[img]1|exact|||no_popup[/img]It is really quite clever.

Within hours, we may have an unofficial read on whether plastic bag manufacturers and their allies have gathered enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure in November 2016 to defeat the pretty silly plastic bag ban.

Six months from Thursday, the prohibition is to go into effective statewide, testimony to a lightweight Legislature and even less attentive governor.

The good news for normal consumers is that if the anti-screwy law crowd has rounded up the needed signatures, that will freeze implementation of the plastic bag prohibition for 16 more months, until voters get a swing at the latest Sacramento version of a fruitcake law.

Talk about revenge.

According to the Orange County Register, if plastic bag manufacturers meet today’s signature threshold, they not only will buy a year and a half, they figure to sell 9 billion plastic bags in the interim.

Three cheers for capitalism, and normal people.

One of the numerous problems with the law driven by the under-exercised but over exorcised Oh, My Gosh the World Will End extremists is that they are selective.

An inherent failing of liberal bigots is their tendency to be selective. They never are sufficiently convicted to enact laws that cover all because, heaven forfend, such an ordinance would risk tarnishing their friends. (See Obamacare for verification.)

In the ill-advised communities that already have adopted this half-octopus ordinance – and the rest of California on July 1 — only certain businesses are and will be prohibited from dispensing plastic bags.

Markets, for example. They are and will be forbidden to hand consumers plastic bags at the checkout counters. But customers may use them to collect vegetables.

This presents what passes for a conundrum for animals in the waterways, whom this law allegedly is protecting:

They are being asked to distinguish between veggie plastic bags and banned plastic bags.

One they can swallow without ill effects, one presumes, and the other will provoke choking and evoke sad memories of past spouses.

Happy New Year? It’s in the bag.