In a post about Wal-Mart signing on to an employer mandate for health insurance, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein says he was initially skeptical, but then read the joint letter between Wal-Mart, the Service Employees Union International, and the Center for American Progress, and pronounces himself convinced.

He notes, though, that Wal-Mart isn’t doing this for altruistic reasons, and in doing so Klein comes perilously close to grasping the concept of rent seeking and regulatory capture. But then he whiffs.

This isn’t, of course, a story of altruism. By being of use to the administration, Wal-Mart ensures that its concerns will be heard and heeded. By publicly associating itself with health reform, the company repairs some of the damage SEIU and others have done to its reputation in recent years. And, in a more macro sense, by throwing its weight behind strict cost controls, Wal-Mart makes it likelier that it gets the largest of all possible benefits: an eventual slowing in the double-time march of health-care costs.

Klein then almost stumbles onto the point again. But again it eludes him.

But health reform isn’t supposed to be about altruism. And that’s arguably the most important message of this letter. Reforming health reform [sic] isn’t just some liberal president’s agenda item. It’s good business.

Supporting new regulations is usually good business if your company is big enough to absorb compliance costs that could slow down or cripple your competitors. Even better if can you sign on early and win over a few influential opinion makers, interest groups, and politicians so you’ll have some pull over how the regulations are written.

Swimming pool in Key Largo.

….if Walmart had given, say, the Cato Institute somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million, after which Cato issued a joint letter with Walmart executives calling for the federal government to pass new policies that would hurt Walmart’s competitors, I’m pretty sure people like Matthew Yglesias would be calling Cato a bunch of corporate whores.

But this isn’t the Cato Institute we’re talking about. It’s Yglesias’ employer, the left-wing Center for the American Progress.

So you see, that means it’s all okay.

Can’t remember where I read it first, but someone who isn’t me once posited if the Bill of Rights were put to a vote (under a different name and slightly different wording, of course), it would probably lose in a landslide. Seems about right.

Aaron Rochester, a city councilman in Sioux City, Iowa, who led an effort to get pit bulls banned in the city is now appealing to prevent his own dog from being euthanized after it apparently bit a neighbor. His dog? A Labrador.

It’s just an anecdote, but it’s illustrative of the problems with breed-specific legislation. Bad owners create bad dogs, regardless of the dog’s lineage. Bans on pit bulls don’t prevent dog fighting, nor do they prevent people from raising vicious dogs. They just ensure that dogs fitting the pit bull description will be vicious, because the well-bred lines will be discontinued and good owners will stop raising them. Meanwhile, people who raise dogs for fighting will simply move on to another breed.

Moreover, the term pit bull isn’t really a breed at all. It’s a generic term that can and has been applied to just about any dog with bulldog and/or terrier traits (take the pit bull test here). The American Kennel Club-recognized breed that’s generally associated with the term is the American Staffordshire Terrier. And the vast, vast majority of staffies are harmless (they’re actually considered a child-friendly breed).

I hope Rochester’s dog isn’t put down, and instead sent to a trainer. But Rochester ought pay the approriate damages to his neighbor and perhaps take a couple of dog-rearing classes before he’s allowed to own another dog. Maybe he’ll even learn from all of this why specific breeds aren’t the problem.

….or better yet, is this a super clever marketing campaign by Firefox?

Argentina’s Patagonia.

More welcome skepticism of junk science in the court room.

Lawsuits filed in Victoria, Texas, allege that Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Pikett and his team of hounds — James Bond, Quincy and Clue — failed controversial sniff tests known as “scent lineups.”

Much like in traditional lineups, the dogs link human scents left at crime scenes to samples from suspects.

In each case, the suits allege, Pikett’s dogs called attention to the wrong person. Both former suspects have been cleared.

This part is fun:

Ken Sparks, county attorney in Colorado County, Texas, an enthusiastic supporter of Pikett’s work, says he understands some of the skepticism.

“Everybody who encounters it the first time says, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” Sparks says. “That’s what I said before I first saw it work.”

Pikett says the lawsuits are just attempts to win large awards. “It’s all about money,” he says.

One of the men wrongly identified by the police dog was jailed for three months before being exonerated by DNA testing. The greedy bastard actually thinks he should compensated for that.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about another police dog in Orlando whose “testimony” has come under fire.

…why FoxNews.com scaled down its opinion section, killing off my column and several others. They had to create room on the front page for the important stuff.

Beale Street, Memphis.

….there may be some unanticipated flaws in the monkey butler plan.

Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco.

Agitator pal Ryan Grim’s new book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America goes on sale today.

You, Agitator readers, are thanked in the acknowledgments, due to your editing suggestions when Ryan was guest blogging here last summer.

Here are a couple nice early reviews for the book.

And here’s Ryan’s Facebook page where he’ll be announcing upcoming events related to the book.

Momma mutt, Mississippi.

Sort of appropriate, I think:

…while the five-month old Obama White House Web site has drawn rave reviews for its fresh design and innovation, several experts say it has not moved the White House toward being “the most open and transparent [administration] in history,” as new media director Macon Phillips promised on day one.

Information is harder to find on the Obama Web site than it was on the site created and run by the Bush administration, according to Web site experts.

“It doesn’t seem to be quite in line with the notion of the pillars of government 2.0 being openness and transparency. It seems just the opposite,” said Mark Drapeau, a columnist for Federal Computer Week who writes frequently on the ways that new technologies can be used by the government…

“It’s lots of PR and not a lot of data,” said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, who called the site “brochureware.”

My favorite part:

One of the most noteworthy marks of the site has been its use as a distribution point, and showcase, for the thousands of exclusive photos taken by Mr. Obama’s personal photographers. The main page of Mr. Obama’s Web site revolves around a large window that rotates between four photos, which are often flattering portraits of the president.

The White House has also created a Flickr.com account on the privately run, commercial Web site, and has posted hundreds of photos of the president, often showing him behind the scenes of his official events or during his private moments.

“Once we got here and saw … what [chief White House photographer] Pete Souza and his team were producing it was a no-brainer to see how we could make that more accessible,” Mr. Phillips said.

Good to know they’re at least working hard to make flattering photographs of the president “more accessible” to the public. Who says Obama has dropped the ball on transparency?