Breitbart

SEE TWO

wow might need to promote him to primary if not uber

this is early on guy mostly, see BREITBART 2 and brbrt tag

capt 619

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bannon trump

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i forgot how key james o'keefe was in launching this bozo into escalator: prominence, explained by richard hofst paranoid style:

acorn attack

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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MMA

September 3, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I want start with a story yesterday, which I love, and it was not getting enough coverage. We can go to the b-roll. President Donald Trump has been very clear that he wants to shrink the map and focus on hemispheric dominance. He was trying to end wars abroad and really focus on our own hemisphere being abused. Yesterday — this is the MAGA doctrine, otherwise known as the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 — President Donald Trump authorized a military strike yesterday of drug runners and drug traffickers of Tren de Aragua that were bringing life-ending drugs to the United States, you can kind of see here in a speedboat.

They're in international waters. I don't know all the legal technicalities here. Obviously, it passed the muster because they authorized it, and they did a drone strike in the Caribbean. Alex, what are your thoughts here? I'm at least thrilled finally that we're using military force in our own hemisphere against people that would have done harm against the American homeland. They actually are a much greater threat, what you are seeing on-screen are a much greater threat than Vladimir Putin. Those drug traffickers would've killed a lot more people than Russian soldiers. Alex Marlow.

ALEX MARLOW (EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, BREITBART): Yeah. You're absolutely right about this, Charlie, and this is just perfect in terms of Trump national security doctrine focusing on our hemisphere first, which — I will tell you, our national security editor at Breitbart News, Frances Martel, she's a Latin American woman, and I'll tell you, this hits such close to home with people who've survived — of ancestry who survived communism in our hemisphere, and have seen Democrat after Democrat and establishment Republican after establishment Republican in this country focus on Europe, focus on the Middle East, and not remember our own hemisphere.

Now we're all aware of the threat of Far East in China, but China's has an encroachment that's taking place into that exact hemisphere, into Central and South America, and so I look at all of this as countering China. But let's be specific about fentanyl and drugs and these gangs that are taking advantage of our open border and have created these industries that bring devastating drugs, the type of stuff that not just ruin lives, that ruin families, ruin communities. They come up into our country, and we've allowed it. We've tolerated it. And Trump comes in one fell swoop, wipes out a bunch of them, sends an unbelievable signal that if you try to bring this poison into America, you're going to face deadly consequences. It is just peak Trump, and I love it.

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no link

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

Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?

By Peter Dreier ,  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.

Breitbart is part of the “paranoid style” 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. 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.

:{

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.}:

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.

Breitbart’s public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.

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 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.”

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.

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. 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).

(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).

Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod. 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.

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.

Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don’t quite know how to categorize Breitbart 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.”

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”.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.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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?

Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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 

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Christopher R. Martin

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html

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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/04/28/breitbartcom-becoming-media-arm-alt-right

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http://www.adweek.com/fishbowldc/breitbart-news-lee-stranahan-quits/117603 2013 male

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/16/union-activist-urges-punch-kick-donald-trump-photo/

drama

http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/09/lee-stranahan-fired-by-breitbart-news-after-being-rehired-what-gives/

3x charm:  http://leestranahan.com/

oh, humor:

My Statement: Why I Have Resigned From Breitbart News

by Lee Stranahan | Apr 1, 2016 | Uncategorized | 10 comments

Tonight I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation.

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.

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:epriebus 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.

That singular goal has been betrayed.

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.

Rather than supporting me, Breitbart News instead published an article by me. 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.”

Still, I stayed.

As his friend, I know Andrew loved steak. Ironic, then, that a new article by Buzzfeed about someone named Milo Yianopoulis should be the steak through the heart of Andrew’s legacy

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.

The article revealed a number of disturbing facts, including that Mr. Yianopoulis is apparently not an American.

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.

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.

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?

No news outlet would stand for it, except possibly Politico, who recently ordered a fleet of Hackbot 9000s from Elon Muck.

I 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.

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.

Anyone at Breitbart who doesn’t follow my lead and have a hysterical hissy fit should be ashamed of themselves.ave

Until that happens, I will be ashamed for them.

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http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/06/16/climate-:{inquisition-:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:exxonmobil-sues-massachusetts-ag-civil-rights-violations/

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

General Healey’s “effort to silence, intimidate, and deter those possessing a particular viewpoint” rises to the level of a claimed 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 while Healey’s public commentary about the company presents an addition due process concern – 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Logan Churchwell is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. You can follow him on

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eg

Mexican Airline Offering Migrants Free Airfare to Texas Border

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.

by LOGAN CHURCHWELL19 May 2016, 4:39 AM PDT2,892

California AG Kamela Harris, U.S. Senate Candidate

California AG Indicts Texas Pipeline Company Tied to ExxonMobil

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.

by LOGAN CHURCHWELL17 May 2016, 2:54 PM PDT14

true the vote irs suit dismissed (delay)

Exxon Climate Change

Texas AG Stands for ExxonMobil’s Speech Rights in Climate Inquisition

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...

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issa ex staff

Kurt Bardella, who had been serving as Breitbart's spokesman, has parted ways with the company, he said in an interview.

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.

Following the incident, Breitbart sent out statements saying it was 100 percent behind its reporter and calling on Lewandowski to apologize, while also publishing posts that seemed to question Fields' account of what happened.

"I resigned," said Bardella, who was formerly a long-time aideto 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."

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Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645#ixzz4AvTGZIfy 

Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook...}:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645

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6. Breitbart’s James Delingpole: NASA, NOAA Scientists Are “Talentless Low-Lives”

On November 30, Breitbart News’ James Delingpole wrote 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.

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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 forced yesterday to share some of his most painful family secrets with the world. This is thanks to a monumentally squalid series of articles 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.

Breitbart’s “scoop” about King came from Vicki Pate, a blogger who runs a truly startling website called “Re-NewsIt!” The site is the kind of typo-ridden bile factory 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.

Pate has had multiple Twitter accounts suspended. When she still had access to Twitter, she used the platform to do things 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 accused his father of “trying to win the race-hoax lottery.”

Pate 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.

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 include “16 Movements Less Ridiculous Than Black Lives Matter” and “Donald Trump Would Be the Real First Black President.” Racial provocation, not rigor, is the goal here.

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 reluctant 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.

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?

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 her own parents 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.

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 told 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.) The Daily News ran multiple stories with headlines like“Rachel Dolezal 2.0? Shaun King, activist for the Black Lives Matter movement, outed as a white man.”

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.

To the surprise of virtually nobody, Breitbart’s crack reporting fell apart almost instantly—but not before King was compelled to disclose 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… declared victory.

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.

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.

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cites stratfor

famines in russia?

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/12/stratfor-russia-economy-hits-perfect-storm/

 JAMES DELINGPOLE 28 Apr 2015640

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

wacko

http://www.breitbart.com/author/dr-susan-berry/

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 brags 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.

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, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets. PVT INTEL

flynt an bannon at groundswell

Not Safe for Work Corporation [1] / By Mark Ames [2], Max Blumenthal [3]

Inside the Collapsing Media Empire of Deceased GOP Sleaze-Peddler Andrew Breitbart

May 5, 2013 |

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation [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.

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.

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 Wired's Noah Shachtman [5] 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.

Some examples:

• The Los Angeles Times [6]: "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."
• Jack Shafer in Reuters [7]: "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."
• Time [8]: "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.
• The Washington Post [9]'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."

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":

"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."

Slate's Dave Weigel [10] quoted that very excerpt in his Breitbart obituary; what's interesting is Weigel's smart decision to edit the next sentence in that quote:

"Today, the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh."

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.

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 collaborated [11] 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.

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.

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.

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.

While pundits gushed over Breitbart's provocations, ignoring race-baiting blunders like the Shirley Sherrod affair and whitewashing his increasingly unhinged behavior – [12] he bellowed at Occupy Wall Street protesters shortly before dropping dead — 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?

Breitbart's Doomsday Machine

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.

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:

• 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;
• 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, The Daily Currant [13];
• Also in March, Breitbart's most famous protege, video smear-artist and convicted criminal James O'Keefe, wasforced [14] 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.O'Keefe's work has been underwritten by everyone from billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel [15] to the billionaire Koch brothers [16] and the billionaireFoster Friess [17];
• 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.

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.

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.

"A Major Letdown"

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.

Looking haggard and swollen as he stood before the CPAC audience, slurring his words, Breitbart described [18] the nefarious plot that his bombshell video would soon expose, bringing down the Obama presidency:

"the rest of us slept as they plotted, and they plotted, and they plotted and they oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in the Annenberg Challenge 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!"

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.

Less than a week after Breitbart's heart popped like a water balloon, the heirs to his legacy were revealed on Fox News' Sean Hannity Show [19]. 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. Before an utterly underwhelmed and clearly disappointed Hannity, the duo unveiled the dramatic Obama video.

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.

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.

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 program [20]:

"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."

Even Glenn Beck was sorely disappointed [21] — and his bar is notoriously low — telling his radio listeners:

"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.'"

And from there, it's been all downhill for Breitbart.com.

Indentured Servitude Limbo

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.

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. 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, adding [22] that she too would gladly pull her pants down and defile their corpses if given the chance:

"I'd drop trou and do it too."

Andrew Breitbart stood by Loesch, but he was alone; even Rush Limbaugh denounced the corpse defiling.

Problems with Loesch only got worse after Breitbart's demise, culminating in a lawsuit she filed in late 2012, accusing [23] 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

The Dorm Troll

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.

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. Another photograph [24] 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.

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.

"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."

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,including former President Thabo Mbeki [25], 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.

It was while working for Leon that Pollak met his future wife, Julia Bertlesmann.

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.

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.

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":

"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 that our Constitution, and my experience in South Africa, warned against."

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.

As one former Harvard student described the situation to us:

"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.

"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."

It was at Harvard, where he had enrolled at law school, that Pollak authored a new book denouncing Obama's election victory, "Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter: How Rhetoric Won The 2008 Presidential Election." [26]

"He goes up against someone big and tries to puff himself up," the former classmate told us. "That's kind of his formula."

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, Raymond and Naomi Pollak [27]. 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.

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.

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 "Guide To The Perplexed," [28] which still stands as a record of his strange college years, Pollak blogged critically, almost obsessively about Kennedy.

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.

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."

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."

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 [29] (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.

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.

Genocide Ben

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.

"I know this sounds pathetic, but I've never been to a rock concert" --Ben Shapiro, June 17, 2011

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.

"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"

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.

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.

"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"

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, this [30] 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:

"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?"

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.

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.

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 genocide [31] and a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Here is Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large at Breitbart, advocating genocide [32]:

"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. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. 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. It's time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn't a solution."

Actually it is genocide. And it's the reason why Ben Shapiro came to be known as "Genocide Ben."

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.

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.

Last Refuge Of A Daily Caller Scoundrel

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:

• John Nolte, Breitbart.com editor and blogger. Has repeatedly called for murdering teachers and mothers. During Occupy protests in November 2011, Nolte tweeted [33], "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 bywriting [34], "whoever this little girl's stage mom is… she should be murdered." When police violently cracked down on Occupy protests, Nolte was sexually aroused [35]: "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 sniffThere's just something about a police baton swung towards the skull of #OWS [36] that sniff chokes a man up.#ItsSoBeautiful [37]".
• Jeff Dunetz: Breitbart.com blogger nicknamed "Yid With Lid," Dunetz, has accused practically everything alive or dead of "anti-Semitism", from Media Matters and George Soros [38], toPresident Obama [39], and even corporations like Delta Airlines.
• Kurt Schlichter, Breitbart.com columnist. Advocated mass-murdering [40] peaceful American protesters on board a flotilla sent to Gaza to protest Israel's blockade; urged [41] conservatives to arm themselves and prepare for war against the left because "Leftists want us dead. D-E-A-D."
• Ali Akbar, Breitbart columnist [42] and head of Breitbart.com-associated [43] outfit the National Bloggers Club [44], is a convicted felon [45] who was jailed and put on probation for four years for credit card fraud, vehicle burglary, and intent to commit theft.
• Brandon Darby, FBI informant [46] who infiltrated young anarchist protest groups and ratted them out, 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 corpse [47] was fished out of a lake, his arms bound and his mouth duct-taped; police ruled it a suicide [48]. 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.
• James O'Keefe,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.
• Lee Stranahan: Breitbart.com blogger who spent years peddling photographs [49] specializing in many of Genocide Ben's favorite fetishes, including bondage [50] and S&M [51], and Ben's fave,schoolgirl lesbian fetishes [52]. Stranahan covered the Steubenville rape trial for Breitbart.com, tweeting out his belief that the rape of the 16-year-old schoolgirl was not "brutal" [53] 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 outed [54] the name of a witness who claimed she'd been sexually abused by Martin's killer.

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.

Recently, the Breitbart.com Asylum welcomed another inmate:Matthew Boyle [55], 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.

A Dominican prosecutor accused [56] the Daily Caller of paying the prostitutes $5,000 to lie about Sen. Menendez and the site has since distanced itself from that fiasco.

The author of that smear, Matthew Doyle, today proudly describes his current job as "investigative journalist for Breitbart News Network [57]."

See more stories tagged with:

breitbart [58]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/inside-collapsing-media-empire-deceased-gop-sleaze-peddler-andrew-breitbart

Links:

[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

Color of Change claims another scalp: Pat Buchanan indefinitely ‘suspended’ by MSNBC

Posted By Steven Nelson On 7:53 PM 01/10/2012 In Politics | 5 Comments

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.

The group’s leaders launched a campaign in October aiming to have Buchanan, who they dubbed a “white supremacist,” removed from MSNBC programming.

“Amazing news!” a Color of Change email alert announced on Tuesday evening. “Pat Buchanan and his white supremacist ideology will no longer be on TV.”

“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.’”

On Monday evening, Buchanan denied 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.”  Instead, he cited health issues for his absence.

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.”

The group similarly succeeded in a campaign to have conservative website mogul Andrew Breitbart banned from the front page of The Huffington Post, after Breitbart called the organization’s co-founder Van Jones a “cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak. And a commie. And an eco-fraudster.”

*Follow Steven on Twitter*

Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/10/color-of-change-claims-another-scalp-pat-buchanan-indefinitely-suspended-by-msnbc/

Michael Patrick Leahy is a Breitbart News contributor, Editor of Broadside Books’ Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, and author of Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.

eg

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 conservative grassroots were really directed at "consultants whose only goal is to make money versus the grassroots."

In his comments on Tuesday, Breitbart News reported that "[a]ccording to our source, Shields stated that he is totally eager and willing to remove 'the professional right' from the GOP.  '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."

On Friday, Spicer offered this initial clarification of those comments:

"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. . . 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."

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."

Spicer also took exception to the Breitbart News characterization 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."

"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]?"

On Tuesday, Shields promised the crowd of 40 listening to his remarks at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington that "[professional right] is a term I'll be using often in the coming months."  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 ."  SEE TP mercenaries, /ideological entrepreneurs like Odom, sam adams tp express etc

we , documetary video Hating B

omg: "

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.  They caught ACORN employees telling them how to cover up felonious activities on their tax forms.  Then, in 2010, there was the infamous and fabricated incident where Reps. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) and John Lewis (D-GA) alleged that the ‘n-word’ was hurled at them during the fight over health care reform.  In that same year, Breitbart exposed USDA official Shirley Sherrod for her racially charged remarks about discriminating against white farmers – which lead to her termination.  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.  As a result, a Republican, Bob Turner, won his seat in a special election held in September of 2011.  It’s the first time a Republican held that congressional district since 1923.

Spiering reported that during the making of the documentary – Andrew would regard the film crew as his “bodyguards.”  Furthermore, “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/

How An Austrian Blogger's Report That Paul Krugman Filed For Bankruptcy Ended Up On Boston.com

Blog››› March 11, 2013 6:01 PM EDT ››› JOE STRUPP

Web News Experts: Bogus Krugman Story Shows Dangers of "Mechanical Aggregation"

The bogus story that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy appeared on Boston.com, the sister website of The Boston Globe, through a third-party content provider that posts content without editorial approval and provides such content to more than 200 web outlets.

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. The blog has since deleted its post and all posts from the author appear to have been removed from Boston.com.

The false story, which had its roots in a satire by the website Daily Currant, was subsequently picked up by the conservative site Breitbart.com, a move later criticized by Krugman himself and numerous news outlets from The Atlantic to Politico. Breitbart.com has deleted the post, with its author blaming Boston.com, which he says he "trusted" for the story.

But according to Boston.com, they played no role in the creation of that post, an editorial mechanism which troubles some observers.

Ron Agrella, editor of Boston.com, said the item was placed on his site by the content provider financialcontent.com on March 7, without approval or review from either Boston.com or the Globe.

He said he reached out to financialcontent.com at roughly 9 a.m. EDT today to have the item removed. It was removed at 11:34 a.m. EDT.

"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."

Financialcontent.com had picked up the item from an Austria-based business blog, Prudent Investor, without any editorial review of its own, according to financialcontent.com CEO Wing Yu. 

"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."

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.

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."

Straka said he picked up the item from the Austrian online magazine Format, which he says posted it without any notice that it was satire. Straka said he posted the item on his own website on March 7 and removed it within an hour after Format advised him it was bogus.

But by then the damage had been done, as financialcontent.com and thus Boston.com had already picked up the post. Asked why he did not inform financialcontent.com that he removed the item because it was bogus, Straka said, "I do not always know where" the content is picked up.

Agrella said financialcontent.com is one of a dozen content providers that are able to post content on the Boston.com site without Globe or Boston.com review. He said Boston.com pays a fee to each provider, but did not disclose the amount.

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 site's web brand. The Krugman item appeared on the financialcontent.com page that provides market information for Boston.com.

"The page is run by them," Agrella said of financialcontent.com. "They have a multitude of partners that are pulled in by a variety of blogs."

Yu criticized 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.

"It seemed that Breitbart should have attributed it to the right outlet," Yu said. "It should have been attributed to Prudent Investor."

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.

"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."

Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, and a former Globe ombudsman, offered similar concerns.

"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.

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 for the moment, stating they are "on probation for lack of a better word," and described their content as "on hold."

Agrella called the bogus story appearing on his site "obviously a concern of ours," but also said no changes in procedures were planned.

"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."

http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/2013/03/11/how-an-austrian-bloggers-report-that-paul-krugm/193006

==

punked on friends of hamas hagel escalator

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-right-wing-media-tricked-republicans-fearing-group-doesnt-even-exist

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

echo:

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/drudge-and-tucker-carlson-arent-only-clowns-circus-8-ridiculous-right-wing

breitbart carlson

pal obit: in WA Times

...

• from a “pop culture-infused wannabe hipster” to the bete noire of what he accurately refers to as the “Democrat-Media-Complex.” Because Andrew 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 Andrew wanted to have with everyone he knew, and he wanted to know everyone.

The chapter that presents a side that not enough people know about is titled “Breakthrough,” and in it Andrew 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 Tulane and had one of the most famous cases of ADHD in America, but Andrew was nothing if he wasn��t well read.

Andrew 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.

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 Juan Williams.

If you remember, in October of 2010, Mr. Williams 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 Andrew: “We’re going to war for Juan Williams.”

...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/26/andrew-breitbart-leading-the-charge-against-the-le/

The New York Times by media writer David Carr. Carr profiles the recently deceased conservative author and editor Andrew Breitbart.

...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.)...

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Many of his familiars called him a “happy warrior,” but worried about his health because he never seemed to unplug.

“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,”

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.

“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.”

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.

As is often the case, there is no more ferocious advocate than a convert.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.��

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.

“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.

“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.”

His expertise was less technical than intuitive, with a mad scientist’s touch for curating and packaging news that made it especially clickable.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.

“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.”

But he was not done. Mr. Breitbart was never done.

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.

“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!”

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.

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.

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.”

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/business/media/the-life-and-death-of-andrew-breitbart.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

matt tabibi RS

So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.

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.

For instance, it would be dishonest not to tip a hat to him for that famous scene whe, and held up the entire event by standing at the lectern and congratulating himself at length, before Weiner could let the humiliating healing begin.

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 with a group of black voters in Florida in 2008 – Breitbart could legitimately claim to have the biggest, hairiest balls on earth. ��

Watching 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.

Furthermore, the ACORN videos 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."

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.

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 "media-Democrat industrial complex" (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.

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.

* See the following Breitbart quote: “I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect... ‘You cocksucker.’ I love that kind of language.”

UPDATE: 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 Rolling Stoneoffices 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.���

Those last ones to me were the most interesting because that quote is lifted directly from Breitbart��s own obit of Ted Kennedy, 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.”

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 got a kick out of the nasty things people said about him. 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.

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, hack into private web sites, tell lies in an attempt to get his enemies fired, andincite readers to threats against his targets and their families, includingdeath threats. 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.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-breitbart-death-of-a-douche-20120301#ixzz1pIvIe0nn

SW:  very basic

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 governor signed on March 11. Big national unions, both major political parties, the Tea Party, and Andrew Breitbart have gotten involved. Democratic state senators fled the state 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, including Michigan and Ohio.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained

GW gaff not corrected

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/breitbart-error-global-warming

Mon Sep. 19, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

On September 6, an article on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site announced that the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change had been debunked once and for all. Nature, "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.'"

The article, written by "nationally recognized financial writer" Chriss W. Street, then revisited the smear campaign known as "Climategate" (which had implicated Nature) and asserted that the study was "a tectonic rejection by academia" of international efforts to combat climate change.

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.

foia:

On Monday, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site posted "exclusive, explosive" video 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 "taxpayer-funded courses in union violence". Now, like many a sensational video linked to Breitbart, this latest scoop has disintegrated in the bright light of day. Crooks and Liars has the definitive takedown, 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."

see summary of okeefe

As Breitbart told the AP, "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?" here. Below, their stings to date

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/james-okeefe-andrew-breitbart-videos

Matt Drudge began the email-based newsletter called Report from an apartment in Hollywood, California, 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 Miami Beach, Florida, with help from Andrew Breitbart, who assists in story selection and headline writing.^[10] Breitbart, who describes himself as "Matt Drudge’s bitch",^[11] works the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report,^[12] as well as running his own website (breitbart.com), and another website (BigHollywood.com) providing a conservative perspective for people in the Los Angeles entertainment industry.^[13]

^^

http://biggovernment.com/category/environment/

enron and BP scheme, reported from Cancun w/ AFP

"

��

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.

But it was the laundry-room that took the cake.

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.

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.

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.

As my friend, colleague, and traveling companion Melissa Clouthier said of this enviro extravaganza:

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.

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!

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.

..."  [Note; racist, gw as faith, imposed commie austerity, Luddite (anti-progress)

comment:

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!!!!!

^----^

^comment ^on ^epa ^looking ^at ^a ^kind ^of ^silicone:

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart

keynoted for Sam Adams awards, alleged connected to Santelli

fox?

newsmax founded by chris ruddy, scaife funded? related to floyd brown

ruddy did hit on clinton? beware similar name guy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html

palin corrupt bastard media charge bogus http://mediamatters.org/research/201011010035

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/06/bob-etheridge-video defense backfires

http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201001270043

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200912150025

Big Falsehoods: An updated guide to Andrew Breitbart's lies, smears, and distortions

July 21, 2010 3:24 pm ET — 9 Comments

Following the dissolution of Andrew Breitbart's smear of former Obama administration official Shirley Sherrod, Media Mattersprovides an updated look at how his sensationalist stories have been based on speculation, gross distortions, and outright falsehoods.

The "video evidence" of Shirley Sherrod's "racism" (NEW)

"Nationwide ACORN child prostitution investigation" (UPDATED)

Platform for anti-gay Jennings smears

Breitbart-promoted O'Keefe Census tape features selective editing (NEW)

Breitbart-promoted video falsely accuses Democrats of reconciliation hypocrisy (NEW)

Wild accusations over Gladney case

Breitbart's websites make baseless claim that NEA engaged in lawbreaking

Bertha Lewis' nonexistent White House visit

The Maoist Christmas tree ornaments

The ACORN "document dump"

False claims of community organizers "praying" to Obama

Breitbart confirms he was duped by O'Keefe and the ACORN pimp hoax

March 02, 2010 5:40 am ET

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.

That's right -- Breitbart didn't know what was on the tapes. Take a few seconds to let the implications of that confession sink in, and what it means to Breitbart's already dented credibility.

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 claimed he had told "the truth" every step of the way about the controversial ACORN clips and bragged that "[t]hroughout the ACORN story I applied my conscience to the material."

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.

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.

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 once touted 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.

In a video interview posted Monday at Crooks and Liars, Stark Reports, as well as The Brad Blog, 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.)

Essentially, Breitbart claims he was duped like everyone else who saw the ACORN clips created by O'Keefe. He was duped because at the outset, the misleading clips contain cut-away shots filmed outdoors, 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.)

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.

The dressed-as-a-pimp storyline was one Breitbart, O'Keefe, and others eagerly pushed last fall. And it was one the press quickly embraced. (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 girlfriendfrom 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.

But it was all a hoax. And for weeks now, ever since the trick was highlighted by blogger 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 The Washington Times, Breitbart specifically claimed O'Keefe had been "dressed as a pimp" while receiving tax advice from ACORN workers.

That claim was categorically false.

He's been laboring to explain why he never sought a single correction last year when an avalanche of news outlets erroneously reported O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp inside ACORN offices.

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 might pop up.

At least now, thanks to Stark, we finally have Breitbart's unequivocal admission: It was all O'Keefe's fault.

From the Stark interview emphasis added; full transcript [here]:

Hello to anyone that thinks that I was misleading. I did not know that there was a discrepancy between the title sequence -- 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 there is a title sequence and it doesn't reflect what he was wearing when he was in there. But he still represented himself as a pimp.

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."

Breitbart may have tried to shift the blame, but the admission was a devastating one. After all, he's the guy who won't stop bragging 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 didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

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.

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?

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 knew 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.

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 single conversation with O'Keefe about the pimp outfit prior to the release of the videos?)

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 attacked the attendees as "common street thugs, the dregs of society.")

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 does 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 spreadthe confusion.)

As the blogger Digby recently explained:

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.

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, he didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

...

http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001

Updated: July 22, 2010

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

wikipedia

Early life

Breitbart is the adopted son of Gerald and Arlene Breitbart, a restaurant owner and banker respectively, and grew up in a family with secular liberal views, in upscale Brentwood, Los Angeles. He was raised Jewish (his adoptive mother had converted to Judaism when marrying his adoptive father).^[7][8] 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 Hispanic.^[7] He changed his political views after experiencing an "epiphany" during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and now describes himself as "a Reagan conservative" with libertarian sympathies.^[4]

Breitbart earned a B.A. in American studies from Tulane University in 1991, graduating with "no sense of [his] future whatsoever".^[9] His early jobs included a stint at cable channel E! Entertainment Television, working for the company's online magazine, and some time in film production.^[8]

[edit] Public life

[edit] Authorship, research and reporting

In 1995 Breitbart saw the Drudge Report and was so impressed that he emailed Matt Drudge. Breitbart said, "I thought what he was doing was by far the coolest thing on the Internet. And I still do."^[6] Breitbart described himself as "Matt Drudge’s bitch"^[10] and selected and posted links to other news wire sources. Later Matt Drudge introduced him to Arianna Huffington (when she was still a Republican)^[8] and Breitbart subsequently assisted her (after she became a progressive) in creating her website.

Breitbart's work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online and the Weekly Standard Online, among others. He writes a weekly column for The Washington Times, which also appears at Real Clear Politics. Breitbart also co-wrote the book Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon with Mark Ebner, a book that is highly critical of U.S. celebrity culture.^[11] On January 19, 2011, the conservative gay rights group GOProud announced Breitbart had joined its Advisory Council.^[12]

In April 2011 Grand Central Publishing released Breitbart's book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, in which he discusses his own political evolution and the part he took in the rise of new media, most notably at the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post.

In June 2011 Breitbart was involved in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, posting photographs of Weiner on his websites.^[13]

[edit] Commentaries

Breitbart has appeared as a commentator on Real Time with Bill Maher and Dennis Miller. In 2004 he was a guest commentator on Fox News Channel's morning show and frequently appears as a guest panelist on Fox News's late night program, Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld. Breitbart also appeared as a commentator in the 2004 documentary Michael Moore Hates America.^[14]

On October 22, 2009, Breitbart appeared on the C-SPAN program Washington Journal. He gave his opinions on the mainstream media, Hollywood, the Obama Administration and his personal political views, having heated debates with several callers.^[4]

In the hours immediately following Senator Ted Kennedy's death, Breitbart called Kennedy a "villain", a "duplicitous bastard", a "prick"^[15] and "a special pile of human excrement."^[16][17]

In February 2010 Breitbart received the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. During his acceptance speech, he responded directly to accusations by New York Times reporter Kate Zernike that Jason Mattera, a young conservative activist, had been using "racial tones" in his allusions to President Barack Obama, and had spoken in a "Chris Rock voice." From the podium, Breitbart called Zernike "a despicable human being" for having made such allegations about Mattera's New York accent.^[18]

[edit] Activism

Main article: Tea party movement

Breitbart often appears as a speaker at Tea Party movement 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.^[19] Breitbart later involved himself in a controversy over homophobic and alleged racial slurs being used at a March 20, 2010 rally at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. by asserting that slurs were never used, and that "It was a set-up" by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party. Breitbart offered to donate $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund "for any audio/video footage of the N-word being hurled", claiming that they made it up. Breitbart insisted Congressman John Lewis 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."^[20][21]

[edit] Websites

I'm committed to the destruction of the old media guard. And it's a very good business model.

“

”

�� Andrew Breitbart, quoted by the Associated Press, August 3, 2010^[22]

Breitbart has launched a number of websites, including Breitbart.com,^[23] BigHollywood.com,^[24] BigGovernment.com,^[25] BigJournalism.com,^[26] and BigPeace.com.^[27]

Breitbart launched his first website as a news site; it is sometimes linked to by the Drudge Report and other websites. It features wire stories from the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Fox News, PR Newswire, and U.S. Newswire, as well as direct links to a number of major international newspapers. Its Blog & "Network" links tend to run to the right within the U.S. political spectrum (e.g., National Review and Townhall.com). The site also features a search engine powered by Lingospot and a finance channel powered by FinancialContent. In 2007, Breitbart launched a video blog, Breitbart.tv.^[28]

In 2008 Breitbart launched the website "Big Hollywood," a "group blog" driven by some who work within Los Angeles, featuring contributions from a variety of writers, including politically conservative entertainment-industry professionals.^[29] The site, an outgrowth of the column "Big Hollywood" that Breitbart wrote for the Washington Times, addresses issues facing conservatives who work in Hollywood.^[30] In 2009, the site used audio from a secretly recorded conference call to accuse the National Endowment of the Arts of encouraging artists to create work in support of Barack Obama's domestic policy agenda.^[31][32]

Breitbart launched BigGovernment.com on September 10, 2009.^[33] He hired Mike Flynn, a former government affairs specialist at Reason Foundation,^[34] as Editor-in-Chief of Big Government.^[35] The site premiered with hidden camera video footage taken by Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe at Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now offices in various cities, attracting nationwide attention resulting in the ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy.

In January 2010, Breitbart launched Big Journalism. He told Mediaite:^[36] "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 Michael A. Walsh, a former journalism professor and Time magazine music critic.^[36] It is now currently edited by Dana Loesch. The site has a fictional contributor named "Retracto, the Correction Alpaca" who posts items requesting corrections from the traditional media.^[37]

BigPeace.com debuted July 4, 2010. The site covers topics such as international issues and foreign policy, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, Islamic extremism, espionage, border security, and energy issues.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Controversies

This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material; see the discussion on the talk page. (December 2010)

[edit] Anthony Weiner

Main article: Anthony Weiner sexting scandal

On May 28, 2011, Breitbart posted a sexually explicit photo on his BigJournalism website of New York Representative Anthony Weiner obtained through Weiner's Twitter account.^[38] 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 Opie and Anthony, though Breitbart stated that the photo was published without his permission.^[39] Weiner subsequently resigned from his congressional seat on June 21, 2011.

[edit] Shirley Sherrod

Main article: Resignation of Shirley Sherrod

On July 19, 2010, Breitbart posted two short videos showing excerpts of a speech by Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP fundraising dinner in March 2010. The videos ensuing controversy resulted in Sherrod being fired from the United States Department of Agriculture 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.^[40][41][42] The NAACP stated that the video excerpts aired by Breitbart were deliberately deceptive and said that he had "snookered" the group.^[41][42] Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack later apologized to Sherrod and offered her a new job.^[43] In 2011, Sherrod brought suit against Breitbart for defamation.^[44]

[edit] ACORN undercover videos

Main article: ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy

Breitbart was also involved in the 2009 ACORN video controversy. Hannah Giles^[45][46] posed as a prostitute seeking assistance while James O'Keefe portrayed her boyfriend, and clandestinely videotaped meetings with ACORN staff.^[47] Subsequent criminal investigations by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office and the California Attorney General found the videos were heavily edited in an attempt to make ACORN's responses "appear more sinister",^[48][49][50] and contributed to the group's demise.^[51][52] Breitbart then provided a forum for O'Keefe on his BigGovernment.com website^[53] and defended his actions on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel program.^[54]

[edit] GOProud

Breitbart has also been embroiled in a controversy within the conservative movement related to the participation of gay group GOProud in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual conference held in Washington, D.C. by the American Conservative Union. 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 GOProud until he stepped down in the wake of the group's inadvertent [citation] outing of a senior Rick Perry aide.^{[55] [56]}

^==^

Mother Jones

— By Kate Sheppard

Fri Feb. 4, 2011 3:00 AM PST

Last June, Glenn Beck paused in the middle of a rant about the economy and climate on his television show 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.

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.

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.

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...

��

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/02/koch-brothers-media-beck-greenpeace

^---------^

I mentioned this a couple of days ago, but I like Mario Piperni’s spin on bat-crap crazy, Breitbart’s manifesto…

Mario Piperni

“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.”

_Morpheus [The Matrix]

Andrew Breibart addressed a Tea Party group last week and had thisto say.

“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.”

“They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. ”

A fine example of the dangerous and irresponsible dribble, and nonsense which Obama and Dems have been dealing with for the last three years.  These people are clearly unhinged.

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.  The right has chosen the blue pill.

Related articles

• Andrew Breitbart’s Dangerous Insanity: The Video (slog.thestranger.com)
• Breitbart’s psychotic break (dailykos.com)
• Breitbart On Conservatives Vs Liberals: “We Outnumber Them…And We Have The Guns” (alan.com)
• Breitbart on Liberals: ‘We Have the Guns’ (newser.com)
• Civil War? Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’ (kaystreet.wordpress.com)

Related articles

• Civil War? Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’ (kaystreet.wordpress.com)

http://kaystreet.wordpress.com/category/andrew-breitbart/

For those who are interested, including members of the press who were struck dumb at the press conference, here is a brief compilation of Breitbart’s reportorial resume, replete with dishonesty and deliberate disinformation. Feel free to offer these in response to Breitbart’s future challenges. We will await his profuse and heartfelt apologies.

1) ACORN: Breibart’s web site was the central agency for disseminating videos that were later shown to have been heavily edited in order to convey a fictional scenario that smeared a social service organization that had for years been assisting low income citizens with financial advice and voter registration. Every investigation of the affair exonerated ACORN and affirmed the deception of the videos. Breitbart’s henchman, James O’Keefe, is currently being sued by former ACORN employee, Juan Carlos Vera.

2) Shirley Sherrod: In this episode, Breitbart was responsible for slandering a USDA employee as a racist. Lately he has been defending himself by saying that he had included the “redemptive arc” of her story that revealed her innocence. But let’s not forget how he originally portrayed the situation:

“In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions. [...] In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer.”

That is a pretty clear accusation of discriminatory behavior on the part of a federal employee. And it is also a lie. Sherrod did not discriminate against the farmer, as Breitbart later acknowledged, and the story she told was of an incident that occurred 20 years before she held a federal post. Nevertheless, Breitbart’s reaction at the time was another demonstration of his paranoid Narcissism as he whined, “As difficult as it probably was for her, it’s been difficult for me as well.” Poor guy. Sherrod is currently suing Breitbart.

3) Clinton Plotting a Tea Party Attack: Breitbart published a story with no evidence, about an alleged conspiracy that never came to pass:

“Big Government has learned that Clintonistas are plotting a ‘push/pull’ strategy. They plan to identify 7-8 national figures active in the tea party movement and engage in deep opposition research on them. If possible, they will identify one or two they can perhaps ‘turn’, either with money or threats, to create a mole in the movement. The others will be subjected to a full-on smear campaign.”

Also never coming to pass…a retraction. This story bubbled up through the media like much of Breitbart’s fiction, eventually getting coverage from Fox Nation.

4) Jason Mattera’s Punking of Grayson and Franken: Jason Mattera, who later became editor of Human Events, was employed to run a couple of “ambush” interviews that were posted on Breitbart’s web site. One interview targeted Rep. Alan Grayson and castigated him for his support of bill that funded a program to prevent child abuse. The other interview was directed at Sen Al Franken who was attacked for supporting student health and school safety. In both cases Mattera twisted the purpose of the legislation into something unrecognizable and patently false. Expect more of this because, as Breitbart says in his book, Righteous Indignation, “Ambush journalism is the most valuable kind of journalism.”

5) University of Missouri Labor Class: In another phony video sting, Breitbart published a video of the proceedings of a class on the history of labor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. As usual, the video was a deceitful mash-up that misrepresented the professors and students as supporting violent labor activity. The twist here is that it was Breitbart’s one-time friend Glenn Beck who published an accounting of the video deception and vindicated the professors. As a bonus intrigue, the party from whom Breitbart got the UM video is identified only as Insurgent Visuals. That, however, may be a ruse to disguise Breitbart’s long-time partner in crime, James O’Keefe.

6) Beck’s Back Alley Snitch: Speaking of Glenn Beck, in happier times when the two weren’t feuding, Breibart was the source for numerous Beck offensives. He provided Beck with scandalous material on Van Jones who, at the time, was a White House adviser on environmental initiatives. Beck lauded Breitbart, saying…

“You know where the great journalists of our time are? Andrew Breitbart. [...] You were the only one, besides watchdogs, that were really aggressively working behind the scenes with us on Van Jones.”

The same thing occurred with Yosi Sergant, communications director for the National Endowment for the Arts. Breitbart went after him and provided the data to Beck, who said…

“This is again another Breitbart story, where the NEA communications director reached out and said, hey, listen, we have to be very careful with our language here.”

In both cases the information provided by Breitbart was vague and/or untrue, but both Jones and Sergant were jettisoned — just as Sherrod was — by a nervous White House for violations that were either false or greatly exaggerated.

7) Democrats Plotted to Blame Tea Party for Slaughter: Breitbart’s site featured an article that made the sensationalist claim that Democrats devised a plan to blame the Tea Party for the tragic shooting in Tucson, AZ. The allegation consisted of a single, unidentified source who merely offered his own opinion that the massacre could be pinned on Tea Partiers. There was no allegation of a conspiracy or even of any discussions of such a plan by anyone connected to the Democratic Party. But that didn’t stop Breitbart from posting the story with an irresponsibly provocative headline.

8) The Abbie Boudreau Affair: In one of the most bizarre adventures by the James O’Keefe gang, they set out to lure CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau into a floating love nest to embarrass her in some manner that was never really explained. While Breitbart did not act as the agent for this prank, he did provide a platform for O’Keefe to publish his defense after having been outed by an accomplice. O’Keefe managed to take a situation in which he appeared to be a revolting pervert and make it worse by saying about Boudreau…

“She would have had to consent before being filmed and she was not going to be faux ‘seduced’ unless she wanted to be.”

Considering the fact that he never sought the consent of his previous video victims, why should we accept his assertion that he was going to start seeking consent now? Even more troubling is his implication that his intended victim “wanted” it. O’Keefe is resorting to the disgusting defense that rapists offer about their victims. And Breitbart permitted this to be published on his site.

9) GEICO Gecko – Tea Party Crasher? Breitbart’s BigGovernment blog posted a mind-numbingly stupid article that accused Ricky Gervais, the actor/comedian and voice of the GEICO Gecko of disparaging the Tea Party in a profanity-laced voice-mail. The only problem is that Gervais had nothing to do with it. It was an actor (D.C. Douglas) who worked for GEICO a couple of years prior. But it wasn’t enough to smear Gervais with insinuations, Breitbart also posted a picture of the Gecko atop a table that was adorned with a poster of President Obama sporting a Hitler mustache. What that had to do with the story is anyone’s guess. It just appeared to be a gratuitous slap at the President while falsely slandering Gervais.

10) Racism: Breitbart is obsessed with the theme of racism. He is convinced that the charge is thrown around cavalierly, and mostly to insult Tea Partiers and himself. He embarked on a campaign to prove that congressman and civil rights hero, John Lewis, was lying when he said that he had been the victim of racial epithets when attending a congressional rally. He regards the Shirley Sherrod incident as an example of the racism demonstrated by the NAACP. But when discussing allegations of his own prejudice, Breitbart said this to radio host Adam Carolla:

“Can I prove that I’m not a racist toward Hispanics? Did you ever see Moscow on the Hudson? Remember Maria Conchita Alonso in that? The things I did to myself as a teenager prove that I’m not a racist

==

What Happened To Breitbart’s Millions?

BY MATT OSBORNE ON SEPTEMBER 23, 2013

A few months before his death, Andrew Breitbart secured nearly ten million dollars in venture capital from two sources. One of them was reportedly his friend Aubrey Chernick, a right wing Israel-booster who made his fortune in the national security world and uses his millions to subsidize Islamophobia. So what has happened to Breitbart’s Muslim-bashing millions since his death? We ask because asShirley Sherrod’s defamation caseadvances to its inevitable conclusion, no one seems to want to own that money anymore.

Shirley Sherrod has clearly been defamed by malicious and sloppy journalism. But U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon recently said he was “mystified” that attorneys for the Breitbart estate do not seem to know whether Breitbart had a will when he died. In a hearing on Sherrod’s suit against the Breitbart estate, the law firm of Katten Muchin appeared unsure that they even represent Andrew’s fortune. Calling the attorneys “evasive and uncooperative,” Leon read them the riot act and allowed thirty days for them to “‘disabuse’ him of the notion that the defense or the defendants were being uncooperative in the case” before he holds them in contempt of court:

“This court expects a law firm of the stature of Katten Muchin to not be a party to games like this, at least as the court sees it,” Judge Leon said.

“If he died intestate, if he had no will, I want to know it. Point blank,” Judge Leon added.

The full story was posted on September 11th at Law360.com, where you must register to read it. Breitbart News President and CEO Larry Solov managed to draw Judge Leon’s attention at the hearing, and not in a good way. As the head of what remains of Andrew’s blog empire, Solov is the only person who seems at all eager to defend the estate anymore. Katten Muchin apparently wants no part of a losing defamation case.

Wednesday’s hearing started badly from the outset for Breitbart’s side. Breitbart executive and former general counsel Laurence Solov, who attended the hearing and sat initially at the bar, was told by Judge Leon to remove himself after admitting he was not an attorney on the D.C. bar or a legal representative of the party in the dispute.

“What is he doing here?” Judge Leon asked.

“Step back,” he added, telling Solov to sit in the seats reserved for the public.

Sherrod’s lawsuit has proceeded slowly thanks to a series of motions regarding the John Doe in Georgia who provided Breitbart with the video clip of Sherrod. After Judge Leon granted a defense motion to let John Doe answer Sherrod’s attorney’s questions anonymously, her legal team finally got answers to how the clip of her talking about an interview with a white farmer was presented in such a misleading manner.

In a BU exclusive, we have that document (.PDF). John Doe admits that he did not watch the entire speech, so he did not know the context of the clip or Sherrod’s story about the white farmer when he told Andrew Breitbart about it. After two failed attempts to transmit the entire video to Breitbart employee Larry O’Connor, John Doe finally succeeded:

On July 18, Mr. O’Connor told me that the file I had sent on July 14 was of poor quality because of background noise and that we needed to capture it again. I repeated what I had done earlier and also captured the part of the speech where Mrs. Sherrod makes statements about lifetime government jobs being available at the USDA. I sent both video excerpts to Mr. O’Connor through yousendit.com. The following day, on July 19, I mailed a DVD copy of the entire speech to Mr. O’Connor by UPS for delivery on July 20 and sent him an email with the tracking number. From that point on, I had no further role in providing information to Mr. Breitbart or Mr. O’Connor. Like the rest of the public, I read the commentary for the first time when it was published on Mr. Breitbart’s blog.

Mrs. Sherrod’s Complaint contains many incorrect factual assertions about my role in this matter, which was limited to the contacts described above with Mr. Breitbart and Mr. O’Connor. The allegation that I inserted “inaccurate text” into an “edited video segment” of her speech and posted this “edited” video on YouTube is false. I inserted nothing into the excerpts, nor do I posses the skill to perform such a task.

In denying Sherrod’s “incorrect factual assertions” this way, John Doe leaves Larry O’Connor and Andrew Breitbart as the principals responsible for defaming her. O’Connor, who is responsible for the Protective Order for John Doe’s name, was clearly an employee of Breitbart, who bore executive responsibility for the inaccurate text and the clip’s presentation without context. Whatever is left of Andrew in a legal sense, that entity is what must be held to account at trial. But so far, no one wants to admit that any such entity exists.

Perhaps the legal strategy here is to use up Andrew’s millions by extending litigation for as long as possible. If so, we recommend Jarndyce and Jarndyce for your legal research. But we are pretty sure that the weird way this courtroom disaster is unfolding has more to do with the loss of Andrew Breitbart’s authoritarian style. Eulogies about his “unique vision” for a right wing web empire have been a polite way of saying that his blogging inheritors are a pack of venal losers and idiots. As Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert told Dave Weigel,

“I don’t think Breitbart hired very strong editors to work for him,” he said. “Take the Derrick Bell story. The only pick-up it got was in its own corner of the Internet.” He wasn’t impressed at how Fox News covered the story? “I don’t count Fox. In the real world, no one paid attention.” The Daily Show covered the story, too, but we can move on. When Breitbart ran the shop, they scrambled to combat the ACORN tapes and pieces about the past of the openly gay “education czar” Kevin Jennings. The danger seems to have passed. “They’re having trouble sustaining it.”

Andrew Breitbart, who once proudly described himself as a C student on C-SPAN, died surrounded by people who made him look like the smartest person in the room. One of them was Lee Stranahan, who announced he was leaving Breitbart.com over the weekend. He is very proud of his work on the Pigford story, which is related to the smearing of Sherrod.

Follow

Lee Stranahan @stranahan

I can't blame other people for not having Andrew's unique editorial vision: it was unique for a reason. But ignoring it is another thing.

6:52 PM - 22 Sep 2013

Retweets   2 2 likes

Follow

Lee Stranahan @stranahan

And this new editorial policy extended to things like Pigford. I was specifically told several times to NOT cover Pigford.

6:44 PM - 22 Sep 2013

Retweets   2 2 likes

Follow

Lee Stranahan @stranahan

After the NYT Pigford story hit, we had a spate of coverage but then I was told to stop spending any time on it. Somewhere, Andrew wept.

6:46 PM - 22 Sep 2013

1 1 Retweet   4 4 likes

Follow

Lee Stranahan @stranahan

All that being said, I was able to do work I'm proud of at Breitbart and was supported when I colored inside the lines.

6:48 PM - 22 Sep 2013

Yes, Breitbart.com is a right wing coloring book. But Solov and O’Connor at least seem to have understood that the Pigford story and its defamatory stepchild were best abandoned before they dragged the whole ship under water. Stranahan, who insists to this day that Shirley Sherrod is an evil person who deserved her defamation, is not smart enough to comprehend the legal exposure that further coverage of those stories would surely create. His ratlike intelligence is good enough to escape a sinking ship, however, and so he has. In fact, he has been trying to find a paying gig outside of Breitbart.com since shortly after his mentor’s death.One of his supporters is Dana Loesch, who is herself suing Breitbart.com for holding her in “indentured servitude” after she tried to find outside work.

Whatever is left of Andrew, it is already being sued into nonexistence. In all likelihood, Aubrey Chernick’s millions will make lawyers very rich while the blog empire he sought to fund bleeds away the minor talent it has left. When judgment finally comes down, we doubt there will be anything left of Andrew’s fortune for Sherrod to claim.

==