Ed Morrissey: If they weren’t legit, the police would have said that explicitly rather than issue a bunch of diversionary statements

Nashville Trans Shooter Manifesto Leaked?

Ed Morrissey, HotAir

Criminal head of the FBI James Comey withheld evidence of Hillary plot against Trump from his own FBI agents investigating Trump

 They all knew, except the agents. Hillary Clinton continues to be the worst person in the whole world, and all her patsies the dumbest.

What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony today at House Oversight, which will go on for at least a couple of hours or more, but this part wasn’t the bombshell. In his special-counsel report, Durham had already revealed that CIA Director John Brennan briefed these four in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton planned to paint Donald Trump as linked to Russian intelligence, presumably to shift attention away from her own e-mail scandal.

That briefing resulted in a “referral memorandum,” and one of its recipients was then-FBI director James Comey. Oversight chair Jim Jordan asks Durham whether Comey ever bothered to share that with the agents assigned to the newly launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane or ever presented to the FISA court when applications were made for domestic surveillance of Trump campaign officials. Nope, Durham says, and explains how he found that out . . .

. . . the director of the FBI knowingly withheld evidence pertinent to an FBI investigation. That resulted not just in errors made by the agents conducting the investigation that might have resulted ending what turned out to be a witch hunt, but also contributed to misrepresentations to the FISA court about the nature of the evidence they used to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign figures. ...

Comey knew it, but made sure the agents assigned to the case did not. So did Obama, Lynch, and Biden. And yet all of these officeholders lied publicly about the nature of the rumors and innuendo consistently for months.

More.

Ed Morrissey remembers Doris Day, who has passed away at 97

Doris Day: America’s Sweetheart

Doris Day - Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be) - YouTube

Democrats threaten with chaos and tyranny, stand for overturning all basic American political institutions and norms

Voting Republican has literally become a vote for survival and is no longer simply a policy preference:

The Electoral College is a civic abomination, Damon Linker of The Week, September 19, 2018

The Supreme Court Is a Historically Regressive and Presently Expendable Institution, Christopher Sprigman in Slate, October 11, 2018

Abolish the Senate. It's the only way to rein in modern presidents., John Bicknell for WaPo, August 30, 2016

Democrats’ ‘Fighting Words’ Take on an Ominous Tone, Carol M. Swain, The Epoch Times, October 12, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh and America's vanishing presumption of innocence, Edward Morrissey of The Week, September 19, 2018

140 House Democrats Refuse to Condemn Illegal Aliens Voting, John Binder of Breitbart, September 26, 2018 

Hillary at Oxford at June end avoids discussing Electoral College: Because it prevented the populism which would have elected her

She can't tell the truth about anything.

Hillary At Oxford: Let Us Not Speak Of This Electoral College Today

Hillary:

"‘Turkey also shows that political and intellectual elites, both inside the country and around the world, persistently underestimate the threat which these kinds of leaders pose to the survival of democratic institutions'".

Morrissey is too charitable to say that precisely Hillary is one of these leaders who pose a threat to the survival of democratic institutions, since she's repeatedly come out against the Electoral College since her memoir appeared a year ago:

Ahem. Among those democratic institutions in the US happens to be the Electoral College. And why did the framers of the Constitution create it? To act as a buffer against populism, at least in form. The Electoral College reflects the popular vote on a state-by-state basis to prevent a handful of the most populous states from controlling the executive through the nationwide popular vote, which creates a buffer against the very impulse Hillary decries in this speech.

Pope Francis pontificates, calls for legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State

In front of the UN this morning, quoted at length and discussed here:

"[E]quitable economic and social progress can only be attained by joining scientific and technical abilities with an unfailing commitment to solidarity accompanied by a generous and disinterested spirit of gratuitousness at every level. A contribution to this equitable development will also be made both by international activity aimed at the integral human development of all the world’s peoples and by the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society."

Ed Morrissey tap dances all around this:

"It’s clear, though, that he wasn’t calling for widespread and massive confiscation of wealth by governments."

Yes he is, while calling for it at every level knowing that that's not going to happen, and hiding behind the word "legitimate", a qualification foreign to the language of Jesus on the subject. 

Well, you first. The pope, the Vatican and the people of the Roman Catholic faith should take the lead: Let the redistribution begin with them, with the enormous wealth of the church. When we see them impoverishing themselves for the sake of the poor perhaps we'll take this more seriously.

Until then, this is just more pontificating.

What part of "that ye have" don't they understand?

"Sell that ye have and give alms." -- Luke 12:33

Rush Limbaugh Must Be High Again: Now Blames Tea Party For Staying Home In 2012

Up until now I haven't heard Rush Limbaugh blame the Tea Party specifically for staying home in 2012. It's always been the Republican "base" which he's been blaming for staying home, first 3 million of them, then 4 million. 

But now he's saying specifically that it's the Tea Party which stayed home in 2012, here on Friday:

CALLER: Hi, Rush, thanks for taking my call. Hey, I was just wondering if the Tea Party is so strong, what the hell happened to us in 2012?

RUSH: Stayed home.

CALLER: I would have walked over broken glass to vote against Obama.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Nothing could have kept me from it.

RUSH: Yeah, but four million of you didn't.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rush got this "stay home" meme in his head from some uncritical knee-jerk repetition of provisional reporting right after the election suggesting whites stayed home, based on admittedly incomplete exit polling data, which is kind of an irony since Rush used the same airtime on Friday to highlight how a false story about a country singer couldn't be erased no matter how hard she tried. Well this false story is well nigh impossible to erase from Rush's hard drive, and it's just getting worse now that he's singling out the Tea Party, which is probably more responsible for Romney's actual better performance than McCain's than people realize.

Within weeks of the election the whole idea that McCain got more Republican votes than Romney was decisively trashed by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal here and by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air here. Strassel points out the only losing state where McCain bested Romney was Ohio.

In point of fact, Strassel's numbers show Romney could have won the election but for 334,000 votes in just four states:

In the end, it was 334,000 votes—in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire—that separated Mr. Romney from the presidency.

In McCain's loss to Obama in 2008, the election similarly turned on just 1.4 million votes in the swing states. And for all the close states Romney lost to Obama in 2012, not just those four, the election turned on half that many in total.

So actually Romney did much better than McCain, it's just that Obama deployed his resources on the ground very effectively in a targeted manner, especially in Ohio, while Romney can't be said to have deployed much at all. Turning out your peeps in contested territories is key even if you lose those. Peeling off votes even in small numbers can increase the value of your turnout elsewhere in the same state, which is the point of campaigning on the ground in Hispanic and other minority strongholds, as Strassel points out. You don't have to win them, just weaken them.

Why Rush Limbaugh just keeps phoning it in on this issue is anyone's guess. But it is clear from much of what he says on the show that he increasingly relies on others to do his show prep for him.

Sympathetic critics of Rush Limbaugh are embarrassed for him, and Tea Partiers in particular can't be too happy. 

Q1 2010 GDP Drops to 3.2% from Q4 2009's 5.7%

The following discussion of the initial report of first quarter GDP appeared here at HotAir.com:

Obama: Drop in GDP growth rate means we’re on the right track, or something

APRIL 30, 2010

ED MORRISSEY

Er, come again? The White House crowed endlessly about the 2009Q4 annualized GDP growth rate of 5.7% in January, even after most of it was shown to come from inventory adjustments. Now Barack Obama wants to treat today’s announcement of a 3.2% annualized GDP growth rate as a continuing improvement, when (a) it failed to meet analyst expectations of 3.5%, and (b) it’s a significant drop from the last report. Don’t worry, though, because as Obama explains . . . he has a different measure of progress:

The economy that was losing jobs a year ago is creating jobs today. After the single biggest economic crisis in our lifetimes, we’re heading in the right direction. We’re moving forward. Our economy is stronger — that economic heartbeat is growing stronger. But I measure progress by a different pulse.

Well, obviously. A 3.2% annualized GDP growth rate is better than the -6.0% of a year ago, but it’s still not a figure that will create the kind of economic expansion that will move large numbers of Americans from unemployment rolls to payrolls. Even the White House acknowledges that much in its own projections of unemployment. Despite Obama’s claims above, we still aren’t at a level of net job creation, and the continuing status of initial jobless claims in the mid-400K range means we’re not even getting close to break-even yet.

One last point . . . : Federal spending only rose 1.4% in 2010Q1, while state government spending dropped by 3.8%. The Porkulus money has all but stopped appearing in the economic measures. That makes the 3.2% a bit more solid than earlier measures, but it also means that Obama’s ability to artificially boost numbers before the midterms appears to be dissipating. The next quarters’ numbers will be quite interesting in terms of [their] affect on the national debate. If it’s still stuck at around 3% and unemployment continues to stagnate, Democrats will have trouble trying to use the spin Obama applied today.