Carl Mitz is a third-generation horseman.  The Texan is widely known as one of the nation’s best horse dentists.  He’s treated the teeth of over 100,000 horses and has clients in over 30 states.

But Texas bureaucrats tried for years to shut him down.

In a classic case of economic protectionism, Carl and all other Texas equine dentists were told they had to spend up to $100,000 and four years at veterinary school, where they would learn next to nothing about caring for horses’ teeth, or else abandon their occupation.  To top it off, they were threatened with massive fines and even jail.

Instead of giving up his American Dream, Carl teamed up with other Texas horsemen and the Institute for Justice to fight for their right to earn an honest living.

And this week, they won.

On Tuesday, a Texas judge struck down the effort by the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners to put equine dentists like Carl—known as floaters—out of business and leave the state’s approximately one million horses without proper dental care.

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The Germans have a word called Schadenfreude, which roughly translates into taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.  It’s the feeling most of us had when we read about Paris Hilton’s latest arrest.

Usually you feel a little guilty, but sometimes life brings an example that’s so crazy it becomes almost funny.  In other words, you get Free Press.  This is the Professional Left group founded by the avowed socialist Robert McChesney around the time he called the United States “by any honest account, the leading terrorist institution in the world today.”

This week, Free Press became so hysterical as to be almost unhinged, acting like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.  The organization launched a full-throated “shock and awe” broadside to get the FCC to begin regulating “neutrality” over the Internet.   Along with fellow liberal travelers at Public Knowledge, Free Press posted scathing attacks suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski had become a tool of corporate interests and a “toothless bureaucrat.”

As enjoyable as it is to watch these guys work themselves into a frenzy on Net neutrality, it’s even more fun to admire the irony: Free Press is pushing exactly the kind of Executive Branch power-grab that liberals scorned loudly during the Bush years!

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This week, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, South Africa’s tourism minister, was nominated to head the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC). Van Schalkwyk is a former apartheid operative who bartered his way into the black majority government by helping it smear its democratic opposition. He is a statist bureaucrat who is one of the most unpopular political figures in the new South Africa. He is just right for the job.

There is no one better to put in charge of the entire political enterprise of climate change as it is collapsing amidst failed negotiations and accusations of fraud. Van Schalkwyk will be sure to hasten the end. He did the same when he took over the rump of South Africa’s National Party, the party of apartheid, and led it to crushing defeat. He gave up and joined the African National Congress (ANC) government in return for his ministry.

That was bad news for South Africans, as Van Schalkwyk encouraged other politicians to defect from the country’s leading opposition parties to join the corrupt and hegemonic  ANC. (An angry public began referring to those who crossed the floor for political favors as “crosstitutes.”) But it is good news for critics of the UN climate change bureaucracy, who now have a target who personifies everything there is to dislike about the system.

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