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From this Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Darrell Issa wasn't the only one who had a contentious back and forth with Attorney General Eric Holder: Holder smacks down Gohmert over Boston bombings–’You cannot know what I know’:

An already-ugly House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday turned even nastier when Texas Republican Louie Gohmert took the wheel on questions related to last month’s Boston Marathon bombing–specifically, about what the FBI did and did not do after receiving information from Russian intelligence that suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been radicalized.

Attorney General Eric Holder had already faced a heavy grilling on both the AP and IRS scandals plaguing the Obama administration this week when Gohmert began pelting him with accusations that the FBI shirked a thorough examination of Tsarnaev because of “political correctness.”

“On the one hand, we go after Christian groups like Billy Graham’s group, we go after Franklin Graham’s group, but then we’re hands off when it comes to possibly offending someone who has been radicalized as a terrorist,” said Gohmert.

The Texas lawmaker added that though he “appreciated” the concern of racial profiling, he believes “there were a lot more people in America concerned about being blown up by terrorists.”

Holder fired back that Gohmert was speaking “as a matter of fact” about information not fully available to him.

“Unless somebody’s done something inappropriate, you don’t have access to the FBI files,” said Holder. “You don’t know what the FBI did. You don’t know what the FBI’s interaction was with the Russians. You don’t know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that…I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know.”

Yeah, old "terror babies" Gohmert is back at it again, fearmongering as usual.

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The man who is being hailed as a hero for rescuing the lives of three women kidnapped for a decade says that he would like any reward money to be turned over to the victims.

Charles Ramsey became an instant Internet sensation on Monday when he helped free Amanda Berry, Georgina DeJesus and Michele Knight from the house next to his where they had been trapped for around 10 years.

"Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms," he told WEWS following the rescue. "Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway."

On Tuesday, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked Ramsey what it felt like to find out that he had been living next to kidnapping victims.

"See, that's why now I'm having trouble sleeping," he explained. "See, up until yesterday, the only thing that kept me from losing sleep was the lack of money. See what I'm saying? So now that that's going on, and I could have done this last year, not this hero stuff, just do the right thing."

"Because there's a lot of people, they're saying you're a hero," the CNN host noted.

"No, no, no. Bro, I'm a Christian, an American, and just like you," Ramsey insisted. "We bleed same blood, put our pants on the same way. It's just that you got to put that - being a coward, and I don't want to get in nobody's business. You got to put that away for a minute. You have to have cajones, bro."

Continue reading »

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(Ed. Note: The video above is NSFW)

A reporter from Alex Jones' Infowars.com website found himself being being verbally destroyed by a resident on the streets of Boston over claims that the recent bombings had been the result of a so-called "false flag" operation carried out by the U.S. government.

In the YouTube video posted on Friday, a man can be heard tearing into Infowars.com reporter Dan Bidondi over "right wing conspiracy theories."

The day of the bombing, Jones had tweeted that "this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag," adding that "the FBI has been behind virtually every domestic terror plot in the US."

"Your boy said this was a false flag, the bomb that blew up people was a false flag," the angry man in the video notes. "The FBI is behind the bombing, that's what you're here to cover. And that's why I'm the asshole? Because the FBI blew up those people at the Boston Marathon? That's right. That's because you're a dope. And what you say is dangerous and people like you shouldn't be able to drive a car, much less espouse your opinions in public."

"But we have a First Amendment, got to protect it. But you're an asshole. And so is Alex Jones... And that's the nicest thing I can say about you, you son of a bitch."

"Anything else you got to say?" Bidondi asked.

"Yeah, I just said it, motherfucker," the man shot back. "I am the smart guy because I'm not standing here saying the FBI blew up the people at the Boston Marathon, you fucking shitheel."

"We got the photos to prove it," Bidondi insisted.

"You got shit, you got jack shit, you got your dick in your hand," the Boston resident replied. "You fucking asshat."

(h/t: Addicting Info)

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In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Sen. Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that “We need to revisit our laws" and potentially give the FBI more power to track terrorism suspects, because lord knows we haven't shredded quite enough of our civil rights already.

No amount of deaths are ever enough for Graham to want to infringe on the Constitutional rights of gun owning Americans, but as soon as the word terrorism is involved, all bets are out the window.

Graham warns intel agencies ‘going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping’:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “information sharing failed” ahead of the Boston Marathon bombings and warned that stove-piping between intelligence agencies remained a problem.

“This is a failure to share information and missing obvious warning signs,” said Graham Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We are going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping,” he warned.

Graham called for a “post-mortem” to examine the intelligence failures and see if such missteps could be prevented in the future, citing reports that the FBI failed to interview suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev after a trip to Russia, where authorities believe he was partly radicalized and the failure of the agency to notify agents in Boston to watch him more closely.

“How could you miss that the guy you were informed about by a foreign intelligence service, you got a radical in your midst, we can’t track him to Russia, we lose him going to Russia and coming back,” asked Graham. “And when he goes on the internet for the whole world to see, to interact with a radical Islamic websites how do we miss that?

“We’re going to have to up our game,” said the South Carolina senator. [...]

Graham’s comments are the latest from GOP lawmakers frustrated that intelligence system reforms made after the September 11, 2001 attacks have failed to work. Lawmakers fear that the same intelligence sharing issues before that incident are again playing a role in the Boston attack.

Graham last week suggested that the FBI may need more powers to track terror suspects.

“We need to revisit our laws,” he said.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Sunday declared that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was at fault for failing to prevent last week's bombing in Boston.

In an interview on CNN's State of the Union, host Candy Crowley noted that the FBI had interviewed deceased bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, but wondered if it was fair to blame the agency for not anticipating something that happened two years later.

"The ball was dropped in one of two ways," Graham opined. "The FBI missed a lot of things is one potential answer or our laws do not allow the FBI to follow up in a sound, solid way. There was a lot to be learned from this guy. He was on websites talking about killing Americans."

"This was a mistake," he added. "I don't know if our laws are insufficient or the FBI failed, but we're at war with radical Islamists and we need to up our game."

House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers (R-MI), however, on Sunday insisted that the FBI was not to blame, arguing that the bureau "did their due diligence and did a very thorough job."

Crowley also pressed the Graham on his assertion that surviving Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev should be treated as an enemy combatant and should be interrogated without being informed of his Miranda rights.

"This man should be designated as a potential enemy combatant and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of and that evidence cannot be used against him in trial," the senior South Carolina senator argued. "Anytime we question him about his guilt or innocence, he is entitled to his Miranda rights and a lawyer."

"But we have the right under our law -- I've been a military lawyer for 30 years -- to gather intelligence from enemy combatants. And a citizen can be an enemy combatant."

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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz on Sunday pushed back against a Fox News pundit who slammed the "deafening silence of too much of the media" over coverage of a Philadelphia doctor accused of killing seven babies and one woman while performing late-term abortions.

In a USA Today column last week, Fox News political analyst Kirsten Powers pointed to former Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as evidence that Planned Parenthood has been wrong to claim that it's "highly unusual" that infants survive late-term abortions.

Powers said that there was a double standard because conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh had received front page coverage after he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" over her advocacy of contraception coverage for students, but Gosnell had not gotten the same attention.

"You don't have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy," the Fox News pundit wrote. "The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace."

In his "Media Monitor" segment on Sunday, Kurtz agreed that the Gosnell case had not gotten enough national coverage, but suggested that conservatives had oversimplified the argument to attack the "liberal media."

"Some conservatives are saying this amounts to blackout by the so-called liberal media, but it's more complicated that that," he explained. "First, the Gosnell case has drawn some coverage since the FBI first raided that clinic back in 2010, in such outlets as Time, NPR, the AP, The New York Times, Slate and The Daily Beast. Now since Gosnell's trial began, CNN has done a half dozen segments, including one by Jake Tapper back on March 21 and Fox News did a story that same day."

"MSNBC, like Fox, has done a few stories," Kurtz continued. "CBS and ABC carried evening news segments back in January, but there hasn't been nearly enough on the trial. Almost nothing in The Washington Post, not enough in The New York Times. Perhaps the mainstream press is less attuned to a story that cast a shadow on abortion, but the conservative media didn't do much either."

"And it's not like even the staunchest pro-choice advocate would defend what Gosnell is alleged to have done. This is a gruesome case that journalists on both sides of the abortion question have told me is hard to stomach."

The Philly Post's Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote last week that the media should cover the Gosnell case, but it was wrong to use it as a tool to fight against abortion rights.

"Powers is a liberal and an evangelical Christian; she criticizes the right on women’s rights, the left on abortion," he observed. "Powers’s aim is to draw attention to the fact that the Gosnell murder charges should make us consider whether there’s really a difference between killing a baby inside the womb, or outside, as he so horrifically did. But this is misleading."

"The moral to be drawn from the Gosnell trial is not that current abortion laws are screwed up. Indeed, Gosnell broke them, which is why he’s on trial. Rather, it’s that as individual states increasingly restrict abortion rights, more and more illegal clinics, like Gosnell’s may crop up."

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This story looks like it's about to get more interesting. I wonder if we're going to find out who paid the Dominican hooker to try to frame Sen. Bob Menendez. Report: Dominican Escort Now Says She Made Up Menendez Claims:

One of the women who appeared in a video last fall claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) paid her for sex has now told a different story to the police in the Dominican Republic, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

According to affidavits obtained by the newspaper, the woman said she and a friend appeared in the video after being approached by a lawyer. That lawyer, meanwhile, said a second lawyer provided him with a script and paid him to find the women.

The Post report, which also cites two people “briefed on [the woman’s] claim,” does not identify the women or the lawyers by name, nor does it detail what court the affidavits were filed in, or what kind of proceeding they are related to. It is also not clear how the Post obtained the documents.

The videos referred to in the report are apparently the same ones that appeared, at least in part, on the conservative website The Daily Caller in November. The Daily Caller did not identify the women, and their faces were blurred.

The story was initially ignored by much of the press. But in late January and early February, the rumors resurfaced, in the form of an anonymously posted WordPress blog containing a shadowy tipster’s correspondence with a watchdog group, ABC News and an apparent FBI agent. The tipster said he had information that Menendez had slept with prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic, where he stayed at the home of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Miami ophthalmologist and businessman who is both a friend and political donor of the senator’s. In late January, the FBI raided Melgen’s Miami offices, reportedly as part of parallel investigations into potential Medicare fraud and Melgen’s relationship with Menendez.

Wonkette has more here: Daily Caller’s Menendez Hooker: I Can’t Believe We Made Up The Whole Thing.

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Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday said that she would be willing force a "thoughtful" shutdown of parts of the United States government if President Barack Obama did not agree to deep spending cuts.

"What we want to make certain is that this president, this administration, this bureaucracy realizes that kicking the can must stop," she told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "It is spending cuts and it is imperative that we reduce the size of the federal government, that we get in on a mega-diet, that we end this out-of-control spending."

"There is the option of government shutdown," the Tennessee Republican continued. "There is an option of raising the debt ceiling in short-term increments... There's also the plan of three dollars in cuts for every one dollar of debt limit increase. So, the healthy thing is this, we are having a good discussion on it."

Jansing pointed to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center which found that the government could continue to fund interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps during a shutdown -- but it would mean that almost every other federal program would grind to a halt.

"[B]ut doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else," The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote last week. "The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease."

"I think that there is a way to avoid default," Blackburn insisted. "If it requires shutting down certain portions of the government, let's look at that. Let's put these option on the table, be very thoughtful, but get this spending pattern broken. We cannot afford a $4 billion a day deficit and trillion dollar plus deficits every single year."

"So, it requires thoughtfulness and it requires that we are going to have a plan to work through this. I think that's where we as Republicans are headed."

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Tuesday pointed to the example set by Democrats who refused to confirm John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations when he was asked if he would be willing to back Ambassador Susan Rice as secretary of state.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with Rice, Sens. Graham, John McCain (R-AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) all seemed to escalate their opposition to the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations over her public assessment of September attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

"I'm more disturbed now than I was before that the 16 September explanation about how four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya by Ambassador Rice, I think, does not do justice to the reality at the time and in hindsight clearly was completely wrong," Graham explained. "But here's the key, in real time, it was a statement disconnected from reality. If anybody had been looking at the threats coming out of Benghazi, Libya it was jump-out-at-you that this was an al Qaeda storm in the making."

The South Carolina Republican added that he was "very disappointed in our intelligence community" but Rice should have known better than to suggest that the attacks could have been related to an anti-Muslim video.

When asked about the possibility of supporting Rice to be the next secretary of state, Graham insisted that she could not be confirmed until Congress was provided more information from the FBI investigation into the Benghazi attack.

"I remember the John Bolton episode pretty well," he pointed out. "Our Democrat friends felt like John Bolton -- they didn't have the information needed to make an informed decision about Ambassador Bolton's qualifications -- John Bolton to be ambassador -- and Democrats dug in their heels and said, 'We're not going to vote, we're not going to consider this nomination until we get basic answers to our concerns.'"

"All I can tell you is that the concerns I have are greater today that they were before. We're not even close to getting the basic answers."

In 2005, President George W. Bush recess-appointed Bolton to the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after Democrats filibustered the nomination because the White House refused to provide information about his mishandling of N.S.A documents and his questionable assessment of Syria's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

"This is about partisan politics, not documents," White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said at the time. "They have the information they need."

After Bolton was forced to resign as ambassador, Graham opined that the Democrats' filibuster "unfairly undermines President Bush's prerogative to appoint his own people to his team."

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In a face to face confrontation that aired on Sunday, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) called out Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) for using "weasel words" to suggest that President Barack Obama knew about former CIA Director David Petraeus' sex scandal prior to the November election.

Hutchinson told CNN's Candy Crowley and a panel of lawmakers that she couldn't believe that an email threat that Paula Broadwell, Petraeus' mistress, allegedly made to another woman triggered a low-level FBI investigation that the president would not have known about.

"I'm very worried about this," she opined. "Did it really trigger an FBI investigation of the CIA director? At a low level? And it wasn't raised to a higher level? I mean, if anybody is investigating the director of the CIA, the president of the United States should know immediately. And I feel like, A, we don't know enough and, B, I have great concerns about a lot of this surrounding..."

"Nobody was investigating the director of the CIA," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) interrupted. "What they were inquiring into was whether or not somebody had unauthorized access or was taking advantage of access to the director."

"But at what level were these decisions being made?" Hutchinson insisted. "I just think there needs to be a whole lot more."

"Are you suggesting that there was some cover up, that the FBI was playing games, Kay?" Frank wondered. "I think we ought to be explicit about this. I'm troubled by the implication of your statement. Are you suggesting that something wasn't legitimate here? Because that would trouble me."

"I am suggesting that I have great concerns about the legitimacy of this," Hutchinson repeated.

"Using 'great concern' is kind of a weasel word," Frank shot back.

"No, I don't think it's a weasel word," Hutchinson replied. "A general in our military and the CIA director, to all of the sudden have this kind of upheaval when it appears that the president didn't know until two months later? Two months later?"

"It seems to me, frankly, that you're kind of hinting at something bad and I don't see what that could be," Frank pointed out. "I find those kind of implications very troubling. Do you distrust the FBI? Is [FBI Director Robert] Mueller lying? Who are you accusing of not having done the right thing?"

"I tell you what troubles me to some extent, Candy, if this was an investigation into David Petraeus' bank account instead of his sex life, all of us would be paying a lot less attention to it," the Massachusetts congressman added. "And I'm troubled by the prurience of some of this. And the prominence it's getting is -- privacy shouldn't totally disappear."

Earlier this month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told reporters that the policy of not sharing facts about ongoing investigations with the White House had been followed because "there was not a threat to national security."

(h/t: Think Progress)