Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Obama administration paves way for false sexual harassment charges

Famous conservative professor Mike Adams explains the problem at Townhall.

Excerpt:

[T]he Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced new guidelines that will force due process to take a back seat to political correctness. These guidelines will apply to sexual harassment and felony sexual assault cases.

[…]According to the new OCR guidelines, any college that accepts federal funding or federal student loans (close to 100% of our nation’s colleges) must now employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. This lowered standard replaces the traditionally accepted standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which, according to most triers of fact, is close to 100% confidence of guilt. In contrast, “preponderance of evidence” means the campus judiciary only needs to be 50.01% confident that a person is guilty of a given offense – even if that offense is rape, which, regardless of degree, is always a serious felony.

This mandate from the federal government will have profound real-life costs for real students. If we learned anything from the infamous Duke Lacrosse case it is this: Academia is quick to blame people for creating a “rape culture” on campus and slow to take responsibility for false accusations.

Unfortunately, Duke was not an isolated case. At Stanford, student jurors in sexual misconduct cases are actually given “training materials” that say things like, “Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence” and “An abuser almost never ‘seems like the type.'”

In other words, even highly respected universities like Stanford try to create unfair and partial juries prior to rape adjudications – in clear violation of the spirit of the 6th Amendment (Do you remember when liberals cared about the “spirit of the law”?). Adding a mere “preponderance” standard to such a toxic environment would be a recipe for disaster – disaster in the form of wrongful felony convictions.

The OCR mandates are not merely confined to actions. They apply to students’ speech, too. Columbia University already lists “love letters” as a form of sexual harassment. The University of California, Santa Cruz, classifies using “terms of endearment” as sexual harassment. (Who could have ever imagined that one could be endeared and harassed at the same time?). At Yale, “unspoken sexual innuendo such as voice inflection” is considered sexual harassment. The absurdities are seemingly endless in 21st Century “hire” education.

Studies have shown that the number of false rape accusations is near 50%.

Here’s a Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy.

Excerpt:

“Forty-one percent of all reports are false.”

This claim comes from a study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Although Kanin offers solid research, I would need to see more studies with different populations before accepting the figure of 50 percent as prevalent; to me, the figure seems high.

But even a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

If you would like to get an idea of how false rape accusations are handled by the police, here is an example. Here’s a very recent example.

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The failed prediction that the mainstream media isn’t covering

From Powerline Blog.

Excerpt:

I have been puzzled by the extent of the media coverage of some crank’s prediction that the world would come to an end today. People are always predicting the end of the world. So far they have always been wrong. Was there something about this particular prediction that was newsworthy? Did any significant number of people expect to wake up this morning and see graves opening and people ascending into Heaven? This morning, there were news stories to the effect that the world still exists. Really! Did reporters expect their readers to be surprised? Why, in short, was this silliness a major media event?

I wish reporters would pay as much attention to a more important failed prediction: the Obama administration’s assurance that its policies, including the “stimulus,” would foster job creation and prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent.

And here are some charts from John’s post.

Community organizer Obama predicted that his $800 billion dollar stimulus program would keep unemployment below 8%:

Stimulus Job Creation Prediction
Stimulus Job Creation Prediction

Ooops! Never send a community organizer to do an economist’s job.

How about all that spending? Surely ALL the spending must have created more jobs?

Government Spending Vs Jobs
Government Spending Vs Jobs

Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute links to a new study by two economics professors that shows that 550,000 jobs were LOST because of the stimulus bill.

This should be the end of the belief that government spending creates jobs, but it won’t be, because the university is not committed to teaching what gets results, but what produces feelings of superiority. The secular elites feel that they should be allowed to redistribute the wealth created by businesses and workers. This feeling of entitlement to control and distribute is best put into practice with large-scale taxation, spending and redistribution of wealth. The professors think that their good feelings (subjective) will somehow, mysteriously, cause good effects in the real world (objective). The chart proves their mysticism wrong, but the university is insulated from feedback from the real world.

That is why we need to elect business owners like Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain.

If Obamacare is so great, then why do so many Democrats get waivers?

Investors Business Daily reports on who is getting exemptions from Obamacare.

Excerpt:

It’s bad enough that the administration has granted another 204 ObamaCare waivers. But even worse is that nearly one in five went to employers in the district of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, House architect of the bill.

It was Pelosi who said Congress had to pass the Democrats’ health care overhaul so the country could find out what’s in it.

Seems that quite a few businesses in her backyard found out what is in it and decided they didn’t like it.

According to the Daily Caller, 204 waivers for a provision of ObamaCare were approved last month — bringing the total waiver count to 1,372. Out of that April number, 38 of the waivers “are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in” the Democrat’s hard-left San Francisco district.

The waivers, which the administration began granting only months after the bill was passed and signed, let employers avoid terms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that require health care insurance plans to carry at least $750,000 in benefits before being exhausted.

This requirement, found in the thousands of pages that make up the ObamaCare bill, is too costly for many businesses that can afford to provide health coverage only through less comprehensive plans.

The owner of Tru Spa, one of the San Francisco businesses granted a waiver, told the Daily Caller both ObamaCare and new local laws have “devastated” businesses in the region.

The employers that were granted waivers in Pelosi’s district include Boboquivari’s, a restaurant that, reports the Daily Caller, “advertises $59 porterhouse steaks, $39 filet mignons and $35 crab dinners.”

“Then, there’s Cafe des Amis, which describes its eating experience as ‘a timeless Parisian style brasserie,’ which is ‘located on one of San Francisco’s premier shopping and strolling boulevards.'”

Also among the 38 are the four-star hotel Campton Place and the self-proclaimed four-diamond Hotel Nikko.

While Pelosi’s constituents are being protected from her party’s health care wreckage, another Democratic constituency is being taken care of, as well.

A coalition of groups operating under the name wheresmywaiver.com says that “50.26% of waiver beneficiaries are unionized, despite union workers only making up 11.9% of the workforce.”

The Service Employees International Union, whose former President Andy Stern was one of the most frequent White House visitors before he was named to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, has been well-represented on the waiver list.

So have the teacher unions.

Organized labor, of course, is a heavy donor to Democratic candidates and was among the groups that pressed hard for Congress and the president to ram ObamaCare through the legislature and into Americans’ lives.

If ObamaCare is so vital to our national well-being, why are these unions and employers in a heavily Democratic district seeking relief from the burdens it imposes?

And why would Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose brilliant thought process led him to say “the bill and I are one,” ask for a waiver for his hometown of New York City?

This is what happens when the government takes money out of the private sector and lets politicians spend it. Especially left-wing politicians who are not inclined to cut taxes and reduce regulations.

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