MARKDOWNS ON DVD and Blu-Ray.

IRA STOLL: Fatherhood.Gov.

President Obama interrupted my Father’s Day with an e-mail announcing the launch of “The President’s Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative” and an associated Web site, Fatherhood.gov, which honestly I could have mistaken for an elaborate prank undertaken by some libertarian group trying to make the point that the next thing you know, Big Government and President Obama are going to try to insert themselves into the father-son or father-daughter relationship. Except that, sure enough, at the bottom of the Web site is language announcing, “This is an official U.S. Government Web site managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.”

So I ignored my children for a few minutes of Father’s Day and did what the president asked which was to check out the Web site, and especially the government’s “Tips for Parents.” They were infuriating. . . . The current federal government can barely do the tasks that it is assigned in the Constitution, such as keeping us safe from foreign invaders and regulating the value of money. I’d be happy if the government could just win Iraq and Afghanistan, secure the border, live roughly within its means, and make sure the beaches of Florida aren’t covered with petroleum products. If the government is going to beyond that and assign itself, unbidden, the all-new task of improving the nation’s fathers, it’s going to have to do better than telling people to filter their water, mute the television commercials, use more expensive lightbulbs, and check the Halloween candy for tampering, if President Obama wants to avoid spawning more of the very cynicism he went to Washington vowing to defeat.

Do tell.

WELL, THAT’S ONE WORD FOR IT: Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is expected to leave his job later this year after growing tired of the “idealism” of Barack Obama’s inner circle.

AT AMAZON, an iPod clearance sale.

KYLE STONE: My Evening with Bill Ayers, Cindy Sheehan, and Some Creepy Communist Lady.

SHOCKER: A new study of the country’s largest red light camera program found no significant benefit to the use of photo enforcement. Except for the revenue.

PAUL MIRENGOFF: America — The Weak Horse By Choice.

BUT THERE’S NO ANTI-SEMITISM INVOLVED: Radicals, Islamists and Longshoremen blockade Israeli ship in Oakland.

UPDATE: East Bay Jew Hatred?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Barack Obama: Dreamer-In-Chief.

CRIME ON THE BORDER: Tom Maguire offers a statistical correction to the New York Times. “Measured by violent crimes per 100,000, the non-MSA portion of Arizona has seen a dramatic increase in crime.”

THERE AREN’T JUST TWO AMERICAS — THERE ARE ALSO TWO BRITAINS:

Public sector employees work nine years less than their private sector counterparts but are paid 30 per cent more, a bombshell report reveals today.

Extraordinary research tells a tale of two Britains – a state sector awash with taxpayers’ cash while the rest of the economy struggles to stay afloat.

Public sector workers enjoy better pay than those in the private sector, as well as better pensions, shorter hours, and earlier retirement. Over their lifetimes, those in the private sector work 23 per cent longer – equivalent to an extra nine years and ten weeks – than public sector employees. This is thanks to a combination of shorter hours, more time off and earlier retirement.

The findings explode once and for all the old idea that public sector workers have better job security and gold-plated pensions because they have lower salaries. They will be seized on by the Coalition Government, which has warned that the bloated state sector has been artificially insulated from the recession and is in line for massive spending cuts.

The report, by centre-Right think tank Policy Exchange, also found that the chance of being made compulsorily redundant in the civil service is an astonishing 0.00007 per cent.

This may become a source of tension in a lot of countries.

UPDATE: Reader Adam Sullivan writes:

You may want to link the Amazon DVD set for “Yes, Minister” which is a great, classic British comedy.

Aside from simply being funny, the series does a great job of deconstructing how career government workers rig the system to create benefit streams to themselves while coming up with cynically absurd rationalizations to sell the public. Sadly, we are told these same reasons today. And the politicians who enter the scene to reform the system quickly get co-opted, manipulated, duped or simply undermined by the ruling class of cynical, smart, and elite bureaucrats.

Highly recommended and completely relevant to today’s global political situation of government run for the governing class.

You could never get Hollywood to produce something like that for America, could you?

INDEED: “It’s amazing what reporters don’t see when they aren’t looking.”

SO ALL THE DIRTY STORIES ARE BOGUS? How Frozen Head State Park got its name. I spent a lovely weekend camping there back in college.

BUT WHERE’S MY WARP DRIVE? Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft.

DWARF PLANETS are big this month.

WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: ‘The grandaddy of all gushers’? Not this spill.

Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.

“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.

The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.

Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.

Well, the decade is young, yet. . . .

LOOKING AT HISTORICAL supervolcano eruptions.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Euro and EUtopia.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS takes a look at the Tea Party Movement.

Dan Riehl is shocked that it’s fair.

IN THE MAIL: From Nat Hentoff, At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene.

MISTAH CRONKITE, HE DEAD. If you missed it yesterday on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, the latest PJM Political is now online.

DAVID NESENOFF: I asked Helen Thomas about Israel. Her answer revealed more than you think.

I merely asked a question with a video camera to a columnist. She answered me with an opinion that was unacceptable not just to me but to former and current press secretaries, politicians, the president, her agent and a great many other people. Her freedom of speech was not stifled; on the contrary, it was respected.

She didn’t say that the blockade was unjust, or that aid was not getting to Gaza, or that there was a massacre on the high seas, or that East Jerusalem is occupied, or that the settlements are immoral . . . and get out and go back to West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Eilat. No. This was not the two-state solution. This was get the hell out and go back to the places of the final solution, Poland and Germany. The Jew has no connection with the land of Israel.

And why? Because, as Thomas went on to explain to me, “I’m from Arab descent.” That’s it? That’s all you got? Do we all travel with only our parents’ stereotypes to guide us, never going beyond them to get to a peaceful destination?

Funny, isn’t it, that the designated liberal icon turned out to be in the grip of ancient tribal bigotry?

REIHAN SALAM: GOP Rep. Joe Barton spoke the truth when he called the $20 billion agreement between the White House and BP a “shakedown.”

REMEMBERING NEDA SOLTANI: “A young Iranian woman named Neda Soltani was brutally murdered on this date last year for doing nothing more than expressing her opinion along as other like minded people did that day. No one has been caught. No one has been charged. We have seen a lot of posturing and we have seen fawning requests for picnics from our State Department, but no accountability and no compensation by the Iranian regime for the wanton murder of this individual.”

JACK DUNPHY: What I Saw At The Lakers Riots. “If you thought L.A.’s mayor and police brass learned from last year’s embarrassment, you are not a police officer, certainly not one with the LAPD.”