Did Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lie to Congress?

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Photo Credit: APSen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., issued a sharp and unusual challenge to the truthfulness of the nation’s top uniformed military commander on Thursday, demanding that U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, return to Capitol Hill to provide fresh testimony on the Benghazi attacks.

The point of contention involved whether any military officers issued an order to U.S. armed forces personnel on the night of Sept. 11, when the U.S. consulate and a nearby annex came under terrorist attack, to “stand down” from providing assistance.

“I asked [Gen. Dempsey] directly,” Graham said in an exclusive interview with Fox News. “Were there any military assets in motion, to help folks in Benghazi, [that were] told to stand down? And what did [State Department whistleblower] Greg Hicks say? That Lt. Col. [Steve] Gibson — a DOD employee, a member of the Army — was in Tripoli, ready and willing to go to Benghazi, preparing to go to Benghazi, and was told to stand down.”

“Clearly,” Graham added, “our chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ rendition that no one was told to stand down is now in question.”

What’s more, Graham lumped the chairman into a group of prominent Democrats whom the Senate Republican said he would like to see summoned, or recalled, to the witness chair to testify on Benghazi. These included former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff.

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Missouri Passes Nation’s Most Extreme Gun Protection Bill

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The Republican-controlled Missouri Legislature passed the nation’s most extreme gun protection bill, along with bans on Islamic law and the United Nations sustainability agenda, during a late-night session Wednesday.

Under the gun measure, lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to nullify all federal gun laws in the state, while allowing some teachers to carry guns in schools. The bill also says some teachers who do not carry guns can be fired, while providing them with limited arrest powers.

The gun bill’s passage followed passage of the sustainability and Sharia, or Islamic law, bans. All three bills now move to Gov. Jay Nixon (D) for his consideration. A Nixon spokesman said he did not have a comment until the governor reviewed the bills.

Senate Majority Whip Brian Nieves (R-Washington) trumpeted the bills on Facebooklate Wednesday night, describing the gun bill as the “most hard core piece of Second Amendment legislation in the nation.”

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Why Obama and Hillary Engaged in the Benghazi Cover-Up (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeIn perhaps one of the most logical articles we’ve seen explaining Obama’s and Hillary’s actions in Benghazi recently, Erick Erickson’s Red State provides a plausible explanation for the Benghazi cover-up:

The general rule here is Command takes responsibility. JFK survived the Bay of Pigs incident because he embraced that rule. Nixon didn’t survive Watergate because he didn’t. If Obama had said Well, we thought that we had good security up at Benghazi, only we didn’t, so al-Qaeda caught us by surprise and killed our people and that was something that I have to take full responsibility for and I’m never going to let that happen again then… well, he might have lost the election, actually. We didn’t realize at the time, but Obama’s 2012 re-election strategy had pretty much no margin for error. So the administration picked a narrative (it was all due to a YouTube video!) that cynically traded on stereotypes about foreign Muslims and their collective level of impulse control, and did nothing but push said narrative for as long as they could. Which was, oddly enough, long enough for the election to be over.

So why didn’t the Republican National Committee and Romney try to sink this narrative? Well, believe it or not, the RNC actually cut an ad calling the Obama Administration out on Benghazi:

Inexplicably, the ad was never aired.

Texas Congressman’s Reelection Campaign Giving Away a Free Bushmaster AR15

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Photo Credit: US CongressWhile congressional gun control advocates and gun-rights supporters duke it out with words and parliamentary tactics, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman is showing off his Second Amendment fervor by doing what some consider unthinkable: giving away a Bushmaster AR-15rifle, the same weapon crazed murderer Adam Lanza carried to a Connecticut elementary school where he massacred nearly two dozen children.

Stockman, a congressional freshman whose campaign boasts on Twitter that he is ‘the most conservative Congressman in Texas,’ is angling for a second term.

His campaign – not his government office, spokesman Donny Ferguson told MailOnline – is offering the unusual prize to entrants who join his online mailing list.

Twitter erupted late Wednesday after the congressman announced the prize giveaway by tweeting: ‘Want to win a FREE AR-15? Congressman Steve Stockman is giving one away! … Grab this gun before Obama does!’

‘Here in the congressional office the response has been overwhelmingly positive,’ he said. ‘What Democrats have called in have been universally violent and mentally unstable.’

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Boston: FBI Failed to Warn, Could Have Prevented Bombings

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Photo Credit: APBoston authorities could have prevented last month’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings if federal law enforcement agencies had adequately shared information and followed through on warnings about accused bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, witnesses told Congress Thursday.

“I believe that though it would not have been easy, it was possible to have prevented the terrorist attacks in Boston,” former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., told the House Homeland Security Committee. “In a literal sense, the homeland security system we must acknowledge that we built after 9-11 to protect the American people from terrorist attacks failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers.”

In the first congressional hearing into the April 15 bombing that killed three and injured more than 200, Lieberman and other witnesses testified about a lack of information sharing between federal agencies and between federal authorities and local police. Republicans and Democrats alike joined in the criticisms.

“We cannot ignore that once again it has taken a tragedy to reveal problems in our vast, varied and numerous federal databases,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, the committee’s top Democrat.

Witnesses told the committee that Boston authorities were never told prior to the bombing that Russia had warned the FBI about the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the bombings’ alleged mastermind who also had posted radical jihadist videos on the internet.

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Dershowitz: Ted Cruz one of Harvard Law’s Smartest Students

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Photo Credit: Grae StaffordFamed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz ranks Sen. Ted Cruz among the school’s smartest students, adding that the Canada-born Texan can run for president in 2016.

Cruz was a “terrific student,” Dershowitz told The Daily Caller. “He was always very active in class, presenting a libertarian point of view. He didn’t strike me as a social conservative, more of a libertarian.”

“He had brilliant insights and he was clearly among the top students, as revealed by his class responses,” Dershowitz added.

Dershowitz also gave a high estimate of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who has decidedly different political views than Cruz.

Dershowitz says he and Cruz would often debate issues presented in Dershowitz’s criminal law class. “Cruz’s views were always thoughtful and his responses were interesting,” the law professor explained. “I obviously disagreed with them and we had good arguments in class. I would challenge him and he would come up with very good responses.”

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Prosecutor May Seek Death Penalty Against Alleged Cleveland Kidnapper For Murdering Unborn Children

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Photo Credit: abbybatchelderAriel Castro, the Cleveland man police say kidnapped and held captive three women for a decade, could also face aggravated murder charges for allegedly terminating the pregnancies of his captives.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said Thursday that based on the facts of the case, his office intends to seek charges not only for the sexual assaults endured by the victims, but also “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies.”

Castro is accused of separately abducting two teenage girls and a young woman and holding them in his home for about 10 years. One of the victims, Amanda Berry, escaped with her 6-year-old daughter. Castro is set to undergo a paternity test to confirm he is the girl’s father. Another victim, Michelle Knight, alleges she became pregnant five times and that each time Castro starved her and punched her in the stomach until she miscarried, according to a police report reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

McGinty said he may seek the death penalty against Castro.

Castro was arraigned Thursday in Cleveland Municipal Court, where the judge set bail at $8 million.

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Cher’s Mom Almost Aborted Her

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Photo Credit: Michael Lavine[Cher’s Mom, Georgia] Holt, born in rural Arkansas to a 13-year-old mother, first sang in Oklahoma saloons for change (“My pockets were so full of money, they almost pulled my pants off,” she says in the special).

Strikingly beautiful, Holt sought fame in Hollywood as a singer and actress and barreled through six marriages. After wedding truck driver John Sarkisian, she seriously considered abortion. They divorced soon after Cher’s birth. Struggling financially, Holt briefly placed Cher in a Catholic orphanage, where nuns urged her to give up the baby for adoption.

“I heard the abortion story when I was a teenager,” Cher says. “The orphanage story has been a touchy one for my mom her whole life, and she didn’t want to talk about it. I said, ‘Mom, why didn’t you just march in and take me?’ She said, ‘I didn’t have the power. I didn’t have any money or a job, and the church was so strong. I’d go see you every day and you’d be crying. You don’t know what it was like.’ It was harder for women then.”

Cher initially flinched at the rattle of family skeletons in Dear Mom.

“I thought, this could be tricky,” she says. “But what’s anyone going to do to me now? So I come from a poor white trash background. It doesn’t make any difference.”

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Jodi Arias is Guilty; So Are We

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Photo Credit: Bernard GoldbergThere are times, not many thankfully, when I get depressed, brought down by the sorry evidence that we live in a country fixated on shiny objects. This is one of those times.

A jury in Phoenix has found Jodi Arias guilty of first-degree murder. That’s not what gets me down. What I find so depressing is our collective fascination with trivia, with anything that we can follow without having to actually think.

No one ever heard of Jodi Arias until cable TV made her famous. No one ever heard of the boyfriend she killed, you know, what’s his name. The Arias murder trial tells us nothing about anything bigger than Jodi Arias. She wasn’t famous like O.J. Simpson before she was arrested. This wasn’t Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Those trials had implications. The Arias trial had none.

When it became known that the jury had reached a verdict, cable news went wall-to-wall with Jodi Arias. It would be 90 minutes before the verdict was announced in court, so anchors and pundits spent the time saying nothing – nothing that mattered anyway. But this is a small point. Saying nothing about Jodi Arias gets you more viewers than saying something about the national debt.

But you can’t blame cable TV news, not entirely anyway, because television is a business that gives the people what they want. And if they want Jodi, TV executives will give them Jodi for hours on end. Hell, if she had been found not guilty they might have even given her a show.

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In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in Massive, Internationally Coordinated A.T.M. Scheme

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Photo Credit: NY TimesIt was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault.

In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours.

In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million.

The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating financial information with the stroke of a few keys, as well as common street criminals, who used that information to loot the automated teller machines.

The first to be caught was a street crew operating in New York, their pictures captured as, prosecutors said, they traveled the city withdrawing money and stuffing backpacks with cash.

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