That swelling army of busybodies and know-it-alls that constitutes today’s Democrat party will never run out of ways to stick their noses in your business. Do you like plastic bags? Styrofoam cups for your takeout coffee? Tough.

Citing the area’s polluted streets, rivers and ocean, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday took its first tentative step toward banning public use of plastic bags and phasing in a ban on city purchase and use of polystyrene products.

Despite industry officials who said the products are recyclable - and that future technologies could deal with the problem - the council voted 13-0 to ban use of plastic bags in the city by 2010.

Smart move?

“You are just exchanging one form of litter for another,” Westerfield said. “With Styrofoam, you don’t need napkins wrapped around (food) or two cups to hold your coffee. And those paper cups aren’t recyclable. Styrofoam is.” Plastic bags also are recyclable, officials said, but require the public to place them in the appropriate recycling bins.

But council members said they want to follow the lead of cities such as San Francisco that have banned plastic bags.

Oh, there’s a good role model.

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Jerry Brown is using the cudgel of global warming (the “crisis” that keeps on giving) to curtail suburban living.

Suburbs exist because middle class people like living there. This has long irked smarty pants liberals, who like Edna St. Vincent Millay who “love humanity but hate people,” despise everything middle class while claiming to be its champion.

In the 1960s, California Gov. Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown laid the foundation for building modern, suburban California with massive new highway projects and one of the most significant public water projects in history. The resulting infrastructure gave us broad, low-density developments with room for millions of Californians to have a home with a backyard and two cars in the driveway.

Those were the good old days. Today, Pat Brown’s son Jerry is waging war on the very communities his father helped make possible. Why? Global warming.

Jerry Brown has been a fixture of the state’s politics for more than three decades. He was elected governor in 1974 and four years later earned the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” for his interest in creating a space program in California. In 1998, he was elected mayor of Oakland, a working-class city across the bay from San Francisco. And in 2006, he was elected attorney general. Today he is mulling a run for governor in 2010, when he will be 72.

In the meantime, Mr. Brown is taking aim at the suburbs, concerned about the alleged environmental damage they cause. He sees suburban houses as inefficient users of energy. He sees suburban commuters clogging the roads as wasting precious fossil fuel. And, mostly, he sees wisdom in an intricately thought-out plan to compel residents to move to city centers or, at least, to high-density developments clustered near mass transit lines.

Mr. Brown is not above using coercion to create the demographic patterns he wants. In recent months, he has threatened to file suit against municipalities that shun high-density housing in favor of building new suburban singe-family homes, on the grounds that they will pollute the environment. He is also backing controversial legislation — Senate bill 375 — moving through the state legislature that would restrict state highway funds to communities that refuse to adopt “smart growth” development plans. “We have to get the people from the suburbs to start coming back” to the cities, Mr. Brown told planning experts in March.

About the only thing Democrats are “pro-choice” about is abortion. For everything else, they know better than you.