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In New York City, the answer was to ban transfats. In Los Angeles, it is to ban fast food restaurants from poor neighborhoods. L.A. City Council member Jan Perry (guess which party?) wants to ban new fast food restaurants from South Central Los Angeles. She notes that the city health department has found that 29 percent of South-Central children are obese vs. 23 percent in L.A. County. From that statistic alone, she concludes that fast food is to blame.

"Some people will say, 'Well, people just don't have to eat it,'" she told the Washington Post. "But the fact of the matter is, what if you have no other choices?"

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, executive director of Community Coalition, based in South-Central, said, "You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it's virtually impossible."

But, um, McDonald's serves salads. In fact, the AP photo that accompanied the Post story on Perry's crusade featured a South Central McDonald's. The largest single object in the photo was not the golden arches, but the sign advertising McDonald's "new fruit & walnut salad."

The Post story mentioned Taco Bell, Quiznos and KFC as some of the fast food restaurants supposedly offering South Central residents "no other choices," in Perry's words. But Taco Bell's "Fresco" menu offers nine items with fewer than 9 grams of fat, including a salad with 8 grams of fat and only 350 calories. Quiznos offers eight subs, four sandwiches, three salads and four meals with 500 or fewer calories. KFC offers six different salads.

Evidently Marqueece Harris-Dawson doesn't frequent any of the fast food restaurants she hopes her city council will shut down.

Obviously, it's not the fast food restaurants that are making South Central kids fat. All of those restaurants offer low-calorie options. The residents of South Central just aren't choosing them.

But, again, confronting the real problem -- the eating and exercise habits of local residents -- is not nearly as easy as blaming the corporations, which is what Democrats do best. And again, confronting the real problem would undermine the argument South Central politicians have used for years -- that their ills are caused by outside forces.

IT WOULD BE GREAT to see Democrats do things like acknowledge facts, learn economics, and tell voters to take responsibility for their own actions. But then, if they did that, they wouldn't get to tilt at windmills. The party has become a sort of bad parody of Don Quixote. Every fear is met with a charge at the nearest convenient target, even if everyone within earshot is shouting that it's just a windmill. But the party charges on, convinced -- or hoping to convince others -- that it is on a just and brave crusade.

Unlike Don Quixote, however, this story isn't funny. Because of Dem Quixote's delusions, we're still paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, fighting stupid regulations, and faced with the real possibility that we might retreat from a war we are winning.

topics:
John McCain, Barack Obama, Economics, Environment, Iraq, Oil