An article in the New York Times about the dearth of conservatives in the field of social psychology has triggered the usual self-pitying whining from the usual suspects. More proof, they complain, that they are discriminated against by the evil liberal elite!

But the article itself is frustrating. It doesn’t define “conservative,” for one thing. There are, or there used to be, self-defined conservatives who are intelligent and rational people who might make fine social psychologists. However, such conservatives are rare specimens who must keep their heads down and their opinions to themselves among conservatives and liberals alike.

To liberals, especially the young folks, “rational conservative” is an oxymoron. Yet, children, there used to be such people. And I suspect there are a few such people out there. But rational conservatives are an entirely different species from contemporary conservatives, of all stripes — social, neo-, and paleo- — and contemporary conservatism has pretty effectively hunted them all down and driven them out of their company.

Considering that much contemporary conservatism is hostile to science — especially the humanities, biology and earth science — well, OK, any science except engineering, although they sometimes try to fake being economists — it makes sense that the dearth of conservatives in social psychology is the result of self-selection, not discrimination.

This is not to say that social psychologists don’t have sacred cows that get in the way of objectivity, particularly where race and gender issues are concerned. But you don’t eliminate bias by artificially insisting that other biases must be equally valid. Only the science itself should matter.

This is amusing:

Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

Well, yes, I suppose reading Sowell could teach them that African American men can be pig-headed bigots, too.

Anyway — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology is considering adding conservatives to the category of underrepresented groups, along with racial minorities, the disabled, and lesbians/gays and the bisexual and transgendered. Students who fit into these categories can get subsidies to help them travel to the annual meeting. Yes, amusing.

The President said this –

“If we’re fighting to reform the tax code and increase exports, the benefits cannot just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at the top. They have to be shared by American workers, who need to know that opening markets will lift their standard of living as well as your bottom line,” President Obama told the Chamber of Commerce on Monday morning.

Reaction from Jim “Gateway” Hoft — “His answer to everything… Socialism.” Apparently anything that doesn’t support plutocracy is socialism. Hoft’s “insight” was accompanied by that obnoxious “Obama as the Joker” image. I hadn’t realized the Joker was a socialist.

Update: Here’s another one, from Weasel Zippers —

Marxist-in-Chief: Corporate Profits “Have To Be Shared By American Workers”… What’s he really saying: I intend to force evil capitalists to redistribute their income in the name of class warfare.

Sometimes they’re too predictable. On the other hand, Little Lulu’s post about the speech is an incoherent rant about how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is in cahoots with Big Labor to promote amnesty for illegal immigrants. She also accuses the Chamber of “playing footsie” with the ALF-CIO to support increased government infrastructure spending.

Oooo, evil government infrastructure spending! And yes, the Chamber and the AFL-CIO are in favor of it, because government infrastructure spending is good for business and labor. How dare they actually advocate in favor of whatever is good for their members!

Another Update: Some guy asks, “How is this not socialism?”

This is how:

So·cial·ism

1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

On the other hand, the President’s speech was solidly pro-capitalist:

America’s success didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because [of] the freedom that has allowed good ideas to flourish, that has allowed capitalism to thrive; it happened because of the conviction that in this country hard work should be rewarded and that opportunity should be there for anybody who’s willing to reach for it. …

… We have to renew people’s faith in the promise of this country –- that this is a place where you can make it if you try. And we have to do this together: business and government; workers and CEOs; Democrats and Republicans.

We know what it will take for America to win the future. We need to out-innovate, we need to out-educate, we need to out-build our competitors. We need an economy that’s based not on what we consume and borrow from other nations, but what we make and what we sell around the world. We need to make America the best place on Earth to do business.

It was a capitalism pep talk, in other words. Then he talked about the stuff government does for business, such as maintain infrastructures (is infrastructure socialism?):

As a government, we will help lay the foundation for you to grow and innovate and succeed. We will upgrade our transportation and communication networks so you can move goods and information more quickly and more cheaply. We’ll invest in education so that you can hire the most skilled, talented workers in the world. And we’ll work to knock down barriers that make it harder for you to compete, from the tax code to the regulatory system.

Then he tells businesses –

But as we work with you to make America a better place to do business, I’m hoping that all of you are thinking what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire more American workers, what you can do to support the American economy and invest in this nation. That’s what I want to talk about today –- the responsibilities we all have — the mutual responsibilities we have — to secure the future that we all share.

As Steve M. points out, Obama is “asking for the economy to work the way right-wingers say it should.”

Right-wingers say that showering wealth on the rich in the form of tax cuts inevitably helps the rest of us. They say they want the rest of us to be helped, which is why they want the tax rates of the wealthy to be reduced. So, see, right-wingers want corporate profits to be “shared” by American workers. Right-wingers want to “spread the wealth around.”

Or, as a former Republican president once said, “We ought to make the pie higher.”

It is beyond reason why anyone would object to what the President said, but that’s wingnuts for you.

A number of constitutional scholars have weighed in on Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling that struck down the entire Affordable Care Act, mostly finding it flawed if not absurd. Yale Law School Professor Akhil Reed Amar writes about the ruling in the Los Angeles Times, and presents a number of reasons why Vinson doesn’t know the Constitution from refrigerator mold.

The first argument is that, as a lower court judge, Vinson has no authority to completely ignore Supreme Court precedents. This same argument can be found in many other dissections of Vinson’s opinion, including one at Volokh Conspiracy, by Orin Kerr –

Judge Vinson is just a District Court judge. And if you pair Justice Thomas’s dissent in Raich with Judge Vinson’s opinion today, you realize the problem: Judge Vinson is reasoning that existing law must be a particular way because he thinks it should be that way as a matter of first principles, not because the relevant Supreme Court doctrine actually points that way.

Back to Professor Amar. The central issue, Amar says, is how much power the Constitution gives to Congress. Amar cites the landmark case McCulloch vs. Maryland (1819):

In McCulloch, when states’ rights attorneys claimed that Congress lacked authority to create a federal bank, Chief Justice John Marshall famously countered that the Constitution gives Congress implied as well as express powers. Marshall said that unelected judges should generally defer to elected members of Congress so long as a law plausibly falls within Congress’ basic mission. Though the words “federal bank” nowhere appear in the Constitution’s text, Marshall explained that Congress nevertheless had the power to create such a bank to facilitate national security and interstate commerce. Other words not in the Constitution include “air force,” “NASA,” “Social Security,” “Peace Corps” and “paper money,” but all these things are constitutional under the logic of McCulloch. Obamacare is no different.

I’d rather he didn’t call the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare,” but I’ll overlook that for now. Then Professor Amar looks at the Commerce Clause –

Obamacare regulates a healthcare industry that obviously spans state lines, involving billions of dollars and millions of patients flowing from state to state. When uninsured Connecticut residents fall sick on holiday in California and get free emergency room services, California taxpayers, California hospitals and California insurance policyholders foot the bill. This is an interstate issue, and Congress has power to regulate it.

Even were it conceded that a particular piece of Obamacare regulates a wholly intrastate matter, that piece is OK so long as it is a cog within a truly interstate regulatory regime. In 2005, the court allowed Congress to criminalize private possession of homegrown marijuana plants because, even if these plants did not themselves cross state lines, a blanket prohibition was part of a legal dragnet regulating a genuinely interstate black market in drugs.

I liked this part –

Laws may properly regulate both actions and inactions, and in any event, Obamacare does not regulate pure inaction. It regulates freeloading. Breathing is an action, and so is going to an emergency room on taxpayers’ nickel when you have trouble breathing.

Amar says that, strictly speaking, the ACA does not mandate the purchase of insurance. It just says that you either purchase insurance or pay a tax. Apparently Vinson found that this tax does not fall under the powers given to Congress to levy taxes, a argument that Amar finds bizarre.

Finally, after that and some other good points, Amar adds –

In 1857, another judge named Roger distorted the Constitution, disregarded precedent, disrespected Congress and proclaimed that the basic platform of one of America’s two major political parties was unconstitutional. The case was Dred Scott vs. Sanford, involving a slave who sued for his freedom because he had lived with his master in places where Congress had banned slavery. In an opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court not only ruled against Scott, saying that even free blacks were not citizens and therefore had no right to sue; it also declared the Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed slavery in Northern territories, unconstitutional.

Naturally, the rightie blogosphere, the Cato Institute, and rightie media generally are going nuts over that last paragraph and tearing it to shreds, while mostly ignoring the rest of the column. They are basically taking it as an insult. One guy wrote

Amar starts out by saying his students know more about the Constitution than Judge Vinson, but what I wonder is whether Amar’s students will, like their teacher, use false analogies, set up straw men, ignore their opponents’ arguments, and resort to the equivalent of childish name-calling.

BTW, the same guy who wrote the sentence above crafted a rebuttal to Amar that consists entirely of false analogies, straw men, and ignoring Amar’s arguments. The rebuttal is anal beyond words and reveals the writer has no grasp whatsoever of health care issues and how the Affordable Care Act addresses them. I don’t have time to take the whole thing apart, but for example –

“There is nothing improper in the means that Obamacare deploys,” he writes. “Laws may properly regulate both actions and inactions…” Of course, that part’s true, but it’s beside the point. Congress doesn’t have a general power to write laws; it only has power to “regulate commerce…among the several states.” If the founders had intended to give Congress a general power to write laws, they would have. But what they chose to do instead was to give Congress specific, limited powers. The question here is whether a law that forces people to engage in commerce qualifies as a “regulation of commerce.” Amar merely dodges that question.

Amar doesn’t dodge the question of the commerce clause at all, as you can see by the parts I have already excerpted above.

Get this –

“…and in any event,” he continues, “Obamacare does not regulate pure inaction. It regulates freeloading. Breathing is an action, and so is going to an emergency room on taxpayers’ nickel when you have trouble breathing.”

Think about that: breathing is an action. Does Amar believe that Congress can put conditions on your choice to breathe?! There’s a word for governments that require every citizen to do something as a condition of continuing to breathe. The word is not “free”!

Did I say this guy was anal beyond words? I mean, how stupid do you have to be to have so totally missed the point? The point, of course, is that the individual mandate addresses the issue of cost shifting caused by uninsured people who can’t pay for their own care. The costs are shifted to taxpayers and to the insured — hospitals pad their bills to make up for uncompensated cost, and that cost is passed on to the people who pay padded insurance premiums. But it’s an extremely inefficient and costly way to provide health care. Seeing to it that most people are insured should (the CBO says) bend the curve on health care costs. And this is central to what the Affordable Care Act is trying to do — keep skyrocketing health care costs from bleeding our economy dry. And this makes it a perfectly reasonable thing to be regulated under the commerce clause, since it impacts the entire American economy and the commerce thereof.

But Mr. Anality continues, saying that “Nor is Amar’s reference to emergency rooms relevant. Obamacare has nothing whatsoever to do with this.” Like most righties, he can’t see how things interconnect. The Affordable Care Act probably doesn’t directly address the mandate for federally funded emergency rooms to at least stabilize everyone who comes through the door, even if they can’t pay. But one of the obvious effects of getting more people insured is to relieve the stress on emergency rooms and get people care in a more cost-effective way.

Update: Some of you will appreciate this — “Health Care Challenge in Florida: Blotting Out the Necessary & Proper Clause” by Simon Lazarus at the American Constitution Society.

The heads of state of the industrialized democracies — once known as the “free world” — seem to have converged on the consensus that the Egyptian revolution must be carefully managed, but not halted, and that Hosni Mubarak must be eased out of power gradually so as not to leave a sudden power vacuum in Egypt. They seem to want a transition to democracy as well as political stability. Good luck with that.

Whether this is really the best course, and whether the industrialized democracies have any real say in what’s going on in Egypt, are other matters. It appears the bulk of the teabagger-social conservative Right has fallen in line behind the belief that Islamic terrorists are behind the revolution, and any outcome that allows the Muslim Brotherhood a voice in the government cannot be tolerated.

Writing for the Guardian, Sadhbh Walsh points out some, um, reactions on the Right –

Laura Ingraham was nonplussed by what she felt was a wimpish response from President Obama to the uprising, and was wistful for bygone days when America knew her place in the world (listen to clip here). …

… To demonstrate how things could be if we only had the right kind of president, she played a clip from a speech given by former President Ronald Reagan offering his unequivocal support to the Polish solidarity movement during their struggle for independence from Russia. …

… But lest you think, as I briefly did, that Ingraham was going out on a limb as the lone conservative voice urging more American support for the courageous protesters on the streets of Egypt, who are risking their lives in the hope of a better one, know that it was only the style of Reagan’s message that she wished Obama would emulate (that is, “America is in charge”) and not the substance (“America supports your cries for freedom”).

Of course, Mubarak does have support on the Right, just not the teabag Right. Dick the Dick crawled out from under his rock to tell the world that Mubarak is a good friend and ally to the U.S. On the other hand, Moosewoman blames President Obama because she doesn’t know what the bleep is going on in Egypt. Bizarre.

Joe Klein often is wrong, but I hope he’s right about this –

Today, (hat tip/Ben Smith), we have Bill Kristol sticking with the demonstrators and calling out free-range lunatic Glenn Beck, for his hilarious commie-muslim caliphate delusions. This is not unimportant. Kristol lies very close to the throbbing heart of the Fox News sensibility. And I’ve heard, from more than a couple of conservative sources, that prominent Republicans have approached Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes about the potential embarrassment that the paranoid-messianic rodeo clown may bring upon their brand. The speculation is that Beck is on thin ice. His ratings are dropping, too–which, in the end, is a good part of what this is all about. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a mirror-Olbermann situation soon.

I would be surprised if Rupert cuts Beck loose. Beck is an embarrassment to our species, but he’s very good at keeping the teabaggers whipped into a frenzy to support whatever it is the Koch Brothers want supported.

The anti-human rights organization Live Action has released more Lila Rose videos of their Planned Parenthood “sting” operation. Media Matters documents that the videos are doctored, and says the videos have ended Lisa Rose’s credibility.

If only that were so. If you were getting all of your information about the hoax from mainstream media, you’d probably have a strong impression that Planned Parenthood got caught doing something wrong.

I’ve been checking it out. This Christian Science Monitor story is pretty typical. The headline says “Planned Parenthood Under Fire,” and it’s followed by a blurb saying “Antiabortion activists have released videos showing Planned Parenthood workers allegedly colluding with a man posing as a pimp to exploit underage sex workers.”

How many people really pay attention to “allegedlys”?

The allegations are repeated and elaborated on in the first several paragraphs of the story. However, Christian Science Monitor readers are not told the videos were doctored or that Planned Parenthood notified authorities of a possible sex trafficking ring after the visit by the hoaxers.

In many other newspapers, Planned Parenthood’s side of the story is presented, but you have to read several paragraphs into the story to find it. If you read only the headline and the first paragraph or two, you only hear Live Action’s side. This is sloppy news writing, IMO, but it’s how most news stories are written.

Radio news is even worse; a lot of radio stations are just reporting verbatim what Live Action says.

But there’s something else about the videos that needs to be said. In one of the more recently released videos, the Planned Parenthood employee can be heard telling the “pimp” that what he’s doing is illegal and would have to be reported. Doesn’t that mean Live Action’s own video disproves that Planned Parenthood supports child prostitution? Apparently not; people are linking to the video as “proof” that Planned Parenthood is evil and must be vanquished.

The disconnect, I think, comes from the fact that the woman in the video is not expressing shock or screaming or rending her hair or otherwise reacting to the faux pimp with anything but matter-of-fact calm. She’s just rattling off information, in other words. And when he left, Planned Parenthood says, she reported the hoax visit to her supervisor, who called the police.

What else was she supposed to do? If I’m a woman in a room alone with a man who presents himself to be a dangerous criminal, I would do the same thing. I would stay very calm, tell the guy whatever I think he wants to hear, and then call the police after he has left. If he had been a real criminal, and the woman started screaming at him, he might have reacted violently.

As Gail Collins writes, “there is no way to look good while providing useful information to a self-proclaimed child molester, even if the cops get called. That, presumably, is why Live Action chose the scenario.”

Exactly. What else was she supposed to do? Under that circumstance, unless there happens to be a cop in the next room, when put in that position there is not much else one can do but humor the guy and hope he leaves without hurting anyone. But the people who believe the videos incriminate Planned Parenthood don’t consider that.

Gail Collins also reports on efforts in Congress to de-fund Planned Parenthood, and adds,

The people trying to put Planned Parenthood out of business do not seem concerned about what would happen to the 1.85 million low-income women who get family-planning help and medical care at the clinics each year. It just doesn’t come up. There’s not even a vague contingency plan.

There is no comparable organization to Planned Parenthood, providing the same kind of services on a national basis. If there were, most of the women eligible for Medicaid-financed family-planning assistance wouldn’t have to go without it. In Texas, which has one of the highest teenage birthrates in the country, only about 20 percent of low-income women get that kind of help. Yet Planned Parenthood is under attack, and the State Legislature has diverted some of its funding to crisis pregnancy centers, which provide no medical care and tend to be staffed by volunteers dedicated to dissuading women from having abortions.

It’s all about priorities.

In Washington, the new Republican majority that promised to do great things about jobs, jobs, jobs is preparing for hearings on a bill to make it economically impossible for insurance companies to offer policies that cover abortions. And in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, faced with an epic budget crisis that’s left the state’s schools and health care services in crisis, has brought out emergency legislation — requiring mandatory sonograms for women considering abortion.

So in Wingnut World, puppy mills are good and women’s health services are bad. Unreal.

Update: I forgot to mention — this past week Media Matters had a telephone conference for progressive bloggers and media on the Planned Parenthood sting issue. This is a common thing; it’s like a press conference, only cheaper. Usually somebody makes a statement and then takes questions. I get lots of invitations to phone conferences, although I rarely listen in because they eat time and I’d just as soon get the same information in a press release. I suspect the Right does the same thing with its bloggers now and then.

But Breitbart Media is trying to blow up the phone conference into something sinister, implying that those who took part are somehow taking money to promote child prostitution. Weird.

Update: New GOP Bill Would Allow Hospitals To Let Women Die Instead Of Having An Abortion

This is too funny.

President Obama misquoted a familiar Bible verse during a faith-based address at the National Prayer Breakfast.

“Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint,” the president said during a speech to several thousand people at the breakfast.

But the actual passage, from Isaiah 40:31, states: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

I guess some people insist on keeping God’s Word in the original Elizabethan English.*

(*Some pinheads think there may be an earlier version –

– obviously, this is some nefarious liberal plot.)

Several commenters have identified the Obama quote as the New International Version, although I don’t think it matches the NIV word for word.

Particularly after the Bill O’Reilly idiocy with the tides and the moon, Steve Benen suggests that Fox News just stay completely away from theology. Oh, but where’s the fun in that?

Update: I’d say someone at Weasel Zippers needs Bible lessons, too.

RedState is running an Erick Erickson post that claims the Obama Administration has ordered a cover-up of abortion data. Erickson claims he has “confirmed” with the press office of the Center for Disease Control that “the Obama administration is deliberately playing ‘hide the ball’ on nationwide abortion statistics.”

For apparently the first time in 40 years, the CDC’s annual “Abortion Surveillance Report” was not published, and there are “no plans” for the data to be produced at this time.

According to the CDC website, they’re still working on the report. And the CDC has denied the allegation, saying a report will come out later this month.

I found no evidence that this alleged “deep-sixing” came from anywhere else but Erick Erickson’s imagination. Of course, it will now be added to the elaborate mythology (e.g., abortion causes breast cancer) the pro-criminalization mob has constructed around abortion. No amount of evidence, or lack thereof, will ever persuade them the allegation isn’t true. Just watch; even after the report comes out, they’ll find some reason to claim it isn’t the “real” report.

For several years, anti-abortion activists have been making all kinds of claims about the goings-on in abortion clinics. You’ll remember the late Dr. George Tiller was hauled into court several times on bogus charges. No amount of dismissals and “not guilty” verdicts ever convinced the Fetus People that Tiller was not breaking the law, however. Their reaction to the outrageous and illegal practices of Dr. Kermit Gosnell is the completely unsupported conclusion that Gosnell’s practices are somehow typical of how all abortion clinics are run.

In fact, the Gosnell case is typical of something else that’s a problem — every now and then some colossally incompetent physician will make the news for doing something stupid, leading to a lot of discussion about how in the world this fool was allowed to practice for so long. No one seems to have a solution to that one.

For example, last year a Baltimore cardiologist was found to have placed more than 500 stents in a patient who didn’t need even one. Turns out he’d been making a good living doing unnecessary procedures on mostly healthy people. I don’t see anyone making hysterical claims that every cardiovascular surgeon in the U.S. is doing the same thing, however.

Anti-abortion operatives have been trying to catch abortion clinics doing something illegal for years. So, the recent attempt by an associate of James O’Keefe to entrap Planned Parenthood clinics by posing as a child sex trafficker is just a long line of such attempts. After multiple tries at multiple clinics in six states the posers found one lamebrain employee who fell into the trap, and who was later fired. The resulting highly edited video was triumphantly released to the public as proof that Planned Parenthood enables child sex trafficking.

But the attempts to entrap clinic workers caused Planned Parenthood to alert federal authorities about a possible sex trafficking ring, which to a reasonable person would be solid evidence that Planned Parenthood does not condone sex trafficking. Naturally, the “reasonable person” criterion leaves out Live Action, the group that sponsored the video.

h/t Balloon Juice

The Republican Party in microcosm, via Balloon Juice — last November the voters of Missouri passed (with 52 percent of the vote) a referendum called the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act, which established humane standards for dog breeding operations. The state had become known as the “puppy mill capital” because its lax and ambiguous laws allowed breeders to get away with horrendously substandard care.

The act requires that adult dogs be given a reasonable amount of space and shelter; it outlaws stacked cages with wire floors; it requires that dogs be fed at least once a day and have access to water at all times; it requires that each dog be seen by a vet at least once a year; it limits litters per dog to 2 within 18 months; it requires that euthanasia be performed by a vet. It also limits the number of adult breeding dogs that any person can possess to 50.

Unfortunately, voters also elected a pack of wingnut teabaggers to serve in the state legislature. And guess what? They’re tripping all over themselves in a mad rush to overturn the puppy mill regulations. Because, you know, Missouri doesn’t have any other problems that need attention.

People opposed to the “puppy mill” regulations called it big government run wild and even a step toward communism. Apparently the Daily Show featured one of the anti-regulation activists last year –

Yes, the anti-regulation teabagger interviewed here really did explain that she is opposed to breeder regulations because “They’re expecting all the breeders to sit there and pay for exorbitant amounts of care that are not needed, like adequate food, adequate water, adequate space.”

A revised bill that already came out of committee eliminates the 50-dog limit and the provisions for providing space adequate for dogs to move — turn around, stretch, etc. — plus access to daily exercise. This is “unreasonable government regulation” to these people.

And if we want to talk about “big government,” why is it not “big government” for the legislature to ignore the referendum vote? See “Voters as Nuisances” at St. Louis Today –

Missouri’s state representatives and senators, after all, slog away for four long months a year (part-time, with a 10-day spring break), making the tough decisions about which bills written by which lobbyists they should pass.

But every now and then, some nervy Missourians get it into their heads to read the part of the state constitution about how to make laws without the Legislature. When they succeed, legislators then have to hole up with more lobbyists to figure out the best way to nullify the laws that the people passed without them.

As I understand it, state law does allow the legislature to repeal or amend voter initiated statutes. But it seems that the Missouri legislature has been doing this a lot, and not just to the puppy mill law. The state might save itself some money by abolishing the legislature altogether and just letting the lobbyists run things, which is pretty much how it works anyway. Legislators are just the middlemen.

With the coveted title of Puppy Mill Capital of America at stake, a House committee this week has been considering ways to cancel the election results. One proposal simply would repeal the law. Another would exempt existing breeders. A third course, warmly received by many committee members on Tuesday, would eliminate such pesky provisions of the law as prohibiting dangerous overcrowding in cages, protecting dogs from bad weather and providing them veterinary care when needed.

Opponents of the law insist that city folk don’t understand the livestock business and voted for the bill in ignorance. Some legislators regard the law as part of a plot masterminded by the Humane Society of the United States, a national group that provided $2 million for the Proposition B campaign. “The purpose of these groups is to keep us from eating any meat,” said Rep. Ed Schieffer, D-Troy.

It’s our understanding that Missouri breeders are raising dogs to be sold as pets, not food.

Given the depravity of some dog breeders, I wouldn’t be too sure.

Juan Cole and a guy writing for Foreign Policy say it’s game over, and Mubarak wins.