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I check Drudge Report regularly, because it’s an efficient way to learn about important news stories. I’m not thrilled with his choices at times in terms of freak-show stories, or hyperbolic headlines, but overall I find his site valuable.

I was not pleased at his choice of stories to kick off 2011, however. In particular, he placed at the top of the page, on New Year’s Day, this story, announcing the fact that 725 new laws go into effect in California this year, and briefly describing some of them. (Note that I could not even bring myself to read the article until today. I gather that Drudge lives somewhere in the east, so perhaps he was unaware of the demoralizing effect his headline would have on us Californians. Or maybe he’s a sadist.) Here are a few of the worst pieces of legislation, taken from the article:

AB 119 prevents insurance companies from charging different rates for men and women for identical coverage.

In other words, California is adding insult to injury — i.e., Obamacare — and doing its part to make sure insurance companies cannot profitably do business in our state. If we had a free market in health insurance (hey, a girl can fantasize), the insurance rates for men and women would depend on how much it actually costs to provide health care to each. California politicians have decided that men must subsidize women and, in the process, everyone must pay the extra cost of ensuring compliance with yet another piece of legislation.

SB 782 prevents landlords from evicting tenants who are victims of domestic or sexual abuse or stalking.

Can’t pay your rent this month? Just tell your landlord that you are the victim of domestic or sexual abuse or stalking. I wonder what genius decided that landlords should not only be good property managers, but also savvy social workers.

SB 1317 allows the state to slap parents with a $2,000 fine if their K-8 child misses more than 10 percent of the school year without a valid excuse. It also allows the state to punish parents with up to a year in prison for the misdemeanor.

We want to make sure your kids are properly indoctrinated and conditioned to obey authority. I wonder what constitutes a “valid” excuse and who gets to decide. Probably a new bureaucracy will be necessary. Your tax dollars at work!

Speaking of obeying authority, a Facebook friend of mine recently shared a link to a video by a teen band that calls themselves “X-TReMe PoWeR.” The song was called “Respect & Obey Authority,” and, while the “band” has now closed down their YouTube account, so that the link to the video no longer works, the description of the video has been preserved for all eternity on my friend’s Facebook page: “This is West Coast Believers Kid’s band called X-TReMe PoWeR. It was our second song and we made up the lyrics and put it all together through garage band. It’s all about respecting and obeying your teachers, your parents, and Jesus! Hope you like this one too!”

Yes, I watched the video — the entire video — so I can vouch for the fact that it existed and was just as described above. Worse, in fact. And if you don’t believe me, I refer you to this “visual review” over at Salon.com. Those kids obviously were not missing too much school.

UPDATE: I managed to find the video! Someone I guess downloaded it and reposted in on YouTube. See it here, before this one’s taken down, too.

AB 715 makes a change to the California Green Building Standards code. The change will require new California buildings to be energy efficient.

Because we don’t need any stinking new buildings in California anyway. We like the old ones just fine, and we don’t mind if we drive even more business out of the state, either.

AB 97 bans the use of trans-fats in food facilities.

Ha! We beat New York! In New York the trans-fat ban applied to a mere city. We got the ENTIRE STATE bending to our politicians’ culinary dictates.

There is one piece of legislation that appears to be a step in the right direction (towards more freedom):

SB 1449 makes the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana an infraction with a penalty of a $100 fine.

No more going to jail for possessing small amounts of marijuana. It’s the least the politicians could do, because, between all the new legislation, plus the fact that we are now going to have Gerry Brown as our governor, marijuana could come in handy to ease Californians’ pain. That or a stiff drink.

Will 2011 be the year of the lawyer? Unfortunately, I think it will be, because I think the year, at least politically, will be a year filled with two things: regulation and litigation.

Regulation, because, as we’ve already seen with the FCC’s “Net Neutrality” power grab, when the Obama Administration is not able to achieve what it wants via legislation (and it should NOT be able to do that this year), it will try and do so via regulation. And of course, regulation means lawyers getting more work for two reasons (1) the poor companies who operate under the regulations need lawyers to untangle all the vague and often contradictory legalese; (2) those companies, and others interested in protecting individual rights, will need lawyers to fight the regulations in the courts.

Litigation will be needed not only to fight the regulations, but also to try and undo some of the damage done during Obama’s first two years in office. While the Republicans will (they better!!) do their best to repeal some of the behemoth legislation that was rammed down Americans’ throats in 2010, particularly Obamacare, does anyone seriously think Obama will sign any of those repeal bills, even if they are able to be passed in the Senate? I don’t. So that means more work for lawyers!

Disclaimer: Yes, I happen to be a lawyer. But don’t think I’m glad about all this lawyerly activity in 2011, except in the sense that things could be worse: Obama could still be holding a blank check on Americans’ lives and fortunes, as he has for the last two years. Also, I will likely get to see lawyers fighting the good fight this year, which is really why any good lawyer gets into this business in the first place.

Which reminds me: as an academic lawyer, I have some more grading to do…

Happy New Year all!

Some of my dog-loving friends were disappointed or angry when they heard that President Obama called the Philadelphia Eagles’ owner and commended him for giving Michael Vick — who was convicted of running a dog fighting ring — a “second chance.” The more liberal among them might be, as Obama reportedly is, “passionate about the fact that it’s rarely a level playing field for prisoners once they leave jail.” Still, they thought that Obama, if he wanted to take a stand on this issue, should have chosen pretty much anyone other than Vick about whom to comment. I believe that Obama’s actions in this matter are perfectly consistent with all the other nihilist things he has done since taking office.

Quick disclaimer: while I love dogs, I still think that, in a proper legal system, they would be considered to be (very valuable) property. My preferred disposition of Michael Vick, therefore, would be to convict him of whatever property/fraud crimes I could (how did he get people to sell/give him the dogs he got anyway?) and, once he was punished for those crimes, I would simply encourage people to ostracize and boycott him for the rest of his life. Training dogs to kill each other and otherwise killing them off the way he and his associates did is disgusting and unforgivable. The idea that he has “done his time” and therefore has magically erased the terrible things he has done, is absurd.

So, why is this action of Obama’s a nihilist action? Because he is attempting, via his endorsement, to elevate Vick and other ex-cons to a position of being on a “level playing field” with everyone else. He wants Vick to be given the same chance as someone who hasn’t done the horrible things Vick has done, and is thereby devaluing all the honest, hard-working people who deserve a chance at fame and fortune. He is also saying, by implication, that it isn’t that important whether someone treats innocent animals well.

That Obama is able so readily to brush aside the atrocities committed by Vick, simply in order to advance his egalitarian viewpoint, should be a wake-up call for anyone who hasn’t already gotten the message implicit in his prior nihilist actions: continuing and expanding Bush’s bail-outs of failed businesses (thereby hurting those who have made good business decisions and have thrived); encouraging a monetary policy, “quantitative easing” (a.k.a. printing a bunch of money), that promises to devalue the dollar and thereby destroy the value of Americans’ savings; placing more shackles on our health care industry (thereby threatening to destroy the best health care the world has to offer); attempting to do the same thing (via administrative regulation) to our Internet access; and, of course, apologizing for and failing to defend America and its way of life to others around the world.

Had enough yet?

[Update: This morning, I learned that Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator, said on Fox News that Michael Vick should have been executed! Boycotted and ostracized for the rest of his life, yes. Executed? No. Animals don’t have rights, so as much as many of us love them, they are property.]