"LOS ANGELES -- The acrid odor of Democratic panic, as real as the aroma of burned flesh and cordite on a battlefield, hangs over California in a dark cloud of confusion and uncertainty. 'This is how it smelled in '64,' says a stunned Democratic observer in Sacramento, 'with [Barry] Goldwater charging and [Nelson] Rockefeller on the run.'

"This time Hillary Clinton has the Rockefeller role, with Bernie Sanders in passionate pursuit as the stand-in Barry Goldwater. The point is that suddenly the Democratic world is about to be turned upside down, and everyone is plundering precedents to make sense of it. Only weeks ago Hillary was so far ahead -- leading by up to 60 points in some public-opinion polls -- that the notion than Bernie could catch her was mere fantasy.

"A new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, conducted by Marist, demonstrates the impossible, on the crucial weekend before the Tuesday vote, that the race is statistically tied, with Hillary leading by only 2 points, 49 percent to 47 percent among most likely voters. From so far behind that he might as well have been campaigning in New Zealand, the 74-year-old Socialist Santa Claus from the kingdom of free stuff has pulled even and surges for the finish with the momentum. ...

"If Bernie defeats her on Tuesday, all bets on the Philadelphia convention next month are off. The superdelegates could stampede to somebody, perhaps Bernie but more likely Joe Biden, and deliver what everybody has been hankering for, an open convention. Ain'€™t we got fun?"

"Bank of America has been able to reduce a multi-billion dollar mortgage fraud penalty imposed by the Justice Department by giving millions of dollars to liberal groups approved by the Obama administration.

"The bank has wiped about $194 million off its record $16.6 billion 2014 mortgage settlement by donating to nonprofits and legal groups. Thanks to little-known provisions in the settlement, the bank only had to make $84 million in donations to do that. ...

"Among the groups receiving the money were Hispanic civil rights group the National Council of La Raza ($1.5 million), the National Urban League ($1.1 million) and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America ($750,000). ...

"Republicans have sharply criticized that part of the settlement as well as near-identical language in multi-billion settlements with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, arguing that the administration has created a 'slush fund' for liberal groups. The settlement skirts federal law, which says that any revenue obtained by the government must go to the Treasury and cannot be redirected to third parties. The deals circumvented that by requiring the banks to make 'voluntary' donations before they officially entered into the settlement."

"When previous journalistic fabrications have been discovered -- The New Republic's Stephen Glass, The New York Times' Jayson Blair and last week The Guardian's Joseph Mayton, come to mind -- news organizations have come clean as quickly as possible, offering sincere apologies to readers. Neither Couric nor Yahoo has apologized for their fraud. And Couric's non-apology is actually worse than nothing at all, for it confirms that her fabrication was deliberate. ...

"Couric, like Blair, Glass, and other fabricators, should not work in journalism again. Viewers implicitly trust those who work in television. They reckon they should be able to believe their eyes. But Couric is not worthy of their trust.

"Perhaps she won't face the consequences she deserves, but at least now everyone has fair warning not to trust the integrity of the interviews she does, or of those she has done previously."

"Smart Democrats began dusting off copies of their Plan B for the 2016 fall campaign this week. They were prompted by a devastating report from Department of Justice inspector general, who found that 'significant security risks' were raised by Hillary Clinton's decision to use a private e-mail server at the State Department. ...

"Democrats will carefully watch the polls in the next few weeks. If Hillary stays slightly ahead of Trump or is competitive, she will become the Democratic nominee at the Philadelphia convention. But if her numbers slide, watch for super-delegates now in her camp to consider the possibility of substituting Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate -- with the possible addition of Senator Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, as political balm for the party's not nominating a woman for president.

Everyone knows that the election is in the hands of independent voters, who are about 40 per cent of the electorate. In the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, 59 percent per cent of independents said that their view of Clinton was unfavorable, and 67 percent said that she was 'not honest and trustworthy.'"

"Freedom is never given; it is won."

"Well . . . what are we to make of the refusal by Clinton, Mills, Sullivan, and Abedin to cooperate with the Obama State Department IG?

"What are we to make of Mrs. Clinton's public posturing that of course she is prepared to cooperate -- and encourages her subordinates to cooperate -- with government investigators?

"And how is a former high government official who systematically evaded federal records requirements and then refused to cooperate with a government investigation into that evasion conceivably fit to be president of the United States?"

"Last week's unanimous passage of a Senate bill making it easier for 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia and other foreign terror sponsors was widely heralded as a major victory.

"It's more of a cruel hoax.

"It turns out that just before the vote, Sen. Charles Schumer and other proponents of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act stuffed an amendment into the final draft allowing the attorney general and secretary of state to stop any litigation against the Saudis in its tracks.

"Yes, JASTA would remove the statutory restrictions that have prevented 9/11 families from taking the Saudi kingdom to court. But Schumer helped craft an entirely new section to the original bill, giving the Justice and State departments the power to stay court action indefinitely. All they have to do is inform the judge hearing the case that the US government has engaged with Riyadh in diplomatic talks to resolve the issue."

"On May 10, the Arizona Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could provide a roadmap to eliminate a persistent form of government waste in nearly all 50 states.

"At issue is the practice of union release time, which allows government employees paid time off to conduct union activity unrelated to their job duties or any public purpose. The wasteful practice occurs in a majority of state and local governments.

"The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based free-market think tank, filed a lawsuit in 2011 that argued release time granted to the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, a government employee union, was an unconstitutional government expenditure. ...

"If the Arizona Supreme Court establishes release time as unconstitutional, the decision could have far-reaching impact."

"The definitive chronicler of proactive policing, the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald, spotlighted the Ferguson effect in a Wall Street Journal article in May 2015. She noted that arrests were sharply down in cities such as St. Louis and Baltimore because the 'incessant drumbeat against the police' across the country had 'officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric.'

"Those encouraging such rhetoric include President Obama and his first attorney general, Eric Holder -- even though an intensive Justice Department investigation of Brown's killing in Ferguson cleared the officer involved and made clear that charges that Brown had put up his hands and surrendered were baseless.

"Obama has since said that 'there's no data to support' a Ferguson effect. That puts him at odds with his appointee FBI Director James Comey, who says that his conversations with police officials around the country convinced him there are 'marginal pullbacks by lots and lots of police officers.' ...

"Black Americans were the primary victims of the huge crime increase starting in the late 1960s, and they will be the primary victims again if the Ferguson effect continues to result in more homicides. Can't we prevent this awful history from repeating itself?"

"In one of the most devastating critiques I have ever read of the misbehavior of lawyers at the U.S. Justice Department, a federal judge has issued an order imposing sanctions in U.S. v. Texas, the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas, which is the federal trial court where the lawsuit was originally filed, released a 28-page opinion on May 19 that takes the Justice Department and its lawyers to task for violating multiple ethics and court rules by intentionally misleading and lying to the court. ...

"Hanen lists the specific statements made by DOJ lawyers in court and on conference calls that were outright lies, and then he lists all of the applicable ethics rules that the DOJ lawyers violated. Those misleading statements put 'to rest any doubt regarding misconduct.' Hanen said the representations were made in 'bad faith' by DOJ lawyers and breached Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b), which makes such conduct sanctionable.

"The ethics and conduct rules require a lawyer to '(1) tell the truth; (2) do not mislead the Court; and (3) do not allow the Court to be misled.' According to Hanen, the 'Government's lawyers failed on all three fronts' because their behavior was 'intentionally deceptive.' In fact, said Hanen, 'it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.'"