1 It's because they don't understand natural selection.

2 Well, I'm not too stupid, but I wonder about DPUD...

3 You need to distinguish between laws intended to protect you from yourself and laws intended to protect you from others. The former is overreach, but the latter is exactly what we expect the government to do. It's just a question of what threshold harm is appropriate before government intervention is appropriate.

Here, the new cell phone law is not intended to help you because you're stupid. It's intended to help me because you're stupid. Drivers who talk on cell phones are the cause of quite a few accidents (in fact I had to dive out of a crosswalk in Santa Monica last week when a woman on a cell phone made a left turn without looking to see if anyone was crossing; I had the light) likely equating to millions of dollars in damages each year. That meets my threshold for harm severe enough to prompt government action.

4 More than that, the imposition here is not that great. California hasn't outlawed cell phone use in cars, it has simply required that a hands-free device be used.

5 Unfortunately, in my neck of the woods, the assumption that most drivers are too stupid to use cell phones seems to match the facts on the road.

6 You need to distinguish between laws intended to protect you from yourself and laws intended to protect you from others.

Great, but that can be twisted into anything anymore, which is the problem and sort of the point of the linked post.

7 Gotta be able to make reasonable distinctions. 

8 True, but where do we draw the line, I have to say, after a crisis situation that I experienced, I'm damned reluctant to tell someone no cell phone.

9 But that's not what they're saying. They say; wanna use a cell in the car? Get yourself a handsfree kit. Which is not too bad an infringement on freedom, I think.

The mobile phone is fairly useful, but it is documented and researched (well, at least Mythbusters-researched, you decide if that's alright or not) when using such in a car, your SA degrades well below that of a drunk driver. This is a problem serious enough to warrant some measures, I daresay.

But yeah, keep yer hands of mah greasy bacon triple Whopper.

10 Along the lines of the government-thinks-we're-stupid I remember my eighth grade history text book.

 It was about an inch and a half thick with very large type with many cartoons and exactly one photo in the entire book. The book it replaced was about three inches thick with small type. Occasionally the teacher would have us go grab one of  these out of  the pile by the window and read a chapter if he wanted to make a specific point.

I figure this book was a book designed for the free citizens of a free nation. The book we actually used was designed for morons who were thought to be too stupid to learn anything important.