Americans sure are accommodating:

Dani Moore uses a rat perched on her shoulder as a service animal to alert her to spasms from a disabling condition. Daniel Greene’s service animal is a snake wrapped around his neck to help him predict epileptic seizures.

But these creatures and many others are no longer acceptable as service animals under new federal guidelines issued March 15 by the U.S. Department of Justice for the Americans with Disabilities Act. The new recommendations limit service animals to dogs and housebroken miniature horses.

The new guidelines are not binding to states, municipalities and other agencies, which are free to adopt the policy or to make their own. But individuals who rely on other types of animals to help them manage physical disabilities and conditions are worried.

The law used to say a service animal could be any animal trained to do a task for an individual, said Don Brandon, director of the Northwest Americans with Disabilities Act Center in Seattle. The new policy allowing only dogs and the miniature horses “excludes automatically yard animals, rodents, spiders, snakes, monkeys and cats,” Brandon said.

Nick Cohen in StandPoint:

…The BBC’s Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan. In journalistic language, it is showing they had committed the greatest blunder a reporter can commit: they missed the story. They thought that the problems of the Middle East were at root the fault of democratic Israel or more broadly the democratic West. They did not see and did not want to see that while Israelis are certainly the Palestinians’ problem — and vice versa — the problem of the subject millions of the Arab world was the tyranny, cruelty, corruption and inequality the Arab dictators enforced.

Put this starkly, it sounds as if the charges of double standards and anti-Semitism habitually directed at liberal Westerners are justified. But liberal prejudice — “anti-liberal prejudice” is a more accurate description — is a process as well as an ideology. Dictatorial states and movements shepherded liberal opinion into a one-way street by exploiting the logistics of news-gathering.

No news organisation in the West could base their main Middle Eastern bureau anywhere other than Israel, for the simple reason that it was the only free country with a free press, an independent judiciary and a constitution.

Researchers and diplomats, as well as reporters, could phone or visit Palestinians in the occupied territories, as indeed could anyone else. Crucially, in an age dominated by images, television crews could get pictures. I am not saying that the authorities do not harass foreign or Israeli correspondents trying to report the undoubted violations of Palestinian rights, simply that they can report from Jerusalem but cannot from Damascus or Riyadh.

Deroy Murdoch

A newly elected governor just persuaded his dysfunctional state legislature to close a multi-billion-dollar deficit, keep taxes in check, and limit annual Medicaid spending. Surely, these must be the misdeeds of stone-hearted Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s GOP chief executive, or that ax-wielding alumnus of the Gingrich Congress, Governor John Kasich (R., Ohio).

Actually, these and other reforms are the handiwork of none other than Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democratic governor. This son of liberal icon and former New York governor Mario Cuomo was President Clinton’s Housing secretary and once belonged by marriage to the Kennedy family.

Despite these sterling liberal credentials, Cuomo’s performance thus far has advanced the cause of limited government in the Empire State far more than did his past three predecessors — the hapless David Paterson, the pantsless Elliott Spitzer, and the clueless Republican, George Elmer Pataki.

“You can’t spend more money than you make,” Cuomo said on February 5, setting a tone for his administration. “There are only two groups of people who don’t understand this. No. 1 is the leadership of the New York State legislature. No. 2 are my daughters.”

Cuomo subsequently lived up to those encouraging words:

•Cuomo ignored the bellyaching of left-wing class warriors and demanded the expiration of a so-called “millionaire’s tax” that boosted the 6.85 percent income-tax rate to 7.85 percent for singles earning as little as $200,000 and 8.97 percent for those making at least $500,000.

“The old way of solving the problem was continuing to raise taxes on people, and we just can’t do that anymore,” Cuomo told the New York Post. “The answer is going to have to be that we’re going to have to reduce government spending.”

•And reduce spending Cuomo did. His $132.5 billion budget is $3.4 billion lower than last year’s, an honest 2.5 percent cut.

•Cuomo killed the spending formulae that were “marbleized throughout New York State laws,” as he put it. They automatically boosted annual Medicaid and education expenditures, demanding 13 percent hikes in those programs this year. Instead, Cuomo got Democrats and even the hospital-workers union to accept a 4 percent yearly spending cap on Medicaid and education.

•Scrapping these formulae cut this year’s deficit by $10 billion and next year’s by $13 billion, and set spending growth on a flatter trajectory.

•Cuomo secured permission to cut state agencies by 20 percent, close up to six prisons, and merge the state banking and finance departments, among other agencies.

•The budget lets Cuomo squeeze $450 million in concessions from unions. If they balk, he may sack 10,000 government workers.

•Cuomo’s proposed ceiling on medical-malpractice awards perished in negotiations, as did his wish for a 2 percent cap on property-tax hikes. Still, he accomplished all of this without increasing state borrowing.

The New York Post reacted with a two-word headline: “PIGS FLY.”

The slut woman who accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape five years ago was arrested Sunday, suspected of stabbing her boyfriend, police said.

Officers responding to a call early Sunday about a stabbing at an apartment in Durham, North Carolina, found a 46-year-old man who had been stabbed in the torso, police said. He was taken to Duke University Hospital for treatment of serious injuries.

Officers later arrested the man’s girlfriend, Crystal Mangum, 32, at a nearby apartment. She was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, police said.

…In March 2006, Mangum claimed to have been sexually assaulted by three players on the Duke lacrosse team while performing as a stripper for a team party.

North Carolina’s attorney general later found no credible evidence that the attacks ever occurred and the charges were dropped.

The scandal, however, forced the cancellation of the men’s lacrosse season that year and the resignation of team coach Mike Pressler. It also led to widespread criticism of Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was later disbarred for his handling of the case.

The scandal did not force anything.

Reverse racism by the university was the cause of the cancellation and the resignation of the coach.