JUST WHAT I NEEDED: The post-Comey Day Edition of Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

TOLERANCE: Aussie Conservative Andrew Bolt Fights Off Antifa Ambush.

CATHERINE HERRIDGE: Comey Made A Leak In Hopes Of Changing Focus Of The Russia Investigation.

“I can’t remember a time ever where a former FBI director has deliberately leaked the contents of a government document so it would get to a reporter in the hopes that it would prompt a special counsel investigation,” Herridge said Thursday afternoon.

“What you can draw here from that testimony is that once he left the office of FBI director, he was not necessarily a person of principle,” Herridge said. “He made a decision to leak information on an anonymous basis in the hope of really changing the entire focus of the Russia investigation going forward.”

Instead, everyone is focused on Comey.

SHOCKER: Looks like the NYTs and NBC News beclowned themselves on Twitter this morning.

ANY TAKERS? Jimmy Fallon Jokes That Mike Pence Will Be President Within the Week.

FEDERALISM: Hawaii Becomes First State to Enact Law to Align Goals With Paris Climate Accord.

BREAKING: US led-coalition strikes pro-Syrian regime forces a third time.

PATRICK POOLE: Washington Post Reporter Defends Mosque Where Imam Promoted Female Genital Mutilation.

NEWS YOU HOPEFULLY CAN’T USE: Counterfeit pills and how to avoid them.

Central Georgia officials say there are reports of six more overdose cases – possibly related to fake Percocet pills.

Four people have died so far. Now a new warning is coming out from an Atlanta pharmacist. Experts tell 11Alive News that any time you buy drugs off the street, you could be handing down your own death sentence.

“She was coming around, but she’s gone,” Corey Bailey said.

Bailey lost, Amirrah Gillens, the love of his life, early Monday morning. Bibb County officials said Gillens is one of four people who died from a dangerous street drug masquerading as the painkiller Percocet.

There is an opioid epidemic, but driving it underground doesn’t seem to be helping much.

TOLERANCE: Gay Trump supporters denied entry into Charlotte Pride Parade.

“I’m very proud of my country, proud of my president, and was once proud of my community,” said Brian Talbert, who said he’s proud to be gay and proud to be a republican.

His truck has a Trump-Pence bumper sticker and ‘Not a liberal’ sign on the back window.

“I’m very proud of my vote. I don’t regret my vote. I will vote for Donald Trump again. I’m proud of my president. I don’t think I should be vilified because I’m proud of a U.S. president as an American.”

Talbert said he and a fellow gay republican sent in an application to Charlotte Pride so they could have a float in this year’s Charlotte Pride Parade.

“It was going to be fun. We wanted to be energetic. We wanted to show that we weren’t the racist, bigot; misogynistic…We wanted to show that we are Americans, love our country and our president. We wanted to be there to celebrate gay pride. Everything fell into place except being able to celebrate who I am,” he said.

Talbert said Charlotte Pride sent him an email denying his application for a float.

Why is “Republican” spelled consistently with a small r?

Anyway, “Celebrate Diversity” morphed into “Conform, proles!” so slowly that I hardly even noticed.

FORGET IT, JAKE — IT’S TURTLE BAY: UN Secretary-General Launches Slanderous Attack on Israel.

VIDEO BOMBSHELL: Obama’s Administration Asked Me to Cover up Investigation Into Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE: Stephen Kruiser is covering #ComeyDay for Hot Mic.

THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Aslan Fires Expletives at Trump, but Not the Jihadis.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Michigan State House Passes Concealed Carry Without Permits Bill.

Jazz Shaw:

While the idea of more accessible concealed carry is something I support, I’ll confess that even I have a few reservations about another of the bills in this Michigan package. Currently you need to have some basic firearms training to carry but this new proposal would remove that requirement. I understand how gun rights supporters bristle at the idea of any restrictions and the states have given them good reason to be suspicious. States like New York (among many others) have used the training requirement as cover to make it massively more expensive to obtain a permit, and in places like Washington, DC you often can’t even find a certified Firearms Training Instructor to meet the requirement.

The training should either be free or only charge a modest fee, with sufficient instructors available to meet the demand. But eliminating the requirement entirely is worrisome.

Firearms training used to be done at home, and from a fairly early age — and in my home it still is. But in states where that has fallen out of favor, whether due to previous gun control laws or lack of access to shooting ranges, maybe the state does have a legitimate interest in ensuring that carriers have at least some basic level of training.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: ISIS Says Manchester Attack a Preview of Their ‘Rekindled’ Post-Caliphate Terror Ops.

HUMAN SHIELDS: ISIS Has Killed Hundreds of Civilians in Mosul, U.N. Says.

Iraqi forces, backed by airstrikes from a United States-led coalition, have made advances into the city, and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has responded in brutal fashion to halt the flight of civilians they want to use as human shields, the United Nations said.

The deadliest attack came last Thursday, when at least 163 civilians, including women and children, were killed near a Pepsi factory as they headed out of the Shifa neighborhood of Mosul, the United Nations’ human rights office in Geneva said.

“They were gunned down as they were fleeing,” said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the human rights office, which reported that, as of two days ago, the bodies of the victims were still lying in the streets.

An estimated 200,000 civilians are still trapped in desperate conditions in the old city of Mosul, targeted by jihadists and suffering heavy casualties from coalition bombing and artillery fire.

They must be thinking, “Faster, please.”

JUSTICE: U.S. Charges 31 Members Of Russian Gang With ‘Dizzying Array’ Of Crimes.

The U.S. attorney’s office in southern New York State said the suspects operated internationally and across the United States, trafficking in drugs and stolen goods, including cigarettes and shiploads of chocolate, while engaging in extortion, murder for hire, and credit card fraud.

Most of the 33 defendants were led by Razhden Shulaya and Zurab Dzhanashvili, were born in the former Soviet Union, and had strong ties to Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia, the federal prosecutors said.

Prosecutors called Shulaya a “vor” — the Russian word for thief — which they said in criminal jargon means that he belongs to an “order of elite criminals from the former Soviet Union who receive tribute from other criminals, offer protection, and use their recognized status as vor to adjudicate disputes among lower-level criminals.”

They said he was one of the first such alleged criminals to be charged with racketeering in the United States.

Have they looked into the DNC?

OH: CNN Forced to Issue Correction After Comey’s Written Testimony Refutes Report.

JONATHAN TOBIN: In quest for a Trump crime, Dems refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer.

But if even a veteran grandstander like Comey — as Democrats should remember from his various statements about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal during the 2016 campaign — isn’t willing to say Trump obstructed justice here, it’s obvious these hearings are about politics, not criminality.

You don’t have to think Trump acted wisely to know Democrats view the Intelligence Committee hearings as an attempt to set the stage for impeachment should the GOP lose control of Congress in 2018. The same is true of the attempt to twist Trump’s sympathy for Flynn as “a good guy [who] has been through a lot” — a sentiment Comey said he shared — into an impeachable offense. In the absence of evidence beyond Comey’s equivocal and self-serving memo, the obstruction charge against Trump is almost certainly a legal dead end.

But it keeps the base riled up.

RETENTION BLUES: Desperate To Retain Troops, Army Offers $90K Reenlistment Bonuses.

To reach desired numbers, the Army will need to enlist 6,000 new recruits, retain an additional 9,000 current soldiers, and add 1,000 officers. Over the last two weeks, the Army has paid out over $26 million in bonuses, writes the Associated Press.

“The increased end strength of the Army will enable it to better meet the challenges of an ever-uncertain security environment but must be balanced against the readiness of the Total Force,” the Army said in a press release.

Officials tell the AP that their biggest concern between now and October will be whether they can persuade thousands of enlistees who are only months away from leaving the service to consider staying on active duty for four or more years.

Is retention difficult because of poor pay, frequent deployments, or P.C. B.S. — or all three?

AL FRANKEN: Kathy Griffin Should Come Back with ‘I Effed Up Tour’

“That was unbelievably wrong and out-of-bounds, what Kathy did,” he said. “Kathy has done USO shows and Kathy is a funny comedian and a generous person in all kinds of ways, and she just made this monumental, monumental mistake, and that was an incredibly inappropriate image and that should not be in our national discourse. I called her and told her it was a terrible mistake.”

Franken said Griffin has lost her sense of humor, and recommended she take some time off then return with an appropriately named tour.

“She apologized for it and she begged for forgiveness and she’s devastated by it. I think her strong suit, any good comedian’s strong suit, which she is, is your sense of humor,” he said. “And she just lost it and I think she needs to take some time off and come back with an ‘I effed up tour.’”

Nothing’s funnier than a heartfelt apology.

SO CRAZY, IT MIGHT JUST WORK! The FDA Commissioner’s Novel Plan for Cutting Drug Prices: Competition.

Lower-priced generic drugs saved the health care system an estimated $254 billion in 2014. An FDA study has found that as the number of competing manufacturers for a drug goes up, the price falls dramatically. When two companies compete, the price falls an average of just 6 percent; when there are nine competitors, the price drops by an average of 80 percent.

Gottlieb reportedly plans to prioritize the approval of additional generic competitors, and he hopes to eliminate the backlog of generic-drug applications within a year. It isn’t surprising that he’d set such a goal: He wrote an op-ed last August arguing that excessive FDA regulation was stymieing the development and approval of generic drugs.

For example, the Obama administration abruptly imposed higher manufacturing standards on generic makers in 2009, forcing many to leave the market.

While Obama was promising to save your family $2,500 a year on health care coverage, he was actually delivering the goods to Big Pharma.

OLD NEWS, WE’VE BEEN ALL OVER THIS, THERE’S NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Nets Ignore Oversight Report Showing Holder Impeded Fast and Furious Investigation.

While the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) spent Wednesday focusing on a Senate hearing they were hoping would implicate President Trump in obstruction of justice, they ignored a House Oversight Committee report that showed President Obama’s administration did just that. “An absolutely blistering report tonight out saying the Obama administration in general and former Attorney General Eric Holder in particular repeatedly lied to the family of a slain Border Patrol officer about the weapons used in his death, and stonewalled efforts to get at the truth,” announced Fox News’ Bret Baier on Special Report.

Baier handed the segment off to Correspondent William LaJeunesse, who reported that “Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died in December 2010, killed by guns tied to an Obama administration plan that armed Mexicans. A scandal officials tried to hide by wrongly claiming executive privilege.”

“The [Justice] Department’s belated admission that those 64,000 pages were not privileged, puts the gold seal of authenticity on the House’s bipartisan vote to hold the attorney general in contempt,” testified Senator Chuck Grassley at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

That seems like a big story.

COMEY’S WET BLANKET, HOLDER’S FLASHBACKS, AND OBAMA’S FLEXIBILITY: Liz Sheld’s morning brief has all that and more.

UMM: Mozambique bald men ‘targeted for attack.

“The belief is that the head of a bald man contains gold,” said Afonso Dias, a police commander in Mozambique’s central Zambezia province.

Albino people have also been killed in the region for ritual purposes.

The suspects are two young Mozambicans aged around 20, the AFP news agency reports.

“Their motive comes from superstition and culture – the local community thinks bald individuals are rich,” Commander Dias is reported as having told a press conference in the capital Maputo.

Glenn, Austin, and I all feel safe, but we’re a little worried about Ed.