The new guidelines threaten to turn the campus courts at some of our most august institutions into “kangaroo courts” that ignore basic rights of the accused, such as the right to confront accusers. Most disturbingly, universities are now commanded to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in adjudicating claims of sexual assault, including rape. The preponderance of the evidence standard is little more than a hunch, and is often described as a simple 50.01% probability of guilt.

Universities that do not adopt these new guidelines may be stripped of federal funding.

Read the whole thing here.

FIRE covers the story here.

If the father says anything about the mother in public, he could be sent to jail for contempt of court. The order isn’t limited to banning libelous statements (though I think even such a much narrower ban would itself pose constitutional problems, especially under Pennsylvania law), nor is it even limited to statements about minor children (though even that sort of order strikes me as constitutionally impermissible). Rather, the court order categorically orders the removal of a Web site, and prohibits all public statements — factually accurate or not — by one person about another person.

I guess in Pennsylvania the First Amendment doesn’t count for much anymore.

An archived version of the site that started it all can be found here.

High corporate and individual tax rates lead to high unemployment rates.  If you suggest reducing those tax rates to spur private-sector growth and lower unemployment, you will be accused of making the debt situation worse.  That wouldn’t be very intimidating if the national debt was low.  Why not lower those taxes and see if the resulting growth generated more net revenue at the lower rates?

But because the political class has made the national debt so high, it is able to insist that taking a chance on the power of liberty is an irresponsible gamble.  Because the government lives so far beyond its means, it would be irresponsible to provide it with reduced means.

This is how we have reached the madness of a moment when the national debt is used as an argument against spending reductions, or growth-oriented tax and regulatory policies.  The insane problem becomes a weapon against rational solutions.

Read the whole thing.

Finally, the FAA inspector looked at my random drug testing program to make sure that everything was in place. I’m subject to the same drug testing requirements as United Airlines. I am the drug testing coordinator for our company, so I am responsible for scheduling drug tests and surprising employees when it is their turn to be tested. As it happens, I’m also the only “safety-sensitive employee” subject to drug testing, so basically I’m responsible for periodically surprising myself with a random drug test. As a supervisor, I need to take training so that I can recognize when an employee is on drugs. But I’m also the only employee, so really this is training so that I can figure out if I myself am on drugs. As an employee, I need to take a second training course so that I learn about all of the ways that my employer might surprise me with a random drug test and find out about drug use. But I’m also the employer so really I’m learning about how I might trap myself.

Read the whole thing. H/T Walter Olson at the Cato Institute.

Think about your marriage, if you have one, and break it up by percentage.  (Yes, I’m a true romantic.)  Where do you get the value in your marriage?  What is important?

• Love -  Obviously, this is usually number one.
• Faith – Recognition by your church/faith is important to most, but not all.
• Family – Recognition by your family, important to some.
• Kids – Having the most stable unit possible to raise a family, important to many.
• Government – Having faceless bureaucrats hang on to paperwork acknowledging you got married for one or more of the other reasons. Important to….????

Who cares if the government recognizes your marriage?  I’m not talking about same-sex marriage–I’m talking about every marriage.  I take nothing of value from the fact that the government acknowledges I’m married (more on tax breaks in a second).  I don’t care what they think about it.  I care what my wife, family, kid(s), and church think about it.  I don’t care what my selectman thinks.

That’s why I support marriage equality in this form: the government should have no say in any of it for anybody.  I don’t need or want their approval to be perfectly honest.  I simply don’t care what they think of my love life.

And that, for me, seems to be a crucial issue in the gay marriage debate that no one wants to talk about. Why is it the government’s business at all who can or can’t get married? Marriage does confer certain legal benefits, but how does that translate as the ability of the government to determine what partners should be available to you? That should be determined by you, your partner, and whatever gods or religious rules you should adhere to — it is not the business of the state.

Because at it’s heart, most of the objection to same-sex marriage is religious in nature, and one person’s religious biases should not dictate who another person can marry.*

And since it is always brought up when gay marriage is discussed, yes, this applies to  polygamy as well. Polygamy has functioned through all of recorded history, and is practiced in many places in the world. I’m open to an argument that polygamy is not a good idea (I wouldn’t do it myself), but I haven’t heard any good reason to make it illegal other than “that’s not what good Christians do.” Come up with another argument, and I’ll listen.

* Prediction: most people who read this and disagree will respond with either an accusation that I am gay, or that I hate Jesus. I can’t see how such assumptions do anything but help prove my point that most opposition to gay marriage is based in religious bias (or outright anti-gay bigotry), and hence has no business in determining government policy.

Jenkins says those efficiency standards are clearly justified because the industry supports them and because they benefit consumers, who will save enough money on electricity to more than make up for higher bulb prices. Consumers, of course, have always been free to take advantage of this bargain, and the vast majority have not: According to the Energy Department (PDF), more than 80 percent of residential light sockets were still occupied by standard incandescent bulbs last year. Because consumers are too stupid to perceive the clear advantages of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), LED bulbs, halogen bulbs, or the new, extra-efficient incandescents, they must be forced to buy them. Is it surprising that manufacturers support a law that allows them to foist newer, more expensive products on customers who otherwise would pass them up?

Jenkins accuses Barton of misleading the public by “saying that bulbs meeting the new standards are cost prohibitive.” In fact, Jenkins says, “a Philips incandescent bulb that meets the new standards currently sells for $1.49, lasts about 50 percent longer than older incandescent bulbs, and saves consumers more than $3.00 in energy expenditures.” He presumably is referring to the Philips EcoVantage bulb. By his own account, it costs nearly five times as much as a standard 100-watt incandescent bulb, which can be had for 31 cents (in a $2.48 eight-pack) at Lowe’s. But I can’t find a vendor that sells the EcoVantage equivalent of that 31-cent bulb for less than $3 (in a $5.99 two-pack), almost 10 times as much.

This urge to force you to buy things you don’t want for your own, stupid, ignorant good really seems to be taking of in the government today. I guess they figured that if you need their guidance to buy health insurance, you’re probably too stupid to pick out your own light bulbs, either. After all, CFLs and LED lights are superior to incandescent bulbs in all respects, and if you were smart, you’d know that …

[T]he economies of both the United States and Canada moved in lockstep during the financial crisis, with unemployment at 6.1% in both countries in August 2008, and rising to around 8 percent in February 2009, when President Obama’s Keynesian trillion dollar stimulus bill was passed. U.S. unemployment then continued to shoot up to over 10%, and stayed above 9.5% for almost another year and a half, lately resuming its upward rise. But in Canada, unemployment peaked at 8.7% in September 2009, and has fallen since to 7.4% today, behaving more like the American economy used to, before Obama’s neo-socialist hope and change.

That is because instead of relying on Keynesian government spending, deficits and debt, Canada adopted instead the Reaganite supply-side economics of cutting tax rates and reducing regulatory cost burdens. While President Obama has maintained America’s corporate tax rate at nearly 40% counting state corporate rates, and gleefully proposes still more tax increases on American business, Canada cut their corporate rate to 16.5% this year, scheduled to fall to 15% next year. Lott reports, “By last year, Canada had the lowest overall tax rate on business investment of any major industrialized country.”

Read the whole thing here.

In a piece published Monday, self-proclaimed media watcher MediaMatters (MM) criticizes Fox News for runningthe supposedly “misleading headline”: “Cambridge, MA set to Pay Gay Employees More Than Straight.”  MediaMatters takes issue with Fox because the headline doesn’t explain that the reason for the measure is to compensate homosexuals for a tax that married couples don’t have to pay.

Of course, a headline is a hook, designed to draw readers in, not an explanation.  But Fox offered no such explanation — at least that’s what MM leads its readers to believe.  The attack dog writes that Fox “excerpted an article from The Daily Mail, which has a similarly misleading headline.  However, the Daily Mail article clearly explains that the city is offering gay employees a stipend to offset a federal tax that does not apply to straight employees.”  The Daily Mail “clearly explains” this, so, obviously, Fox doesn’t.

Except that it does.

Fox’s very first sentence is, “A Massachusetts city will start paying its gay employees a stipend so it can offset an unequal federal tax.”  In fact, Fox devotes five of the six sentences in its piece to this explanation.

This is what my father refers to as a “New York Times lie.”

But this is what the left does — if there isn’t anything with which to demonize their opponents, they either imply wrongdoing where there is none, or make stuff up. Without innuendo and ad hominem, they really don’t have much to fall back to.

I’m in an interesting place right now, working 50 hours a week and with little free time. But I’m also working nights, so a day off means a nightime of reading online material. So, I think I’m going to give some attention to this blog again.

I don’t anticipate a large amount of content — probably only a post or two a day, and maybe pre-written and scheduled posts at that. But I’ve been feeling the itch, so I’m going to give it a whirl.

For anyone who’s been checking, I have been regularly posting links to articles of interest at my Facebook page, and I will continue to do so for items I’m not blogging on. We’ll just see where it goes from here …