BACKFIRE: Editor of NY paper that published map of gun owners gets canned.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 94.

IT’S NOT “GOING ON OFFENSE,” IT’S STANDING UP FOR GENDER EQUALITY:

With increasing frequency, women are filing federal complaints against colleges accused of failing to address sexual assault. Heightened awareness of students’ rights and colleges’ obligations under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination, has led to a wave of protests.

Now, two men who left two different colleges after being accused of sexual assault have filed their own lawsuits alleging that administrators violated their due process by mishandling the investigations and campus judicial proceedings that led to their expulsion and withdrawal.

It’s an unusual (but not unprecedented) legal approach, utilizing a federal statute designed to protect the people who historically have been victimized by institutional discrimination. To make a successful case under Title IX, the men must demonstrate that they were discriminated against based on their status as males.

Lawyers and Title IX experts say that’s unlikely.

Really? I’d like to see how colleges treat complaints about female behavior, whether they make clear that such complaints are welcome, whether their training is gender-neutral, and a lot more before I reached that conclusion. I suspect that it would be easy to prove that these programs are based on outdated stereotypes of men as predators, stereotypes that aren’t supported by research.

#NARRATIVEFAIL: Carnegie Mellon research shows cellphone use may not cause more car crashes. It’s more about control than about safety.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on bestselling multitools. The itty-bitty SwissTech keychain tool made me a hero the other day when I was able to fix the Insta-Daughter’s broken purse strap with it. Mall expedition saved!

Also, today only: Save up to 77% on Thousands of Kindle Books for Students.

PUBLIC SECTOR STORIES: Mission Creep at the L.A. Fire Department: The LAFD has become a huge mobile health clinic. And that’s simply unsustainable. “LAFD gets absurd requests — like help finding the lost remote control. And it gets hundreds of calls, every single day, just for a lift to the hospital. Almost unnoticed, these often lower-level calls now all but define LAFD’s reason for being.”

CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: A Writer’s Workout.

RADLEY BALKO: We Need A Whistleblower Prize. “This Washington Post piece looking at what has happened to several notable government whistleblowers is sobering. . . . It needn’t even be something as dire as national security. I’ve seen and reported on countless law enforcement officers whose careers were cut short (or worse) when they reported wrongdoing by other cops, or more systemic problems within their police agencies. It seems to me that we’re asking an awful lot of whistleblowers. We’re hoping their sense of right and wrong and devotion to public service will compel them to come forward even if that likely means an end to their career in public service — at best. If we really value whistleblowers, we need to provide them with a bit more incentive. And it needs to come from the private sector. The government certainly isn’t going to reward them for exposing government malfeasance, President Obama’s campaign promises notwithstanding.”

To be fair, most of President Obama’s campaign promises seem to be “notwithstanding” these days.

THOUGHTS ON the Five-Year Anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Fixing The Mandate From Hell. “I’m kind of surprised to hear a lot of liberals agree that the 30-hour rule is bad policy, and even more surprised to hear that it would be easy to repeal or reform. In fact, while I opposed the law, I find it easy to see why they designed an employer mandate for all employers who worked more than 30 hours, and difficult to imagine how it could be reformed. Let’s start with the reason for the employer mandate — two reasons, actually. The first is that President Barack Obama promised that if you like your insurance, you’ll be able to keep it, and while this was not true, they wanted it to be at least kinda true. . . . This isn’t just politically hard; it’s actually hard. There isn’t a lot of money to go around right now, and weak labor markets are going to magnify the cost of whatever decision you make. There haven’t been any easy solutions in health care for decades now, and the 30-hour rule is no exception.”

PRIVACY: Lavabit’s Ladar Levison: ‘If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It.’

JAZZ SHAW: Matthew Whitaker And The Redefinition Of Racism.

POLITICKING ON THE TAXPAYER’S DIME: UCSB adviser found using school equipment to promote political causes.

MARK STEYN: Know Thine Enemy: Major Hasan is honest about himself; why aren’t we?

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”

It’s almost enough to make you lose faith in the powers-that-be.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Disconnected: Feds award money to establish broadband for area already online.

HEH: Man who created own credit card sues bank for not sticking to terms. So is this a “battle of the forms” situation? Do they have that in Russia?

A REVIEW, in Slate, of Clark Howard’s new book, Clark Howard’s Living Large for the Long Haul.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: National Assessment of Educational Progress ‘Indefinitely Postpones’ Tests of U.S. History and Civics.

The removal of the requirement is a one-two punch: It robs historical-literacy advocates of valuable evidence for our case at the same time that it signals to teachers and administrators that history and civics are just not taken seriously. Almost certainly, this will cause civic and historical education to decay even further than it has.

And that will hurt colleges, too. Already, college graduates demonstrate remarkable ignorance of U.S. history and government. Without up-to-date information on high school graduates’ civic illiteracy, it will be increasingly hard to convince the more than 80 percent of colleges and universities that do not require U.S. history or government to change their ways.

The less they know about U.S. history & government, the less appalled they’ll be by recent departures. Bug/feature?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ten Myths About Summer Weather. The notion that any tan is bad, however, omits the importance of Vitamin D.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: True Story: I’m Delaying Going To College.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

AT AMAZON, back-to-school deals in Camera, Photo & Video.

Also, markdowns in Mowers & Outdoor Power.

FASTER, PLEASE: A unique class of RNA drugs could bring new treatments to cancer and other diseases.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Number of Taxpayers Who Renounced U.S. Citizenship Hits Record High.

MESHNET ACTIVISTS rebuilding the Internet from scratch.