A New York judge isn’t the only one taking aim at New York City’s ban on large, sugary drinks.
In a move to prevent such regulations from taking hold elsewhere, Mississippi legislators have passed an “anti-Bloomberg bill” that bars counties from passing and enacting laws that require calorie counts to be posted or caps the size of beverages or foods. You can read it here.
The legislation is now on Gov. Phil Bryant’s desk and NPR reports that he is expected to sign it. Mississippi, it’s worth noting here, already has the highest obesity rate in the country.
Is there any danger of Yankee Mike Bloomberg swooping down from the Big Apple to take Mississippians God-Given Right to Big Gulps away? I’ll let you go ahead and figure that one out on your own. Suffice it to say that the government of Mississippi is on the verge of solving something that was in absolutely no danger of ever becoming a problem. Although, from the sound of it, the state would save a lot of healthcare money if they took a similar position.
But this is what the GOP has reduced itself to — weird stunts of contrariness, designed to score points off the idea that liberals are always wrong about everything. In this case, it’s merely goofy and stupid. In other cases, it’s deadly — although giant silos of sugar-glop aren’t exactly the healthiest things ever.
When talk of meaningful gun regulation began after the Sandy Hook Massacre, Republicans in many states went fullblown contrarian. Liberals thought fewer guns were the answer, so they wrote bills designed to put more guns on the streets and loosen already nearly non-existent gun laws. As a result, we have school workers getting shot in firearms training classes in Texas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio sending sex offenders to “protect” schoolkids as part of an armed posse program in Arizona. Fewer guns? Ha! More guns! Everywhere! Now! Not because it’s actually a good idea, but because it’ll piss off those damned liberals. This is the sort of governance we’d expected from a five-year old who won’t share because he thinks it’s funny when his sister cries.
At bottom, the point of these laws is to score cheap political points with gullible asses who believe Sean Hannity is a towering intellect. If that means a few of those same gullible dopes get shot — or, in Mississippi’s case, develop type II diabetes — well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few chumps. Those chumps are getting exactly the government they deserve. Unfortunately, the smarter residents they’re so busy trying to troll have to live with this boneheaded crap too.
