New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently wants to turn New York City into the ultimate nanny state. He has already enacted far-reaching bans on smoking (a move I'm in favor of, as I detest smoking.) However, in regard to the next two items, I think he's going way overboard. (I'd say he's out of his freaking mind, but I always try to be polite. Don't I? ) Recently, he announced that he wants to ban the sale of soft drinks in sizes over 16 fluid oz. in venues regulated by the NYC Health Department. (Stores like 7-Eleven, who are not under DOH regulation, can still sell their "Big Gulps.") Public hearings were held last month, and despite public opposition, the motion will likely be voted in by the City Council. Now, he wants city hospitals to lock up thair supplies of baby formula, in order to encourage breast feeding. He feels that breast milk is better for the baby. Maybe if he had watched the Law & Order episode "Mother's Milk", which was rerun just before his formula announcement, he might have changed his mind, and kept his mouth shut.
Bloomberg circumvented a term limit law, voted in by NYC residents, in order to allow himself to run for a third term. He's apparently not going for a fourth, though, as potential candidates are jockeying for position. Mike, go back to your mega-billions and your broadcasting business. Please.

Agreed. The guy's a typical government fascist. He thinks it's the state's place to determine how individuals live their lives, and how businesses should cater to individual's market desires. And then he has the nerve to call his ideas "encouragement". Can you believe the cajones on this guy? "Encouragement", my dear Mike, does not involve passage of laws. Passage of laws means that your ideas will be backed by government force. Government force is not "encouragement". It's not enough that dictators like him try to control citizens' lives; No, they have to call it something else while they're at it, in true Orwellian fashion. God, I can't stand politicians like this.

I will never forget this: In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which pretty much decimated a good chunk of New York City and New Jersey, particularly Staten Island, Breezy Point and Far Rockaway (both in Queens), and the Jersey Shore (which is all but wiped out) Bloomberg insisted on going on with the New York City Marathon. He even went so far as to state (a bold-faced lie) that resources such as police, EMS, sanitation and more would not be diverted from the recovery effort for an event as vain and snobbish as the marathon. (My brother, the retired NYPD detective, stated that there was no way the marathon could be staged without diversion of resources). Bloomberg even sulked like a child sent to bed without his TV over this. He was confronted by a desparate NYC woman, who was displaced by the hurricane, and turned his back and walked away from her. In full view of TV cameras. Bloomberg proved at that moment that the residents of New York are not, and never were, his priority; the snobbish elite are. The marathon was cancelled at the last minute, a little more than 36 hours before it was scheduled to run, with public opinion increasingly against it.
WABC-TV also had the unmitigated gall to not air not one, but two practically consecutive promoes on the morning of 11/2 for their expected broadcast of the event, with actor Edward Norton gloating that he ran it, and saying it was one of the greatest events of his life. Those promoes were run during news coverage of the devastation caused by Sandy. That insensitivity only served to tick a lot of people (like me) off more.

Bloomberg has re-registered as a Democrat; speculation is that he'll run for president in 2020. If he does, I won't vote for him (even though Trump turns my stomach), because of lingering animosity over his nanny state policies, his insistence on running the 2012 New York City marathon after the devastation of Super Storm Sandy (see above), and his failed "NYC 2012" program from the mid-2000's, to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York City.