Sen. Orin Hatch sets his sights on the very important task of . . . changing the BCS.

I wrote a piece on why Congress should butt out for ESPN a few months ago.

Dunkin’s hosting a competition. Here’s mine: Pumpkin cake with pistachio cream filling, maple frosting, and milk chocolate shavings.

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

My rankings for tonight:

Adam Lambert: In terms of sheer talent and artistry, the guy’s miles ahead of everyone else. I still don’t think he’ll win, though. He’s too weird for the Idol crowd. Maybe this sounds weird, but with the goth vibe and the theatrics, he sorta’ reminds me of a male Dita Von Teese.

Matt Giraud: With Allison Iraheta, my favorite right now. The guy has ridiculous soul. Probably his best performance of the competition. And yeah, Marvin is exactly the kind of stuff he needs to be singing every week.

Allison Iraheta: Can’t believe she almost went home last week. Maybe it’s best if she bows out soon, though. Everyone knows she can sing. Go home soon, and she could cut an edgy album that isn’t Idol mush.

Kris Allen: I’m still not a fan, but he was nearly flawless this week. Have to give him some credit. And he’ll get voted much, much higher than where I’d put him.

Anoop Desai: Another nice performance tonight. I had written him off, but the guy’s got a voice. I do think, however, that it would be a mistake for him to take the judges’ advice and go upbeat next week. He got himself back into this with ballads. He should stick with them.

Danny Gokey: I still think he’s the favorite. He’s likeable, he can wail, and he isn’t threatening in the way Adam Lambert is. He was good tonight. Probably didn’t help or hurt himself.

Lil’ Rounds: Motown should’ve been her chance to move to the front of the pack. She was just okay. I think one change would have made the whole thing much better: Save for the last time, each time she sang the word “heatwave,” she went low. She should’ve gone high. It would have made a huge difference. The judges are probably right that the song needed to slow down a bit, too. But a huge missed opportunity for her.

Megan Joy, Michael Sarver, Scott MacIntyre: The prime candidates for elimination over the next three weeks. All three are decidedly behind the rest of the pack. Megan Joy’s vibratto is wearing really thin. Cute is only going to get her so far. Sarver’s a likeable guy, but clearly out of his league, now. And MacIntyre just keeps disappointing each week. He sounded whiny this week.

A few weeks ago, I posted about Guillermo Ramirez Peyro’s appeal of his pending deportation before a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Peyro (also known as “Lalo”) is the central figure in the “House of Death” scandal, in which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are accused of allowing Peyro and members of the Juarez drug cartel to commit as many as a dozen murders because preventing the murders would have disrupted their drug investigation. Peyro is the only non-government witness who knows exactly what happened in that case. If the longtime federal drug informant is deported to Mexico, he’ll almost certainly be killed, rendering moot any possible future investigation of the case here in the U.S.

The bad news is that at the hearing, the Obama administration continued with the Bush administration’s efforts to deport Peyro. The good news is, the panel of judges appeared to be fairly skeptical of the government’s position.

Narcosphere’s Bill Conroy has the transcript of the oral arguments.

You can read my interview with Sandy Gonzalez, the DEA agent who blew the whistle on the House of Death case, here.

It’s up at Reason.

It looks at the “investigative report” on Georgia’s Dr. Kris Sperry I blogged about earlier today. It also looks at a situation in Minnesota I first posted about several months ago. There, District Attorney Jim Backstrom threatened to block a county medical examiner’s reappointment if she continued to allow her staff to testify for defense attorneys in other jurisdictions.

You can read Backstrom’s threatening emails to the medical examiner here.

The five nations with the most executions last year:

China
Iran
Saudi Arabia
United States
Pakistan

MORE: Per the comments, it’s worth noting that there’s a big drop between China and everyone else, and a smaller but still significant drop between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Probably also worth noting that it isn’t clear how Amnesty collected its data. If the organization went solely on government-provided statistics, it’s probably safe bet that North Korea, Russia, and a good portion of the Muslim world were under-counted. That said, that we even have a death penalty puts us in rather unsavory company.

I’m going to have a piece at Reason later today that touches on this, but last week, the Fox affiliate in Atlanta ran a truly awful two-part “investigation” into Georgia state medical examiner Dr. Kris Sperry (see here and here).

Their big scoop? Sperry sometimes testifies for criminal defendants! Even in Mississippi!. In the second part of the report, a local official actually complains that the Georgia medical examiner testifying against the Tennessee medical examiner would be like “a cop testifying against another cop.” God forbid.

The truth is, for years Dr. Sperry has been trying to hold Steven Hayne and Mississippi’s corrupt autopsy system accountable. His efforts have included both writing letters to professional organizations asking for investigations of Hayne, as well as testifying against Hayne (and, in the case of this particular report, an equally corrupt medical examiner on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast) in court. He ought to be praised for his efforts. Instead, a clueless local news station runs a hit piece on him, and quotes without rebuttal some local officials in other states honked off because Sperry made it harder for them to win a conviction.

The Atlanta Fox report also uncritically pushes the idea that there’s something unseemly about a government medical examiner contradicting the testimony of another government medical examiner in another jurisdiction, reinforcing not only the idea that state forensic experts are part of the prosecution’s “team,” but that they should never testify for the defense under any circumstances.

If instead of merely quoting pissed off local officials, reporter Dale Russell had done some research, he’d have found that both of those notions are roundly dismissed by both the National Association of Medical Examiners and the new report on forensics in the courtroom published last month by the National Academy of Sciences. It’s one thing to say a state medical examiner’s freelance consulting is impairing his ability to do his job. It’s something else entirely to say that a state forensic expert should never testify for the defense out of principle.

Russell’s report does say that under Georgia law, there’s a clause in Sperry’s contract forbidding him from contradicting medical examiners in other jurisdictions. If so, that’s the problem, here. Peer review is an integral part of the scientific method. Here you have state agencies trying to take peer review out of forensic science, because it makes it more difficult to win convictions. That should have been Russell’s scoop.

Sadly, it looks like Sperry’s boss at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is taking this misinformed report fairly seriously. He tells Russell he plans to look into Sperry’s consulting business.

Last week, I emailed Russell with my complaints about his report. He hasn’t responded.

The Washington Monthlyoffers a post-mortem for Culture11, which, roughly, was an attempt at a conservative version of Slate.

I think the site needed more time to develop an identity. The writing was uneven, and unfortunately, the highest-trafficked parts of the site (the “Ladyblog,” for example) also hosted some of its weakest material. (Note to friends of mine who posted at Ladyblog: Not you, of course!)

That said, I very much enjoyed reading people like Conor Friedersdorf, Peter Suderman, and James Poulos (among others). And for that, I’m sorry the site is gone.

Third-year law students, take note:

Make the most of your public interest deferment opportunity!

The Institute for Justice, the nation’s leading libertarian public interest law firm, is encouraging third year students to apply to work at the Institute for Justice during their law firm deferment.

More info here.

My story from our April issue is now online.

Read it here.

Some of the new information not in the online version from last month:

–Discussion of Haley Oliveaux’s anal lacerations. Apparently, the only way to tell for sure if the lacerations were caused by sexual abuse is to examine the microscopic tissue slides Dr. Hayne should have created during the autopsy. He testified to having made and examined them at trial. But now that a medical examiner hired by Duncan’s defense team has asked to see them, Hayne has claimed, in turn, to have either lost them, given them to the Mississippi state crime lab in Jackson, or to have sent them to a now-deceased medical examiner in Louisiana.

–Discussion of Jimmie Duncan’s alleged jailhouse confession to a fellow inmate. Turns out, other cellmates told prosecutors that not only did Duncan never confess, but the police were trying to get inmates to lie about Duncan confessing. That information was never turned over to Duncan’s trial attorneys. And one lead investigator in Duncan’s case seems to have a history of eliciting false confessions.

–Information casting doubt on testimony from witnesses who claimed to have seen the marks on Haley Oliveaux’s right cheek.

I’ll have more on all of this in a bit. There are actually other problems with the case that we didn’t have room to fit into the article. I’ll also reiterate once again that I have no idea if Jimmie Duncan beat or raped or killed Haley Oliveaux. I’m not interested in retrying his case, or of proclaiming his innocence. The purpose of this piece was to shine a light on the criminal misconduct by Hayne and West, and to detail some very troubling behavior by police and prosecutors in the case.

• The top drug prosecutor, two police officers, and a retired circuit court judge in Wayne County, Michigan will be arraigned today on charges that they suborned (or in the judge’s case, knowingly allowed) perjury in a case against two alleged cocaine dealers.

• A federal judge in Miami has concluded that prosecutors in a prescription painkiller case against a Florida doctor committed “flagrant violations” during the trial, including unauthorized recordings of witness calls during an illegal attempted bribery sting on one of the defense attorneys (he didn’t take the bait). There are also allegations that the DEA pressured one of the state’s witnesses to lie on the stand. The defendant was acquitted. Talk to Siobhan Reynolds at the Pain Relief Network, and you’ll quickly learn that the only thing unusual about this case is that the government got caught. These prescription painkiller prosecutions generally reek of this sort of thing.

• Santa Clara County, California has been rocked by a series of recent scandals in which police and prosecutors withheld key exculpatory evidence from defense counsel, including in hundreds of sex abuse cases. One prosecutor was recently given an unprecedented three-year suspension by the state bar. So what has been the reaction from Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr? Shame? Anger? Promises for reform?  Nope. She wants to limit the state bar’s authority to discipline prosecutors.

Apparently, if you decline to accept Medicare benefits once you become eligible (opting instead for private health insurance, for example), you also lose your Social Security benefits.

Sweet and nerdy:

Pirates and economics may not be sexy subjects for a book, but economists tend to see things and do things a bit differently. So it made sense for Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, to propose to his girlfriend in the preface of his forthcoming book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. He presented the finished book (and a ring) to her on Friday—and she said yes.

Leeson’s publisher, Princeton University Press, made arrangements for the author to receive the first copy of the book’s printing. Everyone at the press kept the proposal a secret and even went to the trouble of extracting that section of the book—which read, “Ania, I love you; will you marry me?”—from the advance galleys that were mailed out to the press.

A libertarian economic treatise on pirates already sounds pretty awesome. But The Invisible Hook? Fabulous!

I’ve only met Leeson a couple of times, but we have several friends in common. Warm congrats, nonetheless.

MORE: You can pre-order Leeson’s book at Amazon here.

….don’t try to horn in on the DEA’s forfeiture fund.

Come on, San Diego. The break room needs a new espresso machine!

I have this dream about once a month.

Interesting:

A federal judge in Los Angeles this morning postponed the sentencing of a man who emerged as a key figure in the national debate over medical marijuana, saying he wanted additional information about a reported change in the Justice Department’s policy regarding such prosecutions.

U.S. District Court Judge George H. Wu asked prosecutors for a written response from the Justice Department about its position on medical marijuana prosecutions in light of recent comments from Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.

Holder said last week that the Justice Department under President Obama had no plans to prosecute dispensary owners who operated within their state’s law.

Wu said he did not believe that any change in policy would affect the conviction of Charles Lynch, 47. But the judge said he wanted to consider any new information about the policy before imposing sentence.

Sounds to me like Wu’s forcing Obama’s hand, here. And good for him. Obama has kept his campaign promise to call of the raids and respect local law on medical marijuana. But he shouldn’t get a pass on allowing pending outrages like Lynch’s case to go forward, either.

Here’s Reason.tv on Charlie Lynch:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has vetoed a bill that would forbid the state’s government from seizing private land to hand over to other private parties.

It might lead to the first veto override of Barbour’s administration. That would be a good thing.

Hard to believe this guy’s name is sometimes bandied about for national office.

Missed this when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but here’s Hillary Clinton, on exploiting the economic downturn to push a “Green New Deal.”

“Never waste a good crisis.”

But it’s okay when your own people do it, right Naomi?

So my cover story on the Haley Oliveaux video and the Jimmie Duncan case will go up at Reason tomorrow. It’s a bit longer than the online piece, and includes some new information about the case. The new info concerns Hayne’s testimony, as well as some other prosecutorial and police misconduct issues. I have more to come on the case, too.

I’ve also just obtained yet another video starring our favorite dentist, Michael West. Arrived in the mail today. This one isn’t nearly as disturbing. It’s just awesome. And hilarious. And in some ways, rather sad. Hope to have it up later this week.

UPDATE: Okay, after watching the video I’ll revise, and note that it is a little disturbing. But not nearly as disturbing as the Haley Oliveaux video. But more importantly, it’s irrefutable, slam-dunk proof of West’s complete and utter quackery. As if that weren’t already clear. More to come.

Another terrific video by Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg.