Here's the thing. Not everyone is going to agree with you, and they aren't going away either. Since you claim to support democracy, the only way you can "defeat" people who don't agree with you is to convince them that your arguments have merit. Putting them on the defensive is a horrible strategy, and will only result in them circling their wagons.

I thought Don Quixote was a pretty good comparison. Your giants are a Nazi Bloomberg and a supreme-court circumventing Obama. The rest of us see a rich guy who happens to be mayor of NYC and a fairly middle-of-the-road President. To most of us, comparing Bloomberg's limiting the serving size of soda to anything commonly associated with the Nazis is so ridiculous that it becomes hard to listen to what you have to say, no matter how well-thought out. Similarly, I'd love to hear how you think that Obama plans on passing anything resembling the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill that FDR couldn't get through a friendly congress.

Anyway, running around attacking what most people regard as figments of your imagination is not the way to win said people over.

The part of the country that is into NASCAR would not appreciate being called a Yankee... entirely different connotation down there - something about the invention of "total war" occurring on their land.

NASCAR started with liquor running during Prohibition, so speed was more important than handling. Given that, I can kind of excuse the initial use of an oval track. But once the speeds got too high, they started restricting the cars and so the oval track was sort of an anachronism... very hard for me to get into oval track racing. That said, I'm sure it is fun as hell to drive a car around an oval track (I've only done an autocross course, which is terrifying in a good way).

Good luck on your quest, brave Quixote.

Oooo, good point. And they can make the seats and cubbies smaller so that they can get more workers in per square foot!

But that's the life you choose. I'm against giving you the right to impose your choices on other people, just because you might think you know what choices are best.

Only certain vendors... you can still buy 2-liters at the grocery store, for instance.

Which is why I think I find this over-the-line. The rules in New York City for soda will start to resemble those for alcohol... you can get an open beverage here, but not a closed beverage. For that you have to go over here. If you want a larger quantity, you can't get that at either of those places and you have to go over here instead. It's absurd.

Free knee surgery for all!

That's OK, I don't think we'll get anywhere.

I don't mean to insult you or anything like that, but could you please tone down the rhetoric? This is exactly the kind of talk that I was referring to.

Yeah, I don't buy into the slippery-slope stuff either - or rather, I don't think there is any avoiding it.

With the smoking bans, you can at least make the argument that the employees of an establishment don't really have a good choice - either breath smoke and get paid or don't breath smoke and find another line of work. Smoking taxes, you can make the argument that you are trying to recover some of the money that society loses to cigarette smoking. And then there is the whole issue of nicotine. Sugar is not a drug. It is a basic nutrient. You can subsist on sugar, salt, and water for quite a while. Try that with cigarettes, salt, and water (no fair eating the cigarettes) :)