My predominant attitude toward paid corporate mouthpieces: Shut the hell up. Of course they have the right to speak, but if they're just spouting a line, I don't want to hear it. But sometimes, I do appreciate the chuckles I get when they do start talking.

Here's a bunch of crap from Elaine Kolish, vice president of the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an industry-run front erected to forestall binding curbs on advertising of junk food to kids:

Food advertising to children is a “perfect example of a topic that is wholly inappropriate for government regulation,” she preached to the converted at an event sponsored by the conservative Washington Legal Foundation. Her reasoning, as reported by foodnavigator-usa.com, was that the products in question are legal for sale, and that in most cases they're purchased by adults.

This is misdirection. The chief issue about advertising anything — legal or not — to kids is that, under 8 years of age, they are not able to distinguish truth from marketing claims. As a society, we already use age as a cutoff for behaviors we'd leave to individuals if they were older: Think statutory rape. That's a serious issue, but so is child obesity, which often leads to lifelong obesity, which adds misery to life until it shortens it.

Laughably, Kolish's next point was to say that industry should handle its own policing because it can move faster than government. I won't argue whether that's true because it this is misdirection, again. Whether one entity can move faster than another is immaterial if one of them is not only disinterested in moving, but has a vested interest in not going anywhere! The processed food industry has it good, which itself acknowledges when its paid mouthpieces argue for the status quo. The value of government involvement is that it changes behaviors on the basis of public interest, rather than private profits.

Yes, government falls short in many ways, but it is the best way to bring about these changes, even if it's not very good. And let's not forget that a primary reason that government acts slowly is because a great many monied interests fight viciously against changes that would not benefit them.

Kolish completed the bonehead triple play when she said the problem with the voluntary rules the federal government tried to get the processed-food industry to adopt was that they were too stupid to understand what was really involved. "Even experienced, well-informed regulators are unlikely to appreciate was well as the scientists and other nutritional professionals working for companies the enormity of the proposal" to reduce sodium content.

How contemptably smug of her! Run along, do-gooder; grown-ups are work here, and you wouldn't get it.

All anyone really has to understand is that the public good and the corporate good are different, and corporatists are not going to act against their own good unless they are required to. Anyone want to argue with that?