab him, or that he didn't get narc'ed on by the sellouts at American Dairy.

'The Nanny-State Diaries'

Stephen Moore says liberals are the new puritans.

Don't Worry About Terrorism; Eat Vegetables

If Mayor Bloomberg ever gets serious about running for national office, particularly for the presidency, he's going to have to stop equating the War on Terrorism with his adventures in babysitting.

This Monday, following attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow, Mayor Mike said the biggest threats to New Yorkers have nothing to do with terrorism: "Don't go the beach where there's no lifeguards or to pool where there's no lifeguards. Sadly at the end of this weekend, or this week, you'll find that probably a lot more people were killed there than will be killed by terrorism."

Earlier this month, following a foiled plot to blow up New York City's own JFK Airport, incinerating thousands in the process, Bloomberg said: "There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life."

Before that, he used the occasion of Memorial Day to trumpet his congestion-pricing plan, as The New York Post then reported:

U.S. troops will be fighting in vain if New Yorkers aren't healthy enough to enjoy the freedoms they are defending, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday -- making a tenuous Memorial Day link between the war and his congestion pricing plan.

After marching in the Laurelton Memorial Day Parade, Bloomberg made a push for his plan, calling it a "win, win, win, for everybody."

"Our soldiers are fighting so that we have our freedoms. Unless you have good health, you're not going to be around to enjoy them," Bloomberg said.

"The pollution that's going into the air today is causing our kids in a lot of neighborhoods in New York City to have four times the national asthma rate."

The mayor enlisted a group of environmental activists to buttress his case and emphasized that the city's air is simply not good enough.

"It is not healthy for you; it's not healthy for our children yet to be born, or our children who are here today.

"We have to do something to reduce the pollution in the air and the only solution really is mass transit and the only place money is going to come for mass transit is from something like congestion pricing," Bloomberg said.

Adam Brodsky says without a strong stance in the terror war, Bloomberg has no real reason to run.

'Bonfires & Illuminations'

In it's annual Fourth of July tradition, The New York Sun renews its call for the repeal of New York's ban on fireworks, to which I'd add a hearty hear-hear:

The Declaration of Independence, signed 231 years ago tomorrow, shines brightly to this day as a beacon of liberty in a world still too oppressed. So why, we ask in our annual Fourth of July editorial, are New Yorkers forced to celebrate in the dark? The Founding Fathers believed that the Fourth of July should be celebrated with "bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other, from this day forward ever more." Yet at this end of the continent, we New Yorkers live in one of only five states that completely outlaw personal use of fireworks. The state has had a ban on the books in one form or another since 1965.

Although safety is often cited as a justification for such laws, personal responsibility seems to have more bearing on safety than the fireworks themselves. According to the American Pyrotechnics Association, a trade group, consumption of fireworks, measured in millions of pounds, increased 870% between 1976 and 2005. During the same period, injuries, measured in injuries per 100,000 pounds of fireworks sold, fell 90.1%, so that last year there were only 3.8 injuries reported per 100,000 pounds sold. Fireworks account for only about 0.01% of the 70 million personal injuries suffered by Americans each year. Ovens are at least four times as dangerous.

New York's ban seems even more insulting when one considers the completely unnecessary burden it puts on law enforcement. Already this year the New York Police Department has seized 29 cars carrying illegal fireworks, arrested 91 people on charges related to trafficking and possessing illegal fireworks, including six on felony charges, seized 721 cases of fireworks, and given out 61 summonses and six juvenile reports.

An NYPD spokesman, Assistant Chief Michael Collins, attributed significantly fewer arrests and seizures this year to increasing awareness of the NYPD's heightened enforcement measures. The city's enforcement efforts on fireworks read like something more worthy of a counterterrorism program. This year, the police department has worked with surrounding jurisdictions to track down traffickers and used checkpoints at the bridges and tunnels to search vehicles for fireworks as they enter the city. In addition, on Monday Police Commissioner Kelly said, "We are very openly monitoring activities in other states."

What kind of message is that sending to the youngsters of this city? George Washington would have been disgusted. We don't blame the police commissioner or the police; they don't write these laws. They are sworn to enforce them. The legislature owes them other priorities. On this Independence Day holiday, Americans are indeed in danger. But the danger comes from those terrorists who seek to destroy our liberties, not from the means ordinary New Yorkers would like to use to celebrate the country's founding, the very way for which the Founders themselves called. The signers of the Declaration of Independence took a great risk in affixing their names to that parchment. There's absolutely no reason for Albany to spoil our national holiday by preventing New Yorkers from taking their own risks to celebrate that achievement.

'The French fries look like they've been standing on a steam table for an hour'

So says William Gounaris, owner of the Queens restaurant Brooks 1890, in regards to how New York City's newly-effective ban on trans fats has affected his eatery's fries, as reported in today's Wall Street Journal:

Fried chicken doesn't get as crispy in the new oil, Mr. Gounaris complains, and the fries are pale and limp.

Patrons used to slather their baked potatoes and corn on the cob with margarine from a four-ounce tub at Dougie's Bar-B-Que & Grill in Brooklyn, one of a six-unit kosher restaurant chain in New York and New Jersey. By law, the restaurant, where huge portions are the norm, can now only provide petite, foil-wrapped portions of margarine. Customers "think we're making fun of them," says co-owner Barbara Landau, who says she's paying 20 percent more for kosher-certified, nondairy, trans-fat free oils and fats. [...]

The city's roughly 350 kosher restaurants have had a particularly hard time due to the prohibition on meat and dairy products being made or consumed together. "Margarine is a major staple in the kosher industry," says Yoel Schonfeld, a rabbinic coordinator for the Orthodox Union, a large, kosher-supervising agency based in New York.

The trans-fat ban boils down to this: fried food remains unhealthy, it now just tastes worse and costs more.

'Live Free or Die'

Lives another day. The Union Leader reports:

Concord – The mandatory seatbelt bill hit a bump in the road when the Senate Transportation and Interstate Committee voted to recommend the bill be killed.

The committee voted 3-2 on the recommendation and the full Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill May 31. ...

The bill, HB 802, passed the House last month by 13 votes. New Hampshire is the last state in the country without a mandatory seatbelt law, although restraints are required for children and teenagers. ...

[Republican Sen. Bob] Clegg said after the committee vote, "I don't think we should ever fear punishment as a reason to do anything. Government shouldn't be something everybody is afraid of. If seatbelts are a good idea, then we ought to educate people so they'll use them.

He said he does not use a seat belt when he drives his truck, and is not convinced that seatbelts provide a fail-safe remedy to highway deaths.

"My son once slid sideways on the ice and ended up with a branch through the door of his car. If he'd been wearing a seatbelt, it would've skewered him. Instead, the branch pushed him to the other side of the car," Clegg said. "So no, I choose not to buckle, and I think it's baloney that the government would tell me that I have to, or else."

UPDATE: James Taranto relays another story where wearing a seatbelt would have ended a driver's life. Is it not clear drivers ought to be able to decide for themselves whether wearing a seatbelt is in their own best interests?

UPDATE II: New Hampshire becomes the 13th state to reject Congress's Real ID program mandating updated state drivers licenses.

Our Looming Purgatory

Over the weekend I was attempting to chip away at some very stubborn paint with my new cordless Dremel rotatory tool. After sensing it was being overburdened, I did the unthinkable and actually checked the owner's manual. While there weren't any specific warnings as to what users should look out for for signs of excessive use, the manual did helpfully advise that using the power tool for dental work was not recommended. Curious, I generously opted to tackle the cavity that's been pestering Gouverneur Morris, my hamster. Results are still pending.

So whence arrives such pervasive, needless warnings? Count it up as another consequence of America's litigious society, says Wally Olson in The Times of London:

Remove Child Before Folding, which takes its title from the warning on a stroller, contains such invaluable safety tips as: do not consult a telephone directory while driving your car (#84); do not use bubble-bag packing as a flotation device (#37); do not use a curling iron while sleeping (#26); and do not eat the toner in your printer cartridge (#10). Nor, unless you are a fish, should you eat or otherwise ingest common forms of fishing tackle, whether it be a barbed three-hook lure (#30) or worms either live or plastic (#49 and 50). ...

The labels, of course, are mostly there because product makers fear lawsuits. The author of the book, Bob Dorigo Jones, heads an anti-litigiousness advocacy group in Michigan and collects these examples by way of an annual contest. Jones says he’s tracked down some of the real-life lawsuits that underlie the warnings, including ones that arose after a man unwisely used a woodworker’s drill to perform self-care dentistry on his own teeth, and after a student jiggled a Coke machine until it tipped over in hopes of getting it to dispense a free drink.

Beyond do-it-yourself dentistry, Olson describes a more fundamental problem underlying the proliferation of inane cautionary directives:

And of course there is a yet more serious side to the matter in that over-warning can have results that are perverse for the cause of safety itself. It buries the two or three meaningful and non-obvious cautions about, say, a prescription drug, among dozens of the boilerplate kind. By inuring the public to warnings, it teaches us to tune them out.

Elsewhere in the widening world of nanny-statism ...

Vermont dreams up new infringements:

Vermont lawmakers are considering a measure that would ban eating, drinking, smoking, reading, writing, personal grooming, playing an instrument, "interacting with pets or cargo," talking on a cell phone or using any other personal communication device while driving. The punishment: a fine of up to $600.

Similar bills are under consideration in Maryland and Texas, and Connecticut has passed one that generically bans any activity that could interfere with the safe operation of a motor vehicle.

Radley Balko says: "Here's a novel idea: Why not ignore what's going on inside the car, and just pull people over and fine them when they drive recklessly?

Jacob Sullum differentiates between the political paternalism practiced by Republicans and Democrats.

And Theodore Dalrymple reports on what Britain's bureaucratic bloat has wrought:

Frank Chalk’s book, It’s Your Time You’re Wasting, tells essentially the same story, this time with regard to education. It surely requires some explanation that, in a country that expends $5,200 a year for 11 years on each child’s education, a fifth of children leave school virtually unable to read or write, let alone do simple arithmetic. It takes considerable organization to achieve so little, especially when the means by which practically all children can be taught to read to a high standard are perfectly well-known. A small local educational authority in Scotland, for example, West Dumbarton, has virtually eliminated illiteracy in children, despite the fact that its population is among the poorest in Scotland, by using simple teaching methods and at an additional cost of precisely $25 per pupil.

In the looking-glass world of modern British public administration, nothing succeeds like failure, because failure provides work for yet more functionaries and confers an ever more providential role upon the government. ...

The beauty of the system is that dependence on expensive failure reaches quite low levels of the administration ... The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

At the very end of the chain of patronage in the British state is the underclass ... Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. Both Copperfield and Chalk describe with great eloquence precisely what I have seen myself in this most wretched stratum of society: large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.

That's where New York City's headed, if it's not there already.

The Cult of Competitive Moralism

My, how cultish be the politician. Since first observing last November the then-nascent trend of outlawing smoking in cars where "children" are present, the rush with which fellow legislators have fallen over themselves to follow suit has proven tremendously embarrassing -- that is, if thinking for oneself is still considered a virtue. Identical bills have since been proposed in Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Utah, Kansas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

Now comes Jonah Goldberg to join my anti-children campaign:

Democrats love The Children.

Well, I don’t.

In truth, I do love kids. But it’s the “the” in The Children that’s the problem. It transforms children into a principle for which any violation of limited government is justified.

Read the rest for the interesting back story on whence this campaign of pot-shot moralism derives.

The Dirty Jerse ...

... Sure produces some thoughtful lawmakers:

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- New Jersey may have unresolved problems with taxes, child welfare and gangs, but lawmakers are ready to crack down on one perceived danger: talking on a cell phone while riding a bike.

A legislative committee has approved a bill that would make it illegal for people to use a hand-held telephone while riding a bicycle on a public road. Hands-free devices would be allowed and lawbreakers would face fines ranging from $100 to $250.

Assemblyman Jon Bramnick, a bill sponsor, said the measure is meant to protect bicyclists and the people they may strike when riding and yakking at the same time.

"That is, in our judgment, a danger to pedestrians as well as to the bicyclists themselves, due to the fact that now they have one hand on the handlebars, they're talking to someone and they're on a public highway,'' said Bramnick, a Union County Republican.

Meanwhile ...

TRENTON, N.J. New Jersey is warning residents to limit their consumption of squirrels killed near a toxic waste dump.

Many residents of Ringwood are members of an Indian tribe who hunt and fish in the area.

A squirrel contaminated with lead was found there two months ago.

State officials sent out letters advising that adults who eat squirrels should eat no more than two a week. It should be even fewer for children and pregnant women.

These, I think, speak for themselves.

When Banning Becomes Banal

Last December, The Post compiled a list of things (some tangible, some inanimate) that a city councilmember had proposed banning during 2006:

• pit bulls
• trans-fats
• aluminum baseball bats
• the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds
• foie gras
• pedicabs in parks
• new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods)
• lobbyists from the floor of council chambers
• lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency
• vehicles in Central and Prospect parks
• cell phones in upscale restaurants
• the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute
• mail-order pharmaceutical plans
• candy-flavored cigarettes
• gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily
• Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus
• Wal-Mart

But it seems we forgot a few things. Councilmembers also recommended banning:

• the process that makes steaks pink
• subway ads poking fun at outer boroughs

This year, the City Council is off to another fantastic start. So far, Leroy Comrie (D-Jamaica) has proposed banning the "n-word" (what, and crosses and gasoline get off scot-free?). And the City Council plans to ban pedicabs with electric-assist motors!

At this rate, councilmembers will have proposed banning 34 things by the end of the year, easily topping last year's impressive 19.

'We Seem To Be Choking on Tigers, While Our Bellies Fill With Gnats'

When the walls of Western Civilization come tumbling down, who will bear responsibility for letting its foundation erode? Not the external threat of Islamic terrorism. Terrorists have no involvement in the structural health of Western society. A more likely culprit will be the well-intentioned agents of do-goodery, those mom and dad types whose every legislative turn inspires a return to child-like psychological weakness.

Jonah Goldberg writes today on the dangers lying beneath infantilizing America. Quoting a certain editorial in a certain publication, he begins:

The New York Post recently compiled a list of the things that the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — just in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans-fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart.

On Jan. 2 here in Washington, D.C., the city council’s smoking ban was extended to bars and nightclubs. Even private clubs, where members must pay through the teeth to associate voluntarily, are forbidden to allow smoking on their own property. In some states, you can’t smoke in your car if young children are present — your own children that is. In California, outdoor smoking bans are all the rage. In 2005, a Pennsylvania legislator received national attention for his effort to mandate that all dogs must wear seatbelts in cars. He got the idea from the winner of his annual “There Ought to Be a Law” contest, a busybody kid who thought it was hypocritical that canines be exempt from mandatory seat-belt laws. My daughter seems well on track to spend her entire childhood in a world where eating a peanut product would be as unthinkable as lighting up a stogie.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns: “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. ...”

“Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately,” he continued. “It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.” He goes on to note that in the “great things,” the burden of (temporarily) lost freedom must inevitably fall “upon a small number of men.” For example, in war we understand that some men (and now women) surrender the bulk of their liberties to protect the liberties of everybody else.

A reader sends Goldberg this quote from C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity," which rather perfectly describes nanny-statists:

"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons-marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."

My pops responds, noting:

Liberals are also the leading practicioners of manipulating voters by encouraging envy and coveting what rightfully has been earned by others.
Detestable people.

The cult of paternalistic politics portends dark days ahead. Goldberg concludes:

On countless fronts, the natural pastures of daily liberty have become circumscribed by dull-witted but well-meaning bureaucrats slapping down the paving stones of good intentions on the road to hell.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons. Today, that thumb has been cast down, Caesar-like, pointing in the opposite direction. We have democratized the small assaults on freedom so that everyone must endure them, while we caterwaul about the tyranny of any real inconvenience that might fall “disproportionately” on the few. We ban using trans fats for millions but flinch at the idea that some kid might have to endure the Pledge of Allegiance or a moment of silence in school if it conflicts with his conscience. Everyone must surrender his shoes, his regular-sized toothpaste and shampoo at the airport, but we man the barricades to protect a few young Muslim men from being inconvenienced for an extra five minutes at the airport.

Free speech is most restricted where it is most important — in political contests near Election Day — while it is maximized to an absurd level at the fringes of culture and decency. Banning “hate speech” from everybody’s lips is a progressive priority, but electronic eavesdropping on a few terrorists is an impermissible leap down the slippery slope to the police state.

Of course, there are legitimate objections to infringements of liberty or principle on what de Tocqueville would call the “great things.” What is so disturbing is how few legitimate objections are raised about the “little things.” And I can’t help but shake the feeling that civilizations fall apart, or get plowed under by the wheels of history, when they fail to understand these distinctions. One of my favorite sayings is that America can choke on a gnat, but it swallows tigers whole. These days, we seem to be choking on the tigers while our bellies fill with gnats.