Priorities: NYC Councilman Wants Fast Food Free Zones

I have a better idea. How about keeping idiotic NYC council members away from television cameras?

A New York City councilman wants to keep school kids away from fast food -- or at least keep the fast food restaurants away from them.

Councilman Eric Gioia is unveiling a proposal that would prohibit fast food restaurants from being within one-tenth of a mile of a school. The idea comes after a study this month found students whose schools are within easy walking distance of fast food restaurants are more likely to be obese.

The study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University found that students at schools in close proximity to fast food restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut had a 5.2 increase in the incidence of obesity.

Just what we need. Importing zany idea from Berkeley.

Seems like a better idea to make schools free from bad teachers. Maybe Gioia can have a talk with his puppet master, Randi Weingarten.

It was child's play for the almighty United Federation of Teachers: Destroy attempts to reform lax tenure rules -- and then brazenly write the very law that preserved the status quo.

Last year, UFT President Randi Weingarten's powerful lobby killed a rule passed by then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer -- and supported by Mayor Bloomberg and school boards statewide -- to allow principals to factor in students' test scores when evaluating teachers for tenure.

Weingarten's relentless assault so buried the issue that a special commission, which was supposed to be created to study how test scores may be used, hasn't even been convened, an apparent violation of state law.

"The commission was BS," said one veteran on the losing side of the tenure battle.

What's worse, having illiterate students or the risk of them walking by a McDonald's?