Minding your business: When Tim Walz has that hard conversation with you in the produce section and asks if you've voted yet

That'll Do It: Walz Says Have That 'Hard Conversation' With a Stranger 'In the Produce Aisle'

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

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.

And Trump's AG Sessions says Lois Lerner is off the hook

Discussed here.

Bang up job you're doin' there, Brownie.

FBI Director James Comey is a crook, a dirty cop: Insiders embarrassed by their boss

Story here.

That lying bitch Hillary on headers last night: None of my emails had a 'classified material' header

That's because she made sure they were removed, disproving her claim to the FBI that she was ignorant of what the markings meant.

(See here for Hillary's bald-faced lying to a US Navy veteran at last night's Commander in Chief forum.)

When Jake Sullivan complained in 2011 that he couldn't send something to Hillary because of a classified material header, she told him to remove it and send it non-secure, as recounted by HotAir already in early January here, where the email is reproduced. It took her all of four minutes to commit a crime.

Why are we still rehashing this? Hillary should be under indictment, not running for office.

Hot Air:

In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel. ... “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand. Regardless of whether or not Sullivan complied, this demolishes Hillary’s claim to be ignorant of marking issues, as well as strongly suggests that the other thousand-plus instances where this did occur likely came under her direction.

Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders supporters and move on dot ogre were responsible for shutting down Chicago Trump rally

Noted here:

And perhaps more to the point, who were these protesters? As some MSM outlets almost reluctantly reported, it was a mixed bag of Black Lives Matter activists and Bernie Sanders supporters. ...

And when you need to organize this many marchers, you can’t do it without MoveOn.org taking credit and rounding up the troops. This was staged well in advance by a group of protesters who organized it via Facebook.

Immigration squish Scott Walker calls Hillary Clinton foreign policy mush

Allahpundit, here, last February:

"So Walker does support comprehensive immigration reform — although we already knew that, given that he was willing to endorse a path to citizenship for illegals on camera as recently as two years ago, when he was already surely thinking of running in 2016. Curiously for a guy who’s running as a conservative hero, he really makes no bones about being an immigration squish."

Scott Walker here yesterday:

“Under Obama and Clinton Putin has found far too many years of mush."

"Everywhere in the world that she has touched is more messed up today than it was when she and the president took office."

Independent voters overwhelmingly oppose Obama's illegal immigration cram-down

The middle class knows an obvious threat to its jobs when it sees it.

HotAir reports on the recent Bloomberg poll, here:

Obama gets a 37/54 on immigration a couple of weeks after his big “I’m gonna act alone” statement, which isn’t surprising, considering that Bloomberg respondents oppose executive action by a wide margin, 39/56. A bigger majority of independents oppose this (57%) according to their news report, although the data release didn’t include those breakdowns.

Interestingly, this isn’t a poll of registered voters, either. The survey sample was 1,001 adults, which should be the most favorable sample type for Obama and the Democrats. If it’s that bad with this kind of sample, imagine what the numbers would be among registered voters or likely 2016 voters.

Remember "you didn't build that"? Yesterday Obama said "you didn't vote for that" crushing Republican wave

The ideologue, dismissive of the facts, quoted here:

“To everyone that voted, I want you to know that I heard you,” Obama began. “To two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.”

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. 

IRS' Shulman Visited White House 9 Times In '09 Alone, Everson Once In 5 Years

The former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman is widely reported to have visited the White House well over 100 times after 2008 when he took over the agency, just as the IRS was preparing to target Tea Party groups in earnest.

What's more interesting, however, isn't the aggregate number of visits he made, most of which occurred in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare in 2010 and which are detailed in the logs as health-care related discussions, but that he made so many visits to the White House prior to March 2010.

Earl Glynn here has made an exhaustive study of the White House logs and finds Shulman visited the White House 9 times in 2009 alone.

Shulman's predecessor Mark Everson, by contrast, recalls making just one visit to the White House in the five years between 2003 and 2007, as reported by Susan Ferrechio here:

'The frequent trips to the White House under Obama far outnumbered the times other administrations felt the need to meet with the IRS, according to Mark Everson, who led the IRS under former President George W. Bush. Everson said he remembers making only one trip to the White House between 2003 and 2007 and said he felt like he'd "moved to Siberia" because of the isolation.'

In Shulman's testimony before Congress he has denied discussing targeting of Tea Party groups, but he also testified that he doubted he visited the White House as many times as reported, as recounted here:

He also expressed skepticism that he had visited 118 times.

“I don’t accept the premise that there are 118 visits to the White House,” he objected. “That may or may not be true.”

Yeah right, that's because there were 157 visits, not 118.

The guy's a Slick Willie who absolutely must parse so that if and when we get the goods on the guy at least he'll avoid a perjury charge:

[A]ll of Shulman’s answers were parsed and delivered in practiced legalese.  He almost never answered anything with simple assertions, opting for “recollections” and “as far as I can remembers.”  In his apparent painstaking efforts to avoid making any statement that might ensnare him in a perjury controversy, Shulman seemed unable to cleanly field simple questions about his opinion.  So he hedged and qualified and dissembled — and looked really guilty doing so. 

Obama Bungles Mideast Worse Than Jimmy Carter In 1979, Gets Ambassador Killed

Hot Air, here, has that old weird feelin':

Once again, we had an American government encourage the “democracy” movement run by radical Islamists in chasing our ally out of power.  Once again, we seem surprised when the radical Islamists put radical Islamists in power.  And once again we have “students” assaulting our embassy in the capital, this time Cairo, without so much as an apology from the radical Islamist government now running the nation. ...

Qaddafi had at least been somewhat more cooperative since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the West’s military attack on Qaddafi that caused his fall — led by the US initially — sent a big message on the futility of cooperation with the US and the West to all of the other governments in the region.

Chris Matthews Wanted to Watch Someone Kill Rush Limbaugh

The date was October 13, 2009, here:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy, Mr. Big?  In the end they jam a big CO2 pellet in his face and he blew up.  I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp.  That day may come. Not yet. But we’ll be there to watch. I think he’s Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto.  Are you watching, Rush?

... [Matthews is] openly wistful for the day it happens, telling Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut that “we’ll be there to watch” when someone offs Rush.

Classy.  Really, really classy.  Does NBC want to stand behind this standard for its broadcasts?

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.

Sarah Palin In The News

Back in January I wrote that "In my department, this move removes Sarah Palin from my list of serious candidates for president in 2012. It wouldn't matter what news organization she joined, either. One does not pursue statesmanship by lowering oneself in this way. And perhaps that's what she is trying to tell everyone: that she's packing it in."

Someone who knows her well, Fred Malek, recently came to a similar conclusion about Palin here.

h/t Allahpundit