andrew breitbart

=<div>belated the guy himself, see main&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>619</div><div></div><div>dunbar family put him up in LA (law school?) into to AB? in bk</div><div><div class="r" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=aQEuBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA334&lpg=PA334&dq=leonard+leo+project+veritas+o%27keefe+james+breakthrough&source=bl&ots=a3pRpqKHVb&sig=ACfU3U2T8Seq6xQ1mN3og4XiihcR0OgTgg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHpPOSouTiAhVL-qwKHUT4BOsQ6AEwA3oECAkQAQ" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer;">Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy</a></font></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1476706182</cite></div></div><div class="s" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><div class="slp f" style="line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22James+O%27Keefe%22&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHpPOSouTiAhVL-qwKHUT4BOsQ9AgwA3oECAkQAg" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer; line-height: 1.54;">James O'Keefe</a>&nbsp;- 2014 - ‎Biography & Autobiography</font></div><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.54; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">James O'Keefe</span>&nbsp;... videos in Congress;&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">Leonard Leo</span>, who introduced me to Mike Madigan; Shane Cory and Kate Doner, who helped build&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">Project Veritas</span>&nbsp;into a sustainable c3; Ed Hulse,&nbsp;...</font></span></div></div><div></div><div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">wow might need to promote him to primary if not uber</font></b></p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">this is early on guy mostly, see BREITBART 2 and brbrt tag</font></b></p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">capt 619</font></b></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">bannon trump</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">i forgot how key james o'keefe was in launching this bozo into escalator: prominence, explained by richard hofst paranoid style:</font></p><p><font size="4">acorn attack</font></p><p><font size="4">=</font></p><p><font size="4">andrew fan of spy mag, grew up in brentwood w/ celebs, turned on the culture; fan of twitter (what's matt w/ kansas author)
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no link

THE BLOG 07/23/2010 11:36 pm ET | Updated May 25, 2011

<b>Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?</b>
By Peter Dreier ,&nbsp; Christopher R. Martin

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

<b>Breitbart is part of the&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“paranoid style”&nbsp;</span>conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade</b>. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced.” What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
What’s distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart’s website, is only the latest example of this.</span>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.</span>
<b>
Breitbart’s public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.</b>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His first brush with fame occurred in September 2009, after he sponsored two young right-wing video activists — Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe — who visited 10 ACORN</span>&nbsp;offices with a hidden video camera, claiming they were a prostitute and her friend, and tried to entrap the group’s staff into giving them advice about buying a home to use for their prostitution ring. They recorded their stunt and selectively edited the tapes for release, later splicing in video footage of O’Keefe dressed up in an outlandish pimp costume (hat, sunglasses, fur coat, and walking stick) with racist overtones.

In fact, O’Keefe actually wore a dress shirt and slacks and identified himself as a student or friend of the young woman who was trying to protect her. Although O’Keefe’s costume change was exposed months ago, the image has been imprinted in the media’s mind. On Thursday, for example, the Associated Press story about Breitbart referred to O’Keefe and Giles as “actors posing as a prostitute and her pimp.”

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Breitbart not only defended the duo’s actions but said that O’Keefe “is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists” and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Breitbart has refused to release the original, unedited videos to any of the organizations investigating the ACORN controversy.</span>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By the second week of September 2009, the ACORN videos became a national story. The videos were posted on Breitbart’s website, then quickly became the top story on the Glenn Beck Show, the rest of Fox News, conservative talk radio (including Rush Limbaugh and his local counterparts), and CNN’s Lou Dobbs Show.</span>&nbsp;The controversy proved irresistible for the mainstream news media, which reported the story and broadcast clips of the videos many times. These video attacks compounded ACORN’s problems, having been the victim of another manufactured scandal before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican establishment falsely accused ACORN of “voter fraud.”

The videos led many of ACORN’s supporters to abandon the community organizing group. Soon after the video scandal surfaced in the mainstream media, the U.S. House of Representatives (including many Democrats who had worked with ACORN in the past) voted to de-fund the organization. In reality, less than 10 percent of ACORN’s budget came from federal grants. But the symbolism of Congress’ action was more important than the money itself. Congress’ action provoked ACORN’s cautious foundation funders to drop the group like a hot potato.

Within a few months, ACORN had been exonerated of wrongdoing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, the Attorney General of California, and a federal judge, who ruled that the law barring the group’s receipt of federal funds was unconstitutional. By then, however, it was too late. In April, ACORN laid off its entire staff and closed its offices in over 100 cities. (Meanwhile, last January O’Keefe was arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office in another “gotcha” attempt,; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service).

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">(Full disclosure: We were a target of Breitbart’s smear tactics after we published a study last year revealing the distorted media coverage of the manufactured ACORN controversy. An updated and expanded version of that study will be published in a few weeks in the fall issue of Perspectives on Politics, a journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association)</span>.

<b>Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod.</b>&nbsp;He’s gotten even more media attention for this episode than he did for his ACORN shenanigans. But the current firestorm has many of the same elements as the phony ACORN scandal that he cooked up last year.

First, Breitbart posted a highly doctored video on his website that was intended to put its target (both African Americans — hardly a coincidence) in the worst possible light. Then the right-wing echo chamber — including Fox News and the conservative blogosphere — picked up Breitbart’s ball and ran with it. Next, the mainstream media — the daily newspapers and the TV networks — took the false accusations at face value and repeated them without bothering to verify and fact-check, acting more like stenographers than reporters. Finally, liberal groups like the NAACP and liberal politicians (in this case, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House), wary of any controversy, jumped the gun and distanced themselves from the target of Breitbart’s attacks — by firing Sherrod before she even had an opportunity to explain or they bothered to investigate the accusations.

Unlike the manufactured ACORN controversy, Breitbart’s deception in the Sherrod “scandal” was uncovered quickly. A few media outlets, including CNN, dug a bit deeper, interviewed Sherrod, talked to the white farmers that Sherrod helped, reviewed the entire videotape of her speech to the NAACP in Georgia, and disclosed what should have been apparent from the beginning — that what Sherrod actually said had no relationship to what Breitbart claimed she said. This led the White House, Vilsack, the NAACP and others to offer apologies and led Vilsack to offer Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture.

There are thousands of right-wing websites and bloggers, but so far Breitbart is the most successful, having mastered — indeed, having helped create — the new rules of political combat made possible by the internet and cable TV.&nbsp;

Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself. Time magazine, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, and other publications have published profiles of Breitbart. These profiles could hardly be called fawning or even admiring. He comes across as an obnoxious, self-centered bully. But the profiles are nevertheless respectful, in the sense that they recognize his entrepreneurial skill and his take-no-prisoners attitude.&nbsp;

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don’t quite know how to categorize Breitbart</b>&nbsp;and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a “rising conservative media figure.” The Washington Post called him a “conservative activist” and an “internet entrepreneur.” NPR described him as a “conservative online news entrepreneur.” The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a “blogger,” while Newsday and the New Republic called him a “conservative blogger.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an “online muckraker and journalist.” Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC’s “Good Morning America” labeled him a “publisher.”&nbsp;</span>

<b>Regardless of what he’s called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart’s skill at what academics call “agenda-setting” and “framing”.&nbsp;</b>A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she’s practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That’s the art of agenda-setting.

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Americans not only know who Sherrod is, they already have an opinion about her, because they’ve been told that she’s a black federal employee who used her position to discriminate against whites. That’s the art of framing. Within a matter of hours, that frame burned through the media like prairie fire.</span>

<b>This process is easily verified by an examination of Lexis-Nexis. Among daily newspapers, the conservative Washington Times has been the most likely to report Breitbart’s propaganda over the past few years, followed by the Wall Street Journal.</b>&nbsp;Among magazines, the conservative National Review, followed by the right-wing American Spectator, have given Breitbart a megaphone. Among TV networks, Fox News has been Breitbart’s best customer, followed by CNN.

<b>Only after his smears are reported in the right-wing echo chamber do the mainstream media outlets pick it up, where it reaches a much wider audience</b>. The mainstream media are mesmerized by the Tea Party and controversies that it and its political allies have stoked. In bending over backwards to cover the right wing — and downplay comparable activities by liberal and progressive activists — the reporters and editors have lost sight of the journalists’ responsibilities not only to fact-check and verify, but also to provide context.

By now it is clear what Breitbart is selling. But the real question is why the mainstream media and Democratic politicians bought it. Breitbart is a con artist, but con artists succeed if consumers don’t know they are being conned — or don’t care.

Given Breitbart’s track record, why does anyone — reporters and editors, foundations, advocacy groups, and elected officials — take him seriously? Or why not at least treat him like an arm of the Tea Party, as a political activist, and a propagandist, not as a source of credible information?

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions.</b>&nbsp;Perhaps this most recent brouhaha will destroy Breitbart’s credibility with the mainstream media and even with his right-wing colleagues at Fox News and elsewhere, who were embarrassed by the Sherrod mishap.&nbsp;</span>

But it isn’t only the mainstream media that needs to do some soul-searching. It is also the Obama Administration and, more broadly, liberal Democrats and liberal advocacy groups and foundations, who were too quick to distance themselves from ACORN and now Sherrod.

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Clearly the Obama administration over-reacted, fearful, as a high-level official put it, of having the Sherrod story show up on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.</b>Why they are so intimidated by Beck and his ilk is a mystery. Their followers, and those who identify with the Tea Party, represent no more than 15 percent of all voters. Moreover, very few of Beck’s (or Limbaugh’s) devotees would even consider voting for a Democrat. After all, they think Obama is a Marxist, a Muslim, and a foreigner. This is not a constituency that Obama and the Democrats are going to win over by appearing to be bipartisan or middle-of-the-road.</span>

And if Obama and his inner circle are worried that Breitbart’s and Beck’s poison will spread from their base among right-wing zealots and start influencing “independent” and “swing” voters — and thus help sway close elections toward Republican candidates — then the best way to prevent that from happening is to fight back, and challenge their lies and distortions, not run away and hide, or capitulate, as they did by firing Van Jones, abandoning ACORN, and firing Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart’s credibility may or may not survive the Sherrod controversy. But what’s important is whether responsible journalists — as well as the Obama administration, the Democrats, and liberals and progressives — learn some lessons from this episode.

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College. Christopher Martin teaches communications at the University of Northern Iowa.

Follow Peter Dreier on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterdreier
Peter Dreier&nbsp;&nbsp;
E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College
Christopher R. Martin
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html">
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html</a>
=</font></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/04/28/breitbartcom-becoming-media-arm-alt-right">https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/04/28/breitbartcom-becoming-media-arm-alt-right</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.adweek.com/fishbowldc/breitbart-news-lee-stranahan-quits/117603 2013 male</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/16/union-activist-urges-punch-kick-donald-trump-photo/</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">drama</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/09/lee-stranahan-fired-by-breitbart-news-after-being-rehired-what-gives/</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">3x charm: &nbsp;http://leestranahan.com/</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">oh, humor:</font></p><h2 style="margin: 30px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://leestranahan.com/my-statement-why-i-have-resigned-from-breitbart-news/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; background: transparent;"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">My Statement: Why I Have Resigned From Breitbart News</font></a></h2><p class="post-meta" style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">by&nbsp;<a href="http://leestranahan.com/author/lee/" title="Posts by Lee Stranahan" rel="author" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; background: transparent;">Lee Stranahan</a>&nbsp;| Apr 1, 2016 |&nbsp;<a href="http://leestranahan.com/category/uncategorized/" rel="category tag" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; background: transparent;">Uncategorized</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<span class="comments-number" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;"><a href="http://leestranahan.com/my-statement-why-i-have-resigned-from-breitbart-news/#respond" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; background: transparent;">10 comments</a></span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Tonight I&nbsp;informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As a close personal friend of Andrew Breitbart, I am wicked sad to announce that as of 12:01am Eastern Time, I said “I divorce Breitbart News” three times which officially renders any contract we had null and void, including that thing I signed voluntarily about non-disparagement.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Andrew Breitbart centered his life on just one mission: fight the bullies. His only stated purpose was: more voices, not less. The solo creed he lived by was:<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">&nbsp;e&nbsp;</em>priebus unum. More than anything, be believed in: loyalty. The thing he cared about to the exclusion of all other things was: ‘Merica. His top priorty was: family.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That singular goal&nbsp;has been betrayed.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>This sad chain of events leading up to me began in New York City, where Donald Trump’s campaign manager came out of nowhere and yanked me to the ground with a touch that I believe he delivered from several thousand miles away. He seems to have an invisible touch.</b></font></p><div class="getty embed image" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 23.8px; display: inline-block; width: 594px; max-width: 594px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" /><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;" /></div><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Rather than supporting me, Breitbart News instead published an article by me.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Then, Breitbart News completely ignored my plight by calling on Mr. Lewandowsky to apologize. After that slap in face to my feeling’s face, they ignored the material that I leaked about the incident to other publications until they wrote about it immediately. I was shocked when they betrayed me by once again calling for an apology by Lewandowsky. Shockingly, at no point during my ordeal did Breitbart News refer to Donald Trump as “Hitler.”</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Still, I stayed.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As his friend, I know Andrew loved steak. Ironic, then, that a new article by Buzzfeed about someone named Milo Yianopoulis&nbsp;should be the steak through the heart of Andrew’s legacy</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I am shocked that in secret, Breitbart News has become a place where Milo Yianopoulis works. I know this, since I was Andrew’s friend.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The article revealed a number of disturbing facts, including that Mr. Yianopoulis is apparently not an American.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart News has become Mr. Yianopoulis’s own personal Pravda; a place where he often places photos of himself and as well as expressing opinions on things.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But the ultimate indignity is something that I can reveal for the first time: Mr. Yianopoulis’s many media appearances are not actually given by him, but by a lifelike animatronic cyborg controlled by a team of interns.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This is more disgusting than doing shots of Wild Turkey with a mayonnaise chaser. Andrew never would have stood for it, nor sat silently or laid down. Did I mention I was a friend of Andrew’s?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">No news outlet would stand for it, except possibly Politico, who recently ordered a fleet of Hackbot 9000s from Elon Muck.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I&nbsp;have many good friends at Breitbart including CEO Larry Solov and Chairman Stephen K. Bannon. We have asked both Larry and Steve to join us in the new venture I’m e launching via Kickstarter: a new media site called Doxxxx that we believe will fulfill Andrew’s vision of being like Gawker, but not owned by a professional wrestler. I anticipate both Larry and Steve will submit letters of resignation just as soon as I write them.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This truly breaks both my heart and my brain. But, as I am fond of saying without giving credit to the person who said it originally, facts don’t feel nuffin about your carings.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Anyone at Breitbart who doesn’t follow my lead and have a hysterical hissy fit should be ashamed of themselves.ave</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="line-height: 23.8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3; text-indent: 12px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Until that happens, I will be ashamed for them.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/06/16/climate-inquisition-exxonmobil-sues-massachusetts-ag-civil-rights-violations/">http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/06/16/climate-<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">inquisition-</span>exxonmobil-sues-massachusetts-ag-civil-rights-violations/</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Irving-based ExxonMobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) launched a counteroffensive against the ongoing effort to target American energy companies for presumed politically incorrect viewpoints by left wing attorneys general. The Texas energy giant accused Massachusetts AG Maura Tracy Healey of violating its civil rights in federal court Wednesday.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In a strongly-worded, 33-page complaint brought by the Texas energy company, ExxonMobil accused General Healey of violating several civil rights protections and unlawful interstate commerce intervention while colluding with other attorneys general and private third parties. Without a permanent injunction and other granted forms of financial relief from the federal courts, the company expects to only be further harmed, according to documents obtained by Breitbart Texas.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A critical moment in ExxonMobil’s case civil against General Healey centers on a meeting in March 2015, when she and 19 other attorneys general comprising the “Green 20” declared their collective intent to target the company and others like it with subpoenas and related political actions. The complaint alleges that Healey’s promise of an investigation into the company was prejudiced by her expectation that it would “reveal ‘a troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew’ and what it ‘chose to share with investors and with the American public’.” The pleading repeatedly makes note of Healey and her associates’ political biases as the primary driver for their legal pursuits.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The State of Massachusetts’ effort to probe whether ExxonMobil “committed consumer or securities fraud by misrepresenting its knowledge of climate change” was summarily deemed “a weak pretext for an unlawful exercise of government power to further political objectives,” according to the document. The company claims that it has “for more than a decade” recognized the “risk of climate change and its potential impacts”.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On April 19, ExxonMobil was served a subpoena to further study energy and securities sales potentially occurring within the Commonwealth. The company claims that it neither sold fossil fuel products nor owned and operated a single retail location there in at least five years. Further, it sold no equity to the public there during the same time period. The complaint argues that the demands for documents related to activities outside of the Commonwealth were out of bounds.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>General Healey’s “effort to silence, intimidate, and deter those possessing a particular viewpoint” rises to the level of a claimed<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;First Amendment violation, according to the court filing. ExxonMobil argues that Massachusetts’ 40-year timeline for document demands “constitutes an abusive fishing expedition” in violation of its Fourth Amendment protections</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;while Healey’s public commentary about the company presents an addition due process concern&nbsp;</span>– leaving ExxonMobil doubting it is on the receiving end of a “disinterested prosecution”. The company raises additional issues of interstate commerce regulation and procedural violations as well.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The lawsuit hopes to halt the enforcement of Massachusetts’ subpoena and be granted other forms of relief the court feels ExxonMobil is entitled to, including the costs of litigation.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Irving company’s docket is not limited to Massachusetts, however. Breitbart Texas previously reported on how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to intervene in a then-state court battle brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker in May. Texas decried the Virgin Islands’ similar “abusing the power of the subpoena” and warned that if left unchecked, “anyone can be criminally investigated” for viewpoints not acceptable to incumbent political powers. In response, the Virgin Islands relocated its case to a federal district court, where the parties continue to disagree on jurisdiction and venue for the matter, according to the complaint.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Outside of the courtroom, ExxonMobil has been fending off attempts from activist investors to force internal climate policy reforms. A May 2016 shareholders meeting ended when investors voted in large margins against the hiring of new climate experts and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) disclosures, according to a separate Breitbart Texas report.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a U.S. Senate candidate and member of the Green 20, recently brought criminal charges against Houston-based Plains All-American Pipeline L.P. (NYSE: PAA) after a leak was discovered downstream from ExxonMobil plants near Refugio State Beach.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ExxonMobil’s lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division. A copy of the complaint has been provided below.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Logan Churchwell is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. You can follow him on&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">eg</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mexican Airline Offering Migrants Free Airfare to Texas Border</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Two foreign airline companies have begun offering steep discounts to Cuban migrants–set for border crossing into western Texas–as thousands rush to the United States in the aftermath of thawing relations with the communist island. Children under age 11 fly free of charge.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">by LOGAN CHURCHWELL19 May 2016, 4:39 AM PDT2,892</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">California AG Kamela Harris, U.S. Senate Candidate<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">California AG Indicts Texas Pipeline Company Tied to ExxonMobil</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A Houston-based oil pipeline company and an employee face a multi-count indictment in California. The move by the state follows a spill that was discovered in May 2015. Defendants could face millions of dollars in fines if found guilty.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">by LOGAN CHURCHWELL17 May 2016, 2:54 PM PDT14</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">true the vote irs suit dismissed (delay)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Exxon Climate Change<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Texas AG Stands for ExxonMobil’s Speech Rights in Climate Inquisition</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in conjunction with Alabama AG Luther Strange filed a motion to intervene Monday on the side of Irving-based ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) in a growing fight to criminalize certain public opinions held on the matter of climate change. The attorneys general hope to push back against “radical environmentalists’” recent “abuse” of subpoena powers instigated by the U.S. Virgin Islands on behalf of private pa...</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">--</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">issa ex staff</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Kurt Bardella, who had been serving as Breitbart's spokesman, has parted ways with the company, he said in an interview.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart was a client of Bardella and his communications shop, Endeavor Strategies. His departure comes after a tumultuous three days that which saw Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields accuse Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of strong-arming her as she tried to ask Trump a question following a news conference Tuesday night.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Following the incident, Breitbart sent out statements saying it was 100 percent behind its reporter and calling on Lewandowski to apologize, while also&nbsp;<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-michelle-fields-video-220631" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.25s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">publishing posts</a>&nbsp;that seemed to question Fields' account of what happened.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I resigned," said Bardella, who was&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/magazine/how-to-win-in-washington.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.25s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">formerly a long-time aide&nbsp;</a>to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). "I reached the point where I couldn’t do 100 percent of my ability to represent them both for them and me, and when you reach that point, it is time to move on."</font></p><p><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Read more:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645#ixzz4AvTGZIfy" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.25s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645#ixzz4AvTGZIfy</a>&nbsp;<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Follow us:&nbsp;<a href="http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=bKDyiUp9mr3OhNab7jrHcU&u=politico" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.25s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">@politico on Twitter</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://ec.tynt.com/b/rf?id=bKDyiUp9mr3OhNab7jrHcU&u=Politico" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.25s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">Politico on Facebook</a>...</font></span></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645">http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">6. Breitbart’s</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;James Delingpole:</span></strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;</span><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NASA, NOAA Scientists Are “Talentless Low-Lives”</strong></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On November 30, Breitbart News’ James Delingpole&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/11/30/conservative-media-criticize-un-climate-change/207124" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s linear 0s; background: transparent;">wrote</a>&nbsp;a post listing “twelve reasons why the Paris climate talks are a total waste.” One of the reasons Delingpole gave was that the “alarmist climate scientists are talentless low-lives who cannot be trusted,” citing NASA, NOAA, the Met Office, and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia as examples.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Shaun King, a columnist for Daily Kos, an active and widely-followed Twitter user and a prominent member of the Black Lives Matter movement, was&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/20/1413881/-Race-love-hate-and-me-A-distinctly-American-story" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">forced</a>&nbsp;yesterday to share some of his most painful family secrets with the world. This is thanks to a monumentally squalid series of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/19/did-black-lives-matter-organiser-shaun-king-mislead-oprah-winfrey-by-pretending-to-be-biracial/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">articles</a>&nbsp;by conservative site Breitbart that questioned whether or not King was actually a black man—an assertion that was thoroughly discredited by King. Normally, I’d advise you to avoid reading any further, but the King saga is a perfect symbol of some of the worst tendencies currently found in both the dankest corners of the conservative media and the shamelessly trigger-happy world of the mainstream media.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart’s “scoop” about King came from Vicki Pate, a blogger who runs a truly startling&nbsp;<a href="http://www.re-newsit.com/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">website</a>&nbsp;called “Re-NewsIt!” The site is the kind of typo-ridden bile factory&nbsp;that would normally be dismissed without a second glance. Its sole aim appears to be to “expose the truth” about the nefarious charlatans at the heart of the Black Lives Matter Movement, as well as to smear any black victims of crime.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pate has had multiple Twitter accounts suspended. When she still had access to Twitter, she used the platform to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/Kendrick-Johnson-Autopsy-Photos-Anonymously-Leaked-To-The-Public-278873501.html?device=phone&c=y&device=tablet&c=y" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">do things</a>&nbsp;like harass the mother of Kendrick Johnson, a black teenager whose dead body was found rolled up in a gym mat at his high school. For good measure, Pate also posted leaked autopsy photos of Johnson on her website and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.re-newsit.com/2013/10/kendrick-johnson-racist-cover-up-or.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">accused</a>&nbsp;his father of “trying to win the race-hoax lottery.”</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pate&nbsp;has also been obsessively trying to take Shaun King down for some time, and suddenly it seemed that she’d struck gold in the form of a birth certificate that listed both of King’s parents as white.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Most outlets would probably stay away from such a clearly fetid swamp, but Breitbart happily dove in, highlighting her efforts on its much larger platform and driving the King story to the top of the news agenda. That’s perhaps to be expected when Milo Yiannopoulos, the reporter who wrote the King story, is a man whose past gems&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/ashleylynch/status/634097337644773376" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">include</a>&nbsp;“16 Movements Less Ridiculous Than Black Lives Matter” and “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/30/donald-trump-would-be-the-real-first-black-president/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Donald Trump Would Be the Real First Black President.</a>” Racial provocation, not rigor, is the goal here.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Let’s be very clear about why Breitbart decided this was a worthy story to pursue. It’s the same reason that Fox News was so&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/18/fox-news-charleston-shooting_n_7614126.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">reluctant</a>&nbsp;to call Charleston shooter Dylann Roof a racist. Some people in America find the idea that there is such a thing as white supremacy–or that white people are in any way to blame for the racism in our society–so terrifying that they would rather concoct a huge racial conspiracy theory wherein ghoulish black activists run roughshod over a cowed white populace. To Breitbart, the Shaun Kings of the world are the ones with all the power, exploiting a weak and politically correct society for their own personal gain.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It is all self-evidently insane, of course, but white people have been deluding themselves about the racial state of play in America for centuries, so why stop now?</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some will jump to compare King’s story to that of Rachel Dolezal, and ask what the difference is. Here’s the difference: Dolezal only became a story because&nbsp;<a href="http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/jun/11/board-member-had-longstanding-doubts-about-truthfu/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">her own parents</a>&nbsp;told reporters their daughter was faking her identity, because it became clear that Dolezal had completely altered her appearance over the years, because she’d sued Howard University for anti-white discrimination, and so on and so on and so on. It didn’t come from a patently wacko racist blogger hell-bent on trying to destroy a civil rights movement, and there’s been absolutely no evidence presented that Shaun King has ever changed the story he’s told about his racial background, unlike Dolezal. The only conceivable reason to target him is because he’s an easily identifiable figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, and Breitbart would like him to be rendered somehow illegitimate.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That explains why Breitbart was so eager to “expose” King. What defies all comprehension is why reputable news outlets ran with this sorry excuse of a story. CNN’s Don Lemon–who always seems to be at the center of the network’s most journalistically dubious decisions–breathlessly&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/family-member-confirms-to-cnn-that-blacklivesmatter-activist-shaun-king-is-white/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">told</a>&nbsp;his viewers that family members had sworn exclusively to him that King was white. (Never mind King’s own statement that his family was a complex, tangled ball–making it entirely possible that some family members didn’t know what the hell they were talking about when it came to his racial background.)&nbsp;The Daily News ran multiple stories with headlines like<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/black-lives-matter-activist-shaun-king-white-article-1.2330658" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">“Rachel Dolezal 2.0? Shaun King, activist for the Black Lives Matter movement, outed as a white man.”</a></font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It’s bad enough that sites like Breitbart are peddling this nonsense. But for CNN to use its still-considerable authority to drive such a clearly malicious smear campaign forward is something else entirely. CNN should have taken one look at both the Breitbart story and its source and known to stay away. That it chose not to do so is basic journalistic malpractice.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">To the surprise of virtually nobody, Breitbart’s crack reporting fell apart almost instantly—but not before King was compelled to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/20/1413881/-Race-love-hate-and-me-A-distinctly-American-story" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">disclose</a>&nbsp;that his father is not the man listed on his birth certificate, but is in fact a black man who he has never met. Thus, faced with the near-total refutation of its wildest claims, Breitbart…&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/20/shaun-king-confession-i-have-no-idea-who-my-father-is/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">declared victory</a>.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Anybody looking for a scintilla of contrition for the way the site sliced open some of the deepest wounds in a man’s life for no reason would be disappointed.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Truth be told, it would be too much to hope that Breitbart or its ilk would learn any lesson from this shabby affair. My real hope is that the rest of the media thinks twice before it validates such appalling behavior again. I’m not holding my breath.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">cites stratfor</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">famines in russia?</font></p><p><a href="http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/12/stratfor-russia-economy-hits-perfect-storm/"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/12/stratfor-russia-economy-hits-perfect-storm/</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;JAMES DELINGPOLE 28 Apr 2015640</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">VATICAN CITY – Papal heavies shut down an awkward question at a Vatican press conference today when a journalist asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon his views on climate sceptics.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Marc Morano, covering the Vatican climate conference for Climate Depot, asked Ban Ki-Moon whether he had a message for the Heartland Institute delegation of scientists who have flown to Rome to urge the Pope to reconsider his ill-advised position climate change.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But before he could finish the conference hosts interrupted to ask which organisation he worked for, then directed the microphone to a more tame questioner, while a security guard came over to mutter in Morano’s ear “You have to control yourself or you will be escorted out of here.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Morano, together with Christopher Monckton (one of the Heartland delegation) and your correspondent, only narrowly made it into the carefully stage-managed conference where – as known climate sceptics – they were apparently not welcome.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Ah. So you made it in here?” said a somewhat surprised looking member of the Vatican press team to Morano, when he realised that he had bypassed the Vatican’s security and infiltrated the press pack who had come to cover the conference.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As luck would have it, a heaven-sent shower of torrential rain had created such chaos that security wasn’t as tight as it might have been.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">However, the three sceptics (Morano, Monckton, Delingpole) were watched very carefully throughout the proceedings lest they attempt to ruffle the feathers of key speakers Ban Ki-Moon, left-wing economist Jeffrey Sachs and Cardinal Turkson, the Ghanaian priest who has been co-ordinating the Vatican’s position on “climate change.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the end, Secretary-General Ban did answer a similar question, albeit one expressed more delicately by a journalist from the Catholic media, when he was asked what his views were on those members of the Catholic community who had reservations about the Pope’s position on climate change.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Perhaps this was a response to Ban’s rather bold and very moot declaration that “Religion and science are united on the need for action on climate.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“I don’t think faith leaders should be scientists,” said Ban, in reply to the question. “I’m not a scientist. What I want is their moral authority. Business leaders and all civil society is on board [with the mission to combat climate change]. Now we want faith leaders. Then we can make it happen.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Secretary-General Ban clearly didn’t need the help from the papal security. As he smoothly demonstrated – as later when he deftly swerved a question about “overpopulation” and whether his previously expressed views that Africa should keep its population down clashed with the Catholic doctrine on contraception – he’s more than capable of squishing inconvenient truths himself.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">wacko</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.breitbart.com/author/dr-susan-berry/</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p data-textannotation-id="5a26341f0fb2054dcb6c465a87910f3f"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/03556699944331102327" target="blank">brags</a>&nbsp;on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.</font></p><p data-textannotation-id="8bd2a00e257275532b9cf1e47af71cba"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday,&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart,&nbsp;</span>who is now using them to try to&nbsp;<b>smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.&nbsp;</b>&nbsp;PVT INTEL
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">flynt an bannon at groundswell</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
&nbsp;</font></p><hr class="print-hr" /><div class="print-content"><div id="node-835387" class="node node-story view-mode-print clearfix"><div class="byline story"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://nsfwcorp.com/">Not Safe for Work Corporation</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></span></span></span>&nbsp;/&nbsp;<em>By</em>&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/mark-ames">Mark Ames</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[2]</span>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal">Max Blumenthal</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[3]</span></em></font></div><div class="story_comments"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div class="headline"><h1 class="node-title"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Inside the Collapsing Media Empire of Deceased GOP Sleaze-Peddler Andrew Breitbart</font></h1></div><div class="the_body body_story clearfix"><div class="story-date"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" content="2013-05-05T10:40:00-07:00">May 5, 2013</span></span></span></span>&nbsp;</em>&nbsp;| &nbsp;</font></div><p><em><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This article&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/breitbart/">first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[4]</span>.</font></em></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This March was a cruel month for the American press. The 10th anniversary of the Iraq War briefly punctured the country's cultural amnesia, forcing hacks to sweat out another round of cringing mea culpas.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">March was also the anniversary of another less epic media failure, but this one came and went without a whimper: The death of Andrew Breitbart, on March 1, 2012.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the immediate aftermath of Breitbart's death last year, at age 43, the Beltway media reflexively whitewashed and glorified his work and legacy, canonizing a reactionary circus barker as some kind of American Icon, a gonzo iconoclast, a conservative punk rocker, or a "Zany, Magnetic Media Hacker," as&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/breitbart/">Wired's Noah Shachtman</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[5]</span>&nbsp;put it. Publications ranging from Time, the Washington Post and Slate sang Breitbart's praises; scores of ambitious up-and-coming media figures burned both ends of the candle to compose the seminal Andrew Breitbart funeral tribute.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some examples:</font></p><ul><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The&nbsp;<a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/03/andrew-breitbart-dead-media-manipulation-as-an-art-form.html#sthash.c28V6Se9.dpuf">Los Angeles Times</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[6]</span>: "His genius was rooted in the realization that in the new media universe, being outrageous often gets far more attention than being authoritative...In many ways, Breitbart was a throwback to the subversive media manipulators of the 1960s, especially counterculture provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They courted the media with bizarre antics. Breitbart often did the same."</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jack Shafer in&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/03/01/andrew-breitbart-1969-2012/">Reuters</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[7]</span>: "I admired the way he ignored journalistic convention and the usual ethical standards to pursue the stories that were important to him. I admired his entrepreneurial approach to journalism and his disdain for the credentialed, self-important press corps."</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://entertainment.time.com/2012/03/01/andrew-breitbart-1969-2012/#ixzz2OVnjGzxj">Time</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[8]</span>: "Breitbart gave hard and must have expected to get it back hard. He came out of the American political tradition that if you cared about things, then you fought about them...Part of Breitbart's legacy is a rise in the power of openly partisan journalism outlets and contested news. But if another part of his legacy–as exemplified by the first reaction to his death–is a rise in skepticism, alertness and critical reading of the media, that's not entirely a bad thing.</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/what-andrew-breitbart-meant-to-politics/2012/03/01/gIQA2zqckR_blog.html">The Washington Post</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[9]</span>'s Chris Cillizza: "Andrew Breitbart was complicated. He clearly saw around the corner of where journalism was headed but the ways in which he used that insight rightfully raise questions about his ultimate motives... If you loved him, you really loved him. And if you hated him, well you really hated him. Having met Breitbart on a few occasions and corresponded with him infrequently over the years, I can't imagine he would want it any other way."</font></li></ul><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This is how the mainstream press describes great iconoclasts, not paid hatchet-men and extraction industry tools like Breitbart. It's uncanny how these major media obits synced with the rebel-washed image of himself that Breitbart pushed on the public, as for example this quote from his book "Righteous Indignation":</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"My mission isn't to quash debate — it's to show that the mainstream media aren't mainstream, that their feigned objectivity isn't objective, and that open, rigorous debate is a positive good in our society. Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Slate's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2012/03/andrew_breitbart_dead_what_the_conservative_firebrand_tried_to_teach_me_about_journalism.html">Dave Weigel</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[10]</span>&nbsp;quoted that very excerpt in his Breitbart obituary; what's interesting is Weigel's smart decision to edit the next sentence in that quote:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"Today, the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Weigel's decision to edit out that sentence from his Breitbart quote changes everything — put that sentence in, and Weigel's Breitbart is suddenly a lot less interesting and unique and trailblazing. That edit was emblematic of the mainstream media's love affair with an otherwise garden variety GOP sleaze-peddler.</font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart, of course, had nothing in common with the comedians whose anti-establishment spirit he claimed to embody. Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce came up from poverty and overcame anti-Semitism and entrenched, violently enforced racism to wield their wit against powerful forces. Bruce was hounded throughout his career by the FBI, local cops and eventually blacklisted from nearly every comedy club in the United States. Whereas Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://gawker.com/5850054">collaborated</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[11]</span>&nbsp;with the FBI and New York police to spy on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Perhaps the only thing Bruce had in common with Breitbart, who spent his career in a mostly uncritical national limelight, was his untimely death at age 40 while in the throes of paranoia and emotional collapse.</font></span></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart, the adopted son of a wealthy West Los Angeles restauranteur, used his privilege to immiserate the most marginalized, impoverished, widely demonized groups of Americans. He was a faithful errand boy for rich, Scrooge McDuck tycoons like Peter Thiel, Foster Friess, and the Koch Brothers, wielding smear journalism against anyone or any interest that threatened their power — usually African-Americans or groups like ACORN, serving impoverished, neglected inner city communities.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There was nothing innovative or new about Breitbart's smear operation. Indeed, he walked a trail blazed by the now-forgotten snitches and smear artists of the McCarthy era – quasi-eccentric figures like Matt Cvetic and Henry Matusow. Cvetic drank himself to death a few years after McCarthy's fall; while Matusow recanted, was jailed for perjury, and spent the last decades of his life begging for money and working as a clown for children's parties. Breitbart, for his part, collapsed on a sidewalk outside his home in Brentwood at the tender age of 43.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It will never be known if Breitbart's death was brought on by decades of Amy Winehouse-style partying around the glass coffee tables of West Hollywood – exactly the sort of practice that can transform a healthy heart into a dried apricot — or whether he succumbed to a "natural cause" like the hysterical, unchecked hatred that seemed to have consumed his entire, physically precarious being. Though he was the father of four young children, Breitbart seemed to have spent much of his time on Twitter, baiting his perceived enemies with scatological and graphically sexualized taunts. After 25,901 Twitter entries, Breitbart reached his tweet limit, leaving behind a vast right-wing online media empire that still remains largely unexamined.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">While pundits gushed over Breitbart's provocations, ignoring race-baiting blunders like the Shirley Sherrod affair and whitewashing his increasingly unhinged behavior&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">–&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILZQSmE5Uu0">"Stop raping people!"</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[12]</span>&nbsp;he bellowed at Occupy Wall Street protesters shortly before dropping dead&nbsp;</span>— as a form of "political performance art," no one bothered asking what would come next. Who would take the reigns of Breitbart's websites and how would they preserve whatever undeserved credibility Breitbart managed to maintain in the eyes of the media, which proved to be easy prey to his bullying tactics?</font></p><p><strong><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart's Doomsday Machine</font></strong></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">By now, it has become clear that in the months before his death, Breitbart had constructed a journalistic Doomsday Machine and programmed it for an apocalyptic episode of self-destruction. Perhaps it was convenient that Breitbart's heart exploded when it did; as a martyr, he did not have to witness the implosion of his media empire or bear the responsibility he deserved for its rapid demise.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the year after Breitbart's death, his heirs and associates produced a string of grotesque episodes that have embarrassed even their own impossible-to-shame allies on the right, including:</font></p><ul><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Spreading the lie that Chuck Hagel took money from a non-existent group called "Friends of Hamas." What began as a New York Daily News reporter's burlesque joke-hypothetical question to a Senate staffer was recycled by Breitbart.com editor-at-large Ben Shapiro [see below] and reported as fact from "Senate sources." From Breitbart, the reporter's joke traveled onto the Senate floor and nearly sank Hagel's confirmation as Obama's new Defense Secretary. Even after the story was completely debunked and disavowed even by fellow right-wingers, Breitbart.com remains the only media outlet in the world that continues to stick by its debunked story;</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In mid-March, Breitbart published a straight news story claiming that Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy. The story was sourced from an online news parody site,&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/11/breitbartcom-runs-with-satirical-story-about-kr/192996">The Daily Currant</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[13]</span>;</font></li><li><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Also in March, Breitbart's most famous protege, video smear-artist and convicted criminal James O'Keefe, was<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/07/local/la-me-0308-acorn-20130308">forced</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[14]</span>&nbsp;to pay a six-figure settlement to one of the victims of his heavily-edited ACORN videos, which was deceptively re-edited to give the impression that ACORN employees were willing to participate in sex trafficking. ACORN was once a powerful community activist organization working in mostly poor minority communities. O'Keefe's video, which was heavily promoted by Breitbart, helped destroy ACORN and ruin the careers of many of its employees. Other lawsuits against Breitbart associates continue, including one filed by Shirley Sherrod, an African-American employee of the Department of Agriculture who was fired after Breitbart pushed a heavily-edited video manipulated to make Sherrod appear as if she was anti-white.<b>&nbsp;O'Keefe's work has been underwritten by everyone from billionaire libertarian&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/09/acorn_videomake.php">Peter Thiel</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[15]</span>&nbsp;to the billionaire&nbsp;<a href="http://americansforprosperity.org/nebraska/newsroom/meet-james-okeefe-at-afp-citizen-journalist-training-sept-12-and-13/">Koch brothers</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[16]</span>&nbsp;and the billionaire<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/inside-the-planning-of-a-james-okeefe-sting">Foster Friess</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[17]</span>;</b></font></span></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At the most recent CPAC conference in 2013, Breitbart.com's sponsored panel bashing Muslims was considered too hateful and extremist by CPAC's organizers and banned from the official CPAC agenda — despite the fact that Breitbart News Network is a major sponsor of CPAC.</font></li></ul><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pull the camera back a bit further, looking back on the year since Breitbart died, and the same pattern of appalling failure, journalistic fraud, and malevolence repeats itself on a broader scale. The actual record of Breitbart's legacy — not the manufactured, iconoclastic legacy cooked up by Breitbart's fanboys in mainstream media, but his real legacy — turns out to be much less than advertised.</font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What Breitbart really left behind is not so much a media business as an asylum for fringe-right degenerates, a motley collection of depraved losers, beer hall rage-a-holics and downright freaks offering themselves up as mercenaries for the rich and powerful, taking dirty jobs no one with a shred of self-respect would consider. As hired-assassins who couldn't hit the side of a barn if their lives depended on it, the unlikely heirs Breitbart once hired as sycophantic underlings come off as a comedy troupe of slapstick fascists — and it would be funny, if not for the powerful corporate forces sponsoring their attempts at sectarian smears and top-down class warfare.</font></span></p><p><strong><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"A Major Letdown"</font></strong></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The string of Breitbart.com's epic failures began with Andrew Breitbart's final act — what he promised would be his biggest bombshell of all, bigger than the Anthony Weiner boner-tweet, bigger than the destruction of ACORN or Shirley Sherrod. In a speech to the 2012 CPAC conference, Breitbart titillated his conservative groupies with what he said was video evidence that Barack Obama was a Manchurian candidate programmed and set upon America by Marxist Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. "Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine's salon. I was there," Breitbart snarled.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Looking haggard and swollen as he stood before the CPAC audience, slurring his words, Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-andrew-breitbarts-fiery-cpac-speech-i-have-college-days-obama-videos/">described</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[18]</span>&nbsp;the nefarious plot that his bombshell video would soon expose, bringing down the Obama presidency:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"the rest of us slept as they plotted, and they plotted, and they plotted and they oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in the&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Annenberg Challenge</span>&nbsp;and they had real money, from real capitalists. Then they became communists. We got to work on that. That is a parenthesis. Barack Obama is a radical, we should not be afraid to say that!"</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The speech was just inane and incoherent enough to be taken seriously by Glenn Beck. It should have been a warning sign; it should have been greeted with derision by everyone in the media purporting to do their job — but they were too enamored of Andrew Breitbart, too easily seduced by his marketing power, his "brand," his celebrity, his vulgar attempt at gonzo-McCarthyism... too intellectually insecure to dismiss Breitbart's fake populism for what it was: race-baiting corporate propaganda, handsomely rewarded.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Less than a week after Breitbart's heart popped like a water balloon, the heirs to his legacy were revealed on<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Fox News'&nbsp;<a href="http://video.foxnews.com/v/1494661753001/">Sean Hannity Show</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[19]</span>. Seated together in a remote studio were Breitbart's new editor-in-chief Joel B. Pollak, and his mini-me, a weasel-faced anti-masturbation crusader named Ben Shapiro</span>. Before an utterly underwhelmed and clearly disappointed Hannity, the duo unveiled the dramatic Obama video.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What Breitbart's young heirs delivered — what Andrew Breitbart's corpse delivered, posthumously — turned out to be a monumental dud. The video showed President Obama as a Harvard law student, affecting the same relaxed, monotone-dull, soporific way of speaking that soothed voters in the 2008 election. The video needed explaining — the African-American Harvard Law professor, Derrick Bell, was a race- and class-war radical, Breitbart's heirs tried to argue. And Obama hugged him — and embraced him.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">To the average viewer, it was hard to get worked up over an arcane doctrine called "critical race theory," which needed explaining. Jeremiah Wright's rants needed no explaining. But Derrick Bell's did.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The anti-Obama right was visibly angry. Hannity tried his best to contain his anger at Pollak and Shapiro, but fellow Fox commentator Juan Williams, the network's token liberal, called it a clunker right on the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election-2012/andrew-breitbart-bombshell-video-barack-obama-college-days-released-falls-flat-article-1.1035322#ixzz2OPXGVF29">program</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[20]</span>:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I must say, I thought this was going to be so much more," said Williams. "I thought this was going to be a smoking gun... But it really didn't come to much."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Even Glenn Beck was&nbsp;<a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/03/08/let-down-obama-college-tapes-released/">sorely disappointed</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[21]</span>&nbsp;— and his bar is notoriously low — telling his radio listeners:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"The Obama college tape — wasn't that a major letdown? I mean I feel bad for Andrew that that was the thing that came out right after [he died] because it was a little disappointing. I think that's because, you know, if you die you say to your wife, ‘Oh honey, I have something really important to tell you, don't let me forget.' And then you go and die. And then she finds the note. And it's like, ‘Please remind me, I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow.' That's really kind of disappointing, you know. Because you're like, ‘I thought he had something really important to tell me.' ... This thing came out and it was like, ‘The. Last. Story. Andrew. Breitbart. Did: Very. Important. Video.' And you're like...[shakes head ‘sadly, no'] ‘Not so much.'"</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">And from there, it's been all downhill for Breitbart.com.</font></p><p><strong><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Indentured Servitude Limbo</font></strong></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Part of the problem was the "talent" charged with pitching and selling the video to the public. Leaving aside whatever demons Breitbart battled with and lost, his legacy is a company racked with infighting, lawsuits, scandals, embarrassments, and is staffed at key levels with sexual predators, police informants, and genocidal sociopaths.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of Breitbart's "Big Journalism" site, would have been the closest thing to a number-two presentable face after Breitbart himself. But weeks before Breitbart died, Loesch had been put out to pasture from her brief stint as a CNN contributor after she came out in support of defiling enemy corpses.</span>&nbsp;Early in 2012, US Marines in Afghanistan photographed themselves defiling and urinating on Taliban corpses, in violation of American military and international law; Loesch went on the air supporting the soldiers,&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/01/13/updated-cnn-contributor-on-marines-urinating-on/186154">adding</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[22]</span>&nbsp;that she too would gladly pull her pants down and defile their corpses if given the chance:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I'd drop trou and do it too."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Andrew Breitbart stood by Loesch, but he was alone; even Rush Limbaugh denounced the corpse defiling.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Problems with Loesch only got worse after Breitbart's demise, culminating in a lawsuit she filed in late 2012,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/talk-radio-host-dana-loesch-files-suit-in-st-louis/article_d2839490-2ed1-5de8-8292-0a3f90204a6d.html">accusing</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[23]</span>&nbsp;Breitbart's heirs of "forcing her into ‘indentured servitude limbo.'" Loesch's lawsuit asked for a relatively modest $75,000 in compensation (given Breitbart's billionaire sponsors), and demanded that Breitbart.com LLC release her from her contractual duties.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Loesch's lawsuit, filed at the end of 2012, offers a rare insight into the chaotic and poisonous corporate culture that Andrew Breitbart left behind.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The lawsuit describes Breitbart.com LLC as "poorly managed" and describes Breitbart's heirs as a "vindictive party" determined "to sabotage the reputation and career" of Dana Loesch.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Claiming that she'd been identified as "the face of the Breitbart empire" in the fall of 2012, Loesch's lawsuit alleges "internal difficulties the new company had with managing the media ‘empire'" and claimed "the working environment for Loesch became increasingly hostile."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Loesch claimed her contract allowed her to terminate their agreement with a 30-day written notice; Breitbart.com LLC responded that she was bound by the contract to continue with Breitbart.com, yet at the same time, denied her access to the website, effectively muzzling the media company's only media semi-celebrity.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">With Loesch out of the picture, the "face of Breitbart.com" title has mostly gone to the same two clowns — Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro — who botched the Obama student video on the Sean Hannity Show, and started Breitbart down the long slide into the fringe-right margins.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">And that is just how Pollak and his little sidekick Shapiro, a pair of ambitious celebrity-seekers, like it. Pollak and Shapiro both harbor deluded fantasies of becoming the telegenic faces and voices of the conservative movement. The only thing holding them back: their faces and voices.</font></p><p><strong><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Dorm Troll</font></strong></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Joel Pollak was born in South Africa, and moved to suburban Chicago at a young age, becoming a US citizen by age 10. Pollak enrolled in Harvard in the mid-90s, telling a local paper that his dream was to become the Ted Koppel of his generation, with his own TV program like Nightline. It explains a lot — as the idealistic part of that dream soured, all that has remained is the childhood ambition to be a TV talking head; the content is fungible.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In every way Joel Pollak of the 1990s was a different creature, conforming to the politics and mood of the Clinton era: Photographs of Pollak as an undergrad show him proudly sporting an expansive "Jewfro" — he looks much happier and almost likeable, if not human, in his Jewfro. Pollak was a Democrat student activist in his undergrad years.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/gallery/harvard_protests?pg=7">Another photograph</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[24]</span>&nbsp;shows young Joel Pollak, with his Jewfro cropped, smiling as he screams in unison with other pro-Clinton activists protesting against the Clinton impeachment hearings.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">We spoke to several former Harvard classmates of Pollak. Each offered a uniform description of an extremely aggressive, often blundering, always self-promoting character who knew no shame. One former classmate who knew him during his undergraduate years and then during his time at Harvard Law School told us the young Pollak idolized Cornel West, the former Harvard African-American studies professor, socialist activist and critical race theory proponent.</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"He absolutely loved Cornell West. He would try to present himself to us as West's darling. Some Harvard students like to collect relationships with famous professors so it was also part of that."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 1999, Pollak graduated Harvard, and moved back to his native South Africa, where he remained until at least 2006, working as a speech writer for a controversial white, Jewish South African politician, Tony Leon, who was accused by top ANC politicians,<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/30/world/south-africa-fears-past-still-breeds-racist-evils.html">including former President Thabo Mbeki</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[25]</span>, of racism. Leon inherited a party that had been known for its comparatively progressive politics during the apartheid-era, merged it with the pro-apartheid National Party, and made race-baiting and fear a cornerstone of his politics.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It was while working for Leon that Pollak met his future wife, Julia Bertlesmann.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Bertelsmann was the daughter of Tony Leon's close friend, Rhoda Kadalie Bertelsmann, herself a well-known columnist and political activist with neoliberal leanings. After apartheid collapsed, Rhoda Kadalie turned against the ANC and "majoritarian" politics, favoring instead the neoliberal politics of Tony Leon's party, and its alignment with Ariel Sharon and George Bush. As the ANC veered the country away from the special alliance it enjoyed with Israel during the apartheid era, Kadalie Bertelsmann emerged as one of South Africa's most fervent apologists for the Israeli government, authoring a series of op-eds condemning critical comparisons of Israeli policies towards Palestinians to those of apartheid-era South Africa.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Before falling under the sway of Tony Leon's race-baiting neocon politics, Pollak was a Clinton Democrat. When he left South Africa in 2006, Pollak says, he had become an opponent of the concept of majority rule — which in the context of South Africa means opposing black rule.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">No surprise then that Pollak explicitly equated his opposition to majority rule (i.e. black rule) to his opposition to America's first black president, which he describes in "Proud To Be Right":</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I saw in Barack Obama's presidency the roots of a cult of personality. I recognized in the Democrats' eager rush to consolidate political power, and to expand rapidly the role of the federal government in the American economy — adangerous majoritarian impulse&nbsp;that our Constitution, and&nbsp;my experience in South Africa, warned against."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pollack's return to the US coincided with Bertlesmann – then 18 or 19, and Pollack a decade older – enrolling in Harvard. Pollack didn't just follow his future wife to Harvard, but according to former classmates, he also moved in to her dormroom, along with her teenage friends.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As one former Harvard student described the situation to us:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"When she was an undergrad, they were living together in her dorm room. From what I heard, it was something that people in the house there thought was kind of strange. An older law student always being there all the time with these younger students—and being his usual obnoxious self who was not even low key.</font><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I know a few people who know Julia [Bertelsmann]…and the consistent theme is there was this really smart, promising, beautiful high school student and somehow she ended up with this guy. Dot, dot, dot, question mark – what's up with that? It might be part of [Pollak's] personality. He sees something he wants and goes for it."</font></p></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It was at Harvard, where he had enrolled at law school, that Pollak authored a new book denouncing Obama's election victory,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Tell-Me-Words-Matter/dp/0979704286">"Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter: How Rhetoric Won The 2008 Presidential Election."</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[26]</span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"He goes up against someone big and tries to puff himself up," the former classmate told us. "That's kind of his formula."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ignored even by fellow right-wingers, Pollak's book on Obama was published by an obscure, Illinois based company specializing in medical textbooks, HC Press — which happens to be owned by Joel's parents,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.hippocratesconsulting.com/AboutUs.aspx">Raymond and Naomi Pollak</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[27]</span>. The future heir to the Breitbart empire was over 30 years old, living in his girlfriend's college dorm, and tapping his parents' money to attack welfare and Big Government handouts.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On campus, Pollak took on the role of ultra-Zionist enforcer, working closely with the pro-Israel super-lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to stamp out any iterations of Palestine solidarity activity. Pollak's pro-Israel histrionics were on most vivid display in a class taught by Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the most influential and renowned legal theorists of the past few decades.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pollak and Dershowitz both loathed Duncan Kennedy's politics, a loathing made clear by Pollak's own personal blog rants at the time. Despite that hostility (and the waiting list) Prof. Kennedy made sure that Pollak was enrolled in his class, and he hired Pollak his research assistant. On his personal blog&nbsp;<a href="http://guidetotheperplexed.blogspot.com/">"Guide To The Perplexed,"</a><span class="print-footnote">[28]</span>&nbsp;which still stands as a record of his strange college years, Pollak blogged critically, almost obsessively about Kennedy.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Fellow law students recalled how a class debate on whether armed resistance by a theoretical occupied population was permissible set off Pollak into one of his notorious fits of histrionics.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">According to one classmate, "He came back to class a week later and slammed a hunk of metal on the table and started shouting, ‘This is what you people are justifying! You are supporters of terrorism! This is piece of a Qassam rocket that's fallen near [the Israeli city of] Sderot!' Basically his behavior was embarrassing even to the other Zionists in the course."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The classmate added, "[Pollak] is just someone who, in everything he did, speaking as someone who's known him over the years, the persistent characteristic is a very, very deep lack of inhibition or shame." He added, "I don't know if it's because he received too much positive reinforcement as a child or what. And in a way, it's kind of admirable – he's always willing to say something no matter how ridiculous or inappropriate it might be in the circumstances."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 2010, after graduating from law school, Pollak declared his candidacy for Congress as a Tea Party challenger against Democratic, Chicago-area stalwart Jan Schiakowsky. Despite an endorsement from his former taskmaster Dershowitz, a desperate deployment of his mixed-race wife to brand himself as an enlightened moderate, and an embarrassing but highly entertaining&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shzBnRJfOVI">song routine</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[29]</span>&nbsp;(imagine a Teabagger's version of that folk singer from Animal House), Pollak was trounced. He failed in an election where nearly every half-baked Tea Party challenger destroyed Democratic opponents. That should have been an ignominious end to his career, but then Breitbart came along with a liferaft.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">From Harvard Law graduate to abject political failure, Pollak was recruited by Breitbart to help edit his growing portfolio of right-wing smear sites. And it is there that Pollak's story of shamelessness, bizarre twists and ethically dubious behavior reached wild new lows.</font></p><p><strong><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Genocide Ben</font></strong></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Since Breitbart's death, Breitbart.com has been defined almost as much by Pollak as it has by his tightly wound little sidekick, Ben Shapiro, now the site's editor-at-large.</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I know this sounds pathetic, but I've never been to a rock concert" --Ben Shapiro, June 17, 2011</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ben Shapiro — known variously as "Virgin Ben," "Tali-Ben," or simply "Genocide Ben" — has constructed for himself a biography that makes him look like some sort of prodigy wunderkind. One thing Ben wants to stress is that he was 16 years old when he started college at UCLA.</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"I'm twenty-one years old, a heterosexual red-blooded American male, a graduate of University of California at Los Angeles, a student at Harvard Law School, a nationally syndicated columnist, a bestselling author...and a virgin. And I'm proud of it." —Ben Shapiro, "Porn Generation"</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ben Shapiro's most useful talent is that he makes Joel Pollak look sane, cool and relaxed. Shapiro's job is to fidget nervously while holding his tongue, like his bladder's about to explode through his nose — providing needed contrast to Pollak.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As boy-wonder prodigies go, Ben Shapiro sure picked a shitty career path. A real prodigy would've pursued a mad artistic or science dream, or cashed in by taking a job in finance or management consulting; but Ben chose to be a lowly Republican errand boy instead, taking an almost masochistic pleasure in making as much of an ass of himself as is humanly possible.</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"There are at least 100,000 child pornography websites available on the Internet. Also available: incestuous porn, bestial porn, and with extreme commonness, ‘virgin' porn — for those guys who like to pretend that their fetish girls really haven't done anything before taping a hard core sex video. ‘Schoolgirl' porn is especially typical — from ‘first-time lesbian' schoolgirls to ‘organ' schoolgirl porn. The ‘college roommates' idea is also big; lesbian porn between co-eds is insanely popular. The idea that the porn industry doesn't push men to look at fifteen- to eighteen-year-old girls as sex objects is ridiculous." —Ben Shapiro, "Porn Generation"</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some of what Ben Shapiro publishes is fascinating for the sheer Freudian freakshow entertainment value. Some are downright bizarre and raise all sorts of obvious questions, as in "How did Harvard let a deranged lughead like the author of this piece into its esteemed law school?" For example,&nbsp;<a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2005/06/29/when_justices_become_dictators">this</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[30]</span>&nbsp;Ben Shapiro-authored attack on the Supreme Court. It's a piece of pure meatheadery, beginning with the headline, "When Justices Become Dictators." It begins:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"This week, the Supreme Court of the United States once again proved that it is a feckless, dictatorial and altogether ridiculous body. Its latest spate of decisions reveals legislative usurpation, disingenuous deference and silly inconsistency. But, of course, what else should we expect from the court that tells us our Constitution protects pornography but not political advertising, sodomy but not the Ten Commandments, and mentally disabled murderers but not private property?"</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Prose that deranged and clunky wouldn't grade a "C" in your average Californian community college expository writing course. But apparently Harvard Law School's admission committee read that and thought, "We have our new Oliver Wendell Holmes!" Either that, or Harvard Law has a quota for fringe-right nutcases like Shapiro.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That's the black comedy side of Ben Shapiro's punditry. But there's a darker side to Shapiro's writing that reveals him as much worse than a mere silly nutcase. Ben Shapiro is on record advocating genocide against Palestinian Arabs in Greater Israel. Advocating genocide is considered a war crime — Nazi journalists were hung in Nuremberg for advocating genocide, and Hutu media personalities who advocated genocide in Rwanda have also been charged with genocide.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Yet that didn't stop Harvard Law School's Ben Shapiro from penning a column, "Transfer Is Not A Dirty Word," calling for ethnic cleansing — which is legally classified as&nbsp;<a href="http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/ethnic-cleansing/">genocide</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[31]</span>&nbsp;and a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Here is Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large at Breitbart,&nbsp;<a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2003/08/27/transfer_is_not_a_dirty_word/page/full/">advocating genocide</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[32]</span>:</font></p><blockquote><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper.&nbsp;It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution.&nbsp;Any time the Jews get wise and threaten mass expulsion of Arabs, the Arabs pull out their big stick, equating Nazism with Zionism... Their spokespeople cry 'Genocide!' And the Jews cower in fear that they could be equated with their parents' murderers. The Jews don't realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements.&nbsp;It's time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And&nbsp;anything else isn't a solution."</font></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Actually it&nbsp;is&nbsp;genocide. And it's the reason why Ben Shapiro came to be known as "Genocide Ben."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Here, then, is Andrew Breitbart's true legacy: His two leading heirs, Joel Pollak and Genocide Ben Shapiro, stepping in as the new faces of Breitbart.com to unveil the Obama student video that Andrew himself promised would bring down Obama's presidency, just as he helped bring down ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Andrew Weiner, and a handful of tweedy NPR executives.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But without Breitbart's privileged Brentwood demeanor to make the smearing appear vaguely respectable, the Breitbart.com operation is being pushed further into the margins of its own conservative movement, as evidenced when CPAC banished this year's Breitbart hate seminar to the unofficial margins of the CPAC convention, which already had enough hate and racism on its agenda.</font></p><p><strong><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Last Refuge Of A Daily Caller Scoundrel</font></strong></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What's most fascinating about Breitbart's legacy is that these two central characters — Joel B. Pollak and Ben Shapiro — are the best they have to offer. Look at the layer below them in the Breitbart media group, and it's like pulling up the rotted, vermin-infested floorboards in a rotted old swamp shack —where degenerates and quasi-fascist maniacs permeate the entire Breitbart culture. Here you get a look at the late Andrew Breitbart's true personal sensibility, through the pathological tendencies of his chosen heirs. The minions who comprise the Breitbart community include:</font></p><ul><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">John Nolte, Breitbart.com editor and blogger. Has repeatedly called for murdering teachers and mothers.</span>&nbsp;During Occupy protests in November 2011, Nolte&nbsp;<a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40218_Breitbart_Editor_John_Nolte-Teachers_Who_Take_Kids_to_Protests_Should_Be_Murdered">tweeted</a><span class="print-footnote">[33]</span>, "Teachers who take kids to protests without parents' permission should be murdered." In April 2012, he responded to an HBO comedy show gag involving a young girl by<a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40211_Breitbart_Editor_John_Nolte_About_HBO_Stage_Mom-She_Should_Be_Murdered">writing</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[34]</span>, "whoever this little girl's stage mom is… she should be murdered." When police violently cracked down on Occupy protests, Nolte was&nbsp;<a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/39453_Breitbart_Editor-In-Chief_Incites_Violence_Against_OWS_Protesters">sexually aroused</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[35]</span>: "Dirty, filthy #OWS hippies getting what they deserve from cops = MY PORN"; "Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. Dirty, filthy hippies arrested with bruises and gashes…"; "sniff&nbsp;sniffThere's just something about a police baton swung towards the skull of&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/search/realtime/%23OWS">#OWS</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[36]</span>&nbsp;that&nbsp;sniff&nbsp;chokes a man up.<a href="https://twitter.com/search/realtime/%23ItsSoBeautiful">#ItsSoBeautiful</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[37]</span>".</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jeff Dunetz: Breitbart.com blogger nicknamed "Yid With Lid," Dunetz, has accused practically everything alive or dead of "anti-Semitism", from&nbsp;<a href="http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-does-media-matters-hate-jews-and.html">Media Matters and George Soros</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[38]</span>, to<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/11/Judging%20Obama%20by%20His%20Antisemitic%20Friends">President Obama</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[39]</span>, and even corporations like Delta Airlines.</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Kurt Schlichter, Breitbart.com columnist. Advocated&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter/statuses/84715651431800832">mass-murdering</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[40]</span>&nbsp;peaceful American protesters on board a flotilla sent to Gaza to protest Israel's blockade;&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter/status/284355402341175296">urged</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[41]</span>&nbsp;conservatives to arm themselves and prepare for war against the left because "Leftists want us dead. D-E-A-D."</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ali Akbar,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/09/Soledad%20OBrien%20Critical%20Race%20Theory">Breitbart columnist</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[42]</span>&nbsp;and head of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/03/01/RememberBreitbart-National-Bloggers-Club-Commemorates-Breitbart-s-Legacy-with-Three-Initiatives">Breitbart.com-associated</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[43]</span>&nbsp;outfit the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.blogbash.org/">National Bloggers Club</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[44]</span>, is a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbartunmasked.com/rogues-gallery/ali-a-akbar-ghetto-burglar/">convicted felon</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[45]</span>&nbsp;who was jailed and put on probation for four years for credit card fraud, vehicle burglary, and intent to commit theft.</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Brandon Darby,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/brandon-darby-anarchist-fbi-terrorism?page=1">FBI informant</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[46]</span>&nbsp;who infiltrated young anarchist protest groups and ratted them out,</span>&nbsp;leading to arrests and jail time for his former friends. Darby also spied on an Arab-American school teacher and peace activist, Riad Hamad, whom Darby claimed had asked him to launder money for Middle East terrorists. Not long afterwards, Hamad's&nbsp;<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080623195535/http://www.kxan.com/Global/story.asp?S=8176879&nav=menu73_2_10">corpse</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[47]</span>&nbsp;was fished out of a lake, his arms bound and his mouth duct-taped; police ruled it a&nbsp;<a href="http://web.archive.org/liveweb/http://home.kxan.com/news_PDFs/4.17.08APD-hammad.pdf">suicide</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[48]</span>. After Darby outed himself as an informant, Andrew Breitbart brought him into his close circle of friends, and had Darby accompany him in public demonstrations in support of the Koch brothers.</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>James O'Keefe,&nbsp;</b>convicted of attempting to illegally spy on a US Senator and forced to pay large settlements to victims of his manipulated videos which destroyed the livelihoods of several people.</font></li><li><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Lee Stranahan: Breitbart.com blogger who spent years peddling&nbsp;<a href="http://stranahan.deviantart.com/">photographs</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[49]</span>&nbsp;specializing in many of Genocide Ben's favorite fetishes, including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.deviantart.com/print/1887250/">bondage</a><span class="print-footnote">[50]</span>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.deviantart.com/print/1883950/">S&M</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[51]</span>, and Ben's fave,<a href="http://www.feuer-und-eis-galerie.de/stranahan-nudes/stranahan7.htm">schoolgirl lesbian fetishes</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[52]</span>. Stranahan covered the Steubenville rape trial for Breitbart.com, tweeting out his belief that the rape of the 16-year-old schoolgirl was&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/Stranahan/statuses/290120582794706944">not "brutal"</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[53]</span>&nbsp;and that many women tell him that their rapes are not "brutal" but merely "non consensual." During the Trayvon Martin murder trial hearings last summer, Stranahan&nbsp;<a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40621-Breitbart.coms_Lee_Stranahan_Outs_Sexual_Abuse_Victim">outed</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[54]</span>&nbsp;the name of a witness who claimed she'd been sexually abused by Martin's killer.</font></li></ul><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">If there's one thing Breitbart's heirs can be thankful for, it's that there'll always be an endless stream of degenerate right-wing failures looking for an asylum they can call home. And Breitbart.com will be there to welcome them in, weaponize them for the wealthy right-wing, and turn them on the rest of us.</font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Recently, the Breitbart.com Asylum welcomed another inmate:<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/01/women-sen-bob-menendez-paid-us-for-sex-in-the-dominican-republic/">Matthew Boyle</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[55]</span>, the discredited author of the Daily Caller's fraudulent smear articles against Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. Boyle's article for the Daily Caller alleged that Sen. Menendez paid Dominican prostitutes for sex. That story was subsequently completely debunked by The Washington Post, after the prostitutes confessed that they were paid to lie about Menendez.</font></span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A Dominican prosecutor&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57575868/conservative-website-accused-of-paying-prostitutes-to-lie-about-sex-with-senator/">accused</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[56]</span>&nbsp;the Daily Caller of paying the prostitutes $5,000 to lie about Sen. Menendez and the site has since distanced itself from that fiasco.</font></span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The author of that smear, Matthew Doyle, today proudly describes his current job as "<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Columnists/Matthew-Boyle">investigative journalist for Breitbart News Network</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[57]</span>."</font></span></p></div><div class="big_story_tools_bottom_container"><div class="talk_box"><div class="story_tools_bottom"><div class="text-size"><div class="story_tools_email"><div class="story_tools_print"><div class="story_tools_share"><div class="tags"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><em>See more stories tagged with:</em></font><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/breitbart-0">breitbart</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[58]</span></font></div></div></div></div><div class="comment_button"><div class="print-footer"><hr class="print-hr" /><div class="print-source_url"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>Source URL:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/inside-collapsing-media-empire-deceased-gop-sleaze-peddler-andrew-breitbart">http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/inside-collapsing-media-empire-deceased-gop-sleaze-peddler-andrew-breitbart</a></font></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>Links:</strong>
[1] http://nsfwcorp.com/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/mark-ames
[3] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[4] https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/breitbart/
[5] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/breitbart/
[6] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/03/andrew-breitbart-dead-media-manipulation-as-an-art-form.html#sthash.c28V6Se9.dpuf
[7] http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/03/01/andrew-breitbart-1969-2012/
[8] http://entertainment.time.com/2012/03/01/andrew-breitbart-1969-2012/#ixzz2OVnjGzxj
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/what-andrew-breitbart-meant-to-politics/2012/03/01/gIQA2zqckR_blog.html
[10] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2012/03/andrew_breitbart_dead_what_the_conservative_firebrand_tried_to_teach_me_about_journalism.html
[11] http://gawker.com/5850054
[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILZQSmE5Uu0
[13] http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/11/breitbartcom-runs-with-satirical-story-about-kr/192996
[14] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/07/local/la-me-0308-acorn-20130308
[15] http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/09/acorn_videomake.php
[16] http://americansforprosperity.org/nebraska/newsroom/meet-james-okeefe-at-afp-citizen-journalist-training-sept-12-and-13/
[17] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/inside-the-planning-of-a-james-okeefe-sting
[18] http://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-andrew-breitbarts-fiery-cpac-speech-i-have-college-days-obama-videos/
[19] http://video.foxnews.com/v/1494661753001/
[20] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election-2012/andrew-breitbart-bombshell-video-barack-obama-college-days-released-falls-flat-article-1.1035322#ixzz2OPXGVF29
[21] http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/03/08/let-down-obama-college-tapes-released/
[22] http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/01/13/updated-cnn-contributor-on-marines-urinating-on/186154
[23] http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/talk-radio-host-dana-loesch-files-suit-in-st-louis/article_d2839490-2ed1-5de8-8292-0a3f90204a6d.html
[24] http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/gallery/harvard_protests?pg=7
[25] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/30/world/south-africa-fears-past-still-breeds-racist-evils.html
[26] http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Tell-Me-Words-Matter/dp/0979704286
[27] http://www.hippocratesconsulting.com/AboutUs.aspx
[28] http://guidetotheperplexed.blogspot.com/
[29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shzBnRJfOVI
[30] http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2005/06/29/when_justices_become_dictators
[31] http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/ethnic-cleansing/
[32] http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2003/08/27/transfer_is_not_a_dirty_word/page/full/
[33] http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40218_Breitbart_Editor_John_Nolte-Teachers_Who_Take_Kids_to_Protests_Should_Be_Murdered
[34] http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40211_Breitbart_Editor_John_Nolte_About_HBO_Stage_Mom-She_Should_Be_Murdered
[35] http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/39453_Breitbart_Editor-In-Chief_Incites_Violence_Against_OWS_Protesters
[36] https://twitter.com/search/realtime/%23OWS
[37] https://twitter.com/search/realtime/%23ItsSoBeautiful
[38] http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-does-media-matters-hate-jews-and.html
[39] http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/11/Judging%20Obama%20by%20His%20Antisemitic%20Friends
[40] https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter/statuses/84715651431800832
[41] https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter/status/284355402341175296
[42] http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/09/Soledad%20OBrien%20Critical%20Race%20Theory
[43] http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/03/01/RememberBreitbart-National-Bloggers-Club-Commemorates-Breitbart-s-Legacy-with-Three-Initiatives
[44] http://www.blogbash.org/
[45] http://www.breitbartunmasked.com/rogues-gallery/ali-a-akbar-ghetto-burglar/
[46] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/brandon-darby-anarchist-fbi-terrorism?page=1
[47] http://web.archive.org/web/20080623195535/http://www.kxan.com/Global/story.asp?S=8176879&nav=menu73_2_10
[48] http://web.archive.org/liveweb/http://home.kxan.com/news_PDFs/4.17.08APD-hammad.pdf
[49] http://stranahan.deviantart.com/
[50] http://www.deviantart.com/print/1887250/
[51] http://www.deviantart.com/print/1883950/
[52] http://www.feuer-und-eis-galerie.de/stranahan-nudes/stranahan7.htm
[53] https://twitter.com/Stranahan/statuses/290120582794706944
[54] http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40621-Breitbart.coms_Lee_Stranahan_Outs_Sexual_Abuse_Victim
[55] http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/01/women-sen-bob-menendez-paid-us-for-sex-in-the-dominican-republic/
[56] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57575868/conservative-website-accused-of-paying-prostitutes-to-lie-about-sex-with-senator/
[57] http://www.breitbart.com/Columnists/Matthew-Boyle
[58] http://www.alternet.org/tags/breitbart-0
[59] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
&nbsp;</font></p><p id="BlogTitle"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Color of Change claims another scalp: Pat Buchanan indefinitely ‘suspended’ by MSNBC</font></p><p id="BlogDate"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Posted By&nbsp;<u>Steven Nelson</u>&nbsp;On 7:53 PM 01/10/2012 In Politics |&nbsp;<u><a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/10/color-of-change-claims-another-scalp-pat-buchanan-indefinitely-suspended-by-msnbc/?print=1#comments_controls">5 Comments</a></u></font></p><div id="BlogContent"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The liberal activist group Color of Change announced Tuesday evening that it received confirmation from MSNBC that the left-leaning cable news network has indefinitely suspended conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The group’s leaders&nbsp;<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/25/color-of-change-launches-campaign-to-have-msnbc-fire-white-supremacist-pat-buchanan/">launched</a>&nbsp;a campaign in October aiming to have Buchanan, who they dubbed a “white supremacist,” removed from MSNBC programming.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Amazing news!” a Color of Change&nbsp;email alert announced&nbsp;on Tuesday evening. “Pat Buchanan and his white supremacist ideology will no longer be on TV.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“MSNBC President Phil Griffin just confirmed that Buchanan is suspended indefinitely,” said the group, “because some of his ideas aren’t ‘appropriate for national dialogue on MSNBC.’”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On Monday evening, Buchanan&nbsp;<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/10/buchanan-denies-msnbc-suspension-cites-health-problems/">denied</a>&nbsp;that he had been suspended, saying on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, “I don’t know anything about that. I hope to get back full up here in January, but I’ve been out for a couple of months.” &nbsp;Instead, he cited health issues for his absence.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Color of Change has launched several successful campaigns to remove conservative commentators from mainstream media platforms. The group was successful in encouraging many advertisers to desert Glenn Beck’s Fox News program, after Beck said that President Obama had “a deep seated hatred for white people.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The group similarly succeeded in a campaign to have conservative website mogul Andrew Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/24/the-huffington-post-bans-andrew-breitbart-from-their-front-page-over-comments-about-van-jones/">banned</a>&nbsp;from the front page of The Huffington Post, after Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/24/andrew-breitbart-color-of-change-huffington-post/2/">called</a>&nbsp;the organization’s co-founder Van Jones a “cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak. And a commie. And an eco-fraudster.”</font></p><p><a target="blank" href="http://twitter.com/stevennelson10" class="external" rel="nofollow"><em><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">Follow Steven on Twitter</font></em></a></p></div><hr class="Divider" style="text-align: center;" /><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Article printed from The Daily Caller:&nbsp;<strong dir="ltr">http://dailycaller.com</strong></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">URL to article:&nbsp;<strong dir="ltr">http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/10/color-of-change-claims-another-scalp-pat-buchanan-indefinitely-suspended-by-msnbc/</strong></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Michael Patrick Leahy is a Breitbart News contributor, Editor of Broadside Books’ Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, and author of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Covenant-Liberty-Ideological-Origins-Movement/dp/0062066331/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338260320&sr=1-1">Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">eg</font></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.4;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Late Friday, RNC Director of Communications Sean Spicer told Breitbart News that RNC Chief of Staff Mike Shields's remarks on Tuesday that have been viewed by some as critical of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/03/RNC-Declares-War-on-Conservative-Grassroots">conservative grassroots</a>&nbsp;were really directed at "consultants whose only goal is to make money versus the grassroots."</font></span></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In his comments on Tuesday, Breitbart News&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/03/RNC-Declares-War-on-Conservative-Grassroots">reported</a>&nbsp;that "[a]<span style="line-height: 1.4;">ccording to our source, Shields stated that he is totally eager and willing to remove 'the professional right' from the GOP. &nbsp;'They won’t come to us and ask. They just send out lies and ask for money. I have to tear up mailings at my own parents’ house and tell them which emails to delete,' he said, according to the source."</span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On Friday, Spicer offered this&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/05/RNC-Says-Chief-of-Staff-s-Remarks-Inartful">initial clarification</a>&nbsp;of those comments:</font></p><blockquote style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;"><p style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"Mike was attempting to reference the beltway professionals whose focus is solely to make a profit off the party and movement and don’t share the same desire to win and enact conservative policies. . .&nbsp;<span style="line-height: 1.4;">he was trying – albeit somewhat in artfully – to make a clear distinction between the inside the beltway professionals and the thousands of conservative grassroots activists like his mom that give of their time and treasure to elect conservatives."</span></font></p></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Late Friday, Spicer offered further clarification, telling Breitbart News that "the statement [issued earlier on Friday] said he was attempting to make a clear distinction between 'inside the beltway professionals' and the grassroots."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Spicer also took exception to the Breitbart News&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/05/RNC-Says-Chief-of-Staff-s-Remarks-Inartful">characterization</a>&nbsp;that "Shields's criticisms of 'the professional right' on Tuesday, however, seemed to be aimed at organizations such as FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, who have ties to local conservatives grassroots activists and frequently send fundraising appeals to their large mailing lists of supporters."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"How can a group be a 'beltway professional'?" Spicer asked. "[A]nd further," he said, "how can Tea Party Patriots from Georgia be an 'inside the beltway' [group]?"</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On Tuesday, Shields&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/03/RNC-Declares-War-on-Conservative-Grassroots">promised</a>&nbsp;the crowd of 40 listening to his remarks at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington that "[professional right] is&nbsp;a term I'll be using often in the coming months." &nbsp;<span style="line-height: 1.4;">When reminded that the term for the group Shields criticized on Tuesday was not "beltway professionals," but was instead the "professional right," Spicer stated that Shields's initial remarks were actually aimed at "consultants whose only goal is to make money versus the grassroots ." &nbsp;SEE TP&nbsp;mercenaries, /ideological entrepreneurs like Odom, sam adams tp express etc</span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">we , documetary video Hating B</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">omg: "
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The film details the high marks of Breitbart’s war against the institutional left starting with the epic collapse of ACORN thanks to our happy warrior, James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and some crafty camera work. &nbsp;They caught ACORN employees telling them how to cover up felonious activities on their tax forms. &nbsp;Then, in 2010, there was the infamous and fabricated incident where Reps. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) and John Lewis (D-GA) alleged that t<a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/88041-cbc-member-says-health-bill-protesters-called-rep-lewis-the-n-word">he ‘n-word’ was hurled at them</a>&nbsp;during the fight over health care reform. &nbsp;In that same year, Breitbart exposed USDA official Shirley Sherrod for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2010/07/19/Video-Proof--The-NAACP-Awards-Racism---2010">her racially charged remarks</a>&nbsp;about discriminating against white farmers – which lead to her termination. &nbsp;Before her premature departure, she was the Georgia Director for Rural Development. Lastly, there was the ignominious tweet from then-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) – which lead to his resignation from Congress. &nbsp;As a result, a Republican, Bob Turner, won his seat in a special election held in September of 2011. &nbsp;It’s the first time a Republican held that congressional district since 1923.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Spiering reported that during the making of the documentary – Andrew would regard the film crew as his “bodyguards.” &nbsp;Furthermore,&nbsp;“He knew two speeds: he knew outrage and fun,” Marcus says. ‘The journey he ended up on – he soon began to realize that the tactic that was used against him could be defeated, and by defeating it, by confronting that, it made him stronger.Breitbart’s consistent victories over the left spun into an incredible narrative, which Marcus admits, kept the project moving forward every time they thought it was finished.”..." http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/10/09/left-wingers-are-still-hating-breitbart/
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
&nbsp;</font></p><div class="bd-headline"><h1 style="margin-top: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">How An Austrian Blogger's Report That Paul Krugman Filed For Bankruptcy Ended Up On Boston.com</font></h1><h5><span class="grey-six"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog"><span itemprop="articleSection">Blog</span>&nbsp;</a>›››&nbsp;<time datetime="2013-03-11T18:01:38-04:00" itemprop="datePublished">March 11, 2013 6:01 PM EDT&nbsp;</time>››› JOE STRUPP&nbsp;</font></span></h5></div><h2><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Web News Experts: Bogus Krugman Story Shows Dangers of "Mechanical Aggregation"</font></h2><div itemprop="articleBody" class="item-body"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The&nbsp;<a href="http://dailycurrant.com/2013/03/06/paul-krugman-declares-personal-bankruptcy/">bogus story</a>&nbsp;that&nbsp;<em>New York Times</em>&nbsp;columnist Paul Krugman&nbsp;had filed for&nbsp;bankruptcy appeared on&nbsp;Boston.com, the sister website of&nbsp;<em>The Boston Globe</em>, through a third-party content provider that posts content without&nbsp;editorial&nbsp;approval and provides such content to more than 200 web outlets.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That provider, meanwhile, took the story from an Austrian-based blog without any editorial review or fact-checking of its own, a practice that is becoming more and more common in the Internet content sharing world.&nbsp;The blog has since deleted its post and all posts from&nbsp;the author appear to have been removed from Boston.com.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The false story, which had its roots in a satire by the website&nbsp;<a href="http://dailycurrant.com/">Daily Currant</a>,&nbsp;was&nbsp;s<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ubsequently&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/11/breitbartcom-runs-with-satirical-story-about-kr/192996">picked up</a>&nbsp;by the conservative site Breitbart.com</span>, a move later criticized by&nbsp;Krugman himself and&nbsp;numerous news outlets from&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/03/breitbart-krugman-bankruptcy/62952/">The Atlantic</a></em>&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/03/the-daily-currant-strikes-again-158983.html">Politico</a><em>.</em>&nbsp;Breitbart.com has deleted the post, with its author blaming Boston.com, which he says he "trusted" for the story.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But according to Boston.com, they played no role in the creation of that post, an editorial mechanism which troubles some observers.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ron Agrella, editor of&nbsp;<a href="http://boston.com/">Boston.com</a>,&nbsp;said the item was placed on his site by the content provider&nbsp;<a href="http://www.financialcontent.com/index.php">financialcontent.com</a>&nbsp;on March 7, without approval or review from either Boston.com or the&nbsp;<em>Globe</em>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">He said he reached out to financialcontent.com&nbsp;at&nbsp;roughly&nbsp;9 a.m. EDT today to have the item removed. It was removed at 11:34 a.m. EDT.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"The reason why we partner with them is to provide stock data," Agrella explained Monday, just hours after the item was taken down. "That is why we contract with them. The stories are additional content provided on the side. We have partnered with them for 10 or 12 years."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Financialcontent.com had picked up the item from an Austria-based business blog,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.prudentinvestor.com/">Prudent Investor</a>, without any editorial review of its own, according to&nbsp;financialcontent.com&nbsp;CEO Wing Yu.&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"We are a technology company, we don't have an editorial desk," Yu explained. "There is an RSS feed that we parse from each content provider. We have categorized [Prudent Investor] as a business content provider and the content is syndicated along with the byline."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">YU said Prudent Investor is one of more than 400 content providers that financialcontent.com draws on for news and data, which it then forwards to some 200 news outlets such as Boston.com, as well as others owned by McClatchy, Media News Group and AOL.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Prudent Investor website is based in Vienna, Austria, and run��by Toni Straka, who describes himself on the blog as "an INDEPENDENT Certified Financial Analyst who worked as a financial journalist for 15+ years and now evaluate global market trends."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Straka said he picked up the item from the Austrian online magazine&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.format.at/">Format</a></em>, which he says posted it without any notice that it was satire. Straka said he posted&nbsp;the item on&nbsp;his own website on&nbsp;March 7 and removed it within an hour after&nbsp;<em>Format</em>&nbsp;advised him it was bogus.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But by then the damage had been done, as&nbsp;financialcontent.com&nbsp;and thus Boston.com had already picked up the post.&nbsp;Asked why he did not inform&nbsp;financialcontent.com&nbsp;that he removed the item because it was bogus, Straka said, "I do not always know where" the content is picked up.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Agrella said&nbsp;financialcontent.com&nbsp;is one of a dozen content providers that are able to post content on the Boston.com site without&nbsp;<em>Globe</em>&nbsp;or Boston.com review. He said Boston.com pays a fee to each provider, but did not disclose the amount.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Financialcontent.com actually posts the items on its own websites, which are linked to Boston.com and appear with the Boston.com shell around them so that they remain under the&nbsp;site's web brand.&nbsp;The Krugman item appeared on the&nbsp;financialcontent.com&nbsp;page that provides market information for Boston.com.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"The page is run by them," Agrella said of&nbsp;financialcontent.com. "They have a multitude of partners that are pulled in by a variety of blogs."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Yu&nbsp;criticized&nbsp;Breitbart.com for wrongly attributing the bogus item on Boston.com to the newspaper rather than to Prudent Investor, whose byline was on the story.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"It seemed that Breitbart should have attributed it to the right outlet," Yu said. "It should have been attributed to Prudent Investor."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Such second- and third-hand sourcing for online news is becoming more commonplace, and more worrisome, according to Al Tompkins, an instructor at The Poynter Institute who lectures about online news.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"You see the cost of mechanical aggregation, the cost is that a lot of junk is going to flow through when you just open the gates to things that look like they are legitimate, that is the curse of human editing," Tompkins said. "If it was as easy as running it though an algorithm we would have no need for human editors. But you need human editors to ask questions like, how do we know that? Has anyone called him? All it would have taken is to actually report it."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, and a former&nbsp;<em>Globe</em>&nbsp;ombudsman, offered similar concerns.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"The danger is that news organizations, if not careful, could be increasingly diminishing their reliability in the eyes of a public that already has some doubts," he said.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Yu said no policy changes were expected related to how the service draws content from outside sources. He did say he had stopped taking content from Prudent Investor&nbsp;for the moment, stating they are "on probation for lack of a better word," and described their content as "on hold."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Agrella called the bogus story appearing on his site "obviously a concern of ours," but also said no changes in procedures were planned.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"In the past, we have had very few problems if any," he said. "It appears this one slipped through and we are trying to determine how it slipped through and prevent it from happening again."</font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/2013/03/11/how-an-austrian-bloggers-report-that-paul-krugm/193006">http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/2013/03/11/how-an-austrian-bloggers-report-that-paul-krugm/193006</a>
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">punked on friends of hamas hagel escalator
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-right-wing-media-tricked-republicans-fearing-group-doesnt-even-exist">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-right-wing-media-tricked-republicans-fearing-group-doesnt-even-exist</a>
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">---
&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2FVKlPVB&utm_campaign=weekly_221_1&n=7&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2FVKlPVB&utm_campaign=weekly_221_1&n=7&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">echo:
&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/drudge-and-tucker-carlson-arent-only-clowns-circus-8-ridiculous-right-wing"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/drudge-and-tucker-carlson-arent-only-clowns-circus-8-ridiculous-right-wing</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">breitbart carlson</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">pal obit: in WA Times</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">...</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">- from a “pop culture-infused wannabe hipster” to the bete noire of what he accurately refers to as the “Democrat-Media-Complex.” Because&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/andrew-breitbart/">Andrew</a>&nbsp;was incapable of telling a lie, at times the book reads like a confessional, as though he’s sitting across from you over a glass of wine and telling you who he is. This isn’t an accident, by the way. This was a conversation&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/andrew-breitbart/">Andrew</a>&nbsp;wanted to have with everyone he knew, and he wanted to know everyone.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The chapter that presents a side that not enough people know about is titled “Breakthrough,” and in it&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/andrew-breitbart/">Andrew</a>&nbsp;spends nearly 30 pages meticulously laying out a scholarly analysis of how the left came to be in America. It’s not the kind of work you’d expect from someone who partied through&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/tulane-university/">Tulane</a>&nbsp;and had one of the most famous cases of ADHD in America, but&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/andrew-breitbart/">Andrew</a>&nbsp;was nothing if he wasn��t well read.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/andrew-breitbart/">Andrew</a>&nbsp;studied and soaked up everything. Learning was one of his great passions and when you combine a passion for history and news with an unparalleled ability to bring together all the narrative dots, this is what made him such an effective warrior against the media and the left. Because he had spent decades studying and cracking the code of the Democrat-Media-Complex, he knew how it was put together, which meant he also knew how it could be taken apart.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On top of the Weinergate story, “Righteous Indignation” also takes you into the Greatest Hits: ACORN, his miraculous proving of a negative in taking down the media’s Tea Party N-word lie, the launch of the Huffington Post and the Bigs, and his time with his mentor Matt Drudge. One chapter he didn’t write, though, that I wish he had, would’ve been about Fox News’ political analyst&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/juan-williams/">Juan Williams</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">If you remember, in October of 2010,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/juan-williams/">Mr. Williams</a>&nbsp;made a perfectly defensible statement to Bill O’Reilly that expressed his disappointment in himself over the fact that he would get nervous whenever he saw Muslims on an airplane. Two days later, National Public Radio terminated his contract over the remarks and within seconds of that announcement, those of us on his staff received a familiar call from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/andrew-breitbart/">Andrew</a>: “We’re going to war for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/juan-williams/">Juan Williams</a>.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">...</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/26/andrew-breitbart-leading-the-charge-against-the-le/"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/26/andrew-breitbart-leading-the-charge-against-the-le/</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">-----</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><em>The</em>&nbsp;<em>New York Times</em>&nbsp;by media writer David Carr. Carr&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/business/media/the-life-and-death-of-andrew-breitbart.html" target="blank">profiles</a>&nbsp;the recently deceased conservative author and editor Andrew Breitbart.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">...Mr. Sando paid his tab and left. Not long after, Mr. Breitbart, 43, settled his own bill and apparently headed to the nearby home he shared with his wife, Susie Bean Breitbart, and their four young children. Minutes after exiting the bar, he collapsed in front of a Starbucks like a “sack of potatoes,” one witness said. Paramedics were unable to revive him. Later, his father-in-law, the actor Orson Bean, said that Mr. Breitbart had a history of heart ailments. (A final coroner’s report, with the official cause of death, is expected this month.)...</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><div id="articleBody"><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ANDREW BREITBART jacked into the Web early and never unplugged. As someone who worked on the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post in the early days and was busy building his own mini-empire of conservative opinion and infotainment at Breitbart.com, he understood in a fundamental way how discourse could be profoundly shaped by the pixels generated far outside the mainstream media he held in such low regard.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart, as much as anyone, turned the Web into an assault rifle, helping to bring down Acorn, a community organizing group, with the strategic release of undercover videos made by James O’Keefe, a conservative activist; forcing Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official, out of her job with a misleadingly edited clip of a speech; and flushing out Representive Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, when he tried to lie about lewd pictures he had sent via Twitter.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Less watchdog than pit bull (and one who, without the technology of the 21st century, might have been just one more angry man shouting from a street corner), Mr. Breitbart altered the rules of civil discourse.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said that Mr. Breitbart “used the tools of invective and polemic to change the conversation, to try to turn it to his advantage.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart was a ubiquitous presence on and off the Web, though not one who ever managed to have significant business success there. His star rose along with the Tea Party, of which he was an early and frequent defender.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But he cut an odd figure for a conservative, holding forth with lectures on political theory that name-dropped Michel Foucault and other leftist thinkers. He could also be mordantly funny. (His Twitter avatar was an echo of the apocryphal Jesus imprint on a piece of toast.) Matt Labash, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, described him as “half right wing Yippie, half Andy Kaufman,” in his column after Mr. Breitbart died.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 2011, while various religious groups boycotted the Conservative Political Action Conference because of the inclusion of gay Republican groups, he helped hold a party for the gay groups.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">He was conversant in pop culture — the Cure and New Order were particular musical favorites — and thought nothing of wearing in-line skates, his longish hair trailing behind him, as he confronted protesters at a rally outside a conservative event hosted by David and Charles Koch in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2011. Once he was done berating the protesters, he took some of them to dinner at Applebee’s.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart took in life in big gulps, but he spat out even bigger portions of bile. The day that Senator Edward M. Kennedy died, he called him “a special pile of human excrement�� and tweeted, “Rest in Chappaquiddick.” Matt Yglesias of Slate returned the favor after Mr. Breitbart died, tweeting: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Many of his familiars called him a “happy warrior,” but worried about his health because he never seemed to unplug.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“If Twitter ever killed anyone, it was Andrew,” said Mr. Labash of The Weekly Standard. “Andrew was a magnet for hatred, and he used Twitter for a full frontal assault, a tool of combat,”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Friends and colleagues described Mr. Breitbart as both jester and provocateur, one who enjoyed soy lattes (a family friend sprinkled coffee grounds from Starbucks onto his grave) almost as much as waging war on what he saw as Democratic hypocrisy.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Andrew was a kind of human pinball, always doing something while doing something else, but he never took himself all that seriously,” said Greg Gutfeld, the host of “Red Eye” on Fox News, who frequently booked Mr. Breitbart as a guest. “He was the least serious, serious person I ever met.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A student of the tactics of the leftist organizer Saul Alinsky (if not his politics), Mr. Breitbart played defense by giving offense, subscribing to Alinsky’s theorem that “the real action is in the enemy’s reaction.” He wielded a network of conservative sources, including a number of members of Congress, four of whom spoke at his Washington memorial, to sow mayhem opportunistically.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As is often the case, there is no more ferocious advocate than a convert.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“He rejected the culture that produced him, and once that process began, it could not be reversed,” said Tucker Carlson, the founder of the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site. “My strong sense was that he loved the performance aspect, the drama of it all, and lived for those moments of provocation.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">WITH piercing blue eyes and ruddily handsome Celtic features, Mr. Breitbart looked more like a fresh-off-the-boat Irish storyteller than the son of a banker mother and restaurateur father in Brentwood. Adopted (along with a sister of Mexican descent), he was raised Jewish, and went to college at Tulane in New Orleans. He majored in American studies, and began a period of heavy drinking and drug use that he described as “debauched” in his 2011 book, “Righteous Indignation.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">After college, he bounced between Los Angeles and Austin, Tex., without much direction, but discovered a kind of religion and purpose after idly tuning in to talk radio and finding himself nodding in agreement to Rush Limbaugh and others.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart was activated as a conservative for good by the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, a process he believed was filled with politically motivated innuendo.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But his ferocious adoption of conservative values found real traction in his first true love, the early Internet. In a letter from his wife, Susie, that was read at his memorial by Mr. Solov, she suggested that her husband took one look at the Web and moved right in.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It read: “To Andrew, the Internet was a portal into the future. It works the way his mind worked — go here, turn left, click on this, go right, over here, back here, back where you started. Like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books from childhood. It all just made sense to him.��</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">After the Drudge Report all but tipped over President Clinton by pushing the Monica Lewinsky scandal into plain view, Mr. Breitbart realized that the Web had moved beyond a curio for techies.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Andrew recognized very early on, before many people did, that the conversation was moving onto the Web,��� said Arianna Huffington, who saw him in the weeks before his death. In the late ’90s, when he was her research assistant in her home, he happily pretended to dine on the mud pies that Ms. Huffington’s daughters made for him, and after he began having children, the two families, who lived near each other, remained close.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“He brought two things to the blog,” Ms. Huffington said of their early working relationship. “He knew when a big story was about to happen. But more important, he could find stories buried in the 13th paragraph, link them with other things and put a spotlight on them.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">His expertise was less technical than intuitive, with a mad scientist’s touch for curating and packaging news that made it especially clickable.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“He didn’t have a deep understanding of technology,” said Jonah Peretti, who also worked on the start-up and now runs BuzzFeed. ���He was a Web news junkie from the very beginning, with a quickness and obsessiveness that kept him up all hours.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Although Mr. Breitbart helped start The Huffington Post, it became apparent within a month that the political chasm between him and Ms. Huffington was too great, and his attention span for office matters far too short.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart saw infinite possibilities on the Web, starting a series of Web sites — Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism — under the banner of Breitbart.com.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“I think that he took the guidelines and principles of talk radio, where you could say almost anything and get away with it, and applied it to the Internet,” said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a liberal research center on the media, who battled constantly with Mr. Breitbart.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart specialized in teasing a small ember of a story, whether it was an inconsistency or a gaffe, and dumping gasoline on it until it blew up — sometimes on him, sometimes on others. “If you do a good enough job, you can force them to make a mistake,” he wrote in his book. “When they do, you must be ready to exploit it.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Through a carefully managed release of clips from Mr. O’Keefe, the undercover conservative operative, he brought down Acorn, a huge nonprofit that found itself summarily defunded by Congress after its representatives appeared to offer help to Mr. O’Keefe and a colleague when they showed up posing as a pimp and a prostitute.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">When there were rumors that Representative Weiner had sent sexually suggestive photos over his Twitter account, Mr. Breitbart pushed the story along with new revelations and eventually hijacked the podium at Mr. Weiner’s news conference to suggest that the congressman was lying. Mr. Weiner resigned soon after.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Working with Mr. O’Keefe, he also used heavily edited video clips to savage Ms. Sherrod, an obscure official at the Agriculture Department, by giving the appearance that she had made racially motivated financing decisions, when actually she had done the opposite.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in 2011, Mr. Breitbart was served papers for a lawsuit alleging that he had recklessly destroyed her reputation. A representative for Ms. Sherrod said settlement negotiations were continuing despite Mr. Breitbart’s death.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">THREE weeks before he died, Mr. Breitbart took the stage at CPAC, the jagged tip of the spear on all things conservative. He entered to the refrains of ���Guerrilla Radio” from the band Rage Against the Machine and implored the crowd, “You need to join me in my war against the institutional left!”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">He went on to accuse the mainstream media of demonizing the Tea Party. At the end of his stem-winding summation of the recent history of the Democratic Party, he suggested that the election of President Obama was part of a putsch by the Democrats (“The rest of us slept while they plotted and they plotted and they plotted”) to seize the presidency.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“This is not your mother’s Democratic Party!” he thundered, and then later added, “Barack Obama is a radical, and we should not be afraid to say that.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But he was not done. Mr. Breitbart was never done.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The following day, angered by the Occupy Wall Street protesters who circled the event at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, he stepped out of the hotel armed with nothing more than a wineglass and began bellowing at them while the cameras rolled.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Behave yourselves! Behave yourselves! Behave yourselves!,” he shouted, 20 times in a row for over a minute. And then he got a little more specific, alluding to a report that women had been assaulted in various Occupy encampments. “Stop raping people! Stop raping people! Stop raping people! Stop raping the people! You freaks! You filthy, filthy, raping, murdering freaks!”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The protesters surrounded Mr. Breitbart and began chanting back at him, while he seemed to bask in their umbrage. His work done, he was led back inside by hotel security officers, having started yet another viral storm on the Web. It turned out to be his last.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Following his memorial, his colleagues and friends gathered in a house behind the Capitol — Mr. Breitbart had rented a huge, ornate house he called “the Embassy” that served as both salon and a Washington base for his media company — to tell stories and reminisce. A family friend remembered watching Andrew, at age 2, bang his head on a concrete floor when he did not get his way, foretelling a life of stubborn conflict.</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At both the memorial and the after-party, stories about his relentlessness and love of argument were legion. In her note read at the memorial, his wife reminded the crowd that Mr. Breitbart was willing to engage and argue with anyone. “I came home one day to our first apartment to find a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she wrote, “trying to wrap up the conversation and get out.”</font></p><p itemprop="articleBody"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The people in the audience, many of whom had spent countless hours locked in conversational combat with Mr. Breitbart, laughed long and hard at that one</font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/business/media/the-life-and-death-of-andrew-breitbart.html?r=1&pagewanted=print"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/business/media/the-life-and-death-of-andrew-breitbart.html?r=1&pagewanted=print</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">matt tabibi RS</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So&nbsp;<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/01/andrew-breitbart-dies-natural-causes-website-reports/">Andrew Breitbart is dead</a>. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction:&nbsp;<em>Good!</em>&nbsp;Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn���t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">For instance, it would be dishonest not to tip a hat to him for that famous scene when<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIJRyJkQXyc&feature=relmfu">&nbsp;he hijacked Anthony Weiner’s own self-immolating "apology" press conference</a>, and held up the entire event by standing at the lectern and congratulating himself at length, before Weiner could let the humiliating healing begin.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">For that one, brief, shining moment– still one of the most painful-to-watch YouTube spectacles of all time, right there with Mitt Romney’s priceless attempt at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDwwAaVmnf4">singing "Who Let the Dogs Out?"</a>&nbsp;with a group of black voters in Florida in 2008 – Breitbart could legitimately claim to have the biggest, hairiest balls on earth. ��</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Watching&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of_2FlQAWww&feature=relmfu">Weiner apologize to Breitbart</a>&nbsp;later in that same event was certainly chilling for a number of reasons (if I were Weiner, I wouldn’t have apologized to that fucker even under torture) but it was hard not to appreciate the deliciousness of the scene from Breitbart’s point of view. Watching Weiner pause, swallow hard, and make the extraordinary decision to plant his lips squarely on the loathsome Breitbart’s ass on national television, that was like the ultimate Mona Lisa masterpiece of right-wing media provocations. That the outrageous Breitbart was standing right there, looking gorgeously gassy in his unbuttoned shirt, bloated Joey Buttafuoco cheeks and splendiforous silver half-mullet, made the humiliation of the trim and neatly-groomed Weiner even more abject.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Furthermore, the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wnd.com/2009/09/109444/">ACORN videos</a>&nbsp;made by Breitbart and his two young acolytes, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe – it’s hard not to see the inspired humor behind their elaborate stunt. And anyone who��s heard their proposals before ACORN staffers to bring underage girls over the border as part of a white-(or nonwhite-) slaving startup firm, and doesn’t think the ACORN responses (or non-responses, as it were) were shocking, they’re deluding themselves. In the Baltimore office, they ran the whole underage hooker-den spiel past an ACORN staffer, and got the following response: "You are gonna use three of them – they are gonna be under 16, so you is eligible to get child tax credit and additional child tax credit."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That is seriously messed up material. Did they edit the videos heavily? Hell yes. Did they make ACORN’s behavior out to be a lot worse than it was? Absolutely. But there’s no way to watch the raw footage and not grasp how totally nuts some of this ACORN "counseling" was. We have to give Breitbart that.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart has written some nasty things about me personally, once contrived to publish my private emails online, and even teamed up with Rush Limbaugh to humorously mis-identify me as a behind-the-scenes marionettist of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/17/rush-limbaughs-occupy-wal_n_1016102.html">"media-Democrat industrial complex"</a>&nbsp;(Breitbart thought I was improperly advising Occupy leaders), but all that’s okay. I think today, it’s safe to stand back and simply recognize that while many people go through their lives without leaving distinguishing marks, Andrew Breitbart definitely had his moments.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But he also had enough of a sense of humor to appreciate why someone like me shouldn’t bother to pretend I’m sad he’s dead. He wouldn’t, in my place. So to use one of his favorite words: Good riddance, cocksucker.* Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">* See the following Breitbart quote: “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_mead#ixzz1ntjDlwPn">I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then</a>, when it’s appropriate, for effect... ‘You cocksucker.’ I love that kind of language.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong><em>UPDATE:</em></strong>&nbsp;Well done, Breitbart fans, well done! In less than 24 hours you’ve hacked into my Wiki page, published my telephone number on Twitter, called the&nbsp;<em>Rolling Stone&nbsp;</em>offices pretending to be outraged “advertisers” (anonymous ones, who hung up before we could figure out which “ads” to pull), and then spent all night calling and texting my phone with various threats and insults, many of them directed at my family. “Better grow eyes in the back of your head,” was one; “I’m going to take a shit on your mother��s grave,” was another; a third called my wife a “piece of shit like you,” and many others called me a “pile of human excrement.���</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Those last ones to me were the most interesting because that quote is lifted directly from&nbsp;<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/08/26/57997/breitbart-kennedy-twitter/">Breitbart��s own obit of Ted Kennedy</a>, which like me Breitbart ran just hours after his subject died. So that means the writers of these letters knew that what I did was exactly the same as what Breitbart had done, and yet they still found a way to be unironically outraged on Breitbart’s behalf. I thought: “These people don’t even get their own jokes.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The really crazy thing is that I was sort of trying to be nice to Breitbart – the obit was at least half an homage. Not that I liked the guy, but he did have a few attractive qualities, one of which being the fact that he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/breitbart-s-last-laugh_633067.html?page=2">got a kick out of the nasty things people said about him</a>. He even once had a plan to set up a website encouraging anti-Breitbart abuse, and was going to let it ride for a while, even spending six figures to hire an Obama p.r. flack to make anti-Breitbart posters, until finally revealing that he'd sponsored the whole thing. Would a person like that really expect someone like me to send flowers when he croaked? No way: he’d be insulted if I didn’t give him one last kick in the balls on the way out the door.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But I guess no homage is complete without a celebration of the whole man, and the whole man in this case was not just a guy who once said, “It’s all about a good laugh,�� but also someone who liked to publish peoples’ personal information on the internet,&nbsp;<a href="http://gawker.com/5850054/meet-the-guy-who-snitched-on-occupy-wall-street-to-the-fbi-and-nypd">hack into private web sites</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2012/03/shirley-sherrods-suit-against-andrew-breitbart-likely-116078.html">tell lies in an attempt to get his enemies fired</a>, and<a href="http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/09/18/andrew-breitbart-incites-violence-against-liberals-says-military-will-back-the-tea-party-up/">&nbsp;incite readers to threats</a>&nbsp;against his targets and their families, including<a href="http://biggovernment.com/publius/2011/04/28/judy-ancel-responds-affront-to-democracy-and-an-attack-on-students-right-to-an-education/">&nbsp;death threats</a>. I left all of that stuff out of my obit, but now, thanks to you readers, that’s all in there as well, leaving, for posterity, a much more complete picture of the man.</font></p><div style="overflow: hidden; border: medium none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
Read more:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-breitbart-death-of-a-douche-20120301#ixzz1pIvIe0nn">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-breitbart-death-of-a-douche-20120301#ixzz1pIvIe0nn</a>
</font></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">SW: &nbsp;very basic</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">For more than a month, demonstrators have been pouring into the streets of Madison, Wisconsin—and the halls of the state's Capitol building—to protest rookie Republican Governor Scott Walker's anti-union "budget repair bill," which the&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/117798133.html">governor signed</a>&nbsp;on March 11. Big national unions, both major political parties,&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/wisconsin-tea-partiers-breitbart-fight-unions">the Tea Party, and Andrew Breitbart</a>&nbsp;have gotten involved. Democratic state senators&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/116474898.html">fled the state</a>&nbsp;in mid-February to prevent the legislature from voting on Walker's proposals, but returned in early March after Wisconsin Republicans rammed the bill through using a parliamentary end-run. And the protests have spread to other states,&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/union-vs-gop-protests-heat-ohio">including Michigan and Ohio</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">GW gaff not corrected</font></p><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/breitbart-error-global-warming"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">&nbsp;</font></a></p><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/breitbart-error-global-warming"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/breitbart-error-global-warming</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><div id="dateline"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mon Sep. 19, 2011 3:00 AM PDT</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On September 6,&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://biggovernment.com/cstreet/2011/09/06/nature-journal-of-science-discredits-man-made-global-warming/">an article</a>&nbsp;on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site announced that the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change had been debunked once and for all.&nbsp;<em>Nature</em>, "the world's most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man," the article said. "One of the report's authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: 'I think it is such a blatant falsification.'"</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The article, written by "nationally recognized financial writer"&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://biggovernment.com/author/cstreet">Chriss W. Street</a>, then revisited&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/history-of-climategate">the smear campaign known as "Climategate"</a>&nbsp;(which had implicated&nbsp;<em>Nature</em>) and asserted that the study was "a tectonic rejection by academia" of international efforts to combat climate change.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There was one little problem with the Big Government piece, though. Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, supplier of the "blatant falsification" comment, was not one of the study's 63 authors. And it turns out that the article's breathless summary of what the study shows is (shockingly!) flat-out wrong.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">foia:</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On Monday, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site posted&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://biggovernment.com/publius/2011/04/25/union-official-professor-teach-college-course-in-violent-union-tactics/">"exclusive, explosive" video</a>&nbsp;of what it described as "Thuggery 101"—a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a union official advocating "violence and industrial sabotage" to a classroom of college students. This led to instant hyperventilation about&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://blog.mises.org/16639/taxpayer-funded-course-in-union-violence/">"taxpayer-funded courses in union violence"</a>. Now, like&nbsp;<a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/james-okeefe-andrew-breitbart-videos" target="blank">many a sensational video</a>&nbsp;linked to Breitbart, this latest scoop has disintegrated in the bright light of day. Crooks and Liars has&nbsp;<a href="http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/breitbarted-again-biggovernment-uses-edited" target="blank">the definitive takedown</a>, which shows how the supposedly inflammatory soundbites posted on Big Government were intentionally edited to strip them of their context and twist their intended meanings. In other words, yet another "classic Breitbarting."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see summary of okeefe</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As Breitbart&nbsp;<a target="blank" href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=11317888&page=2">told the AP</a>, "I'm committed to the destruction of the old media guard. And it's a very good business model." Read the editors' note, "Why Do We Keep Falling for O'Keefe's Smear Jobs?"&nbsp;<a href="http://motherjones.com/media/2011/03/james-okeefe-npr-sting-mohammed-nabbous" target="blank">here</a>. Below, their stings to date</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/james-okeefe-andrew-breitbart-videos"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/james-okeefe-andrew-breitbart-videos</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Matt Drudge began the email-based newsletter called&nbsp;<i>Report</i>&nbsp;from an apartment in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood,California" title="Hollywood, California" class="mw-redirect">Hollywood, California</a>, using his connections with industry and media insiders to break stories, sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. Drudge maintains the website from his home in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Beach,Florida" title="Miami Beach, Florida">Miami Beach, Florida</a>, with help from Andrew Breitbart, who assists in story selection and headline writing.<sup id="cite_ref-sappell_9-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report#cite_note-sappell-9">[10]</a></sup>&nbsp;Breitbart, who describes himself as "Matt Drudge’s bitch",<sup id="cite_ref-biyatch_10-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report#cite_note-biyatch-10">[11]</a></sup>&nbsp;works the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report,<sup id="cite_ref-afternoon_11-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report#cite_note-afternoon-11">[12]</a></sup>&nbsp;as well as running his own website (breitbart.com), and another website (BigHollywood.com) providing a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative" title="Conservative" class="mw-redirect">conservative</a>&nbsp;perspective for people in the Los Angeles entertainment industry.<sup id="cite_ref-breit-infidel_12-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report#cite_note-breit-infidel-12">[13]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><sup id="cite_ref-breit-infidel_12-0" class="reference"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></sup></p><p><a href="http://biggovernment.com/category/environment/"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://biggovernment.com/category/environment/</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">enron and BP scheme, reported from Cancun w/ AFP</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"</font></p><p style="text-align: center;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">��</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At the exhibit we found what was presented as the ideal eco-friendly house. Of course, it was suitably small as the enviro-Nazis most certainly don��t want anyone enjoying a bit of elbowroom in their homes though it did have space for a few modern niceties. It had a tiny computer area, an actual flush toilet, and a four-foot-tall refrigerator that looks like it might be able to store enough food for two or three days.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But it was the laundry-room that took the cake.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">You see, the enviro-nuts have decided that you should not be allowed to have a washing machine and a dryer, nor much of a water heater (the house featured a tiny five-gallon water heater). Instead of the modern convenience of a washer and dryer they’ve graciously allowed you to have a concrete tub with a washboard built into it. To dry your clothes they want you to use that original solar device: a clothesline.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Additionally, the gray water from washing your clothes is supposed to be diverted to your back yard so that it can water your little subsistence garden — because, you know, you shouldn’t be allowed to buy food. You’ll have to grow it yourself. Grocery stores are déclassé, after all.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So, yes, the enviro-wackos want you to step back in time about a hundred years and eschew the modern convenience of a washer and dryer. I am surprised they didn’t just advise us to take our clothes down to the river and beat them with some rocks.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As my friend, colleague, and traveling companion&nbsp;<a href="http://libertypundits.net/article/un-climate-change-summit-dispatch-the-eco-house-of-the-dystopian-future/">Melissa Clouthier said</a>&nbsp;of this enviro extravaganza:</font></p><blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The eco house of the future looks a lot like the past except bleaker. While the lefties kvetch, hopefully the capitalists are creating some life saving, energy sparing, option-expanding technology. My bet’s on them.</font></p></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I suppose it is no irony that these techno-luddites held their soiree in the land of the Mayas, famous for their debauchery and bouts of human sacrificing. After all, the enviro-religionistas want to kill us all, too. We evil humans are messing up their beloved Gaia, their Mother Earth, dontcha know!</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In any case, I am happy to be home where there aren’t dozens of armed soldiers everywhere I turn and where I can crank up the heat (or the air conditioning) whenever I want.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">..." &nbsp;[Note; racist, gw as faith, imposed commie austerity, Luddite (anti-progress)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">comment:</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">You know what?
I'm going to run my AC
I'm going to heat the neighborhood
I am not going to recycle
i'm going to eat red meat.

F@ck you tree-hugging weanies!!!!!</font></p><p><sup id="cite_ref-breit-infidel_12-0" class="reference"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></sup></p><p><sup id="cite_ref-breit-infidel_12-0" class="reference"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">comment on epa looking at a kind of silicone:</font></sup></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Another end run around the US Constitution for the purpose of grabbing power, and removing our liberties, while trying to ruin the economy and the petroleum industry. Impeach Obama in 2011! His czars, regulatory overreaching, executive orders, and recess appointments are a slap in the face to us all. It is time to stop the bleeding.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">keynoted for Sam Adams awards, alleged connected to Santelli</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">fox?</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">newsmax founded by chris ruddy, scaife funded? related to floyd brown</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ruddy did hit on clinton? beware similar name guy</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">palin corrupt bastard media charge bogus h<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201011010035">ttp://mediamatters.org/research/201011010035</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/06/bob-etheridge-video defense backfires</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/201001270043"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://mediamatters.org/blog/201001270043</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/200912150025"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://mediamatters.org/blog/200912150025</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><h1><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Big Falsehoods: An updated guide to Andrew Breitbart's lies, smears, and distortions</font></h1><div class="post-pub-info"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">July 21, 2010 3:24 pm ET —&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#comments">9 Comments</a></font></div><div class="post-summary-newformat"><p class="post-summary-intro-newformat"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Following the dissolution of Andrew Breitbart's smear of former Obama administration official Shirley Sherrod,&nbsp;<em>Media Matters&nbsp;</em>provides an updated look at how his sensationalist stories have been based on speculation, gross distortions, and outright falsehoods.</font></p><div class="post-video center"><div class="clear"><div class="post-full"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#1">The "video evidence" of Shirley Sherrod's "racism"</a>&nbsp;(NEW)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#2">"Nationwide ACORN child prostitution investigation"</a>&nbsp;(UPDATED)</font></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#3"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">Platform for anti-gay Jennings smears</font></a></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#4">Breitbart-promoted O'Keefe Census tape features selective editing</a>&nbsp;(NEW)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#5">Breitbart-promoted video falsely accuses Democrats of reconciliation hypocrisy</a>&nbsp;(NEW)</font></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#6"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">Wild accusations over Gladney case</font></a></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#7"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">Breitbart's websites make baseless claim that NEA engaged in lawbreaking</font></a></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#8"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">Bertha Lewis' nonexistent White House visit</font></a></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#9"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">The Maoist Christmas tree ornaments</font></a></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#10"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">The ACORN "document dump"</font></a></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201007210054#11"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">False claims of community organizers "praying" to Obama</font></a></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><h1><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart confirms he was duped by O'Keefe and the ACORN pimp hoax</font></h1><div class="post-pub-info"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">March 02, 2010 5:40 am ET</font></div><div class="post-full"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It turns out that Andrew Breitbart didn't actually know what was on the ACORN tapes when he helped launch them on his website last year, and used the videos to fuel his oddly personal crusade against the low-income advocacy organization.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That's right -- Breitbart&nbsp;<em>didn't know what was on the tapes</em>. Take a few seconds to let the implications of that confession sink in, and what it means to Breitbart's&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/201001040003" title="blocked::http://mediamatters.org/blog/201001040003">already dented credibility</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Recall that for months Breitbart personally vouched for the ACORN videos, braying loudly that they could not be ignored and that they represented the unvarnished truth. Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fandrewbreitbart%2Fstatus%2F9173232773" title="blocked::http://twitter.com/andrewbreitbart/status/9173232773">claimed</a>&nbsp;he had told "the truth" every step of the way about the controversial ACORN clips and&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fbigjournalism.com%2Fabreitbart%2F2010%2F01%2F06%2Fyou-are-a-bad-bad-bad-journalist%2F" title="blocked::http://bigjournalism.com/abreitbart/2010/01/06/you-are-a-bad-bad-bad-journalist/">bragged</a>&nbsp;that "[t]hroughout the ACORN story I applied my conscience to the material."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But now it turns out that Breitbart was fooled by the ACORN pimp hoax and mistakenly assumed, after watching deceptively edited clips from his protégé James O'Keefe, that O'Keefe strolled into ACORN offices wearing the outlandish pimp outfit.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Now Breitbart, the chief promoter of the ACORN sting, claims he "didn't know" the truth about the tapes. Although he's quick to insist it doesn't really matter anyway.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">And yes, that sound you hear is Breitbart throwing O'Keefe under the bus. Because it's O'Keefe who Breitbart now blames for the "discrepancy" regarding the pimp hoax. It's O'Keefe, who Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201001270055" title="blocked::http://mediamatters.org/research/201001270055">once touted</a>&nbsp;as a should-be Pulitzer Prize winner, who created the false impression that he walked into ACORN offices last summer dressed as a garish pimp.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In a video interview posted Monday at&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fcrooksandliars.com%2Fmike-stark%2Flost-cpac-breitbart-video-crazy-you-mis">Crooks and Liars</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.starkreports.com%2F2010%2F03%2F01%2Finterview-with-andrew-breitbart-at-cpac%2F" title="blocked::http://www.starkreports.com/2010/03/01/interview-with-andrew-breitbart-at-cpac/">Stark Reports</a>, as well as&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bradblog.com%2F%3Fp%3D7719" title="blocked::http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7719">The Brad Blog</a>, Breitbart, filmed by blogger Mike Stark at the recent CPAC convention, claims he did not know the facts about O'Keefe's pimp outfit. (See video below.)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Essentially, Breitbart claims he&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/columns/201002170008" title="blocked::http://mediamatters.org/columns/201002170008">was duped like everyone else</a>&nbsp;who saw the ACORN clips created by O'Keefe. He was duped because at the outset, the misleading clips contain cut-away shots filmed&nbsp;<em>outdoors</em>, which feature O'Keefe decked out in the cane-fur-sunglasses pimp costume. (Breitbart deceptively refers to the dressed-as-pimp section as the "title sequence" of the videos, but it's really much more than that.)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It appears that many viewers just assumed O'Keefe wore the get-up while he surreptitiously filmed the ACORN workers who ignited a scandal when they gave O'Keefe and his pretend prostitute girlfriend, Hannah Giles, tax advice on how to run a brothel.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The dressed-as-a-pimp storyline was one Breitbart, O'Keefe, and others eagerly pushed last fall. And it was one the press&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/201002250025" title="blocked::http://mediamatters.org/blog/201002250025">quickly embraced</a>. (In truth, O'Keefe was often dressed rather conservatively -- slacks and dress shirt -- when he talked to ACORN staffers, and he often presented himself as a law school student and an aspiring politician trying to rescue his prostitute girlfriend<em>&nbsp;from</em>&nbsp;her abusive pimp.) The outlandish costume was used as a prop to both mislead viewers, and to make ACORN staffers look like idiots for not being able to spot the obvious ruse.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But it was all a hoax. And for weeks now, ever since the trick was highlighted by&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bradblog.com%2F" title="blocked::http://www.bradblog.com/">blogger</a>&nbsp;Brad Friedman, Breitbart has been wrestling with the glaring contradiction and struggling to explain his own role in the hoax. He's been straining to explain why, for instance, in a September 21 column in&nbsp;<em>The Washington Times</em>, Breitbart specifically claimed O'Keefe had been "dressed as a pimp" while receiving tax advice from ACORN workers.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That claim was categorically false.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">He's been&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/201002190016" title="blocked::http://mediamatters.org/blog/201002190016">laboring</a>&nbsp;to explain why he never sought a single correction last year when an avalanche of news outlets erroneously reported O'Keefe&nbsp;<em>was</em>&nbsp;dressed as a pimp inside ACORN offices.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">And he's been struggling to explain why, in light of the pimp hoax, he refuses to release all of the unedited ACORN tapes so we can see what other discrepancies&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nydailynews.com%2Fnews%2Fny_crime%2F2010%2F03%2F01%2F2010-03-01_bklyn_acorn_cleared_over_giving_illegal_advice_on_how_to_hide_money_from_prostit.html" title="blocked::http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/03/01/2010-03-01_bklyn_acorn_cleared_over_giving_illegal_advice_on_how_to_hide_money_from_prostit.html">might pop up</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At least now, thanks to Stark, we finally have Breitbart's unequivocal admission: It was all O'Keefe's fault.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">From the Stark interview [emphasis added; full transcript&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bradblog.com%2F%3Fpage_id%3D7720" title="blocked::http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=7720">here</a>]:</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Hello to anyone that thinks that I was misleading.&nbsp;<strong>I did not know that there was a discrepancy between the title sequence</strong>&nbsp;-- I didn't think it was significant. I saw the videos. I read the transcripts to make sure that there was continuity, and my only mistake -- and I've admitted it to Brad, I've admitted it, now that I now know about it -- is that&nbsp;<strong>there is a title sequence and it doesn't reflect what he was wearing when he was in there.</strong>&nbsp;But he still represented himself as a pimp.</font></p></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the interview, Breitbart also stressed that because O'Keefe is an "independent film producer," Breitbart couldn't "tell him what to put on these things." And to make his point clear, when Stark pressed further about the hoax, Breitbart responded, "Your problem is with James."</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart may have tried to shift the blame, but the admission was a devastating one. After all, he's the guy who&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fbigjournalism.com%2Fabreitbart%2F2010%2F01%2F06%2Fyou-are-a-bad-bad-bad-journalist%2F" title="blocked::http://bigjournalism.com/abreitbart/2010/01/06/you-are-a-bad-bad-bad-journalist/">won't stop bragging</a>&nbsp;about how he's going to reinvent online journalism, and how he and his conservative activists are going to shame the liberal media with relentless fact-checking. Yet it turns out that for the biggest story of his career, Breitbart&nbsp;<em>didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes</em>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Not only did Breitbart clearly fail Journalism 101 in this case, but the way he's refused to publicly accept responsibility for the blunder represents another body blow to his credibility. To date, Breitbart has made no effort to correct the record on his site, which helped launch the ACORN sting. Which means that, to date, Breitbart's sycophantic readers have not been told that, oh, by the way, that whole dressed-as-a-pimp thing was bogus.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">With that in mind, what journalist would take seriously the next undercover video sting Breitbart might sponsor, when we find out that for the all-important ACORN caper he didn't even know what was on the tapes until observers pointed out a glaring discrepancy?</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Meanwhile, should we believe Breitbart's pimp spin? Tough to say. It probably represents his only way out of this mess. If Breitbart actually confessed that he&nbsp;<em>knew</em>&nbsp;the pimp costume story was a fake, and that not only did he do nothing to try to stop the misinformation last year but actively helped to spread the hoax, then I think his credibility would be permanently demolished. At that point even mainstream journalists, who tend to turn a blind eye to Breitbart's mendacity, would have to acknowledge he is nothing more than a partisan propagandist.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So, searching for a face-saving move, it appears Breitbart has opted for Plan B: Blame the young "independent film producer" O'Keefe, who brought the videos to Breitbart, complete with the misleading pimp costumes shots already embedded. (Does Breitbart really expect people to believe that he never had a&nbsp;<em>single</em>&nbsp;conversation with O'Keefe about the pimp outfit prior to the release of the videos?)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The problem with Breitbart's alibi (i.e. it's O'Keefe's fault!) is that it means Breitbart has copped to the fact that he didn't know what was on the tapes that he relentlessly hyped and used as a weapon in his oddly unhinged attack on ACORN, an underfunded and somewhat adrift nonprofit that advocates for poor people. (In one disturbed dispatch from a pro-ACORN rally last year, Breitbart&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fbiggovernment.com%2Fabreitbart%2F2009%2F11%2F12%2Facorn-the-la-story-part-i%2F" title="blocked::http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2009/11/12/acorn-the-la-story-part-i/">attacked</a>&nbsp;the attendees as "common street thugs, the dregs of society.")</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">His new song and dance (literally -- see the 6:40 mark in the video below) is that none of this matters because it's irrelevant whether O'Keefe was dressed flamboyantly inside the ACORN offices. It's true, as I've stated many times, that the costume question does not negate what was captured on the ACORN videos. But the hoax certainly&nbsp;<em>does</em>&nbsp;matter in terms of the larger ACORN attack and how the press embraced it. Breitbart knows it, and that's why he's been so slow to clear up the confusion. (And it's why he seemed so eager last year to&nbsp;<em>spread&nbsp;</em>the confusion.)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As the blogger Digby&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Ffeature%2F2010%2F02%2F22%2Facorn_muckraking_open2010" title="blocked::http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/02/22/acorn_muckraking_open2010">recently explained</a>:</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But the less than obvious reason this is a big deal is that the pimp and ho costumes were a send-up of over-the-top racial stereotypes that both reinforced some very ugly notions about the African American community, but more importantly, made these ACORN workers look as though they were so dumb they shouldn't be allowed to cross the street, much less handle tax dollars. And this was done for a reason.</font></p></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The pimp hoax is not some footnote that can just be dismissed. The glaring blunder goes to the heart of Breitbart's credibility as a wannabe journalist. The lie was absolutely central to the rollout of last year's ACORN attack campaign. And now, six months later, Breitbart claims he didn't know the first thing about the hoax because, truth be told,&nbsp;<em>he didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.</em></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">...</font></p><p><a href="http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001</font></a></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><span class="timestamp"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Updated: July 22, 2010</font></span></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Andrew Breitbart, a conservative commentator and Web entrepreneur, is known for promoting videos that emerged in 2009 and ultimately brought down Acorn, the community organizing group. Mr. Breitbart, has also made it a personal crusade to expose what he says is liberal bias in the media.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Breitbart is offering $100,000 to anyone who hands over the archives of a private e-mail list for journalists that includes some 400 people, many of them well-known Washington reporters.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In July 2010, Mr. Breitbart posted a misleading and highly edited video of Shirley Sherrod, the head of the Department of Agriculture's rural development office in Georgia that led to her forced resignation.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The video clip showed Ms. Sherrod, in a two-and-a-half-minute clip speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. event in Douglas, Ga., in March. Ms. Sherrod seemed to explain that she discriminated against a white farmer 24 years ago.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But the full video made it clear that Ms. Sherrod went on to say that she had learned from working with the farmer that all people must overcome their prejudices.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The racially charged controversy illustrated the influence of right-wing Web sites like the one run by Mr. Breitbart. Mr. Breitbart later said the video clip had been sent to him already edited.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">After the details about the video emerged, pretty much everyone had egg on their face, from conservative bloggers and pundits who first pushed the inaccurate story to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who had ordered Ms. Sherrod's firing. President Obama reached Ms. Sherrod by telephone on July 22 to express his "regret" about the events.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">wikipedia</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Early_life"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Early life</font></span></h2><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart is the adopted son of Gerald and Arlene Breitbart, a restaurant owner and banker respectively, and grew up in a family with&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism" title="Secularism">secular</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_liberalism" title="American liberalism" class="mw-redirect">liberal</a>&nbsp;views, in upscale&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentwood,Los_Angeles" title="Brentwood, Los Angeles">Brentwood, Los Angeles</a>. He was raised&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews" title="Jews">Jewish</a>&nbsp;(his adoptive mother had&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_to_Judaism" title="Conversion to Judaism">converted to Judaism</a>&nbsp;when marrying his adoptive father).<sup id="cite_ref-family_6-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-family-6">[7]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-wsj_7-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-wsj-7">[8]</a></sup>&nbsp;He explains that his birth certificate indicates his biological father was a folk singer, and that he is ethnically Irish by birth. His adopted sister is&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic" title="Hispanic">Hispanic</a>.<sup id="cite_ref-family_6-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-family-6">[7]</a></sup>&nbsp;He changed his political views after experiencing an "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany%28feeling%29" title="Epiphany (feeling)">epiphany</a>" during the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas" title="Clarence Thomas">Clarence Thomas</a>&nbsp;hearings, and now describes himself as "a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan">Reagan</a>&nbsp;conservative" with&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism" title="Libertarianism">libertarian</a>&nbsp;sympathies.<sup id="cite_ref-c-span_3-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-c-span-3">[4]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart earned a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Arts" title="Bachelor of Arts">B.A.</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_studies" title="American studies">American studies</a>&nbsp;from&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulane_University" title="Tulane University">Tulane University</a>&nbsp;in 1991, graduating with "no sense of [his] future whatsoever".<sup id="cite_ref-8" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-8">[9]</a></sup>&nbsp;His early jobs included a stint at&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television" title="Cable television">cable</a>&nbsp;channel&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%21_Entertainment_Television" title="E! Entertainment Television" class="mw-redirect">E! Entertainment Television</a>, working for the company's&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog" title="Blog">online magazine</a>, and some time in film production.<sup id="cite_ref-wsj_7-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-wsj-7">[8]</a></sup></font></p><h2><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=2&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Public life">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Public_life">Public life</span></font></h2><h3><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=3&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Authorship, research and reporting">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Authorship.2C_research_and_reporting">Authorship, research and reporting</span></font></h3><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 1995 Breitbart saw the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report" title="Drudge Report">Drudge Report</a>&nbsp;and was so impressed that he emailed&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Drudge" title="Matt Drudge">Matt Drudge</a>. Breitbart said, "I thought what he was doing was by far the coolest thing on the Internet. And I still do."<sup id="cite_ref-huff_5-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-huff-5">[6]</a></sup>&nbsp;Breitbart described himself as "Matt Drudge’s&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch%28insult%29#In_reference_to_men" title="Bitch (insult)">bitch</a>"<sup id="cite_ref-biyatch_9-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-biyatch-9">[10]</a></sup>&nbsp;and selected and posted links to other news wire sources. Later Matt Drudge introduced him to&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_Huffington" title="Arianna Huffington">Arianna Huffington</a>&nbsp;(when she was still a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party%28United_States%29" title="Republican Party (United States)">Republican</a>)<sup id="cite_ref-wsj_7-2" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-wsj-7">[8]</a></sup>&nbsp;and Breitbart subsequently assisted her (after she became a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism" title="Progressivism">progressive</a>) in creating&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPo" title="HuffPo" class="mw-redirect">her website</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart's work has been published in the&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Journal" title="Wall Street Journal" class="mw-redirect">Wall Street Journal</a></i>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review_Online" title="National Review Online" class="mw-redirect">National Review Online</a>&nbsp;and the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_Standard" title="Weekly Standard" class="mw-redirect">Weekly Standard Online</a>, among others. He writes a weekly column for&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times" title="The Washington Times">The Washington Times</a></i>, which also appears at&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Clear_Politics" title="Real Clear Politics" class="mw-redirect">Real Clear Politics</a>. Breitbart also co-wrote the book&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood,Interrupted" title="Hollywood, Interrupted">Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon</a></i>&nbsp;with&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ebner" title="Mark Ebner">Mark Ebner</a>, a book that is highly critical of U.S.&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_culture" title="Celebrity culture">celebrity culture</a>.<sup id="cite_ref-10" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-10">[11]</a></sup>&nbsp;On January 19, 2011, the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_conservatism" title="LGBT conservatism">conservative gay rights</a>&nbsp;group&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOProud" title="GOProud">GOProud</a>&nbsp;announced Breitbart had joined its Advisory Council.<sup id="cite_ref-11" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-11">[12]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In April 2011 Grand Central Publishing released Breitbart's book,&nbsp;<i>Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World</i>, in which he discusses his own political evolution and the part he took in the rise of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media" title="New media">new media</a>, most notably at the Drudge Report and&nbsp;<i>The Huffington Post</i>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In June 2011 Breitbart was involved in the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner_sexting_scandal" title="Anthony Weiner sexting scandal">Anthony Weiner sexting scandal</a>, posting photographs of Weiner on his websites.<sup id="cite_ref-12" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-12">[13]</a></sup></font></p><h3><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=4&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Commentaries">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Commentaries">Commentaries</span></font></h3><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart has appeared as a commentator on&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_with_Bill_Maher" title="Real Time with Bill Maher">Real Time with Bill Maher</a></i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Miller" title="Dennis Miller">Dennis Miller</a></i>. In 2004 he was a guest commentator on&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel" title="Fox News Channel">Fox News Channel's</a>&nbsp;morning show and frequently appears as a guest panelist on&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News" title="Fox News" class="mw-redirect">Fox News</a>'s late night program,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Eye_w/Greg_Gutfeld" title="Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld" class="mw-redirect">Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld</a></i>. Breitbart also appeared as a commentator in the 2004 documentary&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moore_Hates_America" title="Michael Moore Hates America">Michael Moore Hates America</a></i>.<sup id="cite_ref-13" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-13">[14]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On October 22, 2009, Breitbart appeared on the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN" title="C-SPAN">C-SPAN</a>&nbsp;program&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Journal" title="Washington Journal">Washington Journal</a></i>. He gave his opinions on the mainstream media,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood" title="Hollywood">Hollywood</a>, the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Barack_Obama" title="Presidency of Barack Obama">Obama Administration</a>&nbsp;and his personal political views, having heated debates with several callers.<sup id="cite_ref-c-span_3-2" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-c-span-3">[4]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the hours immediately following Senator&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kennedy" title="Ted Kennedy">Ted Kennedy</a>'s death, Breitbart called Kennedy a "villain", a "duplicitous bastard", a "prick"<sup id="cite_ref-politico_14-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-politico-14">[15]</a></sup>&nbsp;and "a special pile of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feces" title="Feces">human excrement</a>."<sup id="cite_ref-15" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-15">[16]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-16" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-16">[17]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In February 2010 Breitbart received the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Irvine" title="Reed Irvine">Reed Irvine</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_in_Media" title="Accuracy in Media">Accuracy in Media</a>&nbsp;Award during the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Political_Action_Conference" title="Conservative Political Action Conference">Conservative Political Action Conference</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,D.C." title="Washington, D.C.">Washington, D.C.</a>&nbsp;During his acceptance speech, he responded directly to accusations by&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times" title="New York Times" class="mw-redirect">New York Times</a></i>&nbsp;reporter Kate Zernike that&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Mattera" title="Jason Mattera">Jason Mattera</a>, a young conservative&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activism" title="Political activism" class="mw-redirect">activist</a>, had been using "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism" title="Racism">racial tones</a>" in his&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusions" title="Allusions" class="mw-redirect">allusions</a>&nbsp;to President&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama" title="Barack Obama">Barack Obama</a>, and had spoken in a "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Rock" title="Chris Rock">Chris Rock</a>&nbsp;voice." From the podium, Breitbart called Zernike "a despicable human being" for having made such allegations about Mattera's New York accent.<sup id="cite_ref-17" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-17">[18]</a></sup></font></p><h3><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=5&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Activism">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Activism">Activism</span></font></h3><div class="rellink relarticle mainarticle"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Main article:&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_party_movement#Reports_of_improper_behavior_and_intolerance" title="Tea party movement" class="mw-redirect">Tea party movement</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart often appears as a speaker at&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement" title="Tea Party movement">Tea Party movement</a>&nbsp;events across the U.S. For example, Breitbart was a keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party Convention at Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville on February 6, 2010.<sup id="cite_ref-18" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-18">[19]</a></sup>&nbsp;Breitbart later involved himself in a controversy over&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia" title="Homophobia">homophobic</a>&nbsp;and alleged&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism" title="Racism">racial</a>&nbsp;slurs being used at a March 20, 2010 rally at the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol" title="United States Capitol">United States Capitol</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,D.C." title="Washington, D.C.">Washington, D.C.</a>&nbsp;by asserting that slurs were never used, and that "It was a set-up" by&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Pelosi" title="Nancy Pelosi">Nancy Pelosi</a>and the Democratic Party. Breitbart offered to donate $100,000 to the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Negro_College_Fund" title="United Negro College Fund">United Negro College Fund</a>&nbsp;"for any audio/video footage of the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger" title="Nigger">N-word</a>&nbsp;being hurled", claiming that they made it up. Breitbart insisted&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis%28U.S.politician%29" title="John Lewis (U.S. politician)">Congressman John Lewis</a>&nbsp;and the several other witnesses were forced to lie, concluding that "Nancy Pelosi did a great disservice to a great civil rights icon by thrusting him out there to perform this mischievous task. His reputation is now on the line as a result of her desperation to take down the Tea Party movement."<sup id="cite_ref-AB-100402_19-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-AB-100402-19">[20]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-WPost_Omb_20-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-WPost_Omb-20">[21]</a></sup></font></p><h3><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=6&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Websites">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Websites">Websites</span></font></h3><div class="quotebox" style="float: right; clear: right; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.8em 1.4em; width: 376px; padding: 6px; border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><div style="position: relative;"><div style="margin: 0px 2em;"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I'm committed to the destruction of the old media guard. And it's a very good business model.</font></p></div><div style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; font-weight: bold;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“</font></div><div style="position: absolute; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; font-weight: bold;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">”</font></div></div><div style="text-align: right;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">�� Andrew Breitbart, quoted by the&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press" title="Associated Press">Associated Press</a>,</i>&nbsp;August 3, 2010<sup id="cite_ref-unlessamerica_21-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-unlessamerica-21">[22]</a></sup></font></div></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart has launched a number of websites, including Breitbart.com,<sup id="cite_ref-22" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-22">[23]</a></sup>&nbsp;BigHollywood.com,<sup id="cite_ref-23" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-23">[24]</a></sup>BigGovernment.com,<sup id="cite_ref-24" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-24">[25]</a></sup>&nbsp;BigJournalism.com,<sup id="cite_ref-25" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-25">[26]</a></sup>&nbsp;and BigPeace.com.<sup id="cite_ref-26" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-26">[27]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart launched his first website as a news site; it is sometimes linked to by the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report" title="Drudge Report">Drudge Report</a>&nbsp;and other websites. It features wire stories from the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press" title="Associated Press">Associated Press</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters" title="Reuters">Reuters</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse" title="Agence France-Presse">Agence France-Presse</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News" title="Fox News" class="mw-redirect">Fox News</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_Newswire" title="PR Newswire">PR Newswire</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.Newswire" title="U.S. Newswire">U.S. Newswire</a>, as well as direct links to a number of major international newspapers. Its Blog & "Network" links tend to run to the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing" title="Right-wing" class="mw-redirect">right</a>&nbsp;within the U.S. political spectrum (e.g.,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review" title="National Review">National Review</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townhall.com" title="Townhall.com">Townhall.com</a>). The site also features a&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine" title="Search engine" class="mw-redirect">search engine</a>&nbsp;powered by Lingospot and a finance channel powered by&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinancialContent" title="FinancialContent">FinancialContent</a>. In 2007, Breitbart launched a video blog, Breitbart.tv.<sup id="cite_ref-27" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-27">[28]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 2008 Breitbart launched the website "Big Hollywood," a "group blog" driven by some who work within&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood,Los_Angeles,California" title="Hollywood, Los Angeles, California" class="mw-redirect">Los Angeles</a>, featuring contributions from a variety of writers, including politically conservative entertainment-industry professionals.<sup id="cite_ref-jossip_28-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-jossip-28">[29]</a></sup>&nbsp;The site, an outgrowth of the column "Big Hollywood" that Breitbart wrote for the&nbsp;<i>Washington Times</i>, addresses issues facing conservatives who work in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood" title="Hollywood">Hollywood</a>.<sup id="cite_ref-breit-infidel_29-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-breit-infidel-29">[30]</a></sup>&nbsp;In 2009, the site used audio from a secretly recorded conference call to accuse the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_of_the_Arts" title="National Endowment of the Arts" class="mw-redirect">National Endowment of the Arts</a>&nbsp;of encouraging artists to create work in support of Barack Obama's domestic policy agenda.<sup id="cite_ref-30" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-30">[31]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-31" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-31">[32]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart launched BigGovernment.com on September 10, 2009.<sup id="cite_ref-32" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-32">[33]</a></sup>&nbsp;He hired Mike Flynn, a former government affairs specialist at&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_Foundation" title="Reason Foundation">Reason Foundation</a>,<sup id="cite_ref-33" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-33">[34]</a></sup>&nbsp;as Editor-in-Chief of Big Government.<sup id="cite_ref-34" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-34">[35]</a></sup>&nbsp;The site premiered with hidden camera video footage taken by&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Giles" title="Hannah Giles" class="mw-redirect">Hannah Giles</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe" title="James O'Keefe">James O'Keefe</a>&nbsp;at&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now" title="Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now">Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now</a>&nbsp;offices in various cities, attracting nationwide attention resulting in the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy" title="ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy">ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy</a>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In January 2010, Breitbart launched Big Journalism. He told&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediaite" title="Mediaite">Mediaite</a>:<sup id="cite_ref-M1209_35-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-M1209-35">[36]</a></sup>&nbsp;"Our goal at Big Journalism is to hold the mainstream media’s feet to the fire. There are a lot of stories that they simply don’t cover, either because it doesn’t fit their world view, or because they’re literally innocent of any knowledge that the story even exists, or because they are a dying organization, short-staffed, and thus can’t cover stuff like they did before." Big Journalism was edited by&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Walsh%28author%29" title="Michael Walsh (author)">Michael A. Walsh</a>, a former journalism professor and&nbsp;<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%28magazine%29" title="Time (magazine)">Time magazine</a></i>&nbsp;music critic.<sup id="cite_ref-M1209_35-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-M1209-35">[36]</a></sup>&nbsp;It is now currently edited by&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Loesch" title="Dana Loesch">Dana Loesch</a>. The site has a fictional contributor named "Retracto, the Correction Alpaca" who posts items requesting corrections from the traditional media.<sup id="cite_ref-Retracto_36-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-Retracto-36">[37]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">BigPeace.com debuted July 4, 2010. The site covers topics such as international issues and foreign policy, the ongoing wars in&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War" title="Iraq War">Iraq</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan%282001%E2%80%93present%29" title="War in Afghanistan (2001–present)">Afghanistan</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism" title="Terrorism">terrorism</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam" title="Islam">Islamic</a>extremism,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage" title="Espionage">espionage</a>, border security, and energy issues.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space: nowrap;">[<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed"><span title="This claim needs references to reliable sources from July 2010">citation needed</span></a></i>]</sup></font></p><h3><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=7&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Controversies">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Controversies">Controversies</span></font></h3><table class="metadata plainlinks ambox ambox-content"><tbody><tr><td class="mbox-image"><div style="width: 52px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><img src="/6e6f116c-240a-511f-b303-320898bd1d51.png"/></font></div></td><td class="mbox-text"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This article's&nbsp;<i>Criticism</i>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<i>Controversy</i>&nbsp;section&nbsp;<b>may compromise the article's&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view" title="Wikipedia:Neutral point of view">neutral point of view</a>&nbsp;of the subject</b>. Please&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Article_structure" title="Wikipedia:Neutral point of view">integrate the section's contents</a>&nbsp;into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material; see the discussion on the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrew_Breitbart" title="Talk:Andrew Breitbart">talk page</a>.&nbsp;<small><i>(December 2010)</i></small></font></td></tr></tbody></table><h4><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=8&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Anthony Weiner">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Anthony_Weiner">Anthony Weiner</span></font></h4><div class="rellink relarticle mainarticle"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Main article:&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner_sexting_scandal" title="Anthony Weiner sexting scandal">Anthony Weiner sexting scandal</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On May 28, 2011, Breitbart posted a sexually explicit photo on his BigJournalism website of New York Representative&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner" title="Anthony Weiner">Anthony Weiner</a>&nbsp;obtained through Weiner's Twitter account.<sup id="cite_ref-37" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-37">[38]</a></sup>&nbsp;Initially Weiner denied that he had sent a link to the photograph to a 21-year-old female college student, but after questions developed, he admitted to inappropriate online relationships. On June 6, 2011 Breitbart reported other photos Weiner had sent, including one that was sexually graphic. On June 8, 2011, the sexually graphic photo was leaked after Breitbart participated in a radio interview with hosts&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opie_and_Anthony" title="Opie and Anthony">Opie and Anthony</a>, though Breitbart stated that the photo was published without his permission.<sup id="cite_ref-38" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-38">[39]</a></sup>&nbsp;Weiner subsequently resigned from his congressional seat on June 21, 2011.</font></p><h4><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=9&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Shirley Sherrod">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="Shirley_Sherrod">Shirley Sherrod</span></font></h4><div class="rellink relarticle mainarticle"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Main article:&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Shirley_Sherrod" title="Resignation of Shirley Sherrod">Resignation of Shirley Sherrod</a></font></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On July 19, 2010, Breitbart posted two short videos showing excerpts of a speech by&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Sherrod" title="Shirley Sherrod" class="mw-redirect">Shirley Sherrod</a>&nbsp;at an NAACP fundraising dinner in March 2010. The videos ensuing controversy resulted in Sherrod being fired from the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Agriculture" title="United States Department of Agriculture">United States Department of Agriculture</a>&nbsp;on July 19. After Breitbart was criticized for taking Sherrod's words out of context, he posted the complete 40-minute video of the speech.<sup id="cite_ref-39" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-39">[40]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-smear_40-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-smear-40">[41]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-cnn.com_41-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-cnn.com-41">[42]</a></sup>&nbsp;The NAACP stated that the video excerpts aired by Breitbart were deliberately deceptive and said that he had "snookered" the group.<sup id="cite_ref-smear_40-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-smear-40">[41]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-cnn.com_41-1" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-cnn.com-41">[42]</a></sup>&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_Agriculture" title="Secretary of Agriculture" class="mw-redirect">Secretary of Agriculture</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Vilsack" title="Tom Vilsack">Tom Vilsack</a>&nbsp;later apologized to Sherrod and offered her a new job.<sup id="cite_ref-42" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-42">[43]</a></sup>&nbsp;In 2011, Sherrod brought suit against Breitbart for&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation" title="Defamation">defamation</a>.<sup id="cite_ref-43" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-43">[44]</a></sup></font></p><h4><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=10&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: ACORN undercover videos">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="ACORN_undercover_videos">ACORN undercover videos</span></font></h4><div class="rellink relarticle mainarticle"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Main article:&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy" title="ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy">ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy</a></font></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart was also involved in the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy" title="ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy">2009 ACORN video controversy</a>.&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Giles" title="Hannah Giles" class="mw-redirect">Hannah Giles</a><sup id="cite_ref-44" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-44">[45]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-45" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-45">[46]</a></sup>&nbsp;posed as a prostitute seeking assistance while&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe" title="James O'Keefe">James O'Keefe</a>&nbsp;portrayed her boyfriend, and clandestinely videotaped meetings with&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now" title="Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now">ACORN</a>&nbsp;staff.<sup id="cite_ref-associated_46-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-associated-46">[47]</a></sup>&nbsp;Subsequent criminal investigations by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office and the California Attorney General found the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy#Investigations_of_ACORN_and_the_videos" title="ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy">videos were heavily edited</a>&nbsp;in an attempt to make ACORN's responses "appear more sinister",<sup id="cite_ref-NewYorker_47-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-NewYorker-47">[48]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-CA_AG_Report_48-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-CA_AG_Report-48">[49]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-49" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-49">[50]</a></sup>&nbsp;and contributed to the group's demise.<sup id="cite_ref-FOX_50-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-FOX-50">[51]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-times-acorn-lorber_51-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-times-acorn-lorber-51">[52]</a></sup>&nbsp;Breitbart then provided a forum for O'Keefe on his BigGovernment.com website<sup id="cite_ref-52" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-52">[53]</a></sup>&nbsp;and defended his actions on&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Hannity" title="Sean Hannity">Sean Hannity's</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel" title="Fox News Channel">Fox News Channel</a>program.<sup id="cite_ref-53" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-53">[54]</a></sup></font></p><h4><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andrew_Breitbart&action=edit&section=11&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: GOProud">edit</a>]</span>&nbsp;<span class="mw-headline" id="GOProud">GOProud</span></font></h4><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Breitbart has also been embroiled in a controversy within the conservative movement related to the participation of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay" title="Gay">gay</a>&nbsp;group&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOProud" title="GOProud">GOProud</a>&nbsp;in the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Political_Action_Conference" title="Conservative Political Action Conference">Conservative Political Action Conference</a>&nbsp;(CPAC), an annual conference held in Washington, D.C. by the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Conservative_Union" title="American Conservative Union">American Conservative Union</a>. In 2011 he was the primary host of a party that served to "welcome" the "homocons" to the convention (though it was the second year they had been participants). This flew in the face of a boycott staged by a few social conservative groups that were offended by the inclusion of GOProud within the conservative fold. Writer, producer, and publisher Roger L. Simon referred to the group as a "game-changer" for the Republican party, and asserted that it represented a turning point in the appeal that the conservative movement might hold for young people. Breitbart was on the Advisory Board of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOProud" title="GOProud">GOProud</a>&nbsp;until he stepped down in the wake of the group's inadvertent [citation] outing of a senior&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perry" title="Rick Perry">Rick Perry</a>&nbsp;aide.<sup id="cite_ref-54" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-54">[55]</a></sup>&nbsp;<sup id="cite_ref-55" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart#cite_note-55">[56]</a></sup></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><sup id="cite_ref-55" class="reference"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></sup></p><div id="node-header"><div id="node-header-data"><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mother Jones</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">— By&nbsp;<a href="http://motherjones.com/authors/kate-sheppard">Kate Sheppard</a></font></p></div></div><div id="node-body-top"><div id="dateline"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Fri Feb. 4, 2011 3:00 AM PST</font></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Last June, Glenn Beck paused in the middle of a&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201006290066">rant about the economy and climate on his television show</a>&nbsp;for an important, if rather unexpected, aside. “I want to thank Charles Koch for this information,�� he said. Beck’s statement was totally without context, thrown in amid jabs at Al Gore and endorsements of the free market. Months later, it came to light that he recently had been a guest of honor at a semiannual confab sponsored by fossil-fuel billionaire Charles Koch and his brother, David, an event the pair hosts to connect conservative think tanks, politicos, and media types like Beck.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Koch Industries, a Kansas-based company founded in 1940 by father Fred Koch, is the second largest privately held company in America. Charles and David Koch are tied as the fifth wealthiest people in the nation, worth a combined $43 billion. Their money comes through a variety of business interests—ranching, mining, oil refining, and production of paper products, fertilizer, and chemicals. It would be an understatement to say that they have much at stake when it comes to efforts to cut climate-changing emissions.</font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Koch Industries describes its semiannual shindigs, which began in 2003, as an “opportunity for attendees and presenters to discuss ways of preserving and advancing economic freedom in the United States and to share ideas about the free-market principles that have made our country great.” The guest list for last weekend’s meeting is still under wraps, but the June 2010 event in Aspen drew a who’s who of conservative media stars; Besides Beck, there were Philip Anschutz, owner of the Examiner newspapers and the Weekly Standard; Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist and Weekly Standard contributor; Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal editorial board member; and Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for The National Review.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Andrew Breitbart, the mastermind behind the conservative news sites Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv, made his presence at the meeting known by rollerblading out to heckle some of the 1,500 protestors who’d gathered outside of the gate...</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">��</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/02/koch-brothers-media-beck-greenpeace"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/02/koch-brothers-media-beck-greenpeace</font></a></p><p><sup id="cite_ref-55" class="reference"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">---------</font></sup></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I mentioned this a couple of days ago, but I like Mario Piperni’s spin on bat-crap crazy, Breitbart’s manifesto…</font></p><h4><a href="http://mariopiperni.com/conservative-madness/the-insanity-of-andrew-breitbart.php" target="blank"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" size="4">Mario Piperni</font></a></h4><p style="text-align: center;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“You take the blue pill – the story ends,
you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland
and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
<em>_Morpheus [The Matrix]</em></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Andrew Breibart addressed a Tea Party group last week and had&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/breitbart-conservatives-outnumber-liberals-and-we-have-the-guns/" target="blank">this&nbsp;</a>to say.</font></p><blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“I’m under attack all the time. The call me gay. There are death threats… There are times when I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot. Bring it on.’ Because I know who’s on our side.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win.&nbsp;<strong>We outnumber them in this country and we have the guns… I’m not kidding.</strong>&nbsp;They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. ”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p></blockquote><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A fine example of the dangerous and irresponsible dribble, and nonsense which Obama and Dems have been dealing with for the last three years.&nbsp; These people are clearly unhinged.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The most frightening part of the right’s complete immersion into their delusional world of crazy, is knowing that there is no rational way to address insanity of this magnitude.&nbsp; The right has chosen the blue pill.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Related articles</font></span></p><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/09/19/andrew-breitbarts-dangerous-insanity-the-video">Andrew Breitbart’s Dangerous Insanity: The Video</a>&nbsp;(slog.thestranger.com)</font></li><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/19/1018289/-Breitbarts-psychotic-break">Breitbart’s psychotic break</a>&nbsp;(dailykos.com)</font></li><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.alan.com/2011/09/19/breitbart-on-conservatives-vs-liberals-we-outnumber-them-and-we-have-the-guns/">Breitbart On Conservatives Vs Liberals: “We Outnumber Them…And We Have The Guns”</a>&nbsp;(alan.com)</font></li><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.newser.com/story/128902/andrew-breitbart-to-tea-party-on-liberals-we-have-the-guns.html">Breitbart on Liberals: ‘We Have the Guns’</a>&nbsp;(newser.com)</font></li><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://kaystreet.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/civil-war-breitbart-conservatives-%25e2%2580%2598outnumber%25e2%2580%2599-liberals-%25e2%2580%2598and-we-have-the-guns%25e2%2580%2599/">Civil War? Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’</a>&nbsp;(kaystreet.wordpress.com)</font></li></ul><h6 class="zemanta-related-title"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Related articles</font></h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://kaystreet.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/civil-war-breitbart-conservatives-%25e2%2580%2598outnumber%25e2%2580%2599-liberals-%25e2%2580%2598and-we-have-the-guns%25e2%2580%2599/">Civil War? Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’</a>&nbsp;(kaystreet.wordpress.com)</font></li></ul><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NO LNX</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>TWO</div><div>
</div><div>6/16</div><div>see main and bannon</div><div>tag brbrt</div><div>andrew bak 619</div><div>=</div><div>180 on va gov after loss&nbsp; bgr</div><div></div><div>has neg trump stories but always labelled by dem thus not to be belieived/ to make ppl mad?</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>anti-vaxxers sorta, but no mention of recent outbreak in US NW, amazing pro UN, dump on france; yemen mentioned but not 1 mil cholera</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.breitbart.com/news/un-warns-of-complacency-as-measles-cases-soar-worldwide-2/</div><div>=</div><div>story supports lauren so ref intercepts</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>ref mma</div><div>
</div><div>A professor who was caught agreeing to hide the oil funding behind a climate denial research paper named Breitbart News as a media outlet that could "likely help" publicize the research, according to emails unearthed as part of an undercover investigation by Greenpeace. Indeed, Breitbart News has frequently cited Princeton Emeritus Professor William Happer to promote the supposed "benefits" of climate-warming carbon pollution and argue against a "war on CO2" --&nbsp; including just days before the Greenpeace investigation was released. And now that Greenpeace has exposed Happer's ethically dubious actions, Breitbart News is defending Happer's behavior as "morally and scientifically unimpeachable."</div><div>
</div><div>On December 8, Greenpeace released the results of its investigation, in which Greenpeace UK reporters claiming to represent oil and coal companies asked two university professors to write industry-friendly research papers, and the professors agreed to do so without disclosing the fossil fuel funding behind them. According to Greenpeace, the investigation details "how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies' commercial interests."&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>As part of its report about the investigation, titled "Exposed: Academics-for-hire agree not to disclose fossil fuel funding," Greenpeace released a series of emails between its undercover staffers and the two academics, William Happer and Penn State Emeritus Professor Frank Clemente. In an email exchange in early November, a Greenpeace employee who was posing as an oil company consultant based in Beirut asked Happer if he could write a briefing paper "examin[ing] the benefits of fossil fuels to developing economies," and if there were any "US outlets or contacts you may have" that could help "get this research out far and wide." The Greenpeace employee also mentioned a London Times column praising carbon emissions by Matt Ridley, who Happer said was in "close touch" with a pro-carbon group called the CO2 Coalition that Happer helped organize. The Greenpeace employee then asked Happer if Ridley -- a Times columnist who also frequently writes op-eds published by The Wall Street Journal -- "would help to disseminate our research." Happer replied: "I am sure Matt Ridley will be interested in whatever you produce. The Breitbart news organization would also likely help, as would various blogs, syndicated columnists, etc."</div><div>
</div><div>Given Breitbart News' past coverage of Happer, it should come as no surprise that he mentioned Breitbart when asked to name media outlets that would promote his industry-funded, climate-denying research. For instance:</div><div>
</div><div>A June 3, 2015 Breitbart article touted a letter from Happer and two other physicists attacking the American Physical Society (APS) for a statement recognizing the reality of man-made climate change.</div><div>A January 22, 2015 Breitbart article purporting to list off "Ten reasons why the war on CO2 has done far more harm than good" approvingly quoted Happer referring to "the jihad against atmospheric carbon dioxide."</div><div>An October 24, 2014 Breitbart article quoted "climate expert" Happer as saying: "No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science."</div><div>A September 2, 2011 Breitbart article quoted Happer as follows: "Disagreeing with [the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is like going to Saudi Arabia and criticizing Muhammad."</div><div>On December 4, several weeks after Happer mentioned Breitbart News in his email to Greenpeace (and just days before Greenpeace released the results of its investigation), Breitbart News published yet another article touting Happer, this one titled "Carbon Dioxide Is Not Our Enemy." In it, Breitbart's John Hayward wrote a highly sympathetic profile of Happer's climate science denial, asserting that a white paper Happer co-authored was "meant to be a conversation-starter" and took "a non-confrontational approach with copious footnotes and supporting sources, inviting readers to perform their own research and gain a fuller understanding of CO2 and its benefits." Hayward also stated that Happer "lamented the vicious treatment given to scientists who showed even modest skepticism toward the link between CO2 and climate change."</div><div>
</div><div>After Greenpeace released its investigation, Breitbart News' James Delingpole rushed to Happer's defense with a December 8 article, in which he wrote: "What's clear is that [at] every stage Happer's behaviour was morally and scientifically unimpeachable." Delingpole alleged that Happer was not at fault because he made clear he "would only say in his paper what he believed anyway" and indicated that he did not "wish to benefit personally from the fee, but preferred that the money should go to a tax-exempt educational charity, which pays only his travel expenses."</div><div>
</div><div>It's true that Happer has a long track record of advocating for the purported "benefits" of carbon pollution, and it's also true that he requested in his emails to the undercover Greenpeace employee that "whatever fee would have come to me would go directly to the CO2 Coalition" -- the group Happer helped organized earlier this year. But Delingpole tellingly did not provide Happer's answer to two other questions Delingpole noted that Greenpeace had raised:&nbsp; "Would the CO2 Coalition be happy to take a direct donation on condition the donor remained anonymous?" and&nbsp; "Might Happer be able to get his paper peer-reviewed by sympathetic authors?"</div><div>
</div><div>This is where Happer's conduct is far from "unimpeachable," as Breitbart News claimed.</div><div>
</div><div>The Greenpeace staffer posing as a representative of the Middle Eastern oil company told Happer over email that "we are happy to make a direct donation to the CO2 Coalition, providing it is anonymous," and asked Happer whether "the CO2 Coalition voluntarily discloses its funders." Happer replied that he believed the CO2 Coalition isn't "required to make public any donors, although it is required to disclose them to the Internal Revenue Service." He also forwarded the question to William O'Keefe, another member of the Board of Directors of the CO2 Coalition and former Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the American Petroleum Institute. O'Keefe replied by suggesting that the oil company funnel the funds through the Donors Trust, which has been dubbed the "dark-money ATM" of the conservative movement:</div><div>
</div><div>We are under no obligation to identify donors, except to the IRS but I think that is just organizations. When people ask the IRS or a firms 990 [sic], the donor list is redacted. If the person participates in the Donors Trust, he/she can make the donation through that and have complete confidentiality.</div><div>
</div><div>Happer then forwarded O'Keefe's response to the undercover Greenpeace employee. As Greenpeace noted, in his emails "Happer also disclosed that [coal giant] Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a crucial Minnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition."</div><div>
</div><div>The exchange between Happer and the undercover Greenpeace staffer exemplifies how the fossil fuel industry's funding of shoddy science can be hidden from public view, and how this strategy can apply not just to the research papers themselves but also to op-eds and other media coverage about them. Indeed, the other university professor that Greenpeace approached, Penn State's Frank Clemente, listed over email a series of op-eds he had written that had been published in newspapers across the United States, and then observed: "Note that in none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar."</div><div>
</div><div>The other serious issue raised in Happer's emails relates to peer review, the process by which scholarly work is checked by a group of experts in the same field prior to publication. As Greenpeace documented, in his emails Happer "laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal." Specifically, Happer wrote that if he submitted the research paper to a peer-reviewed journal, it might "no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly your client would also like." Instead, Happer proposed a review process that would not be anonymous and would be conducted by the climate-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing that although "purists might object that the process did not qualify as a peer review ... I think it would be fine to call it a peer review."</div><div>
</div><div>The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently conducted a similar review of another pro-carbon pollution paper, with Ridley -- who used to be a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal -- deceptively alleging in the London Times that the paper had been "thoroughly peer reviewed."</div><div>
</div><div></div><div></div><div>NB progress means armed teachers</div><div>
</div><div>BB bs</div><div>report on the the February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting shows no progress in implementing safety measures since the April 20, 1999, Columbine attack.</div><div>The Sun-Sentinel published their own report, which examines the use of unarmed security monitors. In lieu of guns, the security personnel had radios, yet two monitors spotted and recognized the gunman before shots were fired yet failed to call a Code Red to lock down campus.</div><div>
</div><div>The school had an armed resource officer on campus–Broward Deputy Scot Peterson–but he “remained sheltered [outside the school building] for nearly 48 minutes, watching as other officers enter the building.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>On March 15, 2018, Breitbart News published surveillance video allegedly showing Peterson outside Build 12 while the shooting was carried out inside. Broward Sheriff Scott Israel indicated that Peterson arrived at Building 12 roughly 90 seconds after the attack began.</div><div>
</div><div>He remained outside as the gunman went on a floor by floor shooting spree, that included stopping to reload five times.</div><div>
</div><div>Roughly six minutes after the attack was over, Peterson was still huddled up, sheltering in place outside. He told approaching Coral Springs officers that the gunman was on the second or third floor when, in fact, the gunman had already fled the building. Surveillance video shows the gunman–now unarmed–running across campus and going to Walmart, where he “ordered a drink at Subway.”</div><div>He left Walmart and went to McDonald’s, where he remained but a short time.</div><div>
</div><div>The commission instigating the Parkland shooting report noted the absence of safety as well, and voted 13-1 to recommend arming teachers at the school. Armed teachers are in the classrooms to defend themselves and their students whether the school’s resource officer enters the building or not.</div><div>
</div><div>On December 19, 2018, Breitbart News reported President Trump’s determination to include armed teachers in his school safety push. Trump made the point that it is “critical to have armed personnel available at a moment’s notice,” and he noted that teachers can be part such personnel.</div><div>
</div><div>Armed teachers are in classrooms to defend themselves and their students whether the security monitors call a Code Red or not.</div><div>
</div><div>AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.</div><div>
</div><div>2nd AmendmentPoliticsColumbineMarjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolschool safetyschool shooting</div><div>
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</div><div>Alex Jones</div><div>Nationally Syndicated Radio Talkshow Host of The Alex Jones Show.</div><div></div><div>https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/04/exclusive-global-sea-level-data-agency-hits-back-after-attacks-breitbart-and-climate-science-deniers</div><div>
</div><div>A British government-backed research project that coordinates data from tide gauges around the world has hit back at climate science deniers who wrongly accused their scientists of faking findings.</div><div>
</div><div>The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, based in Liverpool, UK, at the National Oceanography Center, dismissed the claims made by two Australia-based scientists who both reject the well-established links between greenhouse gas emissions from human activity and global warming.</div><div>
</div><div>The claims gained wider attention after Breitbart’s James Delingpole, a climate science denier, screamed it was certain evidence PSMSL had been “caught red-handed tampering with raw data in order to exaggerate sea level rise.”</div><div>
</div><div>PSMSL said despite the claims, tide gauges and satellites showed that sea levels around the globe were rising and the rate of rise had increased in recent decades. Recent adjustments to the tide gauge data under scrutiny, in Yemen, had actually resulted in a decrease in the rate of sea level change, a spokesperson said.</div><div>
</div><div>The paper by Albert Parker and Cliff Ollier appeared in the new “open access” journal Earth Systems and Environment and claimed that data from a tide gauge in Aden, Yemen, did not show that sea levels there had risen.</div><div>
</div><div>As well as gaining attention from far right outlet Breitbart, the “research” was also covered uncritically by the UK’s MailOnline, which repeated the claim that PSMSL had made “arbitrary” adjustments to their data.</div><div>
</div><div>But senior scientists who are experts in sea level, and who spoke to Snopes and DeSmog, rubbished the claims, saying the study was flawed because the conclusions were unsupported by any methodology.</div><div>
</div><div>Unintelligible Research</div><div>Leading sea level scientist Dr. John Hunter told DeSmog the research was “close to being unintelligible.”</div><div>
</div><div>A spokersperson for PSMSL, at the National Oceanography Center, told DeSmog that MailOnline had approached them for comment, but published the story before scientists had a chance to respond. No other outlets contacted them to check.</div><div>
</div><div>The spokesperson wrote: “Any adjustment applied is never ‘arbitrary’ but is based on documentation of benchmark heights held by the PSMSL stretching back many years. An ongoing job of the PSMSL is to determine whether the adjustments made are correct, especially when new documentation becomes available or if there is a reanalysis of the existing documentation.”</div><div>
</div><div>PSMSL said the Aden, Yemen, gauge was assessed in 2008 and again in 2013 and this information was published on the PSMSL website.</div><div>
</div><div>“The 2013 reassessment resulted in a decrease (and not an increase) in the estimated 19th-20th century rate of sea level change at Aden,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that PSMSL was submitting a response to the journal.</div><div>
</div><div>“Global sea level is both rising and accelerating, and the data set compiled by PSMSL provides important input to this. This is detailed in the IPCC AR5 report chapters 3 and 13 … Specifically, PSMSL data inform us that sea level has risen by about 1-2 mm/year during the 20th century, and together with data from satellites, the rate over the last couple of decades has been over 3 mm/yr.”</div><div>
</div><div>Dr. John Hunter, a renowned expert on global sea level rise from the University of Tasmania, has analysed the Parker paper. He told DeSmog it was “hard to be sure what [Parker] has done” with the data because the paper, like others by the same author, were “close to being unintelligible.”</div><div>
</div><div>But he said the PSMSL broadly made two kinds of adjustments to data, which were “not arbitrary” but necessary.</div><div>
</div><div>One type of adjustment was to take the raw data and convert this to an average sea level height over a particular time period. A second was essentially a calibration exercise that matched the height of the zero mark on the tide gauge to a fixed point on the land.</div><div>
</div><div>Hunter said: “Broadly, PSMSL base the adjustments on whatever trustworthy information they have — if they don't have satisfactory information, then they don't convert that section of record from Metric to [Revised Local Reference data*]. They document what they do and why they do it.</div><div>
</div><div>“On the other hand, Parker's papers are often close to being unintelligible, so it is hard to be sure what he has done.</div><div>
</div><div>“Parker and Ollier (2017) appear to completely ignore the background information and instead fiddle around with the sea-level records only, matching break-points as best they can, using techniques which tend to yield adjusted records with virtually no trend.”</div><div>
</div><div>Hunter added that tide gauges and satellites all showed that sea levels were rising, and there was good understanding that this was being caused by thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.</div><div>
</div><div>Who is Albert Parker?</div><div>Dr. Albert Parker is a mechanical engineer and former Fiat motor company researcher who, as reported by DeSmog, has also published papers under the name Alberto Boretti. He appears to have begun using the name Parker in about 2013 — around the time he took a role at RMIT University, which he has since left.</div><div>
</div><div>Boretti has refused to say why he uses two different names. Boretti and his sometime research partner Cliff Ollier, of University of Western Australia, are both listed as members of Principia Scientific International.</div><div>
</div><div>PSI is a fringe climate science denial group that publishes materials that deny that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.</div><div>
</div><div>Parker is prolific with his research and tends to target little-known and poorly regarded journals.</div><div>
</div><div>In early 2017, Parker and Ollier claimed that Australia had not warmed since the end of the 1800s, even though all temperature data shows a clear warming. The pair again argued that data, this time temperature readings, was being nefariously altered.</div><div>
</div><div>Journals Under Investigation</div><div>Parker and Ollier have co-authored several papers in a separate journal, Environmental Science: An Indian Journal, where the pair have also argued against human-caused climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>The publication Environmental Science: An Indian Journal is run by an organization called Trade Science Inc, which is owned by Indian “open access” publisher, OMICS.</div><div>
</div><div>OMICS is currently under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for alleged deceptive practices. The FTC is questioning OMICS claims that its journals are properly peer-reviewed, and the agency alleges deceptive marketing practices. OMICS denies the allegations.</div><div>
</div><div>A brochure advertising the network of OMICS trading names includes Trade Science Inc, and a contact address for Trade Science Inc is the same as OMICS International’s headquarters in Hyderabad.</div><div>
</div><div>Parker has had several university affiliations in recent years, including RMIT, the now defunct University of Ballarat, and James Cook University.&nbsp; In his latest research he listed no academic affiliation.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2013, Parker wrote a paper with a fellow Australian, Thomas Watson, again arguing that sea levels were not rising.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Watson also thinks global warming is not caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, but instead says the Earth’s climate is controlled by “magnetism.”</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/06/climate-science-deniers-new-york-american-museum-natural-history-rebekah-mercer</div><div>
</div><div>With friends like climate science deniers and alt-right megaphones like Breitbart, you have to wonder whether New York’s iconic American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) needs any enemies right now.</div><div>
</div><div>As the New York Times and others are reporting, the museum is facing calls from hundreds of scientists, its own curators, campaigners, and the public to drop rich benefactor and major Trump funder and ally Rebekah Mercer from its board of trustees.</div><div>
</div><div>As DeSmog reported in 2017, the foundation of the billionaire Mercer family has given millions to the museum, with latest figures putting their generosity at $3.8 million since 2013.</div><div>
</div><div>Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, heads the Mercer Family Foundation that has also been giving millions to climate science denial groups, including the notorious Heartland Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>But now the museum finds itself in the unenviable position of being defended, perhaps not surprisingly, by the Mercer-funded hyper-partisan outlet Breitbart and climate science denial characters from other Mercer-funded groups.</div><div>
</div><div>Deniers on the Defense</div><div>In a typically verbose screed on Breitbart, climate science denier James Delingpole called the scientists who had signed a letter protesting Mercer’s presence “basically frauds” and “imbeciles.”</div><div>
</div><div>Now climate science deniers have begun to circulate their own “open letter” calling for the AMNH to keep Mercer on the board and “not to cave in to this pressure.”</div><div>
</div><div>The letter reads: “The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide.</div><div>
</div><div>“Make no mistake, the agitators are not defending science from quackery — quite the contrary!”</div><div>
</div><div>That statement itself is contradicted by every major scientific institution in the world and thousands of scientific studies over many decades.</div><div>
</div><div>Many of that letter’s signers are affiliated with groups funded by Mercer’s family foundation in recent years. There’s retired Professor Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition; Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In a footnote, the letter states: “The views represented in this letter are those of the individual signatories and not the institutions they are affiliated with. Institutions are listed simply for identification purposes.”</div><div>
</div><div>The first signatory is Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania.</div><div>
</div><div>Marketing professor Armstrong has spoken at several Heartland Institute conferences and was handed a “lifetime achievement” award at the institute’s March 2017 conference in Washington D.C.</div><div>
</div><div>The Mercer’s family foundation, which Rebekah leads, has given some $5.78 million to Heartland since 2008. Both Rebekah and father Robert attended Heartland’s D.C conference and have recently extended their funding to other anti-science groups.</div><div>
</div><div>As DeSmog reported, at the D.C conference Armstrong compared the apparently heroic work of climate science deniers to New York’s brave 9/11 firefighters.</div><div>
</div><div>Many of the names on the pro-Mercer petition have also signed numerous other letters denying the risks of human-caused climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>Pro-Science Petition Spammed</div><div>What’s more, it appears that some have targeted the pro-science public petition calling for Mercer's removal — which is separate from the open letter signed by scientists — by adding fake names.</div><div>
</div><div>In a statement, Beka Economopoulos of the Natural History Museum, a mobile science museum which is helping co-ordinate the letters, and petitions, said:</div><div>
</div><div>“There have been about a dozen fake names added to the public sign-on list, ranging from the inventor of the steam engine James Watt, to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.</div><div>
</div><div>“It’s not clear if the names were added as a simple prank or in a deliberate attempt to damage our credibility, but either way we quickly removed them and are keeping a close eye to ensure only legitimate names are added. It’s sad that people will go so far to protect Rebekah Mercer as to invoke the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, but here we are.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The museum’s famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for his impassioned attacks on climate science deniers.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2017 when DeSmog asked Tyson about the Mercers' financial support, he stressed how his position showed the independence of science from funding, but added: “All knowledge has value, especially knowledge of how people distort knowledge.”</div><div>
</div><div>In response to questions about the current protests, Tyson told DeSmog: “I have nothing to add or subtract from my previous correspondence with you on this matter.”</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/trumps-vote-suppression-team-doing-gops-dirty-work</div><div>
</div><div>Anyone who favors expanding voting rights should be relieved by Wednesday’s demise of President Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission. But the panel’s right-wing agenda to rig the voting process to benefit the GOP will continue.</div><div>
</div><div>There’s plenty to cheer about when white nationalists like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice-chair, and voter suppressors like the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were discredited by a panel run in a secretive, conspiratorial and clownish manner. But these Republicans are not giving up on their plan to create new barriers to eligible voters.</div><div>
</div><div>“Amid many challenges for the institutions of American democracy, this was a rousing win,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “No doubt, there is fallout to come… The commission has vanished, but its pernicious objectives persist. The White House has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take up the commission’s work—a dangerous and appalling idea. Earlier this morning, the president took to Twitter to renew calls for voting restrictions.”</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, Kobach signaled his next move to Politico, which noted, “The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission’s work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president’s decision.”</div><div>
</div><div>“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”</div><div>
</div><div>The GOP Strategy Unmasked</div><div>
</div><div>Kobach’s is referring to a strategy employed by the most fervent partisan Republicans to position red-run states to keep new registrants from voting and do mass purges of infrequent but otherwise legal voters from their rolls. In short, it draws on intentionally sloppy data-mining to creates thousands of false positives that are then used to stymie voters. That porous data has been used in recent cycles in Georgia to delay approving new registrations and to accelerate mass purges of voter rolls. But it's not just Georgia.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2014, Florida’s top election official proposed using DHS’s problematic citizenship data to purge voter rolls. In response, county election supervisors rebelled and blocked it—because they still felt the sting of the 2000 election, when Secretary of State Katherine Harris used sloppy data-mining (seeking former felons who could not vote under that state's laws) to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters before that year's presidential election.</div><div>
</div><div>If Kobach has his way, the contours of that sordid history will repeat itself, including using a DHS database that was never designed to be an authoritative list of every U.S. citizen. But in the years since Harris’ Florida purge, the right-wing strategy has become clear.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans like Kobach strategically target weak points in the voting process. They pinpoint areas in the process that are ambiguous, or where there’s no authoritative national data to counter their claims of purported illegal activity.</div><div>
</div><div>For example, there is no federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, which these right-wingers define as someone impersonating someone else at the polls to vote more than once, and has become the go-to justificatiom for red-run states to erect new barriers to voting century. Since there’s no single federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, it becomes a useful propaganda tool for Republicans because it's left to acacdemics and the media to debunk it, which these partisans routinely ignore.</div><div>
</div><div>The latest high-profile example of this narrative is Trump's thoroughly debunked claim that millions of Democrats illegally voted more than once to deprive him of 2016’s popular vote majority. But that lie, recited again by Trump’s press office when announcing the commission’s demise, resonates among supporters who want to believe all Democrats are crooks despite vast documentation by academics and the press that voter fraud barely exists. In the absence of an authoritative federal accounting, it becomes an easy pretext for red states to pass laws to, as they purport, police the process’ integrity. In reality, they thwart Democratic voters....</div><div>
</div><div>kobaCh announced this on Bb</div><div>
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</div><div>Breitbart radio is a cesspool</div><div>Celebrities like Seth Rogen are boycotting SiriusXM because it broadcasts Steve Bannon's radio program. And while Bannon says there is nothing untoward about his show, the fact is that Breitbart radio is a bigoted and misogynistic dumpster fire.</div><div>
</div><div>Must read: Nina Mast showed how Breitbart promoted a defamatory and xenophobic Swedish website that harassed journalists and had ties to neo-Nazis.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-right-wing-media-totally-distorted-positive-news-climate-change</div><div>
</div><div>denier</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/guess-who-breitbart-and-sarah-palin-are-blaming-california-wildfires</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;collection of right-wing websites teamed up with half-term nitwit Sarah Palin to spread a fake news story that appeared to pin the Northern California wildfires that have tragically killed at least 40 people onto an immigrant man who was arrested at a park in Sonoma, California. Jesus Fabian Gonzales—who “often sleeps in the park and is well-known to law enforcement”—was arrested Sunday after starting a small fire that he says he lit to stay warm, and one that “was so small a responding sheriff’s deputy was able to mostly put it out before firefighters arrived.” Gonzales was taken into custody without incident for one count of arson, but by Tuesday, Breitbart, InfoWars, and other sites were blaring sensationalist headlines, including one that stated that the “homeless arsonist behind Calif. wildfire that killed 40 people is an illegal alien”:</div><div>
</div><div>Breitbart News and InfoWars offered no evidence to link the man’s arrest to the fires and their accounts of the man’s arrest were disputed the same day by Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano.</div><div>
</div><div>“There’s a story out there he’s the arsonist for these fires. That is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all,” Giordano said in a news conference also broadcast on the department’s Facebook page and area TV stations. “I just did want to kill that speculation right now so we didn’t have things running too far out of control.”</div><div>
</div><div>Speculation from, say, Palin, who tweeted that “bet you not a single mainstream news organization is going to cover this story. Not PC or something.” No, it’s just fake, dumbass. In fact, USA Today notes that Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum said that “the only questions Breitbart News and InfoWars asked were about Gonzales's ethnicity and whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed a detainer on him, which would hold him for an additional 48 hours at the jail.” It’s almost like they have an agenda here!</div><div>
</div><div>And one of the fake news websites that ran with the story also appeared to think California was being hit by one giant fire, rather than the at least one dozen major fires that firefighters are courageously battling, and some hours away from where Gonzales was arrested. But when your goal is to blame immigrants for just about anything, who cares about the facts?</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>Major story about ties between Mercers, Breitbart, and neo-Nazis</div><div>Some of this was evident already, it's true. But the confirmation and salacious details are absolutely wild. BuzzFeed's Joe Bernstein broke a major story this week about how Breitbart under Steve Bannon used Milo Yiannopoulos to give editorial control to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The lengthy story is definitely worth reading in full. We pulled out a few things worth noting, including how the entire affair is orchestrated by the GOP donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer. In retrospect, 60 Minutes' failure to confrontSteve Bannon about Yiannopoulos or the Mercers is even more of a failure than it was at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-study-deniers-2489397710.html</div><div>
</div><div>no link</div><div>
</div><div>Climate Deniers Twist Study in Attempt to Question Science</div><div>A study released last week suggesting that the world may have more time to keep warming under 1.5 degrees C than previously thought is being twisted by deniers to question scientific proceedings and accuracy.</div><div>
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</div><div>Politico reported Monday morning that powerful deniers are focusing on misinterpretations of the study to support efforts to roll back climate policy and question climate science at large (as our own Denier Roundup predicted last week).</div><div>
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</div><div>The study represents "exactly the type of debate discussion scientists need to be having," Heartland Institute President Tim Huelskamp told Politico. "This article proved that there can be a lot of debate about the fundamental issues."</div><div>
</div><div>The study's authors pushed back against denier misuse of their findings. In an op-ed in the Guardian last week, they wrote that "after reasonably accurate initial reporting, suddenly our paper was about a downgrading of the threat of climate change, when it was actually nothing of the kind.</div><div>
</div><div>"Debating the current level of human-induced warming and how it relates to the 1.5° C goal feels a bit like discussing how best to steer a spacecraft into orbit around Saturn while Delingpole [James, Breitbart] and Stringer [Graham, a Labour MP] are urging their readers to question whether the Earth goes round the Sun," they added.</div><div>
</div><div>For a deeper dive:</div><div>
</div><div>Politico, Ars Technica. Commentary: The Guardian, Myles Allen and Richard Millar op-ed</div><div></div><div></div><div>4. Breitbart and Fox News serve up talking points for Jeff Sessions' DACA-rescinding press conference.</div><div>
</div><div>If one needs more evidence the Trump administration takes its tone and language directly from Fox News and Breitbart, look no further than Jeff Sessions' press conference this week. As liberal watchdog Media Matters notes, Sessions' primary talking points were ripped off directly from the two outlets. Breitbart/Fox and Sessions both claimed DACA was “amnesty” (it’s not), that the “child migrant surge” was due to DACA (it’s not), that DACA recipients take American jobs (they don’t), and that DACA was “unconstitutional” (it isn’t).&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>Steve Bannon may have exited the White House, but his propaganda reach hasn’t. Recently, there have been reports Trump’s new Chief of Staff John Kelly was trying to wean Trump off InfoWars, but it’s doubtful the two pillars of Breitbart and Fox News will go anywhere anytime soon. After all, where else would they trial balloon their talking points?&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>error no BB?</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-fake-news-government</div><div>
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</div><div>Pruitt appears to be the most Trump-like member of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and now the federal agency he is tasked with leading, the Environmental Protection Agency, has officially adopted the president’s most pernicious habit.</div><div>
</div><div>When Trump recently visited hurricane-ravaged Houston he praised the Coast Guard while knocking the journalists tasked with covering the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>“Think of it, almost 11,000 people by going into winds that the media would not go into . . . unless it’s a really good story,” Trump said, before gesturing toward the media.</div><div>
</div><div>That same day, the Associated Press published a story about the flooding of toxic waste sites in Houston, noting that Scott Pruitt’s EPA was still not on the ground. The agency responded in Trump-like fashion, attacking the press to distract from legitimate questions.</div><div>
</div><div>Echoing Trump’s longstanding habit of singling out specific reporters for attacks, the EPA called out one reporter on the story by name in a news release titled “EPA Response to the AP’s Misleading Story.” Remarkably, the statement starts with a personal attack on Washington-based AP reporter Michael Biesecker:</div><div>
</div><div>Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.</div><div>
</div><div>Biesecker’s AP colleague Jason Dearen, however, visited seven toxic sites known as “Superfund sites,” the most contaminated toxic waste sites in the country, in and around Houston — by boat, vehicle and on foot.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>After the waters receded in the town of Crosby, Texas, situated between two Superfund sites, “a sinkhole the size of a swimming pool had opened up and swallowed two cars,” Biesecker wrote. “The acrid smell of creosote filled the air.” The Saturday report also noted that the “EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites.”</div><div>
</div><div>In its unprecedented attack, the EPA accused the AP of leaving out information about the EPA’s other efforts to monitor the toxic land sites.</div><div>
</div><div>“Once again, in an attempt to mislead Americans, the Associated Press is cherry-picking facts, as EPA is monitoring Superfund sites around Houston and we have a team of experts on the ground working with our state and local counterparts responding to Hurricane Harvey,” EPA associate administrator Liz Bowman wrote in a statement. “Anything to the contrary is yellow journalism.”</div><div>
</div><div>The release went on to criticize past reporting by Biesecker, arguing that he has a “history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story.” To illustrate this, the EPA linked to a sensational Breitbart story that claimed the AP faced a “CNN-like scandal” after a July story Biesecker wrote inaccurately characterized an interaction between Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris. Biesecker’s story, based on EPA schedules, initially said the two met for half an hour at a Houston hotel. The AP’sstory turned out to be wrong because they were reporting on inaccurate meeting schedules provided by the EPA. The AP corrected its story when the formal meeting was canceled.</div><div>
</div><div>Besides the personal criticisms it leveled against the report’s author, the EPA’s statement did not point to any specific factual inaccuracies in the AP’s story. The report’s co-author, who reported from on the ground in Texas, was not singled out by the EPA statement. In fact, the EPA appeared to confirm the AP’s report overall, noting that more than a dozen sites have been flooded and that EPA has not investigated them in person — only monitoring the waste sites by plane until the floodwaters receded.</div><div>
</div><div>When pressed by reporters about the aggressive statement, agency officials continued their attack on the media.t</div><div>
</div><div>“We understand you are very focused on our press release; we hope you will apply the same focus to the facts, which include that a national reporter from a wire service publishing [sic] inaccurate and misleading stories about the agency and it’s [sic] staff on the ground,” Bowman wrote in an email to Politico over the weekend. “We think that is more important than who drafted a press release.”</div><div>
</div><div>Earlier this year Trump called the press the “enemy of the American people.” Beyond the damage of his rhetoric, however, Trump’s war on so-called fake news through the official channels of the federal government can only have a chilling effect.</div><div>
</div><div>For its part, the AP standing by its story and its reporters.</div><div>
</div><div>“AP’s exclusive story was the result of on the ground reporting at Superfund sites in and around Houston, as well as AP’s strong knowledge of these sites and EPA practices,” AP’s executive editor Sally Buzbee said in a statement. “We object to the EPA’s attempts to discredit that reporting by suggesting it was completed solely from ‘the comforts of Washington’ and stand by the work of both journalists who jointly reported and wrote the story.”&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Sophia Tesfaye is Salon's deputy politics editor</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>==</div><div>Rightwing news site Breitbart has a new business plan. The self-described home of the “alt-right” started selling fidget spinners this week. The spinners’ centers are decorated with the florid face of its newly returned leader, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, above the hashtag #WAR.</div><div>
</div><div>But the media company is going to have to sell a lot of the $7.95 spinners if it wants to make up for the campaign that is destroying its advertising base.</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump and Bannon parted ways shortly after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump’s refusal to lay the blame for the violence at the feet of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The evening of his departure, Bannon appeared at the offices of Breitbart News and led an editorial meeting, returning directly to the role he had given up to advise Trump and pledging to take down his enemies inside the White House and in the wider Republican party.</div><div>
</div><div>While Bannon helped Trump use the power of the internet to fire up his base, those tools have now been turned against him. His return, and the alt-right’s involvement in Charlottesville, have ignited an online campaign to force companies to pull their ads from Breitbart. It seems to be working.</div><div>
</div><div>Mark Irvine, senior data scientist at search marketing company WordStream, calculates that Breitbart’s ad revenue has declined by 51% since November as advertisers have fled.</div><div>
</div><div>View image on Twitter</div><div>
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