On April 5th, the Western State University College of Law Chapter hosted "Presidential Jeopardy."

We had three professors compete to determine who had been following the candidates' policy positions the closest.  One professor asked not to be on Youtube so we have censored that person from the video (which also accounts for occassional skips in the video when that person speaks for over 5 seconds).

The event went very well.  We had a turnout of over 50 students (our school only has about 500 students) and a lot of students spoke to us about YAL after the event.  Watch and enjoy!

Interested in doing a similar event?  We obtained the jeopardy set at an amazon online auction for $16 (the local teacher store charged about $100 for a similar set).  We also used a projector to display this free jeopardy program.

This is a good video of Obama, before he was President, arguing about the dangers of the National Security Letters in the PATRIOT Act:

"This is legislation that puts our own Justice Department above the law."

"The National Security Letters are an issue.  They allow federal agents to conduct any search, on any American, no matter how extensive, how wide-ranging, without ever going before a judge to prove that the search is necessary.  All that is needed is a sign off from a local FBI agent.  That's it."

"No judge will hear your plea.  No jury will hear your case.  This is just plain wrong."

One of the many reasons our strategy in the Middle East is doomed to fail is that it only addresses two parts of a three- part problem (and it isn't doing the two parts very well, either):  We're fighting the people who executed 9/11 (al-Qaeda), we're fighting the people who harbored the people who executed 9/11 (the Taliban), but why are we doing absolutely nothing against the people who finance these groups?

Because the people that finance them are the U.S. and our allies:

 "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al-Qaeda."  Hillary Clinton has said “it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.”

As outrageous as it is that our ally is funding our enemy, it is even more outrageous what the U.S. is doing to fund our enemy.

The "US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban."

And today an audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction shows that the billions in aid we have sent to Afghanistan may be funding our enemies as well.

If a company rented a factory to use for pumping toxic waste into nearby lakes, it wouldn't make sense to only go after the factory employees (al-Qaeda) and the owner's of the factory (Taliban).  If we ignored the company funding the whole operation, there would be nothing to stop them from renting another factory and doing the whole operation over and over again.

Unfortunately, that appears to be exactly our strategy in Afghanistan.

Sen. Rand Paul discusses his bill which ensures Social Security, interest on the debt, and soldiers' salaries are funded regardless of whether or not a debt ceiling compromise is made:

Senator Lee explains that the U.S. has enough revenue to pay Social Security recipients whether or not an agreement on the debt ceiling is made: