BYRON YORK: Will GOP demand Plame-style leak investigation?

A lot of lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, are angry about the damaging national security leaks that have come out of the Obama administration. But Republicans are probably angrier, and their feelings can be explained in two words: Valerie Plame.

The Plame affair was a complicated, tortured episode in which the George W. Bush White House was accused of having deliberately leaked classified information — the identity of an undercover CIA agent — to score political points during a particularly intense time in the Iraq war. Now, many Republicans believe the Barack Obama White House has deliberately leaked classified information — among other things, details of the U.S. cyberwar against Iran — to score political points during a particularly intense time in the presidential campaign.

As Republicans demand an independent investigation into the Obama leaks — many are not satisfied with the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder, a friend of the president, to appoint a pair of U.S. attorneys to look into the matter — it’s worth looking back to see what can happen when a special prosecutor investigation spirals out of control in a politically-charged atmosphere.

Read the whole thing. I’d forgotten how badly Patrick Fitzgerald turned out to have acquitted himself here, and it’s worth reminding people.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

For years, Democrats have had an Alinsky-driven “anything goes” mindset. The Activist Left stages violent protests, demonstrations at private homes, vandalism, voter intimidation, and now SWATing… and the Institutional Left runs interference. This is how Brett Kimberlin is out of jail, why Bill Ayers has tenure, and how the New Black Panther Party got their charges dropped.

Republicans, at least the Old Guard, responded by saying that “we’re better than that”. And you know what? Being better than that has not only helped the Left immensely over the years, it’s legitimized those tactics. Part of what makes these ethical lines work is a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction. Hitting below the belt doesn’t help if the other immediately responds in kind. It’s a zero-sum escalation, so you just don’t go there. It’s only when you know you can cross the line with impunity that you get tempted.

What we see with the new generation is a willingness to imitate the most effective tactics of the Left. Many of us are former lefties who learned from the pros and then switched sides. The rest of use are young and don’t see the point of playing Charlie Brown and the football. What made Andrew Breitbart so terrifying to the Left isn’t that he did anything new, it’s that they’d never been on the receiving end of it before. On one hand, it’s horrible that our politics includes tactics like these at all. On the other hand, if they’re going to be used anyway by the lefties, we might as well fight fire with fire. The gripping hand is that responding in kind robs these tactics of long-term effectiveness and in the long run helps to re-establish ethical norms.

Re-establishing ethical norms is good.

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THE HILL: Democrats’ Hopes For Recapturing House Dim.

Related: Generic Congressional Ballot: Republicans 45%, Democrats 38%. Nice poll, kid. Don’t get cocky.

ROGER SIMON: Are Liberals The New Squares? “The minute rebellion goes middle class, there’s nothing less rebellious. It’s all as boring as a Volvo. So we are in an era of desperation. A certain class of people who staked their lives on being cool ever since high school — whenever that was, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, who knows — are beginning to be confronted with the truth – that their ultra-conventional received wisdom, that which they thought was cool, is a bunch of hooey. (I was one of them, so I know.) . . . What makes modern liberalism the mess that it is today is that it is mainly composed of people who desperately wanted to be cool in high school – wanted to be Abbie Hoffman or Eldridge Cleaver – but never were. Their longing – this need to be Abbie – has clouded their thinking and their ability to perceive reality, placing us all in a mess along with them. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan became a conservative.”

Plus, stating the obvious: “Libertarians are the cool guys.”

Related: Silicon Graffiti: Where Krugman Has Gone Before.

YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS: Sen. Manchin to skip Democratic convention. “Three prominent West Virginia Democrats said Monday that they would skip the party’s national convention in Charlotte, N.C., this September over concerns that links to the party could hurt their re-election chances. Sen. Joe Manchin, Rep. Nick Rahall, and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin all said they would avoid the convention, according to the West Virginia Metro News.”

OUCH: Investor’s Business Daily: Obama’s Lawless Presidency. “The chief executive who swore to faithfully execute the nation’s laws picks those he’ll ignore and makes up others through regulation and executive order. He sees no need for a Congress or Constitution.”

PRESSURE: Romney Calls For Special Investigator In Leaks Probe.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D BE SENDING MORE TROOPS TO THE PERSIAN GULF: And they were right!

POLITICO: MSNBC mischaracterizes Romney remarks. Save that headline, folks — I’ll bet there’ll be an opportunity to use it again. Meanwhile, let’s find out the names of those responsible. As with the bogus Zimmerman edits, there should be accountability.

JAMES TARANTO: “Lately we’ve seen a spate of articles blaming Obama’s failures on impersonal forces beyond his control.”

Way back in 2009, I noted an ongoing pattern of Obama incompetence and predicted: “Expect this to play out in thumbsucker columns on whether America is ‘ungovernable.'”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

MILLION DOLLAR BABIES:

As anyone with children well knows, raising a child is expensive. What is surprising, however, is just how expensive it truly is. ABC News reports that the US Department of Agriculture has released a report that quantifies the cost of raising a child —from birth to age 18—and the resulting figure is staggering: $234,900.

This is an alarming figure—all the more so because it has risen 3.5 percent in the past year alone. Although some of this increase has been driven by inflation, the main culprits are increasing costs in child care, education, food and especially healthcare, where costs have doubled since 1960. . . .

Clearly, something has to give. Raising children is one of the most fundamental and rewarding experiences of life, and it should not be necessary to be a millionaire to take part in it. And it is not only individuals who will suffer: Europe and Japan’s well-known demographic crises are partially driven by an unwillingness of married adults to have children, and while America has not yet quite reached this point, it is easy to imagine prospective parents already struggling to make a living choosing to forgo children when they take a look at the bill. There are some European traditions worth emulating, but it’s birth rate is certainly not one of them.

What numbers like these tell us is that our society is profoundly dysfunctional. We have organized ourselves so poorly that the most basic and fundamental thing a human society must do — produce the next generation and prepare it for adulthood — is becoming harder and harder with each passing year.

Yes, I’ve written about this in the past, while also noting that the non-economic costs of parenting are also way up. “In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.”

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: “If radical Mormons had initiated acts of terrorism in Manhattan, do you think their religion would be held up for mockery each night on Broadway?”

BORIS JOHNSON: Dithering Europe Is Heading For The Dark Ages. “If things go on as they are, we will see more misery, more resentment, and an ever greater chance that the whole damn kebab van will go up in flames.”

PREDICTION: “The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school.”

HE SORT OF MATTERED, ONCE: Jesse Jackson’s Impotent Protest Against Gun Ranges Is A Bust.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Barbara Hall Had Cooking Spray Sex, Threw Bottle At Boyfriend, Florida Cops Say. She was jealous over another woman named Pam. No, really.

OBAMA’S WEST VIRGINIA PROBLEM STRETCHES INTO PENNSYLVANIA. “A significant portion of western and central Pennsylvania Democrats declined to vote for Barack Obama in the April primary, an analysis by PoliticsPA has found. The results there resemble those of Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia, where the President lost around 40 percent of the primary vote to no-name opponents or ‘undecided’. A review of county-by-county vote totals show that the President underperformed historic trends, as well as other Democrats on the ballot this year.”

HMM: Massive Bombing Exercises Reported At Fort Knox.

UPDATE: Or not. A reader emails: “Sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorists, but Fort Knox isn’t the place for ‘massive’ bombing exercises. Trust me, I should know. I have worked on or near Fort Knox for over a dozen years. I have also been involved in training at Fort Knox as a member of the National Guard. While there are occasions – particularly from June through August when Reserve units most often conduct such training – that one might hear artillery rounds or the like, it’s just not the place for anything resembling massive bombing or testing bunker busters. Too much civilian development near the post to be practicing air strikes. There are plenty of other more appropriate sites the military can choose from to conduct that type of training.”

THESE PEOPLE NEVER LEARN: Ballet Gym Goes All Black Swan On Blogger, Threatens To Call Police After Innocuous Comment.

I’ve warned people about this stuff. More than once.

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DISHONEST EDITING OF “WAWA” TAPE? “In actuality, Mitt was contrasting the ridiculous over-regulation of the public sector, with the efficiency of the private sector, and used the electronic ordering system at WAWAs as an example – here’s the FULL video.”

I think they were trying for a rehash of the Bush grocery-scanner lie.

UPDATE: Dodd Harris emails:

“I think they were trying for a rehash of the Bush grocery-scanner lie”

That was my immediate thought, as well, when I read the story. They got away with it then–and they simply cannot or will not wrap their heads around the fact that the media environment has changed. No matter how many times these sorts of shenanigans boomerang back and embarrass them, they still think they can twist the public’s perceptions the way they wish. “Real journalists” liked that power and simply refuse to accept that “some blogger” has taken it away for good,

Sadly, there are always some willing dupes who won’t ever learn the truth–because they don’t want to. The type that are still pushing narratives like that the Swift Boaters were “proven wrong” or that Obama is a pillar of fiscal restraint.

Sad, hilarious, whatever. (Bumped). Hot Air has the whole story and the videos.

DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY: Happyism: The creepy new economics of pleasure.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sex Tips From The Bunny Ranch Girls. Do I even need to put an NSFW warning on this link?

UPDATE: Reader R.J. Thomas writes: “Not Safe for Work is becoming less and less relevant in this economy. You actually have to have a job for that to apply.”

#OCCUPYFAIL: The Sad Demise Of The Occupy Movement. Sad, hilarious, whatever.

STACY MCCAIN: A Disturbing Silence.