Hold the straws, legalize the rats.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The 6-foot-tall man dressed as a giant receipt stood on a stool next to the emblem of the State Capitol in Sacramento. He was there because Assemblyman Phil Ting of San Fran wanted to ban receipts.

California had a great ban streak going. It had already banned plastic bags, straws and dog breeders. Assemblyman Ting, who had only been known for wearing bow ties, had declared war on receipts.

And Ting had his aide wear a giant receipt to show how bad receipts were for the environment. And how better to crusade for the environment than by printing up a receipt 100,000 times normal size?

According to Ting’s people, receipts not only wasted trees and water, but were actually toxic. The San Francisco Democrat explained that receipts were coated in chemicals that weren’t allowed in baby bottles. It’s probably a good thing then that receipts don’t go inside baby bottles. Or inside babies.

There was even a hashtag, #SkiptheSlip.

In an extraordinary setback for stupid bans, Ting’s receipt ban bill never made it to the floor. But Ting tweeted that he was “glad to have raised awareness about the health & environmental harm receipts can cause. Change often takes time.” Next time around, the receipt bill ban will succeed.

Perhaps Ting ought to consider raising awareness about the 16,000 complaints of filth and waste in his own city. The human waste spread by his constituents is a lot more toxic than paper receipts.

The same Democrats who shrug at a hepatitis outbreak gasp at the toxicity of store receipts.

But Ting didn’t put all his bans in one basket. That same month, he also called for a ban on facial recognition body cameras for police. The fact that no police forces in California use facial recognition body cameras didn’t stop Ting and his partners at the ACLU from trying to ban them anyway.

Meanwhile, yet another bill set out to ban plastic shampoo bottles in hotel rooms. There would be inspections and a $2,000 fine for giving “a small plastic bottle containing a personal care product.”

"Small plastic bottles that are less than 12-ounces represent a sizeable amount of waste," Assemblyman Ash Kalra of San Jose declared. The irony was lost on him. Irony will probably be banned next year.

California Democrats allowed drug addicts and the insane to turn the state’s major cities into toilets leading to outbreaks of hepatitis and typhus. They still haven’t banned public defecation.

But a ban on plastic bottles is their priority.

Assemblyman Karla might have paid more attention to the shigella outbreak in San Jose. Shigella outbreaks are spread through human waste. Not through shampoo bottles. The shigella outbreak in San Jose infected 182 people. The only thing that can worsen disease outbreaks spread by human waste is banning single-use plastic in restaurants and fast food places. So that’s what the Democrats are doing.

But banning individual plastic things, like bags, straws and little bottles, isn’t a radical enough solution.

"Rather than continue to tinker around the edges with one-off bans of individual plastic items, we need a thoughtful, comprehensive solution," Senator Ben Allen warned. The solution thoughtfully declares that all single-use plastic is pollution and must be banned or everyone will die of plastic poisoning.

Nobody in Santa Monica, Allen’s home turf, has actually died of plastic poisoning. Instead, its homeless population is dying of drugs and alcohol, meth, PCP, and a beating with a bolt cutter by Ramon Escobar.

Escobar is an illegal alien who had been deported 6 times and fled to California from Texas. In the sanctuary state, the illegal alien criminal found a fresh hunting ground stocked with vulnerable victims.

Single-use plastics don’t kill. Filling your cities with the mentally ill and illegal aliens does. The thoughtful solution would be to criminalize crime, instead of decriminalizing it, while criminalizing everything else.

August’s bans were the latest outflow of a torrent of insane bans and bills flooding Sacramento. In July, there was CROWN or Creating a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural hair which bans workplaces from asking employees to come to work groomed. Asking nurses or cooks not to wear dreadlocks is now illegal in California which will do wonders for the health and hygiene of hospitals and restaurants.

Meanwhile a bill to ban flavored tobacco products ran into interference from the Hookah Lobby. The Hookah Lobby, a previously unknown force in the Sacramento mental institution where all of the state’s legislative sessions take place, managed to scuttle a ban on cherry and apple vaping products.

But a ban on rat poison succeeded. That’s unfortunate because typhus, a disease making a comeback in Los Angeles, is spread by rats. The outbreak began when California Democrats decided that crazy people had a right to live on the street. The filthy conditions helped spread typhus with rats as the carriers.

After making it impossible to stop the homeless camps, Democrats made it impossible to stop the rats.

Democrats cried racism when President Trump pointed out Baltimore’s rat problem. Now they’ve gone to great lengths to protect the homeless-flea-rat typhus pipeline. Good thing the straws are banned.

San Francisco has a huge rat problem.

"We get complaints for rats all over the city,” Nader Shatara, a top Department of Public Health guy, said. “Rats are part of the fauna in the city."

The ban on some rodenticides will ensure that rats remains a part of the fauna of all of California.

The most effective rat poisons were banned because they also kill the mountain lions who eat the rats. Better to have a typhus outbreak in Los Angeles than to kill a few lions in the Santa Monica mountains.

While California is drowning in filth and disease, its Democrat elites are focused on the environment.

They caused a drought for the environment. They let fires happen for the environment. Now they’re going to cause a rat infestation and typhus epidemic for the environment. It’s the environmentalist way.

And, if you’re an environmentalist, people dying of preventable diseases is good for the environment,

California’s statewide bans include the usual effort to ban circuses, fur, sodas, makeup and bots. Locally, the San Francisco airport, which offers dedicated yoga rooms, banned bottled water. Some California cities are banning natural gas in new buildings. California’s civil war with socially conservative states, where travel by Cali government employees is banned, continues to escalate. The latest boycott strategy is to give tax breaks to movie productions that leave pro-life states for pro-abortion California.

The Share Our Values tax credit bill will offer tax credits on up to $100 million for movies and miniseries that leave a state that restricts “across to abortion”. What shared values does the state of bans have?

Killing babies is the only thing that can’t be banned in California.