The Year's Busiest Busybodies

Michelle Malkin has a piece up running down the year's most obnoxious power grabbers - people who think it is their business to tell us how we can live and what we can do. A couple of the most egregious:

The City of Cleveland

The green police in this Midwestern metropolis made headlines in February with an intrusive plan to roll out snooping trash cans — “smart” rubbish bins bugged with electronic identification chips and bar codes to monitor residents’ recycling habits. Violators could be fined $100. Federal stimulus money has gone to fund a similar program in Dayton, Ohio. The technology originated in Germany, was adopted by eco-authoritarians in England (where at least 500,000 trash cans now have snitch chips embedded in them), and has spread across Europe. Welcome to the age of Bin Brother.

The City of San Francisco

The board of supervisors recently took the “happy” out of McDonald’s Happy Meals by forbidding all restaurants to offer toys with children’s meals that exceed limits on calories, fat, salt, and sugar. Even the mayor of the People’s Republic of San Francisco opposes this latest food-control scheme. But the bossy City by the Bay continues to assault consumer freedom with bans on everything from plastic bags to pet sales to soda pop. This summer, Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning Coke, Pepsi, and Fanta Orange drinks from vending machines on city property. The decree dictates that “ample choices” of water, “soy milk, rice milk, and other similar dairy or non-dairy milk” must instead be offered. It’s not clear how vendors will be able to circumvent the city’s hostility toward plastic bottles. Maybe beverages will be served straight out of those noxiously trendy reusable cloth bags?

JASmius adds: Well, see, the problem with that is nobody wants soy milk or rice milk or vermin milk or vomit milk; if you go to a smorgasbord you can get milk out of a dispenser, but that's 2% or chocolate, not something that came out of a goat. Besides which, such products aren't economical to purchase (not much demand for "non-dairy dairy" products, y'see) much less distribute to restaurants and gum up soda fountains with.

You could call it the price of doing business in Frisco, I suppose, but for the elimination of all choices BUT the one Gavin The Queer Injustice Of The Piece insists all his subjects make. Nothing like a little culinary "Eff You" from the "pro-choice" party, is there?

UPDATE: Gavin The Queer Injustice Of The Piece hurrumphs, "that's Lieutenant-Governor Newsom to you peasants!" I can see it now: "Governator II: Revenge of the Girly-Men".