Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Breitbart’

LinkSwarm

Monday, March 5th, 2012

A busy weekend, so here’s a LinkSwarm to nourish the regulars:

  • The SEIU is helping fund and lead the Occupy movement, and their goal is to “abolish capitalism.” They’re also sneakily incorporating local branches, with names like “Good Jobs, Great Houston.” (Hat tip: Common Sense and Wonder.)
  • Also on on Commonsense and Wonder: an interesting piece about the history of Islamic conquest.
  • Add another member to Republican’s super-majority in the Texas House: Rep. J. M. Lozano of Kingsville (District 43) just announced his switch to the Republican Party.
  • In related news, here’s a piece from last year in the liberal Texas Observer talking about Republican outreach to Hispanics. That seems to be working out a lot better than the “inevitable Democratic majority” theory people like Ruy Teixeira have been pushing for the last decade.
  • Obama’s IRS attacks the Tea Party.
  • Iowahawk on Andrew Breitbart: “How did this socially liberal Jewish RINO from Brentwood become the Emmanuel Goldstein of the left’s unhinged 2-Minutes Hate? A big, lovable, random, generous, fearless, patriotic grinning goofball.”
  • Down With Wind: “If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. ” (Hat tip: Powerline.)
  • Texas’ outsized role in U.S. exports.
  • Debra Medina may run for State Comptroller? We could do worse.
  • How feminist dogma has hidden an obvious truth: the wide availability of contraception has increased illegitimacy, general to the detriment of women.
  • UT to student media director: Balance your department budget. Student media director: OK, how about we sell these TV and radio licenses? UT: Not that balanced. You’re fired. (Hat tip: Mike Godwin’s Facebook page.)
  • Perhaps the Least Insightful Obituary of Andrew Breitbart You’ll Read Today

    Thursday, March 1st, 2012

    I’m sure you’ve already read about Andrew Breitbart dying at the stupifyingly young age of 43 in a dozen places now. And despite Dwight suggesting that I’d have a lively discussion going, I’m not sure I have anything to say that hasn’t been before, and better, by far more famous bloggers than myself. I never met the man, but by all accounts he was a whirlwind of activity. And just as he created a blogging empire (Big Government, Big Hollywood, etc.) almost out of thin air, he wore a dizzying array of hats: reporter, agent provocateur, entrepreneur, blogger, media potentate, editor, and perhaps the greatest Internet Troll of all time. He perfected the “aggressive” in passive aggressive, both uncovering the malfeasance of the left, as well as baiting them with just enough rope to let them hang themselves.

    I doubt we shall see his like again.

    LinkSwarm for December 29, 2011

    Thursday, December 29th, 2011

    The year winds down, and I have a bunch of more-or-less lengthy posts in various stages of completion. You know what that means? That’s right! LinkSwarm!

  • Even profitable firms are leaving California for Texas.
  • Charles Murray concludes that more prisons means less crime. “Higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100 percent of the reduction in violent crime.”
  • Riot at the Mall of America.
  • My amazing psychic powers prove accurate again.
  • Some good news: ethanol subsidies have finally expired. Now let’s make sure to keep them dead.
  • That’s a Heller of a lot of money.
  • Michigan men: Are you living with someone who’s pregnant? Congratulations! If this proposed law passes, you’ll be a slave.
  • “”The Occupy movement is alive and well and kicking, and doing precisely what it was intended to be: The Re-Elect Obama Campaign. Period.”
  • Hat tips: Insta, and a smattering of others.

    More JournoList Fallout

    Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

    This piece by John Hayward (AKA Doc Zero) over at Hot Air on the unfolding JournoList scandal is so chock-full of quotable goodness that I’m going to excerpt some here:

    Taylor Marsh grins through the flop-sweat to assure us conspiracy to defraud the dwindling audience of the dinosaur media, and slander innocent people as racists, is no big deal when “avowed and openly progressive reporters” do it. I guess we’re supposed to take it as a given that all progressives are liars and smear artists, so we’ve got no right to complain when they’re caught lying and smearing people. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressives gotta try throwing a white sheet over Fred Barnes to save Obama from a scandal that should have finished off his campaign.

    [snip]

    Anyone who has studied the tao of Breitbart knows the first revelations are not the worst. The way to turn the Left’s control of media against itself is to save the really devastating material for later, and release it on a timetable that keeps the story sizzling. The Blatant Beast is defeated by feeding it a story it cannot help repeating. The dark cloud forming over the absurd defenses deployed by liberal reporters today is the shadow of incoming rounds from the second volley.

    [snip]

    For independents who don’t follow politics closely, the JournoList scandal provides a simple, blatantly obvious narrative about fraud and propaganda. A sizable segment of the “journalist” population stands revealed as sputtering extremists, who talk about killing stories and destroying people’s lives to protect their favored political candidate. Yes, these people are self-professed liberals – they’re not pretending to be “objective” reporters or news anchors – but the cross-pollination between “liberal” and “objective” journalists is a blindingly obvious matter of public knowledge, and the things they’re talking about doing are vile, underhanded, and conspiratorial.

    The general public will be able to digest this story, and they won’t like the taste. They’ve already got a low opinion of journalists. It will plummet even further once they get a few bites of JournoList. No magazine, newspaper, or network that continues to employ any of the people quoted in the Daily Caller story can be trusted by any fair-minded person as a reliable news source. Period.

    The discussion of false racism charges is an outrage. The American public is growing very tired of being pummeled with the racism club. The cynical plan to pick a random conservative – “who cares?” – and slander them as racists will mix with disgust at the NAACP for trying the same wretched tactic on the Tea Party movement. The once-feared Race Card is looking rather tattered around the edges. The Left has been putting a lot of effort into shuffling those cards into the deck for the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. The nitwits at JournoList just made them much more difficult to play.

    Read the whole thing.

    The JournoList Debate: Breitbart 1, Chiat/Klein 0

    Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

    As more of the JournoList archives come out, it becomes obvious that they’re a lot closer to Andrew Breitbart’s description of them as part of the “Democrat-Media Complex” than Jonathan Chait’s innocuous description of them as “too mundane” to be of interest.

    Or, as Maimon Schwarzschild put it:

    What we have is One-Party Media: newspapers, broadcast networks, newsmagazines which represent the views and preoccupations of the Democratic Party and the political left, and consistently denigrate or ignore the views and preoccupations of the political right or centre-right; and which very often systematically ignore any news or information which might reflect badly on the one party, or reflect well on the policies, proposals, or values of the other.

    What continues to amaze is the stupid arrogance of it all. Did they actually believe that, here in the 21st century, anything in a digital format seen by more than a tiny handful of people wouldn’t come out sooner or later? “Three can keep a secret, if two or dead.” And somehow they expected more than 200 journalists to keep their mouths zipped?

    This is what being in the liberal “reality bubble” 24/7 does to your judgment: It makes you stupid and complacent.

    Look for more revelations from Ezra Klein’s liberal listserve in the coming days.

    More Wiegel Fallout and the Coming Exposure of JournoList

    Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

    I wanted to avoid doing more than one post on the Dave Wiegel flap, but there’s just been too much news to ignore it.

    Here’s Wiegel’s quasi-semi-demi apology. An excerpt:

    “Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean.”

    Anytime someone issues one of these “I was being stupid and that wasn’t the real me” apologies, my automatic assumption is that they’re lying. They’re not sorry, they’re just sorry they got caught. Despite having, like Wiegel, contributed to Reason magazine, and despite Andrew Breitbart’s assertion that Wiegel was “outed” for being insufficiently left-wing, I see no particular reason to modify that assumption in Wiegel’s case.

    The Washington Post still doesn’t get it. “The problem is that conservative views are the mainstream views–but not in Washington, D.C. or New York City or San Francisco. The problem is that only 20% of America self-identifies as liberal, so if the news organizations were politically correct and representative, they’d have 80% of their staff that is either moderate or conservative. Instead, 97% of journalists vote and filter their news through the liberal ideology.”

    And what does admitting your naked bias against conservatives get you these days? Hired by MSNBC. I’m sure all 20 of MSNBC’s regular viewers will appreciate his insightful commentary.

    Then again, they did beat CNN (but not CNN + Headline News) over the first six months of this year, which I think says more about how badly CNN is sucking than how well MSBNC is doing. And Fox News is basically slaughtering all of them in Prime Time.

    I was going to say that if Wiegel really wanted us to trust him, he should put EVERYTHING in the JournoList archives up online. However, Andrew Breitbart has beaten me to the punch with his $100,000 offer for anyone willing to send him the complete archive. So I look forward to perusing the complete JournoList contents online later this week. Or better yet, watching Breitbart roll them out a few at a time over several months, letting the participants wonder how much of the archive he has, and who will be the next among them to be exposed, promises edification, amusement and a demonstration of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” for months to come. I think Breitbart could probably keep dribbling out tidbits well into, say, mid-October…

    Updated: Iowahawk weighs in with his usual pith.