june 1, 2012: there is no better example of the "progressive" agenda than new york mayor bloomberg's attempt to make it illegal for restaurants to serve 16 oz. sugar-sweetened beverages. full disclosure: i have not swallowed even a teaspoon of soda or any other sugar- or artifically-sweetened beverage in years. i drink water, unsweetened ice tea, hot tea, coffee, and no more than a glass of red wine per day as recommended by my physician. i think sugar and artifically-sweetened drinks...sodas, sports drinks, artificially colored junk liquids of various names... are disgusting. why an intelligent human being would choose to drink that stuff is beyond me. nonetheless, i believe in freedom, including the individual's freedom to drink whatever junk he wants in whatever quantities he wants. as the founding fathers astutely realized, nothing poses a greater potential threat to individual freedom than government. so here is bloomberg, using the power of government to control what the citizens of and visitors to new york can imbibe. democrats do love their regulations. oh, i almost forgot - their pet regulations are all meant to simply protect us. no they're not. they're meant to create more taxpayer-funded jobs for bureaucrats, thus creating more democrat vassals and more justification for higher taxes. hannity discussed bloomberg's initiative with two guests on today's show. sure enough, the fellow who was pro the regulation said that the drinks in question are bad and people ought not to drink them...that's right, government's job is to prevent us from making bad lifestyle decisions...and then he said it was a "public health" issue. ah-ha! thus did he reveal that bloomberg is simply jumping ahead of the obamacare curve. in other words, when personal choices affect government-controlled public health appropriations, the government has a "right" to make people stop making those personal choices. bloomberg is simply playing obama's hand a tad early. this is the privilege government will assign itself if the supreme court upholds that most totalitarian legislation or they strike it down in whole or part and congress rewrites it just as onerously (but more cleverly). obamacare, in whatever final form, is going to mean the goverment will decide what we can eat. isn't that considerate of them? you like potatoe chips? better start stocking up.

my next book

i've spent most of the past two weeks at my secret underground lair in the north carolina mountains, from which i direct my cadre of parenting revolutionaries, finishing my next book: parent-babble: how the "experts" got it all wrong, and parents can set things right again. this is an expose' of the unscientific, simply wrong child-rearing advice that's come from the mental health community over the past 47 years, since psychologist haim ginott published his ground-breaking book "between parent and child." in this book, i name names...thomas gordon, dorothy briggs, and the rest of the "progressive" parenting crowd that made such a mess of things. the book is being published by andrews mcmeel, the publishing arm of universal press, in september, unless some vast left-wing parenting conspiracy manages to suppress it. in a couple of weeks, i will announce, on this site and in this blog, which i intend to use to stir things up, as usual, how to place an advance order and get the book before anyone else!