Obama Administration Threatened Whistleblowers on Benghazi (VIDEO)

New explosive allegations out tonight.

At Greta Wire, "THREATS AGAINST BENGHAZI WHISTLEBLOWERS ALLEGED":

At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers, or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate intelligence committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistleblowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to September 11, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded; and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials falsely described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

Continue reading.

Also at Newsmax, "Administration Blocking Benghazi Whistleblowers."

Tsarnaevs' 'Troubled Trail' Gets More Objective Treatment at the Los Angeles Times

Following up from yesterday's report, "Because Frustrated Boxing Aspirations Are So Horrible That Murdering Americans in Jihad Bombings is Totally Understandable, or Something."

Here's the front-page story at yesterday's Los Angeles Times, which eschews the heavy causal implications employed by the New York Times, "The Tsarnaev brothers' troubled trail to Boston":

Anzor Tsarnaev was tough, a championship boxer back home, and he wanted his oldest boy to be tough too.

Rain or shine, like a scene from "Rocky," the wiry Chechen immigrant would ride his bicycle as his son Tamerlan jogged to a Boston-area boxing gym, pushing him to run faster, to punch harder.

"He was his trainer, basically," said Joe Timko, Anzor's supervisor at Webster Auto Body, a corner repair shop in Somerville. "And he was an old Russian soldier. He'd make him run for miles."

Armed with a good left jab and powerful right, "Tam," as friends called him, climbed the ranks in regional tournaments and dreamed of joining the U.S. Olympic boxing team. At home, a crowded third-floor walk-up, he showed off by doing chin-ups outside. At night, he played the piano and accordion.

But by 2009, Tamerlan's life abruptly changed course. He told his parents that "the Koran prohibits beating people in the face." He grew a beard, began to pray more than five times a day, dropped out of college and gave up stylish leather pants for sweat pants. He argued with friends over politics, picked a fight at a pizza parlor, shouted at speakers at a mosque.

"He gave up drinking and smoking, and he even gave up boxing he loved so much," said his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. Anzor Tsarnaev said he was brainwashed by religion.

His uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, asked why he didn't get a job.

"I'm doing bigger things," Tamerlan told him that August. "Now I'm with God. Now I'm happy."

Tamerlan, 26, died nine days ago after he and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, were in a shootout with police. Dzhokhar is in custody at a medical facility for prisoners on federal charges that he planted one of the two nail-filled bombs that exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15.

Investigators are convinced both brothers carried out the plot, which killed three people and wounded more than 260. Yet it did not appear meticulously planned. Authorities say they planted homemade bombs in full view of surveillance cameras, and when their pictures emerged three days later, they tried to flee with no cash, no disguises and one firearm. Officials say that they killed an MIT police officer for his pistol but couldn't figure out how to unlock the holster.

Now investigators are struggling to understand: How did a cocky young athlete and his skateboard-riding brother, if authorities are correct, become do-it-yourself Islamist terrorists?

Read it all at the link.

It's an old-fashioned piece of journalism, although the difference between the New York Times' hack report yesterday is dramatic.

Planned Parenthood Sex Education Graphics Too Grisly for the New York Times

WND reports on the All American Life League's full-page advertisement that was rejected by the New York Times, "Sex-ed cartoons 'too graphic' for N.Y. Times."

Here's the ALL.org website. And the group's ad is at this PDF.

ALL.org says Planned Parenthood's materials are based on the Robie Harris book, "It's Perfectly Normal Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health."

Read all about it at the links. And I'll tell you, I couldn't even put that stuff up on an overhead in my classes at the college. But no doubt Planned Parenthood wants to put this stuff before your elementary school children. Way to go progs!

Because Frustrated Boxing Aspirations Are So Horrible That Murdering Americans in Jihad Bombings is Totally Understandable, or Something

Here's the front-page report at today's New York Times, "A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path."

And some of the reactions:

* At Atlas Shrugs, "THE NEW YORK TIMES WAGES JIHAD ON THE TRUTH: BOSTON BOMBER WENT JIHAD BECAUSE THE GOLDEN GLOVES CHANGED THEIR RULES."

* At Blazing Cat Fur, "Shocka! New York Times Article Blames Boston Bombing On America."

* At Israel Matzav, "NY Times: 'If we'd let Tamerlan become a citizen despite being an Islamist and beating his girlfriend, he wouldn't have blown up the Marathon'."

You've got to read the piece. It's like seriously?

BOSTON — It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen.

The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant.

From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents — not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was Soviet-born of Chechen and Dagestani heritage, but several other New England contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction.

Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge, Mass., to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.

His trajectory eventually led the frustrated athlete and his loyal younger brother, Dzhokhar, to bomb one of the most famous athletic events in this country, killing three and wounding more than 200 at the Boston Marathon, the authorities say. They say it led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship stalled, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day, April 15.

Hey, no doubt.

Who could miss the inevitable causal relationship! It must have been horrible. Horrible! Whaaaaa!!! Next time life throws up a roadblock I think I'll run out and buy a pressure cooker, some gun powder, a few boxes of carpenter's nails and some ball bearings. Now where are are my old copies of Inspire?

Progressives Launch Anti-Koch Brothers Jihad on Rumors of Tribune Company Sale to Billionaire Brothers

From Michael Calderone, at PuffHo, "Koch Brothers Media Strategy, Political Agenda Raise Concerns Over Tribune Ownership."

The LA Weekly first reported news of the Kochs' possible interest in Tribune newspapers last month. But a Sunday front-page New York Times story describing a strategy of using media to promote free-market policy ideas prompted Tribune journalists to speak out, both anonymously and on the record. Clarence Page, a liberal Chicago Tribune columnist who opposes Koch ownership, said the Kochs “seem to be coming in upfront with the idea of using a major news media as a vehicle for their political voice."

This week's outcry is reminiscent of Wall Street Journal staffers’ fears in May 2007 as Rupert Murdoch, the conservative mogul behind Fox News and the New York Post, bid for the august broadsheet parent-company, Dow Jones. While the Journal’s framing of political and policy stories sometimes tilts more to the right, journalists’ worst fears of right-wing tabloidization of the newsroom never came to pass. But the response to Koch ownership is different six years later in that journalists are now pining for Murdoch.

“Murdoch, for all his flaws, is a newspaper man. The Kochs are not,” a Chicago Tribune journalist told media writer Jim Romenesko. “I have no faith in their belief in the importance of a free and robust watchdog press. Frankly, such a press seems antithetical to their goals and harmful to their influence in the political process.”

Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post writer, suggested Thursday that Tribune Co. staffers band together to oppose any sale to the Kochs.

Because nothing promotes robust debate and deliberation like leftist campaigns to squelch competing views.

More at the link.

And who knew? There's a whole website set up to fight the smears. See, "Mother Jones Gets It Wrong… Again."

Well, yeah, Mother Jones has been getting it wrong quite a bit lately, the idiots.

RELATED: At Neiman Labs, "The newsonomics of the Koch Brothers and the sales of U.S.' top metros."

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."

Also at Jill Stanek's, "Stanek Sunday funnies 4-28-13," and Reaganite Republican, "Reaganite's SUNDAY FUNNIES."

And see Randy's Roundtable, "Friday Nite Funnies," and Theo Spark, "Cartoon Round Up..."

BONUS: At Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Hard Boiled."

CARTOON CREDIT: William Warren.

Jessica Davies for Loaded Magazine

Via Twitter:

Shot from my @loadedmag spread x twitter.com/_JessicaDavies…
— Jessica Davies (@_JessicaDavies) April 28, 2013

And at Egotastic!, "Jessica Davies for Loaded Magazine April 2013."

Celebrating Babies

At iOWNTHEWORLD.

Salon's Geller-Obsessives Shill for Islamic Supremacy

You know, it'd actually be hilarious if it wasn't so perverted.

The far-left trolls are relentless in their endless politics of personal destruction. Few folks know this better than Pamela Geller, but every time she shows them out as sh-t-eating dregs of humanity who have no business even commenting on the most grievous threats facing the nation.

At Atlas Shrugs "@Salon's Greatest Hits."

Pamela first smacks down the idiot Alex "Ping Pong Balls" Pareene, and then continues:

Has Salon learned anything? No. And then there is this: the obsessed troll, Alex Seitz-Wald, ran this headline after the Boston bombings.

Read the whole thing.

Again, this kind of epic left-wing juvenility would be mostly mock-worthy if it wasn't so fiendish. Leftists turn their disagreement with Pamela into a Manichean crusade to destroy her. And she has a lot of help from the legions of deranged progressive trolls prowling the Internet. People of decency and faith must continually redouble their efforts at beating back these scummy leftist enemies from within.

NYT's Mark Leibovich Slams White House Correspondents' Dinner

A great clip.

Leibovich hammers Washington's entitled celebrity class, which partied last night at the exclusive correspondents' dinner:

Leibovich discusses his forthcoming book, "This Town: The Way it Works in Suck Up City."

And see Politico, "'This Town': A Washington takedown."

Plus, at Twitchy, "Tweet like a girl: Sarah Palin blasts ‘DC assclowns’ at ‘pathetic’ Correspondents’ Dinner." (The responses to Palin on Twitter have been utterly pathological.) And at Memeorandum.

BONUS: At The Other McCain, "Have You Heard the One About the President Who Was a Miserable Failure?"

Robert Downey Jr. Sprained His Ankle Last Year While Filming the Finale of 'Iron Man 3' in Wilmington, N.C.

Iron Man's my favorite super hero, and my youngest boy's into the franchise, so it's a win-win situation. The film opens next Friday.

The Los Angeles Times reports on some of the challenges of finishing the production, "‘Iron Man 3′: Tony Stark lives by his wits in Marvel’s latest":

It was the moment that brought a $200-million blockbuster to a screeching halt.

Robert Downey Jr. stood frozen in pain after leaping onto a platform of an oil tanker on the Wilmington, N.C., soundstage where “Iron Man 3” was shooting its fiery finale last year. The actor had made ambitious wire jumps for stunt scenes before, but this time was different. The impact of the landing left him with an ankle sprain so severe he was unable to walk for seven weeks.

“I was feeling a little bit invincible, I guess,” Downey said last week while making the promotional rounds for “Iron Man 3,” which rockets into theaters on May 3. “I checked it out, and I was like, ‘Oh, we got this.’ And we didn’t have it.”

When it comes to playing Tony Stark, the genius-billionaire-playboy-inventor whom Downey first brought to the screen in 2008’s record-breaking “Iron Man,” the Oscar-nominated actor could be forgiven for overreaching.

More at the link.

Rolling Stones Play Surprise Gig at Hollywood's Echo Park Nightclub

One lady walked out of the show quipping, "Best bar band ever."

That would have been great.

At LAT, "Rolling Stones rock Echo Park club in surprise 'warm up' gig."

Bomb Couldn't Stop Bill Iffrig

An awesome column, from Chris Erskine, at the Los Angeles Times, "Bomb blast couldn't keep him down in Boston":

If anything proves that you will get up off the ground after being knocked down, it's getting up off the ground after being knocked down ... in an apparent terrorist attack, at the tender age of 78, hell's bells ringing in your ears.

If anyone should make us feel good about our better selves, it's Bill Iffrig, a carpenter by trade, but a man who made history with his feet in Boston, the town where America was born.

Fifteen wobbly steps to the finish. Fifteen wobbly steps to moving on.

More at the link.

Dennis Miller Just Tears Into #Boston Jihad Family on O'Reilly Factor

He calls out O'Reilly too.

An awesome segment, via Kathy Shaidle, "‘Obama Doesn’t Care About Dead Children’":

Oh My! Judge Jeanine Pirro Slams Psycho Jihad Mom Zubeidat Tsarnaeva

Oh my goodness the Judge is on fire!

Don't miss a word of this pissed off rant just destroying the hypocrisy, entitlement, and evil of Ms. Tsarnaeva:

Russia Had Wiretap on Suspect Tamerlan Plotting With Jihad Mom Zubeidat Tsarnaev

Man, jihad mom is into the hardcore terror program.

And Tamerlan was getting tips from the old lady.

At BCF, "Officials say Russian wiretap caught suspicious call between Boston Bomber & Mama Tsarnaev."

Added: At Pamela's, "RUSSIA HAD WIRETAP ON BOSTON SUSPECT, DISCUSSING JIHAD WITH MOM":

The FBI is whining now that they didn't get more info from the Russians? Sorry, fellas, do your own surveillance and investigative work. They are obviously getting their whining cues from Obama.

They are not allowed to be lazy when it comes to protecting American lives on American soil. O's priorities.

Genocide in Syria?

If it's genocide, the U.S. is obliged to act, says Anne Marie Slaughter, at the Washington Post, "Obama should remember Rwanda as he weighs action in Syria."

She's calling for humanitarian intervention, regime change frankly. It's a human rights argument. Leftists can get behind that kind of stuff. Just not intervention for raw realpolitik. That's criminal.

Related: See Michael Burleigh, at London's Daily Mail, "Horrific - but sending troops to Syria would be a catastrophe."

Jodie Gasson Saturday Rule 5

On Twitter:

Just updated my blog :) jodiegasson.com/tour xx twitter.com/Jodie_Gasson/s…
— Jodie Holly Gasson (@Jodie_Gasson) April 25, 2013

Bob Belvedere's got the babe-blogging roundup: "Rule 5 News: 27 April 2013 A.D."

Plus, bonus flashback: "Jodie Gasson Topless Pictures at Egotastic!"

Bagram Batman

This is cool!

At the Wall Street Journal, "A Superheroic Caped Crusade to Keep Troops Safe in Afghanistan: Bagram Batman TV Spots Educate Military; 'He Acts Just as Well as Adam West Did'":

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan—In fictional Gotham City, Batman protects citizens from crime. Here, at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, another Dark Knight is on a different kind of crusade: making sure soldiers carry their rifles and don't get run over at night.

"Bagram Batman" is the star of a recent series of public-service announcements broadcast to troops deployed in and around Afghanistan. The camouflaged superhero—and his catchphrase, "SWEAR TO ME!"— have become an unlikely hit, winning a cult following among soldiers, and going viral on the Internet.

"He acts just as well as Adam West did," marvels Maj. Crispin Burke, an Army officer and military blogger, referring to the star of the original Batman movie and TV series in the 1960s.

While his do-it-yourself costume—rubber Batman mask, black cape and reflective belt over combat fatigues—may look like a joke, Bagram Batman has a very real mission: reminding the troops about the do's and don'ts of life on a forward operating base like Bagram, a small American town planted in the middle of a war zone.

Continue reading.

Gwyneth Paltrow: 'I have to work out Monday through Friday for almost two hours, and it's a nightmare...'

Says Ms. Paltrow, at People Magazine, when asked about how great she looks and how "it's easy to see  why women could be intimidated by you now." The full interview is hard copy only. My wife's a subscriber, however. Here's one of the photos from the magazine:

More: "Gwyneth Paltrow: My Family Makes Me Feel Beautiful."

Plus, at CNN, "Paltrow: 'Most beautiful' title not true," and at US Weekly, "Gwyneth Paltrow Feels "Humiliated" After Ditching Underwear at Iron Man 3 Premiere."

I'll have more babe-blogging later!

PREVIOUSLY: "Gwyneth Paltrow — 'World's Most Beautiful Woman' — Shows Off Smokin' See-Through Mesh Panel Gown at Hollywood Premiere of 'Iron Man 3'."