ANDREW MCCARTHY: Latest in Leak Farce: the ‘Special Counsel’ Folly.

Looking out at the dreadful but lovable 1962 Mets, Casey Stengel used to wail, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Were he here to watch today’s not so lovable Republican leadership in action, “the Ol’ Perfessor” would be making the same observation.

As reported by PJM’s Bridget Johnson, with Beltway fixtures John McCain and Lindsey Graham pointing the way, the GOP has loudly demanded that Attorney General Eric Holder name a “special counsel” to investigate Obama administration leaks of national defense information to the New York Times. Seeing his opportunity to bury this embarrassing episode until after the November election, Holder is naturally accommodating them — or at least doing enough to appear to accommodate them that the media will applaud as the story goes dark.

The whole thing is a farce. You don’t need a special prosecutor to know who talked to the Times. All you need to do is read the two stories — the first on Obama’s assassination list and the follow-up on cyber-warfare. The Times tells you who its sources are.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: ‘Why In The Hell Is Eric Holder Still Attorney General?’

LANNY DAVIS UNLOADS ON OBAMA. “You have vicious people who are working for the president.”

Plus this: “The slowly rising voices of dissent from mainstream Democrats against the Obama brand — not against him as a leader or a man, but his administration and re-election team — may signal many things. One thing it certainly doesn’t signal is a quiet, blissful summer for this embattled president.”

MARK STEYN: Bozo the Jurist. “Over the years, I’ve faced unsympathetic judges in various courts around the world, but I can’t recall ever listening to such a stream of unjudicial drivel from the bench as that which poured from Judge Vaughey.”

DOCTORS AND POLITICS in Illinois.

FASTER, PLEASE: Trial of Alzheimer’s Vaccine is Successful. “Swedish researchers report the successful trial of a vaccine that helps individuals develop protective antibodies that can prevent progression of Alzheimer’s disease. . . . The new treatment, which is presented in Lancet Neurology, involves active immunization, using a type of vaccine designed to trigger the body’s immune defense against beta-amyloid. In this second clinical trial on humans, the vaccine was modified to affect only the harmful beta-amyloid. The researchers found that 80 per cent of the patients involved in the trials developed their own protective antibodies against beta-amyloid without suffering any side-effects over the three years of the study.”

ILLINOIS TEACHERS BEWARE: Your Pension System Is A Scam. “Specifically, the Illinois Teachers Retirement Fund is one of the country’s worst funded pension funds. According to accountants — who use softer methods to measure the health of public funds than they do of private pensions — teacher pensions in Illinois are only 45 percent funded — the fund is expected to be able to pay less than half the pensions Illinois politicians and union heads have been promising for years. . . . It is, in other words, a scam. Both the politicians and the unions want to fool people. They want teachers to think they have secure pensions and they want taxpayers to think that these big pension promises won’t cost them much money. Assuming unrealistic rates of return allows them to square the circle: they can promise big pensions without raising taxes to pay for them right away.”

RESTRICTIONS ON INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL WITHOUT DUE PROCESS?

A few weeks ago the United States Senate passed a piece of legislation called the “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act”, it is essentially a transportation bill focused on roads and bridges. Title III of the act is a revenue provision concerning gas guzzling, cars leaking underground storage tanks, import duties and a number of other fees, taxes and other revenue enhancements.

Section 40304 is a rather bizarre provision that certainly doesn’t seem to fit in a transportation bill and is buried so deep that few senators have probably even read that far into the bill which is 1676 pages. Section 40304 is titled “Revocation or denial of passport in case at certain tax delinquencies”. The provision specifically amends the 1926 Passport Act to permit the IRS to simply ‘Certify” to the Secretary of State that an individual “has a seriously delinquent tax debt in an amount in excess of $50,000.00. The law does not require that any hearing be held or require administrative due process of any kind. In fact the IRS must only give what is called a “Notice of levy” to the tax payer. This is nothing more than the IRS’ own determination that the taxpayer owes $50,000.00 and while $50,000.00 sounds like a lot of money, it can easily be the case that much smaller amounts with penalties and interest can cross the $50,000.00 threshold.

Read the whole thing.

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Cronkite ‘the most-trusted’? Where’s the evidence?

As I describe in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, the “golden age” fallacy is that “flawed but enticing belief that there really was a time when journalism and its practitioners were respected and inspiring.” Such as the 1960s and 1970s, when Cronkite became a dominant figure in American broadcast journalism.

Actually, it’s when journalism became the least trustworthy, and most self-important.

THE DICTATORS’ LEARNING CURVE: How To Make a Revolution: Every revolution is unique. But the men and women who brought down Slobodan Milošević are willing to show you how. (Via John Ringo on Facebook, who comments: “Turns out Bernardo De La Paz was smarter than I realized.”)

HEY, NOW, DON’T BE MOCKING my “Who is John Galt?” bumper sticker.

AT AMAZON, Father’s Day Gifts In Kitchen & Dining.

PEOPLE CALL AMERICANS PRUDES, but Australian bluenoses are up in arms over a simple photo that would arouse no particular interest in the United States.

UPDATE: Reader Gerald Hanner writes: “No wonder the Chinese have been making threats toward the Aussies.” Well, I don’t think the Aussies are wimps, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. But apparently an invader wouldn’t have to worry about “a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

AND I THOUGHT “HEADING” THE BALL WAS THE BIGGEST DANGER: Soccer In Ukraine Brings Fans, Fear Of AIDS.

NEW GOP ANTI-OBAMA AD LOOKS A LOT LIKE ONE OBAMA USED AGAINST MCCAIN.

JOHN ELLIS: The Trap of Minority Studies Programs.

When Naomi Schaefer Riley was fired by the Chronicle of Higher Education for her trenchant remarks on Black Studies programs, most of those who criticized the firing saw in it a display of the campus left’s intolerance. Fair enough, but this episode also has a much broader meaning.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large populations of poor immigrants arrived in the U.S.–Irish, Italians, and Jews from Russia and Poland. Their extreme poverty placed them at the bottom of the social ladder, and they were often treated with contempt. Yet just a few generations later they were assimilated, and their rapid upward social mobility had produced mayors, senators, judges, and even Presidents from among their ranks. None of this could have happened without first-rate public education.

To be sure, they worked hard to get ahead, but they were not obstructed by something that afflicts the have-nots of today: as they walked through the school gates they were not met by people intent on luring them into Irish or Italian Studies programs whose purpose was to keep them in a state of permanent resentment over past wrongs at the hands of either Europeans or establishment America. Instead, they could give their full attention to learning. They took courses that informed them about their new land’s folkways and history, which gave them both the ability and the confidence needed to grasp the opportunities it offered them.

When we compare this story with what is happening to minority students today, we see a tragedy.

Read the whole thing.

FLORIDA PURGE reveals noncitizens who voted.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Real News From Syria.

CNN spotlights the SWATting phenomenon. Video at the link.

PANIC: “Terrified residents” think Shih-Tzu is runaway genetically-engineered pig or something.

READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Hien Nguyen asks for a plug for The Village Teacher. Done!

NPR’S CAR TALK coming to an end.

PROGRESS: Smart shirt syncs with smartphone to perfect your Yoga and Pilates.

KATHLEEN PARKER ON OBAMA: Nobody Likes A Loser. “Democrats seem to be inching away from their man, undermining and diminishing the president with a thousand tiny cuts. Not even his strongest alleged ally, Bill Clinton, can stay on message. Of course, Clinton has never really been Obama’s friend, despite his assertions to the contrary. Does Clinton think that Obama has been a good president? Of course not. He thinks that he was a good president and that his wife would have been better than Obama. . . . In the political jungle, where people tend to be more Darwinian than divine, he is wounded and the pack is beginning to turn. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who could be a hockey mom if he wore lipstick, recently told CBS’s Charlie Rose that Hillary Clinton would have been a better president. Yes, that is blood you smell.”

UPDATE: Reader David Horwich writes: “Yes, that is blood we’re smelling in the water. Thought experiment: what if Bill Clinton is undermining BO for his wife NOT for 2016, but instead for 2012? Knowing Dems, who have demonstrated an uncanny ability to shift any rule they like for political convenience, wouldn’t the biggest surprise of all be if they put HER up for November instead of rapidly-becoming-radioactive Barack?”

Well, if Obama pulled an LBJ, Hillary would be the first name to everyone’s lips, especially since the other leading candidate from 2008, John Edwards, is out of the picture. But I don’t see it.

But boy, Obama’s not getting any respect from the Post today . . . .

JOHN PODHORETZ:

A startingly listless President Obama appeared in the White House press room yesterday morning, spoke some dull preliminaries about the European financial crisis — and then slipped and tumbled headfirst into re-election quicksand from which he will find it very difficult to extricate himself.

Now, it is not the case that the president is finished because he said, “The private sector is doing fine” — even though those were the very words he spoke yesterday, the week after a jump in the unemployment rate and a downward revision of the GDP.

It’s just one quote, after all, and a lot can happen in five months. And while it’s inarguably a huge gift to the Romney campaign — one worth approximately three George Clooneys and six Sarah Jessica Parkers — the president’s rival is certainly capable of making blunders that will hand back some of the advantage.

No, “The private sector is doing fine” may prove to be the pivotal moment for the 2012 campaign because of what it demonstrates about the president’s ideas as he heads into the fight of his life.

Indeed.