As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre this June, buffoonish martial arts movie star millionaire Jackie Chan delivers a roundhouse square to the back of Tank Man’s head:

"I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not," [Chan] told an audience at a regional economic forum in southern China Saturday. "If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic." He continued: "I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want."

The Asian Wall Street Journal notes that Chan’s latest movie has been banned by the Chinese government.

Leftist critics are correct in questioning the authenticity of the right’s renewed interest states’ rights (an awkward term) and federalism (a better one). Conservative chattering heads didn’t seem to care much for the idea back when they were calling the shots from Washington.

But the discussion also reminds me of the encouraging pro-federalism chatter we heard from the left shortly after the Democrats were trounced in the 2004 election. For all the heat he’s taking, Texas Gov. Rick Perry might want to consult with MSNBC analyst and former West Wing writer and producer Lawrence O’Donnell, for example, who favorably used the word secede on the McLaughlin Group back in November of ’04. O’Donnell helpfully pointed out that secession needn’t necessarily be violent, explaining that, “You can secede without firing a shot.”

Lefty pubs like Salon, the Nation, and the Stranger ran think pieces that called for (sometimes begrudgingly) a new debate over the benefits of more parochial control. A couple of lefty-penned op-eds in the New York Times also argued for decentralized control and weakening the federal government’s ability to influence local policy.

Alas, it was all rather short-lived. Nothing invigorates interest in federalism like losing a national election. And nothing smothers that interest like winning one.

After Wisconsin’s attorney general said it’s legal to open carry in his state, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn responded:

“My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we’ll put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether you have a right to carry it.”

Milwaukee’s first problem is that it has a police chief who refers to the city’s peace officers as “my troops.”

No wonder the city’s force includes cops like Det. Kent Corbett, who actually wrote a letter to the editor of National Review in defense of the Maryland raid on Mayor Cheye Calvo. Not in defense of the use of SWAT teams or drug raids in general, but of the specific (and violent, and mistaken) raid on Calvo.

Much of this was already covered in Charlie Savage’s book, but it’s worth repeating:

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

Cheney’s theory of executive power rests on the notion that only the executive can be trusted to protect national security—that the courts and the Congress are too burdened by politial meneuvering, ego, and ivory tower theory to be entrusted with our safety. The irony here is that from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to torture, the Bush administration’s utter and complete incompetence has become a more devastating counterargument to Cheney’s position than any of Bush’s critics could have conjured up themselves.

Rep. Harman, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, has long been an aggressive defender of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, calling federal whistleblowers who revealed the program’s abuses “despicable,” and at one point even suggesting criminal prosecution of the New York Times for revealing how the program may have been in violation of U.S. law.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Harman “was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage.” In return, “the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor…would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative Nancy Pelosi…if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post.”

Suddenly, Harman isn’t so fond of NSA’s wiretapping program, or the idea of federal eavesdropping in general, even though the tap on her own phone was legal, and administered after federal officials actually bothered to secure a warrant. Yesterday on CNN, Harman unleashed a torrent of (self) righteous indignation:

I’m just very disappointed that my country — I’m an American citizen just like you are — could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years.  I’m one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, and I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back.  I’m thinking about others who have no bully pulpit, who may not be aware, as I was not, that someone is listening in on their conversations, and they’re innocent Americans.

I don’t really see any ameliorating factors, here. Harman gets the first perfect score—a 10 out of 10—on the somewhat arbitrary Hackery Index.

If you see an example of a pundit, politician, major blogger, or other Beltway creature who’s done a 180 on this or another issue, please send it here, with links, and “HackWatch” in the subject line. Prior installments of HackWatch here.

(Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald)

And it doesn’t look good. By the NY Times account of yesterday’s arguments, even the Court’s liberal justices seemed amenable to strip searches by school administrators. A couple justices even seemed to endorse the idea of body cavity searches.

Justice Breyer elaborated on what children put in their underwear. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day,” he said. “We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”

The courtroom rocked with laughter, and the justice grew a little flustered at having apparently misspoken…

Several justices appeared troubled by the search, but also seemed loath to second-guess school officials confronted with a variety of dangerous substances.

“My thought process,” Justice Souter said, “is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can’t find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry.”

Can anyone think of a single incident in the last 30 years in which several children have died after ingesting drugs distributed by one of their classmates on school grounds? Before we let school principals go rummaging through the panties of underage girls, shouldn’t we be at least be able to cite a few examples?

It’s a little troubling to see how comfortable these old men (Ginsburg isn’t quoted in the article) seem to be with allowing school administrators access to the genitalia of school children based on nothing more than a hunch that they might be “crotching” some ibuprofen.

At this point, the drug war really can’t be parodied, can it?

This is just nauseating:

The Bush administration’s motives for employing the harsh techniques are also called into question by the report. The Bush administration has argued publicly that it got tough on detainees to prevent another al-Qaida attack. The Senate report describes another possible motive, and a sobering example of how torture can produce bad intelligence.

In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Apparently, one of the individuals applying pressure for results was then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a major advocate of the Iraq invasion. Wolfowitz called the man in charge of Guantánamo at the time, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey. Wolfowitz called “to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production” at Guantánamo, the report says. Wolfowitz suggested the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques. The report cites the Guantánamo interrogation chief at that time, David Becker, as the source of this information about Wolfowitz. Dunlavey, however, told the Senate investigators he could not recall the Wolfowitz call.

So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.

And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.

These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.

The video above shows Erie, Pennsylvania police officer James Cousins II mocking a homicide victim and the reaction of the victim’s mother upon her arrival at the crime scene. Cousins was off-duty and drinking at a bar when the video was taken. The video was later posted to YouTube.

It’s pretty tasteless. But to be honest, I’m not sure it’s really much to get upset about. Cops do have stressful jobs, and I’m not about to begrudge them the right to blow off steam around friends when they’re off-duty, though Cousins’ boasting about punching and Tasering a suspect in another case, also depicted in the video, is more problematic.

That said, it was pretty dumb of him to go as he did on while he was being recorded. And like anyone else who gets caught saying something stupid on camera, he should have to pay the personal and professional consequences for what he said.

But Cousins is a police officer, and he and his colleagues have the power to intimidate people who expose their mistakes. The real outrage in this story is what happened next.

Once the video was posted to YouTube, internal affairs investigator Jim DeDionisio went to confront the man who posted the video, and brought Cousins with him. Thinking they had found the man, they confronted him at his job on a construction site (it turns out that the guy’s brother actually posted the video). The man says DeDionisio then threatened to prosecute him for violating federal wiretapping laws. If true, that’s a preposterous attempt at intimidation. Erie police officials then apparently tried to get the local district attorney to order YouTube to remove the video. To the prosecutor’s credit, he refused.

So you have a police officer making inappropriate, insensitive comments about a murder victim and his mother in a video that eventually gets posted to YouTube. The immediate reaction from the Erie Police Department is to launch an investigation, but not into the officer’s conduct, but to find the identity of the person who posted the video. Their next step is to bring the officer depicted in the video to intimidate the man they believe posted it. And they top it off with a bogus threat and failed effort to have the video removed from the Internet.

Pretty deplorable behavior all around.

Not sure the GOP could handle him, but the former New Mexico governor may run.

Johnson came out against the drug war while still in office in New Mexico, vetoed 700 bills over two terms, and opposed the war in Iraq. He also endorsed Ron Paul in 2008.

And he’s great on Paul’s weakest issue, immigration. From a 2000 interview with Playboy:

PLAYBOY: As governor of a border state, what is your view of the immigration issue?

JOHNSON: I don’t think Easterners recognize that the Hispanics who immigrate are great people, great citizens. They care about their families like other Americans care about their families. They’re living in poverty in Mexico and can come to the United States and do a lot better.

PLAYBOY: By–according to some–taking away jobs.

JOHNSON: They work the lowest-paying jobs, which is a huge step up from where they come from. And they are taking jobs that other Americans don’t necessarily want. They’re hardworking people who are taking jobs that others don’t want. That’s the reality.

PLAYBOY: Would you open the borders and make it easier to immigrate legally?

JOHNSON: My vision of the border with Mexico is that a truck from the United States going into Mexico and a truck coming from Mexico into the United States will pass each other at the border going 60 miles an hour. Yes, we should have open borders. It will help enormously with the drug issue, too, by the way. One of the huge raps on Mexico is that it is a drug supplier, that it’s the drug corridor. But there wouldn’t be drugs coming in illegally from Mexico if there weren’t the demand in the United States. We have a militarized border with Mexico, and it’s a shame. It doesn’t work very well, either. Mexican mules get paid a king’s ransom to carry marijuana or cocaine across the border, but they are just mules. If they get caught, they’re the ones who get locked up, not the drug lords. One out of eight gets caught. Whoever’s paying them south of the border knows that equation and understands the risk.

PLAYBOY: In California, there was a backlash against illegal immigrants. Voters passed a proposition that would have denied them medical and other services.

JOHNSON: It wouldn’t be a problem if they were legal, so the process to make them legal should be easier.

PLAYBOY: Many Americans fear the flood of immigrants that would follow.

JOHNSON: Again, they would come over and take jobs that we don’t want. They would become taxpayers. They’re just pursuing dreams—the same dreams we all have. They work hard. What’s wrong with that?

So refreshing to hear that kind of talk from a politician.

While I’m ragging on Obama, it seems to me he has America’s Cuba policy exactly wrong.

At the OAS meetings last week, Obama refused to denounce Cuba’s human rights violations, including its imprisonment of political dissidents. It’s usually risky to criticize someone for what they didn’t say or do, but in the world of diplomacy the absence of any explicit criticism of Cuba’s political suppression was conspicuous, and almost certainly wasn’t accidental. At the same time, Obama has backed down from his position in the Democratic primaries to open up U.S. trade with Cuba (he actually came down from that position during the general election campaign).

In other words, America’s new Cuba policy seems to be one of gradual rapprochement when it comes to engagement with Cuba’s authoritarian government, but continued isolation and punishment of Cuba’s people. That’s unfortunate.

Obama did allow for more visitation between Cuban-Americans and their families on the island last week, but while that’s a welcome change, it wasn’t particularly bold, brave, or risky. There was almost no political downside at all to the change.

I don’t disagree with Obama’s policy of dialoguing with foreign leaders who are hostile to America. But there’s a difference between conversing with thugs and dictators, and giving them a pass. We do need to pursue a less isolationist approach to Cuba, but it ought to be one that gives more freedom and access to the Cuban people, not one that legitimizes, even a little bit, the boot heel that’s been crushing them for a generation.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) put our Cuba policy into perspective when he noted at a Reason event last year that if one of the two governments is going to prevent peaceful American citizens from trading, visiting with, and engaging with peaceful Cuban citizens, you’d like to think it would be the brutal, authoritarian Cuban government that’s doing the prohibiting. It isn’t, of course.

Obama’s got it wrong on both ends, here.

President Obama has nominated Mothers Against Drunk Driving CEO Chuck Hurley to head up the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Hurley is a lifelong anti-alcohol activist. MADD’s top priority during his stint as CEO was to get states to pass a law mandating ignition interlock devices in the cars of all first-time DWI offenders. The device requires you to blow into a tube before starting your car, then blow again at set intervals as you’re driving. Under Hurley’s watch, MADD also gave a “qualified endorsement” for bills in the New York and New Mexico legislatures that would have required the devices in all cars sold in those states.

Hurley and MADD have a long history of manipulating data to support their policy initiatives. Last year, for example, I explained how a MADD report looking at DWI fatality statistics miraculously came to the conclusion that the numbers in each state–whether up, down, or unchanged–spoke to the urgent need to adopt MADD’s ignition interlock law. Hurley and MADD were at the heart of the effort to force the states to adopt the .08 minimum blood alcohol standard under penalty of withdrawing federal highway funds, and weren’t at all afraid to invoke dubious statistics to push their position. Hurley has aggressively pushed for the use of constitutionally-questionable roadblock sobriety checkpoints to enforce the new standard, even though there’s now good reason to believe the use of roadblocks have actually made the roads more dangerous. Don’t be at all surprised to see Hurley use his position at NHTSA to push for a federal interlock law as well. MADD’s goals are now NHTSA’s.

But Hurley isn’t just a zealot on alcohol. His default position seems to be in favor of more highway safety laws, more regulations, and more reasons to stop and fine motorists. Hurley has pushed states to adopt primary seat belt laws, which in addition to being a questionable use of law enforcement resources (people who don’t wear seat belts aren’t a threat to anyone other than themselves), have been criticized in some quarters for giving police officers another tool to engage in racial profiling, or as a pretext stop in asset forfeiture cases. Hurley has also supported the proliferation of red light cameras, despite studies showing they actually cause more accidents than they prevent.

At the Detroit Free Press, longtime automotive writer Eric Peters lays out what Hurley’s NHTSA agenda might look like:

…drivers can expect a ratcheting up of the low-grade harassment they already endure on a daily basis—in the form of more obnoxious regulations, pullover “safety” checks and very possibly lowered speed limits…

The legal standard for “drunk” driving has already been lowered to .08 BAC—a level well below the .10 and up level at which people have actual accidents as opposed to running afoul of “sobriety checkpoints.”

But even that isn’t enough. Under Hurley, MADD has been pushing to have the legal threshold reduced to .04 BAC, which would turn anyone who had a glass of wine over dinner into a “drunk driver” as far as the law was concerned—and subject them to penalties more severe than those applied to many violent felons…

As NHTSA head, expect him to push MADD’s current agenda as far as he can—including mandatory in-car alcohol detectors for everyone, not just those already convicted of DWI. And controversial “sobriety checkpoints” that stop random cars and subject their drivers to Gestapo-like stop and frisks are likely to sprout up in irban and suburban areas across the country.
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At the National Safety Council, Hurley campaigned for mandatory air bags and “primary enforcement” seat belt laws on the public, which ironically diverted state and local law enforcement away from catching drunk and reckless drivers and turned them into ubiquitous snoops of the nanny state.

Mandatory air bags—which add thousands of dollars to the price/lifetime ownership costs of every new car—have arguably helped undermine the car industry by making new cars much more expensive and thus less affordable to consumers as well as less profitable to sell.

As head of NHTSA, Hurley will wield immense power. Obama administration insiders expect he will order states and cities to install thousands of new photo radar and red light cameras, and to make a major push for a “pay as you go” driving tax—with mandatory GPS transponders for every vehicle, so Uncle Sam can keep track of where, when and how much you drive—and send you a bill accordingly.

That’s change you can believe in. Let the good times roll!

DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano, on immigration:

What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor…

Wow. Providing jobs and pay to impoverished people who come to the U.S. to work is now . . . evil?

I think Napolitiano needs to go back to singing sad songs about her alcoholic boyfriend.

FactCheck.org makes a pretty convincing case that the number of guns seized from Mexican drug distributors that came from America is likely somewhere around 35 percent, double the 17 percent suggested by Fox News, but less than half the 90 percent touted by Obama officials and most major media reports.

Still, I do wonder what percentage of those guns came not from U.S. gun sellers, but from guns sent by the U.S. government to the Mexican government for fighting the drug war that through defections, corruption, and black market sales then ended up in the hands of the cartels.

The Justice Department announced (pdf) over the weekend that it will not intervene in the Charlie Lynch medical marijuana case. The federal judge in Lynch’s case had postponed Lynch’s sentencing to inquire if the Obama administration might want to back off, given Attorney General Holder’s recent statements about not prosecuting medical marijuana distributors who are complying with state and local law.

It would be merely disappointing had the DOJ based its decision not to intervene on the fact that a verdict had already been rendered in Lynch’s case. But the DOJ response goes much further, specifically stating that entire prosecution of Lynch is consistent with the government’s new position on medical marijuana, as laid out by Holder. I’s hard to say, then, exactly what distinguishes Obama’s position on medical marijuana from Bush’s. Lynch sought out and received assurance from state and local authorities that he was in complete compliance with state and local law. If that isn’t enough to meet Holder’s new policy, what is?

This decision looks particularly ugly in light of Obama’s continuing efforts to protect Bush’s torture team from prosecution, from Cheney, Yoo, and Bybee on down to the CIA operatives who actually administered the torture techniques. The message from Obama seems to be that when it comes to powerful government employees and covert agents breaking the law, he’s going to “look forward” and do everything he can to protect them from being held accountable, up to and including questionable assertions of executive power. Regular people who may violate ambiguous laws, on the other hand, can expect no such “looking forward,” just more of the same: the full brunt force of government tumbling down on top of them.

Background on Charlie Lynch’s case:

This week’s Dylan tune is “Tryin’ To Get to Heaven,” from Time Out of Mind. It’s hard to pick one song from that album, which I think his Dylan’s best from this incredible last stage of his career. Released in 1998, seven years after his last album of original material, producer Daniel Lanois created a pensive, atmospheric soundscape to accompany Dylan’s reflections on mortality and lyrics that look back at a career winding down. Oddly, Dylan nearly died of a heart infection shortly after recording the album, but before its release, which makes the album’s ruminations on life and death seem almost prescient. If I had to pick just one cut from Time Out of Mind, this would be it.

Every tax day, a handful of lefties pen paeans to the federal government, and how they do and the rest of us should feel inspired, patriotic, and invigorated when we pay our taxes.

Here’s one example from this year. Here’s another.

The sentiment is particularly misguided this year, as we begin year seven of a misguided war waged under false pretenses; we’re hearing new revelations every day about how the federal government has systematically violated our constitutional rights, and the human rights of others; and the government is spending billions, and risking trillions, to prop up private companies that took stupid risks and should have gone out of business for doing so–despite that the majority of the public opposes the bailouts.

Still, I always want to ask people who write these articles, why not pay more than your fair share, then? If greed (i.e., wanting to keep as much of your own money as possible) is evil, and if government really is so benevolent and wonderful (provided your party is running it, of course), why not pay double or triple what you owe? The point particularly applies to wealthier supporters of big government. But even journalists, I’d think, if they were true believers, could afford to send a quarterly $500 check to the federal treasury.

Think of it as a donation to your favorite charity–only a really, really awesome one that’s filled with noble, self-sacrificing public servants; is run by selfless politicians who run for office only out of the goodness of their hearts; never violates our rights, despite that it has the power to do so; wastes virtually no money at all on overhead or bureaucracy; and generally makes all of us all-around better human beings.

MORE: Hell, some of them publicly ask for assistance on how to pay less that what they rightfully owe.

Earlier this month, Fox News reporters William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott deflated the myth that 90 percent of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels came from the United States. The truth is, 90 percent of the guns Mexican authorities seize from drug dealers, judge from serial numbers are likely to have come from the United States, and then send to the U.S. for tracing are indeed confirmed to have been sold in the U.S. In truth, just a little over 5,000 of the 29,000 guns seized by Mexican authorities were definitively traced back to America.

That hasn’t stopped the 90 percent figure from perpetuating. Both President Obama and Mexican President Calderon reiterated it at a press conference yesterday.

As my colleague Jacob Sullum points out, the NY Times also repeated the figure, though the paper slightly changed its wording. The new wording is technically accurate, but still leaves the wrong impression.

You’d think a group that advocates for criminal justice reform could find worthier people to honor than Janet Reno, the woman who sent an innocent man to prison for 11 years, gave us 76 charred bodies at Waco, wrongly tried to imprison a 14-year-old kid in a fit of anti-occult hysteria, presided over the Justice Department investigation and media leak that ruined Richard Jewell’s life, and built her career on a series of highly questionable child abuse convictions won on manufactured evidence.

You’d think. But Reno keeps raking in the honors, and from organizations for whom I otherwise have a lot of respect.

Disappointing.

According to police reports, on March 11 Grand Valley State University sophomore Derek Kopp sold an undercover police officer 3.3 grams of marijuana for $60. The police then raided Kopp’s apartment, at which point Deputy Ryan Huizenga mistook Kopp shielding his eyes from a police flashlight for brandishing a weapon, and shot the unarmed Kopp in the chest. The bullet pierced Kopp’s liver, broke a rib, and punctured one of Kopp’s lungs.

Apparently, a bullet in the chest and time in the intensive care unit wasn’t punishment enough for selling three grams of pot. This week, a Michigan judge issued an arrest warrant for Kopp on the charge of delivery of marijuana. He’ll be arraigned on Monday.

Congratulations to the Arizona Desert Lamp, which took top prize in the America’s Future Foundation’s college blogging competition. The contest looks to find the best college-run conservative or libertarian blog. I’m happy to say that the top two finishers, the Desert Lamp and the perennially excellent Oregon Commentator, both group blogs, are also primarily libertarian. Third place went to Ivy Sneakers, run by Yale student Max Rosett. All were very good. I’d also put out a good word for UNR Students for Liberty, which I thought was one of the best of the remaining finalists.

I was a judge for the competition, along with Jonah Goldberg, Megan McArdle, Jennifer Rubin, Robert Bluey, and Glenn Reynolds.

Also, any time I mention the Oregon Commentator, I have to mention this wonderful feature on cheap wine tasting which, though now more than a decade old, is still one of the most brilliantly funny pieces of writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.

All I know is what’s in the video.