All aboard the no-smoking train, Wilmette will be your next stop. No smoking, littering, radio playing or freedom is allowed on board.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

(Ping! Doors open. Whoosh!)

Of course you can count on The New York Times to pick up the ball and, in a story headlined “The Gorge-Yourself Environment,” keep running:

Traditionally, the prescription for shedding extra pounds has been a sensible diet and increased exercise. Losing weight has been viewed as a matter of personal responsibility, a private battle between dieters and their bathroom scales.

But a growing number of studies suggests that while willpower obviously plays a role people do not gorge themselves solely because they lack self-control.

Rather, social scientists are finding, a host of environmental factors — among them, portion size, price, advertising, the availability of food and the number of food choices presented — can influence the amount the average person consumes.

Fortunately, reporter Erica Goode explains, a group of helpful lawyers are dreaming up ways to sue the pants off Big Food, which just doesn’t seem to get it:

The food industry, however, dismisses such suits as a device to deposit more money in lawyers’ bank accounts. The onus for eating healthfully, industry spokesmen say, rests entirely with the consumer.

My heavens, what a notion! Studies also show, Goode reports, that price is a huge factor in how much people eat. Who’d have thunk it? I wonder how those clever lawyers will tackle that problem.

The story concludes:

Researchers have yet to cement the link between larger portions and a fatter public. But add up the studies, Dr. Rolls and other experts say, and it is clear Americans might have more success slimming down if plates were not quite so large and a tempting snack did not await on every corner.

Obviously, people have responsibility for deciding what to eat and how much, Dr. Rolls said. “The problem is,” she said, “they’re not very good at it.”

Are people good at anything? Really, how the heck do they survive? Hopefully, the people in the government will straighten this whole mess out!

Did you know that some folks even manage to be obese and hungry at the same time? (Thanks to The Agitator for the link). Now that’s a real feat of ingenuity. They oughta give a medal for that.

Oh, people. When will they ever learn? When the gummint starts telling them what to eat, that’s when. That’ll learn ’em, and good.

What — you don’t trust Ted Kennedy and Denny Hastert for your diet tips?

I’ve been saying for a while (mostly under my breath, to no one in particular) that there’s nothing about the coming fight over fatty food that is substantively different from the tobacco wars. It may be just a matter of time before those poor, desperate, addicted souls huddle outside office buildings scarfing down greasy potato chips next to the cigarette smokers.

The only difference is that most people still have an instinctive responsibilitarian streak, you might call it, that finds any attempt to blame others for individuals’ obesity repulsive. But a steady diet of junk science and a subtle shift in discourse will change that soon enough. The folks at the Center for Consumer Freedom (formerly the Guest Choice Network) have been following this for a while.

Here’s a perfect example — headline: “Burgers are as addictive as heroin: study.”

Yeah. Right. Apparently, some lab rats got upset when their little pieces of burger were taken away. They also professed a sudden fondness for Lou Reed and the movie “Trainspotting.”

Meanwhile, the entire premise of a July 15 story in the Chicago Tribune bodes ill for those who think people should be free to eat what they want and held responsible for their own choices.

The front-page story by Andrew Martin (incidentally, a journalism instructor of mine at Columbia), headlined “Obesity woes eating at fast-food chains,” says the burger slingers are shaking in their boots about new FDA regulations and the onslaught of obesity-related class-action suits. That part is true enough, but the rest of the story is filled with contradictions.

Martin writes:

The super-size approach has come under increasing fire from nutrition experts, Wall Street analysts and lawyers concerned about the food industry’s role in the obesity epidemic.

But while manufacturers promote “lite,” “low cholesterol” or “heart healthy” products, fast-food and casual restaurants are confronted with the reality that their customers still crave sugar and fat … many are still relying on a decades-old formula: abundant food at bargain prices.

Apparently, the restaurants’ problem is that they serve the kind of food their customers like to eat. That’s a problem most restaurants would love to have.

But, you see, it’s really a no-win situation, according to Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University:

They’re caught in a cycle that nobody feels like they can get out of. If people eat less, it’s bad for business. The whole point of the food industry is to get people to eat more, not less.

Really? I thought the whole point was to make money. Amazingly, people like to get more for less. Wait until they hear about this at Wal-Mart!

Martin goes on to list Huddle House restaurants, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Culver’s and McDonald’s new McGriddles as the latest culprits in the conspiracy to fatten up hungry, hungry hippo Americans. But how could that be? According to a poll that’s all done up pretty with a bunch of pie charts accompanying the story, Americans are fed up with fast food.

Sixty-eight percent of them are sick of the poor nutritional value of fast food, while 64 percent are famished for healthier items on menus. Hmmm …

I guess that’s why Pizza Hut now not only offers a pizza with cheese that’s baked into the crust, but a golden ring of cheese on top of the crust as well.

What could possibly explain this difference between people’s expressed opinions and their revealed preferences? Obviously, people are being brainwashed into wanting sugary, fatty foods. What else could explain it? Certainly, not something so mundane as biology. Oops!

Thus spake Jim Hill, director for the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado:

We have this innate preference for sweet, fat things. And sweet, fat things are the cheapest thing on the planet to produce.

Whoa! Just how could we level the playing field here? Those poor fruits and grains and veggies are getting such a raw deal. To paraphrase the Beatles, “Taxes are all you need.”

There’s no question that obesity poses serious health problems, as does cigarette smoking. But where are we willing to draw the line when it comes to how unelected legislators, aka the plaintiffs bar, dictates the way we live our lives? Where will we draw the line that politicians simply cannot cross?

“The government will never tell me what I can put in my mouth!” you say. Good for you, but aren’t most drugs taken by mouth? Aren’t cigarettes smoked by mouth?

The sad truth is that the line has already been crossed — by politicians and by the public at large. The mental gorge that allows for this kind of tyranannyism, I’ll dub it, has been bridged.

The game has already been lost. The only question now is how badly the forces of freedom will get beat. The final score in that fight is one thing the nannies are more than glad to super size.

What is O’Hare expansion really about?

In a blockbuster story in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times, Robert C. Herguth begins:

Ald. Patrick Levar asks for and accepts political contributions from businesses that want approval from the City Council committee he chairs. He does the same with municipal workers whose livelihoods depend on him.

By Chicago standards, that’s not uncommon.

But the old-school Northwest Side Democrat (45th) works a more unusual fund-raising angle, too: He pursues and takes donations from O’Hare Airport contractors who, while not directly involved with his panel, are overseen by his brother Michael Levar, a $93,500-a-year supervisor with Mayor Daley’s patronage-heavy Aviation Department.

Pat Levar and his ward organization have received $50,000 from folks who had contracts up for bid before brother Mike. How cozy!

It just so happened that half of the contractors with business before Mike gave money to Pat in the last three years. How does it go down?

One concrete engineer, Takao Nagai, told Herguth:

I don’t talk to Mike directly on a daily basis, but I talk to a couple of his guys who are in charge of us. They mention a fund-raising dinner is coming up and you should probably attend. I said, “OK, what’s the minimum?” … It was very casually brought up when we were taking care of other business at O’Hare.

He didn’t feel pressured, though:

There was a time when I was interested in getting involved a little more in the political scene to find out what it was like … I’m sure that was my intention.

I’m sure it was. “What’s the minimum?” is often a question asked by those merely interested in learning more about political affairs.

Meanwhile, Greg Hinz reports for Crain’s Chicago Business that all the construction management teams bidding for the contract to oversee O’Hare expansion have ties to Da Mare.

I am shocked — shocked! — that there is cronyism going on in this town.

The prize? Sixty million dollars over the next 15 years. And how much of that will wind up back in the pockets of Da Mare and people like Pat Levar. One only knows.

Just don’t let those Bensenville cemeteries get in the way of all the fun, boys! That’s what we’ve got eminent domain for, isn’t it?

On the wall, on the wall, oh the blood done sign your name:

• Liberia mortar barrage kills more than 90
• Marines set to defend embassy in Liberia

As the White House’s race to pin blame for the nonexistent Iraqi WMD fiasco on the CIA continues unbounded, Joshua Micah Marshall takes pains to point out that it was Dubya & Co.’s encouragement of more aggressive intelligence techniques that got us into Iraq in the first place.

He writes:

… You can’t separate our failure to find a lot of what we thought we’d find in Iraq from the “war” the administration has been fighting with the intelligence community for the last two years.

If the administration spent the previous two years “at war” with the CIA, pushing them harder and harder into a set of assumptions (and in many cases conclusions) that turned out to be wildly off-the-mark, shouldn’t there be some political accountability for what turned out to be at best a very poor call?

Marshall has been all over the intelligence follies and is a must-read.

Steve Chapman thinks so:

Our military is bogged down in a guerrilla war overseas, the federal government is spending way beyond its means, and a president from Texas has opened up a credibility gap. Is this 2003 or 1967?

When we elected George W. Bush, we thought he was the son of George H.W. Bush. But he behaves like the proud progeny of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I think it’s too early to say we’re “bogged down,” but otherwise Chapman is on the mark.

How nice of CIA Director George Tenet to lie on Dubya’s behalf — even though CIA folks already have gone public complaining that Dubya went with the bogus Niger-Uranium story after they’d told him it wasn’t on the level.

Are we supposed to believe this nonsense? Of course. And just like that, another lie slides right off Dubya’s back.

Dean may not quite be the anti-war candidate, after all. He wants more troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and favors sending troops to Liberia.

As Tom Palmer once told me, “Conservatives favor any war said to be in the national interest. Liberals favor any war not in the national interest.”