People are dumb. If you need proof, you can read the emails posted below that Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh received after Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Rush Limbaugh took a poke at her law aimed at protecting raccoons.

If you need a primer about this whole mess,  WTOP’s Mark Segraves has done an epic fact check of Cuccinelli’s complaints about Cheh’s law. Two key points:  the law doesn’t require exterminators to capture rat families and dump them in Virginia as Cuccinelli and Limbaugh have said; but there are some exterminators who find the new law onerous.

LL has always maintained that Cheh’s law, to borrow an overused political metaphor, was a solution in search of a problem. Were District varmints being so mistreated that they needed protections from the government? Extremely doubtful.

That being said, bad laws don’t excuse the kind of garbage that’s been dumped in Cheh’s lap. A sample, released from Cheh’s office:

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Photo by Darrow Montgomery