Reality Beats My Paranoid Fantasies To The Punch.

Yesterday I wrote about San Francisco's new ban on tobacco sales in the city's drug stores, enacted because selling tobacco in drug stores sends the wrong message to children. Really, that's the reason. Read the story.

It's another example of the encroaching Nanny State, which is reached via the Slippery Slope, and in my comments yesterday I speculated that fast food surely would be the next target.

Would that I were not so prescient.

Yesterday, even as I was predicting it, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed a one-year ban on new fast-food restaurants in one of the city's poorest areas. The ban's stated purpose is to fight rising obesity rates, especially among children.

The mayor has to sign the bill for it to become law.

As in San Francisco, the ordinance has the peculiar feature of singling out a particular type of retail enterprise, so new McDonald's and Burger King stores will be prohibited, but there is nothing to prevent Red Robin, for example, whose featured item is a $10 hamburger, from opening all of the units it wants, simply because Burger King has counter service and Red Robin has table service.

Not to pick on Red Robin, but their web site has a slick feature that allows you to build your own burger, or other item from their menu, and see the nutritional information for your creation. A plain burger, on a bun, with lettuce and no other toppings, is 555 calories, with 25 grams of fat.

Conversely, a fast food chain like El Pollo Loco, that features low-fat flame-broiled chicken (which is great, by the way), is banned, not because its own menu is bad, but because it is classified as fast food. El Pollo Loco also provides nutritional information on its web site. A broiled chicken breast, with skin, is 224 calories, with 9 grams of fat.

The justification for the ordinance is a 2007 report which found that 30 percent of children living in the South Los Angeles, West Adams, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park areas are obese compared to about 21 percent in the rest of the city.

Beverly Hills anorexics are probably pulling down the average.

Again, if city governments can keep certain kinds of restaurants out of certain neighborhoods because they have decided the people there are too fat, what's next?

You will have to answer that question for yourself because I'm afraid to predict. I'm too good at it.

San Francisco Bans Tobacco Sales in Pharmacies.

I see slippery slopes everywhere, especially when they involve people trying to force me to do what is best for me against my better judgment. That's why I pay attention when Chicago talks about enacting a mandatory spay/neuter program, even though I don't have pets. It's also why I complain about showboating legislators who demagogue about alcohol producers marketing to children, even though I don't drink Mike's Hard Lemonade. And it's why I pay attention when San Francisco decides to ban tobacco sales in drug stores, even though I don't smoke.

Some of the San Francisco Supervisors who pushed the ban predicted it will be a "first step" toward additional bans on the sale of tobacco in the city. Not surprisingly, Marin County can't wait to follow San Francisco's lead.

The law bans the sale of all tobacco products at pharmacies, including Walgreens and Rite Aid, but not at any other kind of store, including big-box stores like Costco and supermarkets like Safeway that also have pharmacies. The pharmacies, naturally, opposed the ordinance, citing basic fairness and the fact that pharmacies also sell smoking cessation products and pharmacists can give smokers advice about how to quit.

Anyway, that's just posturing. The real issue is the whole Nanny State idea. I've accepted the idea of banning trans-fats, because there was no reason to keep using them after it was determined that they are more harmful than saturated fats, but cigarettes are not comparable and are still a legal product. The idea that a city can take it upon itself to change that fact within its borders sounds like a Commerce Clause violation to me.

The now very broad smoking bans, like the one we have in Illinois, are rationalized primarily as protecting people from second-hand smoke. This is simply intended to make cigarettes harder to buy, and the fact that the mayor's spokesman could say the following should scare everybody. "A pharmacy is a place you should go to get better, not to get cancer." The Public Health Director expanded that thought a little further. "We teach our children that supermarkets and wholesale stores are places you go to buy everything. When it comes to pharmacies, I feel that our children and our teenagers get a different message." Of course, it's always all about the children.

What the article doesn't make clear is the mechanism San Francisco will use to enforce the ban. If Walgreens were to say, "screw you, you can't tell us what we can sell," what could the city do to them? When Chicago banned the sale of foie gras (no, really, they did), it was a ticket and a fine.

If you run any kind of business, think about where this could go. Think about the slippery slope. You're going to have city governments in the towns where your stores are located reviewing your merchandise selection and telling you what you can and cannot sell, based on what message the city government thinks that product is sending to children?

Let's leave indecent literature out of the discussion for right now, because of the additional First Amendment protection. What about selling clothing that the city government considers too revealing, or just too tacky? We want the children to learn good taste too, don't we?

Since cases have found that clothing can be expression, let's leave that out too. Let's go to the obvious next step, unhealthy foods. What if a city decides to ban the sale of ice cream above a certain butterfat percentage, or requires that restaurants not sell any individual meal that contains more than 2,000 calories? Or bans the sale of soft drinks altogether.

Not possible?

Lots of things seem impossible until they happen. That's why you have to look out for the slippery slope.

Kass on Obama and Hopium.

Continuing with my promise to tell you whenever John Kass writes about Barack Obama, today's column is particularly good, by which I mean funny.

It's also, of course, in the furtherance of a basic Republican talking point, which is that Obama's appeal to "hope" is naive, which I could consider insulting and offensive, but which mostly just strikes me as lame. At least Kass manages to dress it up with some creativity and humor, and the MoveOn.org ad that he mocks gives him plenty of ammunition.

Spay/Neuter Update.

I wrote yesterday about Chicago's proposed mandatory spay/neuter ordinance. As further reading, I recommend the Chicago Tribune's editorial on the proposal, published today.

The editorial also provided some interesting facts that were not in yesterday's Tribune story.

First, about the proposed ordinance. "Owners who don't comply could be fined $100. Those who want to breed their pets could get a permit by paying $100 per year, per dog and submitting to criminal background checks."

How likely is it that Chicago animal owners will comply? "The city now requires dog owners to license their pets. It's $5 if your pet is spayed or neutered, $50 if it isn't. Maybe 1 in 10 dog owners bothers to get the license."

The editorial also points out that City Council supporters of the ordinance are primarily looking for a way to get so-called "vicious dogs" off the street, by which they primarily mean pit bulls.

Regardless of anyone's motives or intentions, the bottom line here is that laws which cannot be enforced or most likely will not be enforced are never a good idea, on this subject or any other.

Dogs, Cats, People, Celebrity and City Council.

Boy, what a day it has been, especially for creepy old white guys. Bob Novak, fresh from his hit and run, now has a brain tumor. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was indicted in a massive corruption scandal. Jerry Lewis was busted for carrying a concealed weapon (and the cops say it was not a prop gun, as Lewis's manager claimed). And Bob Barker, he of "The Price Is Right," was in Chicago, arguing for a mandatory spay/neuter ordinance.

This is like a segment on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me." Okay, panel, which story did Chuck find interesting enough to comment on further?

The answer, from the Chicago Tribune, is here.

The issue is more interesting than you might think.

The article covers it much more thoroughly than I will now, so by all means read it. The proposal supported by Barker would require all dogs and cats in the City of Chicago to be spayed or neutered before they are six months old. It is supported by PAWS Chicago and the Humane Society, but opposed by the Chicago and Illinois Veterinary Medical Associations.

This is a great example of people talking past each other because they see the issue in such completely different ways. Barker and the animal advocacy groups are all about the animals and what is best for them, whereas the vets have their own practical concerns about how such a law would be enforced and, in effect, they speak for their customers, the pet owners, not the pets.

Put that way, it sounds like Barker et al are the good guys and the vets are putting their business interests ahead of the best interest of their patients, who are the pets.

But it's not that simple. Both sides have fairly elaborate arguments, most of which sound very sensible, but there is something they're not telling you, at least they're not telling it the way I'm going to right now.

To the extent there is a pet overpopulation problem, the default solution is to kill the excess. Please understand I'm not advocating that or anything else. I'm just trying to cut through the rhetoric and state the issue simply. Killing the excess is only a bad idea for one reason, it's cruel. In every other way it is a good solution, with regard to cost and other practical matters.

Here is where the divide starts to take shape. On one side are people for whom preventing that cruelty is just about the highest value there is. Difficult and expensive to enforce? Intrusive on individual rights? Not proven effective? None of those things matter, because we're saving cat and dog lives.

On the other side are people who regard animals as property, cats and dogs just like pigs and horses. If an animal is no longer needed or wanted, killing it in a humane way is something the animal's owner should have an unfettered right to do. Ownership of abandoned animals defaults to the state, which has no reason, aside from the cruelty argument, not to kill them immediately, in the most humane and expeditious manner possible. In fact, when we were a much more agrarian society and more people depended on animals for their livelihood, often in ways that required animals to be killed, as in eaten, that's exactly what people did. If a cat who was hanging around the place had kittens and no one wanted them, they were taken down to the stream and drowned.

It was sad, it was unfortunate, but what was the alternative?

Again, I don't seem to be saying anything that makes Barker et al sound wrong, but consider this. If we have the government force us to spay and neuter our pets, because voluntary spay/neuter programs haven't solved the pet overpopulation problem, what will happen if the mandatory spay/neuter regime also fails to reduce pet overpopulation? What will they try next? You--meaning all you irresponsible pet owners--have shown you can't be trusted with a companion animal, so now we're going to have the government take your pets away from you. Pet ownership will be a privilege, not a right, and harboring an off-the-grid pet will be a worse crime than owning an unlicensed handgun.

What the vets fear, of course, is that they are next, that they will be required to spay or neuter any pet they see that is more that six months old. How can they be forced to perform a procedure over the objections of the owner? Who will pay for it? Maybe the vets will just be required to report non-compliant owners to the spay/neuter authority.

Their fear is that people will just stop using vets, which will be bad for business but also bad for a lot of pets, who will be deprived of proper medical care.

However, one might argue by analogy that human doctors are required by law to report suspected child abuse? Isn't failure to spay or neuter an animal also a form of abuse? What's the difference?

Do you regard that as a perfect analogy? Or as a perfectly abominable analogy? That, ultimately, is where this issue goes. It is about the relative value of human and non-human animal lives, and the relative value of human liberty when compared to the value of a non-human animal life.

To use an old expression that seems apropos, I don't have a dog in this fight. Because I don't have a dog or cat, I'm not affected no matter how all this turns out, which makes me a pretty neutral observer. For that same reason, I'm under no obligation to resolve the conundrum. It's people who have animal companions who have to take a stand.

Barker et al have such a visceral certainty that it probably is futile to suggest they should see a bigger picture, which is that they stand for the proposition that at least some non-human lives (cats and dogs), maybe even all non-human lives, are just as important in all respects as human lives. There are people who are willing to go that far and who are, at least in the abstract, willing to live with the consequences of that world view. If you are not willing to go that far, if you believe human life is inherently more valuable than non-human life, and you too are willing to live with the consequences of your world view, then you probably should think twice about supporting mandatory spay/neuter laws.

A Special Four Roses Single Barrel Bottling Is Coming to Binny's.

We're lucky here in Illinois, because Four Roses is presently available in only seven states and this is one of them. Sorry Iowa, Wisconsin. and the rest of you.

We're about to get even luckier.

Sources tell me that Brett Pontoni, the Specialty Spirits Buyer at Binny's, has selected three casks for a special Binny's exclusive Four Roses Single Barrel bottling.

Binny's already has many special bottlings of casks selected by Brett, of both American and Scottish whiskey. One of my favorites is his pick of an Elmer T. Lee Bourbon, from Buffalo Trace.

These "buy a barrel" deals are good for everybody. The producer/distributor sells the equivalent of a barrel of whiskey (about 20 cases), maybe more than the retailer normally would buy. The retailer gets an exclusive product and a story to tell, and the customer gets the opportunity to taste something a little bit different.

Buffalo Trace has been the leader with these programs, but Four Roses has seen a good thing and gotten in the game too. At this as with many things, Four Roses brings something unique to the party. They do what no other American distiller does, they make ten different bourbon formulas, by combining five different yeasts with two different mash bills. Their standard, yellow label expression is a mixture of all ten, but by its nature a single barrel can be just one. For the standard issue Four Roses Single Barrel, they don't want too much variation from barrel to barrel, but with a special bottling like this one for Binny's, getting a couple of different tastes is the whole idea.

I'm told they should be available in the next month or so and will be labeled Cask 1, Cask 2 and Cask 3. I'm told that Cask 3 is the "fattest."

Trust me, the crazy people I know will buy as many bottles of all three as they can afford, so don't wait too long. Three barrels, or about 60 cases, may sound like a lot but I predict that it will go fast.

Kass on Obama and Liberal Bias.

I promised to tell you whenever Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass writes about Barack Obama. This one isn't about the Chicago machine side of the story, which is where Kass is best, but a promise is a promise. It's a good read regardless.