Michael Savage is as lazy as Rush Limbaugh, shoots off his mouth about Obama without reading Obama's full speech in South Africa

Far from stirring up race hatred, Obama was attacking it.

We covered it here. WaPo had the full transcript of Obama's remarks in July. Too bad Savage is too lazy to read it.

Another irresponsible person with a microphone.

Laugh of a whole generation: Rush Limbaugh has had the same ethics, conscience, core beliefs, morality for 30 years

Here:

RUSH: So I’ve had a lot of emails from a lot of people in the past couple of days, and one of them I received last night that started me thinking. Now, I love things that make me think — I’ll be honest with you — and this one did. “Do you know how few people can say that they’ve had the same ethics, the same conscience, the same core beliefs, the same morality, and the same connectivity with themselves in their twenties, through their forties, and into the sixties and beyond, into their best years? Do you realize how few people are as consistent and reliable as you are?”

No, I don’t ever stop to think of anything like that. I don’t think… See, this is why I don’t… I don’t think it’s unusual that things I believed in my heart when I was in my twenties would survive my getting to my sixties. Core beliefs. I can totally believe that I wouldn’t change in those things. But this person said, “You don’t know how rare it is,” and what inspired her to write this, I think she said, was a caller that appeared to the program yesterday saying basically the same thing.

Spouses:

Roxy Maxine McNeely (1977–1980, div.)

Michelle Sixta (1983–1990, div.)

Marta Fitzgerald (1994–2004, div.)

Kathryn Rogers (2010–

Drug use:

Admitted addiction to prescription painkillers (October 2003)

Arrests:

Doctor shopping for prescription painkillers (April 2006)

Confiscations:

Viagra, Palm Beach International Airport (June 2006)

95,598,000 eating but not working in July 2018

Yesterday Rush told us a crime was necessary to impeach Rosenstein, but today no crime's necessary to impeach Trump

Ah, high crimes and misdemeanors.

Once again, since misdemeanors are "minor wrongdoings", The Constitution cannot be made to say "high minor wrongdoings" in the sense of "severe", as in "severe minor wrongdoings", which would make no sense. "High" refers to where they occur, in federal office, not to their severity. Crimes are severe in and of themselves compared with misdemeanors, which by definition are not. Therefore, "crime" alone is not necessary for impeachment. A minor wrongdoing will do, committed in high office, that is, in the federal government.

Impeachment is the political remedy for both in the political context, i.e. in the federal government.

Once again, Rush is confused, and the House dropping impeachment of Rosenstein is probably a good thing, politically, because Trump could be impeached for almost nothing at all, as long as there is support for it. Best not to get everyone together on that by going after Rosenstein for a misdemeanor.

This is politics, people!

Here yesterday:

Anyway, Professor Dershowitz said this would be a very, very bad precedent because impeachment is always a remedy for criminal activity, criminal behavior. And it’s very risky here to go out and try to impeach Rosenstein simply ’cause he won’t turn things over to you. It’s kind of a tough case to make that Rosenstein’s behaving in a criminal fashion simply because he will not respond to subpoenas that the House leadership and Devin Nunes have demanded to see some documents.

But here today:

I mean, everything [Mueller has] come up with he’s given to some other jurisdiction to prosecute or do with what they will. And impeachment, you have to understand something about impeachment. This is what this has always been about. The effort here has always been to drive Trump’s approval numbers down. Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding.

It’s political. You can impeach a president if he hadn’t committed any crime. You can try it. High crimes, misdemeanors. They are hoping to drive Trump’s approvals numbers down with all of this.

Rush Limbaugh: Trump supporters don't think running around with Playboy playmates means anything compared with saving the culture

Incredible. What's to save, then? 

The basis of culture is the cult, that is, religion. Mine teaches that such behavior is wrong. I'll bet Melania's does, too.

If you want to make promiscuity the new cult, well, count me out.

Keep in mind that Rush Limbaugh is a drug addict and serial monogamist who has been wrong about far more than little old GDP in his lifetime. He was ecstatic to have that flaming homo Elton John sing at his third fourth wedding, so there you go. His Methodism is thimble deep, like his education.

Trump is nothing more than a transitional figure. Once the force of his personality is gone, nothing will be left . . . unless of course he builds that wall.

Here:

For example, Lowry says this incident on tape with Trump talking to a fixer about paying off a Playboy playmate would sink anybody, particularly any Republican candidate. Why doesn’t it sink Trump? Well, we’ve been through all the reasons for this. One of Lowry’s explanations is that the bar has been set so low with Trump that no new revelation is gonna shock anybody, not after the NBC Access Hollywood video. And so there just isn’t anything that’s gonna shock anybody. Trump’s already survived numerous such attempts to take him out.

So something like this, as far as Trump supporters are concerned, there’s nothing new here. No reason to get upset. But I think it’s far more than that. I think not enough credit’s being given to the sophistication of Trump supporters. And it is that it doesn’t mean anything, when compared to what these people think is really important, like saving the country, like growing the country, like saving our culture. Whether Trump’s running around with Playboy playmates is not relevant to them.

Rush Limbaugh is a GDP boob, again

Rush Limbaugh can't remember good GDP under Obama for two reasons.

One, he's never read the press releases from the BEA. These are available anytime of day or night, including right now, right on Al Gore's amazing internet, for the whole Obama era, but it's more convenient to ignore them at the time if they occasionally disagree with your broader political point.

Second, Limbaugh doesn't realize that real GDP is a moving target. Real means it's an inflation-adjusted figure, and therefore is constantly updated going back in time to incorporate inflation's effects. Therefore no report of GDP he remembers from the past is worth anything today, except in the context of its time.

Limbaugh also doesn't understand that while GDP is subject to constant revision from month to month for this and other reasons, today's report is the 15th comprehensive revision, which occurs every five years. The last one was in 2013. If you looked at the data before the 2013 revision and compared it after you'd see noteworthy differences in the numbers you may have remembered differently.

Comprehensive revisions incorporate new methodologies and measurements across all the data. Today's data revision does just that going back all the way to 1929. Limbaugh wants you to believe new methods and measures under Obama distorted Obama's numbers uniquely but weren't applied uniformly to all the data, which is a complete falsehood.

Here's the recent history of 4.0 real GDP or better from today's revisions vs. contemporaneous BEA press releases:

2Q2018: 4.1%

3Q2014: 4.9% (5% in third estimate Dec. 2014)

2Q2014: 5.1% (4.6% in third estimate Sept. 2014)

4Q2011: 4.7% (3.0% in third estimate March 2012)

4Q2009: 4.5% (5.6% in third estimate March 2010).

Trump's GDP in the first half of 2018 is comparable to Obama's and Bush's best performances before him. That's a hopeful sign. But Trump supporters like me will have something to really crow about if and when these numbers look like they did in the 1990s, and do it consistently.

So far, they don't.

Rick Santorum is suddenly doing robocalls for Sandy Pensler for US Senate here in Michigan, which sounds like desperation

Just got the call a few minutes ago.

Turns out the race is now deadlocked after some time with Pensler in the lead.

Pensler has been advertising vigorously in Rush Limbaugh's timeslot on the radio as well.

His opponent John James has been relying on direct mail to reach his voters.

Pensler is spending an awful lot of money to win when he went out of his way in January to alienate voters by stating for the record that the Polish people were complicit in the Holocaust in World War II.

That's hardly how to win friends and influence people in Macomb and Wayne counties if you really want to be elected to the US Senate in 2018! 

'The Polish legislature yesterday, with particularly insensitive timing, hammered home humanities [sic] dangerous proclivity to insulate ourselves against others. It passed legislation outlawing calling Polish based concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzic and others as “Polish concentration camps” rather they must now be called . [sic] “Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland”. This attempt to whitewash and deny complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust is dangerous.'

Rush Limbaugh's not-working-but-still-eating hits a record 95.5 million in the first half of 2018

Fake news: Drudge contributes to the false boom narrative

Drudge links to a Zero Hedge story, which doesn't use the word "boom". But Zero Hedge doesn't get it right, either. It calls the May 0.8% monthly percentage "surge" in retail sales "the biggest since January 2017" absent the hurricane surge in September 2017. Not true: The actual 0.76% spike in May 2018 was bested by November 2017 at 0.79%. They both round to 0.8%.

But was the 0.8% significant? The only way to know is to look at what has happened in May in the past, and from that we conclude that May 2018 was obviously up but unremarkably so. We did better in May 2008 and 2009 for crying out loud, in the middle of a deep recession, which just proves it takes a while to get people's attention, even after you beat them in the head with a 2 X 4, multiple times.

The bottom line is retail is struggling over the long haul. The trend isn't up even a full half point after 18 years.

Expect Rush Limbaugh to trumpet the fake news nonetheless.

Jim Goad's just upset because readership at takimag has dropped off a cliff

Like Rush Limbaugh, he blames his base:

'I’d like to cheerfully suggest that you take that finger you’re always pointing at others and stick it up your ass. With the way you’re always talking about “degenerates,” you’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?'

Rush is right: On the eve of Election 2016 the American Bar Association Journal was speculating whether Hillary could pardon herself

The assumption was she would win.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, 12.4 million black people eating but not working!

"Not working but still eating" soars to new all-time high of 95.9 million in May 2018, but don't expect Rush Limbaugh to talk about it

Not with a Republican in the White House, no sir.

Rush is right: Comey admitted his dossier meeting with Trump was an "assignment"

Rush thinks Comey got this assignment from Clapper.

Notice that Comey admits he was acting at the behest of "all the intelligence chiefs". That would include Brennan at CIA, and presumably the heads of NSA, DIA and NGIA.

Also notice how Comey characterizes this "defensive briefing" of Trump as part of the FBI's "counterintelligence" operation. He's admitting a counterintelligence operation of a presidential campaign and transition was in existence, at the behest of Obama's government, and that the briefing was part of this.

The adversarial character of all this is hardly appreciated by your average observer. 

From the transcript, here, Meet the Press, 4/29/18:

CHUCK TODD:

When you told him the contents of the Steele Dossier, did you get the impression it was the first time he'd ever heard those allegations?

JAMES COMEY:

Yes. And I didn't give him the briefing on the whole Steele Dossier. My assignment was to brief him on a small part of it that was salacious and personal. And my sense was-- I didn't get a sense that he knew about those.

CHUCK TODD:

I want to re-ask a question that Reince Priebus asked you, and you said in your memo, why include that salacious part? If it was something that you thought was, you know, not that necessary to the investigation? Or did you think it was important that he knew?

JAMES COMEY:

We thought it was important that he knew. And I say, "We," meaning all the intelligence chiefs that put together the intelligence community assessment. We thought it was important that he know, because we knew, and we don't want to be holding that back from the new president. And also, the F.B.I.'s role is counterintelligence. And so we do a defensive briefing, whether or not something's true, just to let the person who might be the target of a leverage effort, of an effort by an adversary to gain advantage over him know that we have this information.

The Limbaugh Theorem again, in a headline: Republicans run like they're not in charge of anything

Rush will never admit that this is the same thing that Obama did, but it is.

It's especially true of Trump, who as president could run an operation to secure the southern border (without congressional support, approval or even funding) just like Eisenhower, but won't. Instead he pretends there's some nefarious impediment keeping him from doing his job, which he isn't going to have after 2020 if he doesn't get down to business.

Laugh of the Day: If paying off a hooker means Trump has to leave office, Washington DC will be empty by tomorrow

A caller just now to the Rush Limbaugh show.

Trump blames Mexico, our own laws and his powerlessness, the Limbaugh Theorem in action

“opposing everything that’s happening, even the things he is causing to happen. He is on a perpetual campaign.”

While Rush Limbaugh keeps trying to find a way to rationalize Trump's signature on the omnibus, Laura Ingraham minced no words

On her radio show this morning she called this a betrayal.

And that's what it was.

The line of the week was Rush Limbaugh's: "Whenever you see the word omnibus, think trash can"

Here:

So on this, for example, this omnibus, whenever you see that word, folks, just think of a trash can. No! In fact, think of a Christmas tree with anything you want gift wrapped underneath it. That’s what omnibus means.

He had it right the first time. A conservative's trash can is a liberal's Christmas tree.

Limbaugh predicts the omnibus spending bill will make Trumpists go wobbly

Well, they should since it's a total betrayal.