MAY/DECEMBER? ISN’T THIS MORE LIKE AUGUST/DECEMBER? Richard Gere And Padma Lakshmi’s May-December Romance Still Going Strong! “The 64-year-old Richard and 43-year-old Padma were spotted on a romantical dinner date in New Jersey and according to a source, the pair looked quite cozy.” Or maybe September/December? I mean if she were 23 it would be a May/December.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Best Way to Brush Your Teeth? Experts Disagree.

SARAH HOYT’S NEW SHORT STORY COLLECTION, Crawling Between Heaven And Earth, is 99 cents on Kindle for a limited time. How can you say no?

UPDATE: Sarah emails that her book goes on sale tomorrow — just say no until then!

ROBOTS VS. JOBS since 2009.

HOW ISRAEL’S IRON DOME is changing warfare.

UPDATE: Popular Mechanics emails that the story was posted prematurely to their Website, and is now offline. Watch for a relink when it goes live (for real) at PM.

GEORGE WILL: From cupcakes to the police, fed up with government. “By printing and borrowing money, government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual competence. . . . The collapse of confidence in government is not primarily because many conspicuous leaders are conspicuously dimwitted, although when Joe Biden refers to ‘the nation of Africa,’ or Harry Reid disparages the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision as rendered by ‘five white men’ (who included Clarence Thomas), Americans understand that their increasingly ludicrous government lacks adult supervision. What they might not understand is that Reids and Bidens come with government so bereft of restraint and so disoriented by delusions of grandeur that it gives fighting knives to police and grief to purveyors of noncompliant cupcakes.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 469.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Obama’s War Of Choice Yields Chaos In Libya.

ANNALS OF REGULATION: The FDA’s Mad Medicine.

My first thought while reading the article was that this is outrageous judicial overreach in a state that has historically been somewhat known for being friendly to plaintiffs. It is, I thought, just allowing plaintiffs to go in search of the deepest pockets in the hopes of getting the largest possible recovery.

Then I read further. And it turns out that generic manufacturers are not allowed to put warning labels on drugs unless those warnings are also in the warning label for the original brand-name drug. That’s when I realized that this was a classic case of outrageous regulatory incompetence. Oblivious bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration created a ridiculous situation in which Pfizer can be sued for a product it didn’t make.

Then I read further. And it turns out that the FDA has proposed a new rule that would allow generic-drug manufacturers to add labeling to their products independently. And guess who’s blocking it?

The generic drug manufacturers, of course. They’ve got a pretty sweet deal right now: They get the profits, while the folks who actually did all that expensive research to develop the drug bear a lot of the liability. They’re in no hurry to have that change.

Remember: Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together. Like protect well-funded cronies at the expense of the public interest.

EXCEPT THAT THIS TIME THE MUSIC SUCKS: Roger Kimball: A Sixties Time Warp.

STEPHEN GREEN: Wargaming November: Incumbents versus angry voters—who wins?

THE ATLANTIC: How The US Failed James Foley. The response to Foley’s beheading should have been a MOAB dropped on an ISIS-held town.

AT AMAZON, Outlet Deals in Electronics.

Also, Warehouse Deals in Home Improvement.

TRIFECTA: Bill Whittle, Stephen Green & Scott Ott On The Perry Indictment.

ASHE SCHOW: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and the cost of sexual assault on college campuses.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., one of the co-sponsors of a Senate bill targeting campus sexual assault, tweeted out an article Tuesday that defended her bill, writing that she agreed with the author that the cost of campus sexual assaults outweighs any cost included in implementing the bill.

Gillibrand’s Campus Safety and Accountability Act would fine universities up to 1 percent of their operating budgets if they do not comply with the legislation, which requires them to provide training for campus employees who handle sexual assault claims, among other things. . . .

“Talking about money misses the point,” Zhang wrote. “The goal of CASA isn’t to fine universities. It’s to incentivize compliance. By investing in the resources now, universities create a safer educational environment for current and prospective students.”

What Zhang misses is the fact that since CASA only focuses on accusers, the probability that colleges and universities will see more lawsuits from accused students will outweigh the cost of the bill and possibly even the penalty for noncompliance. Already there are more than 30 young men across the country suing their universities for what they claim was a denial of due process, and if CASA passes, putting more pressure on universities to convict, that number could increase dramatically.

Zhang also tries to shame the U.S. by comparing the debunked “1-in-5 women will be sexually assaulted during their time in college” statistic to the global problem of violence against women. Except that 20 percent of college women have not been victims of sexual violence, so Zhang, and other CASA supporters, are trying to make the U.S. look as hostile toward women as countries like Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t even allowed to drive, or Pakistan, where “honor killings” are prevalent.

For her part, Gillibrand still has not answered questions about the lack of due process guarantees in CASA. Her spokesman, Glenn Kaplan, did reach out to the Washington Examiner to discuss the bill, but wouldn’t answer the questions provided to him as other senators’ offices had done.

This is really just war-on-women agitprop, but I’d love to see folks on the right run with it and do ads warning women not to attend college because it’s too dangerous, with lots of quotes from Dems saying one in five college women is sexually assaulted.

PRESIDENT PERFUNCTORY: The Hill: Obama returns to golf course after condemning ISIS.

UPDATE:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Survey: Grads Give High Marks to Law Schools for Professors, Training & ROI, But Not Job Placement.

WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY COMPLAIN OF SEXISM, Ann Althouse is unimpressed. “How terrible is it to want to secretly say to them: Lighten up?”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Student Writes English Assignment About Killing Neighbor’s Pet Dinosaur. And then:

Investigators say the teacher contacted school officials after seeing the message containing the words “gun” and “take care of business,” and police were then notified on Tuesday.

Summerville police officials say Stone’s bookbag and locker were searched on Tuesday, and a gun was not found.

To be thorough, they should have searched the neighbor’s yard for a dead Triceratops, too. Everyone involved in this tragedy should be flogged naked through the streets, then put in the stocks wearing a dunce cap.

WAIT, I THOUGHT THAT KIND OF LANGUAGE WAS RACIST: FBI director calls Islamic terror group behind journalist slaying ‘savages.’

LIFE IN OBAMA’S POST-RACIAL AMERICA: Race-based hate crimes spike in D.C.; whites most common victims, but underreporting feared.

WILL BAUDE: Is there any good argument against the right to record the cops?

JOHN HINDERAKER: “In recent months, Barack Obama has crossed an important threshold. He has always shown contempt for his opponents; now he shows contempt for his supporters. He has quit pretending to be a leader, and more or less quit pretending to be a president. On the right and the center, he has become a joke.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Thousands of armed rebels flood Yemen capital.