The elitists who think it is their job to tell the great unwashed what to eat and to drink are at work in my hometown of Berkeley, California, with an initiative measure on the ballot that would tax sugary soda one cent per ounce. Measure D (full text here) is being fought with a full court press by the soft drink industry, which has pouted millions of dollars into pervasive advertising on local cable TV and billboards, and hiring canvassers to visit every home (ours has been visited twice). My local BART subway station is full of ads. For their part, proponents have been running TV ads blaming soda for childhood obesity and diabetes (“Fight diabetes: vote for Measure D”) that read at the end, “Paid for by Michael Bloomberg,” and blanketing the city with yard signs showing happy thin children cavorting, celebrating their parents’ inability to pay for soda because of heavy taxes. I had wondered about why there were so many of these signs...(Read Full Post)