First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt.

On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.

The new plan is said to be voluntary and involves no new legislation.  Does anyone believe it will stay that way?

“You libertarians are the types that would allow fornication in public parks!”

“What do you mean, public parks?”

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked for $6.9 billion in federal funds in his state-budget proposal Friday and warned that state health and welfare programs would be threatened without the emergency help.

Mr. Schwarzenegger’s proposed $82.9 billion general-fund budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year would close a $19.9 billion gap over 18 months. In addition to the federal aid, he called for $8.5 billion in cuts and $4.5 billion in alternative funding to balance the budget.

“It’s time to enact long-term reforms that will change the way the most populous state and the federal government work together,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. He and state legislative leaders plan to visit Washington to lobby for bailout money. White House budget officials weren’t available for comment on the governor’s request.

Federal bailouts of state governments are insane not just because they reward profligate state spending. These bailouts also come with strings attached – dictates on how states can run education, welfare, transportation, and so on – and thus quickly destory any remnance of federalism in the United States.

BOSTON — Martha M. Coakley, the Democrat running for Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, had seemed so certain of winning the special election on Jan. 19 that she barely campaigned last month.

But the dynamic has changed in recent days. …

And a new poll that showed a competitive race between Ms. Coakley and Mr. Brown has generated buzz on conservative blogs and energized the Brown campaign — though many news organizations dispute its methodology.

Brown is unlikely to win, but if he does, the implications for the health care debate are huge.

Well, it still is in some parts of the world:

KUALA LUMPUR — Rohaya Mohamad, 44, is an articulate, bespectacled medical doctor who studied at a university in Wales. Juhaidah Yusof, 41, is a shy Islamic studies teacher and mother of eight. Kartini Maarof, 41, is a divorce lawyer and Rubaizah Rejab, a youthful-looking 30-year-old woman, teaches Arabic at a private college.

The lives of these four women are closely entwined — they take care of each others’ children, cook for each other and share a home on weekends.

They also share a husband.

So, should polygamy be legal?  To address this question, I think it is useful to consider two prior questions:

Should government “supply” and enforce the particular bundle of contracts known as marriage?

If it does so, should it restrict this supply to opposite-sex couples?

My answer to the first question is no: government should establish and enforce default rules about the division of property from communal living arrangements, about inheritances, and about guardianship of children, but it need not and should not bundle these rules into the particular package known as marriage.

My answer to the second question is also no.  If goverment is going to supply marriage, it should do so in the most neutral way possible.  This means treating same-sex marriage and polygamy just like opposite-sex marriage.   Government should calls these contracts civil unions, leaving marriage to religious institutions.

David Leonhardt has a terrifice piece in today’s New York Times on the Fed’s quest for more power.   His key point:

The fact that Mr. Bernanke and other regulators still have not explained why they failed to recognize the last bubble is the weakest link in the Fed’s push for more power. It raises the question: Why should Congress, or anyone else, have faith that future Fed officials will recognize the next bubble?

A related point is that, even without additional power, the Fed could have sounded an alarm about the housing bubble rather than chanting, “All is well.”  Imagine how different the last few years might have been if in 2004 the Fed’s testimony before Congress had been,

“Housing prices are growing at an unprecedented rate.  While the U.S. has never had a large nationwide decline in housing prices, it has also have had such a huge nationwide increase in prices, so all bets are off. Consumers and banks are becoming obscenely levered.  Fannie and Freddie are issuing mortgages to every borrower with a pulse.  This situation is scaring our pants off!

A radical Islamic group planning a protest march through the streets of a town that has achieved iconic status in Britain for honoring the passing hearses of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan ran into a stiff rebuff from the British government on Monday.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a statement saying he was “personally appalled” by the group’s plan to march through the streets of Wootton Bassett, 70 miles west of London, where townspeople have lined the sidewalks since April 2007 to mourn the passing cortèges of British military casualties flown home to the nearby military airbase at Lyneham. …

Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who is responsible for the police, said in a separate statement that he would support any request from the police or local government officials to ban the march.

The point that the opponents of the march fail to get is that suppressing the march will polarize and alienate Muslims even more.

BAGHDAD — The banner appeared mysteriously this fall on a railing along Abu Nawas Street, the hub of nightlife on the banks of the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad, where the atmosphere in recent months has grown markedly more subdued.

“Damned is he who sits at a table with alcohol,” the handwritten sign said.

Posted near a strip of nightclubs recently raided by police, the unsigned missive spoke to a new fight being fought across Iraq as government officials attempt to assert greater control over the country’s moral and social norms.

This is evidence for my view that, when all is said and done, the invasion and occuption of Iraq will have replaced a secular repressive regime with a sectarian repressive regime.

Six years after New York City passed a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, it is easier than ever to find smokers partying indoors like it’s 1999, or at least 2002. In November, Eater.com called it “the worst kept secret in New York nightlife” that “smoking is now allowed in numerous nightspots, specifically just about any and every lounge and club with a doorman and a rope.” A few weeks later, GuestofaGuest.com, a blog about New York clubs and bars, posted a “smoker’s guide to N.Y.C. nightlife.”

“Everyone looks the other way,” said Billy Gray, 25, a reporter for Guest of a Guest, who says that he knows precisely which high-end bars and lounges, most of them in the meatpacking district or Lower East Side, will let him smoke inside. Far from deterring smoking indoors, the ban simply adds an allure to it, said Mr. Gray, a half-pack-a-day smoker.

“It’s more of an illicit thrill now,” he said. “Like when you were a teenager and snuck a beer in your parents’ basement.”

Thus, as with other prohibitions, smoking bans breed disrespect for the law.

Is a prohibition ever the right policy?  What about the ban on murder?  Take as given that this one is a good idea.  So what’s the difference between banning murder and banning smoking in restaurants?

Everyone agrees that murder inflicts grave harm one someone who cannot easily avoid that harm.  Smoking in restuarants does not share this feature.  Even taking the evidence on second-hand smoke at face value, the effects from occasional expsoure are trivial, and anyone who wants to avoid them can stay home or patronize non-smoking restaurants.

Smoking bans are also miguided because they assume restaurants and bars are “public” and should therefore be subject to regulation by government.   Instead, any privately owned establishment should be regarded as fully private, with owners allowed to offer smoking versus non-smoking experiences, as they wish.

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

All these criticisms are dead on.  Keeping people in homes they cannot afford makes no sense, so policies that attempt to prevent foreclosure are guaranteed to generate perverse side effects.  The horrifying fact is that policy is still subsidizing high-risk mortgages.