Wisconsin politicos in both parties will be on red alert this Thursday when January’s job numbers for Wisconsin are announced. [Gov. Scott] Walker and the Republicans pray they’ll be big numbers and, more importantly, black numbers. Democrats and employee unions will be secretly hoping they’ll be red numbers. …
Here’s my prediction: Thursday will bump Wisconsin UP another 18,000 jobs. Just an intuition. That’s one press release. If not, the second press release asks where is The Kathleen’s job-creation plan? Higher taxes across the board?
Walker could rightly blame the continuous political turmoil. You’re a small- to medium-sized employer in Illinois thinking about expanding in Wisconsin. Who is going to be governor in six months: Scott Walker or Michael Moore?
This is being posted before, I think, the job numbers are released. It was written before the job numbers are released.
Whatever the January job numbers are, they won’t be enough. Not because of Walker’s 250,000 job numbers pledge. And not because of the previous months’ job numbers, although the previous months’ job numbers (some of which were inaccurate as originally reported) are symptomatic.
The reason the job numbers won’t be enough is because the Legislature has not done nearly enough to promote business, which leads to private-sector jobs, the 34.9 percent of the population who pay for 100 percent of what government does.
The most recent example of the Legislature’s failures on the job front is the failure to pass the mining bill, which would have led Gogebic Taconite to invest $1.5 billion in a new taconite mine, which would have created 800 union jobs and an estimated thousands of other jobs. Badger Blogger assesses the blame:
Not only are Dale Schultz, and Sen. Bob Jauch, the representative for the district that would have directly benefited from the mine, but think of all of the Southeastern Wisconsin democratic senators that have constituents that work for the two largest mining equipment manufacturers in the world, Joy Global (P&H) and the former Bucyrus, now owned by Caterpillar. Their workers would have benefited greatly from a new Wisconsin mine. So a large part of the blame for this has to fall on people like Tim Carpenter, Lena Taylor & Chris Larson, who voted against their unionized constituents that work for these and many other companies. This vote proves that they are more concerned about delivering Scott Walker some sort of perceived loss, than they are about thousands of great paying jobs for Wisconsinites.
The failure of the mining bill demonstrates the mindset that appears to be cemented among our elected officials — that no business that is not willing to jump through every government-created hoop is worthy of Wisconsin. (Given the fact that unions were supporting the mining bill, I guess that shows where Democrats are on the question of jobs.) I have yet to hear the ridiculous claim (currently being made by Obama misadministration officials) that overregulation creates jobs, but I assume that’s on the news release list from the Kathleen Falk campaign.
Walker’s recall campaign commercials tout the government employee collective bargaining reforms that, he says, saved government jobs. (As if that’s a good thing.) Govzilla the regulatory monster will not be defanged until the government employee workforce is cut substantially — just to use a nice round number, let’s say 10,000 jobs, about one-fourth of the state workforce — in addition to changing much of state law. (For instance, open shop legislation.)
How can I assert that the way to create jobs is to cut government jobs? The answer should be obvious. The only jobs that count are private-sector jobs. Let me repeat and emphasize: The only jobs that count are private-sector jobs. Private-sector jobs are the only jobs that inject money into the economy without taking money out of the economy. If all jobs were created equal, then the government could solve the unemployment problem by simply hiring every unemployed person and assign half to digging holes and the other half to filling in the holes.
When government actually costs less, instead of just limiting the increases as the Walker administration has done, businesses will have more money to pay employees, invest in their business, or pay dividends to their owners. Any of those is a better use of business profits than paying taxes.
The only thing that’s been done to improve the business climate is the dumping of the Department of Commerce in favor of the new Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. But the jury is out on whether WEDC is doing its job of promoting the state as a place to do business less than a year into its existence. Improving the state’s finances is a necessary but insufficient step by itself.
That’s because one big negative remains our tax climate. The Tax Foundation reported that Wisconsin ranked fourth in business taxes for new businesses, but 35th for established businesses. Fourth is more like it, but the fact that Wisconsin’s startup and incorporation numbers remain bad, apparently that approach hasn’t been working for a long time. And there are many more business that are subject to the 35th-place ranking than the fourth-place ranking. The Tax Foundation also ranks Wisconsin 43rd in its 2012 State Business Tax Climate Index, which includes corporate taxes, personal income taxes (which affect not just executive salaries, but subchapter-S corporations), sales taxes, unemployment insurance taxes and property taxes. Since we know that businesses make location and expansion decisions based on how much they’ll pay in taxes, until Wisconsin ranks closer to the top than eighth from the bottom, we are unlikely to see improvements in the state’s economy.
The state also needs to be honest for a change and admit two other things. First, we are not getting anywhere close to our money’s worth from the billions of dollars the state spends on education. Despite taxpayers’ paying for 13 four-year UW schools, 13 UW two-year schools, 16 technical colleges and more than 400 K–12 school districts, our state’s economy has been lagging for decades. (To be specific, per capita personal income growth has trailed the national average since I was in middle school.)
Second, it should be obvious that the state’s quality of life (which is because of the state’s geography and people and has nothing to do with government) is of nearly no value in attracting business to come to this state. If our quality of life was as good as Wisconsinites claim, the resulting inmigration of population and resulting business and job creation to serve all those residents would place Wisconsin at the top of all those business climate comparisons, instead of sometimes in the middle and more often toward the bottom.
Blaska asked the question of what Falk (and by extension any other Democrat) will come up with for their jobs plan. One can assume whatever Democrats come up with will parrot the approach of Gov. James Doyle, which was to promote exports and throw tax-break goodies only at favored businesses (for instance, green companies), and to hell with everyone else. Add up all of Walker’s job numbers since he took office in January 2011 (and if Blaska is right, they’ll be on the plus side), and they will dwarf Doyle’s 2009, when the state lost 90,000 jobs.
If the Legislature was doing its job, it would pay attention to the state’s business climate rankings, which have gone from horrible under Doyle to between horrible and mediocre under Walker, and do something about them. Now.
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released. Other than the run-on nature of the lyrics, the song was one of the first to have an accompanying “promo film,” now known as a “music video”:
Today in 1971, Radio Hanoi played the Star Spangled Banner, presumably not as a compliment:
Today in 1973, Paul McCartney was fined £100 for growing marijuana at his farm in Campbelltown, Scotland.
McCartney’s excuse was that he didn’t know the seeds he claimed to have been given would actually grow.
The number one single today in 1975:
Today in 2003, Mark Knopfler, formerly of Dire Straits, discovered that in a conflict between his Honda motorcycle and a Fiat Punto, the bike loses — or, more accurately, the bike and its rider lose.
Birthdays begin with Ralph Ellis of the Swinging Blue Jeans:
Andrew Semple of the Fortunes:
Michael “Mickey” Dolenz of the Monkees:
Songwriter Carole Bayer Sager:
Randy Meisner played guitar for the Eagles:
Mike Allsup played guitar for Three Dog Night:
Mel Galley played guitar for Whitesnake:
Clive Burr played drums for Iron Maiden:
Gary Numan:
Richard Darbyshire of Living in a Box:
Peter Gill played drums for Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
Tom Chaplin of Keane:
Today in 1973, Ron “Pigpen” McKernen, keyboard player for the Grateful Dead, really was dead.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s George Lightbourn thinks a new era may have dawned in Wisconsin politics:
Over the past year in Madison, the psychology of government is changed. No, it’s not because of changes to collective bargaining or recalls. The change is that for the first time in a long time, competence and fortitude have value.
For years, the snide undercurrent running through the State Capitol was a belief that the citizens weren’t really up to the task of understanding the state budget. Why else would our elected leaders so consistently approve budgets that they knew were unbalanced? The press conferences where governors of both parties signed the rivers of red ink into law were scenes where there was more winking going on than a Saturday night in Amsterdam. …
Leading up to the last election for governor, our pollster asked if the public thought the elected leaders in Madison were, “capable of solving the state budget deficit.” Only 23% said they did. 59% of those same citizens told our pollster that they saw the state budget as a big problem.
What a disconnect. It’s not often that you can actually measure public cynicism, but that is exactly what that poll did. It is ironic that the cause for the cynicism was the very political leaders who were counting on the public on being too dim to understand what was really going on in the budget?
Now, after Governor Walker and the Legislature have rather famously – some would say infamously – balanced the state budget, how is the public feeling? We asked about that last October when 41% of the public said that they actually thought the budget – a budget that included numerous cuts – would actually improve the future quality of life in Wisconsin. This level of approval is surprising given that most people – even Republicans – tend to get weak in the knees when it comes to spending cuts.
Even more telling was the most recent Marquette Law School poll. Charles Franklin, who runs the poll, took a different approach to testing public sentiment around Walker’s austere budget. Franklin found that fully 71% of Wisconsin adults feel that the middle class in the state, “won’t catch a break unless we get state spending under control.” In that same February poll, 38% of the respondents said that Walker’s budget would reduce the chance that we have budget deficits in the future. Only 25% disagreed with that sentiment.
So have we entered a period where nerdy, wonkish budgeting is fashionable? I think yes.
I guess I’ll agree with Lightbourn when I see the results of Recallarama Part Deux and then the legitimate November elections. I’ll also be more convinced that Republicans have seen the fiscal responsibility light when they pass legislation to officially correctly measure state spending by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles instead of on a cash basis, as well as when spending and tax controls are added to the state Constitution.
I’m not going to waste my time suggesting that state Democrats see the fiscal responsibility light, even though they should. Apparently the party is collectively too dense to figure out that while a significant number of voters may oppose the way that Walker balanced (on a cash basis) the 2011–13 state budget and fixed his predecessor’s deficit in the 2009–11 budget, going back to the way things were will be neither good for the state nor a winner with unattached voters. A Bill Clintonesque Third Way candidate might win a recall election, but if not, would be a frontrunner for the 2014 gubernatorial election.
Proof of the ineffectiveness of the bend-over-for-the-government-unions-strategy is that, according to Rasmussen Reports, opponents of Walker’s recall now have an 11-point margin over supporters of his recall. Most distressing for Democrats is that according to Rasmussen, 58 percent of unaffiliated voters oppose Walker’s recall.
The Nicolet Bank Business Pulse has measured the opinions (the “pulse” if you will) of business owners for several years.
The Business Pulse is now expanding statewide. In addition to the 498 participants in the regional Pulses, another 134 business owners and CEOs are participating in the statewide Business Pulse.
Anyone who has read my opinions since 1994 (with the seven-year break from mid-2001 to early 2008) knows how I feel about the importance of Wisconsin business to Wisconsin. William F. Buckley Jr. once said if the choice was to be governed by the faculty of Harvard University or an equivalent number of names at the beginning of the Boston telephone book, he’d choose the latter. (I don’t think the fact he was a Yale graduate had anything to do with that.)
My corollary is that I’d rather be governed by the members of any chamber of commerce in this state, even Madison’s, than any equivalent number of state legislators, regardless of party. Compare the net positive impacts of business people to politicians; business people win by such a large margin that you can’t count that high. Compare the net positive impacts of business to labor unions, and the margin is larger. All that business does is pay people in salaries and employee benefits, provide products and services for their customers, purchase products and services from other businesses, and contribute, financially and otherwise, to the communities in which they have facilities.
Those who survey and poll as their livelihood will tell you that the larger the sample size, the better. So if you’re the ultimate decision-maker in a business, you can have your opinions counted (and find out the opinions of your peers) by signing up at http://stnorbert.us2.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5q1oWxytxh7j55O. You can also pass on this item to your CEO/business owner/entrepreneur/person-who-makes-the-state’s-economy-go-and-contributes-positively-to-our-quality-of-life friends so they also can participate.
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded their first radio appearance, on the BBC’s “Teenagers’ Turn — Here We Go”:
Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present Britain’s number one single today in 1970:
The number one single over here today in 1970 was by an act that had already broken up:
Today in 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Luther R. Campbell aka Luke Skyywalker, et al., Petitioners v. Acuff-Rose Music, Incorporated. Campbell and the rest of 2 Live Crew took Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” …
… and turned it into 2 Live Crew’s “Pretty Woman”:
Since 2 Live Crew hadn’t gotten Acuff–Rose’s permission (though they had asked), Acuff–Rose sued Campbell et al. The Supremes upheld the original U.S. District Court decision that parodies may be protected fair use under Chapter 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Birthdays begin with Chris White, who played bass for the Zombies:
Matthew Fisher played keyboards for Procol Harum:
Peter Wolf sang for the J. Geils Band:
Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers:
Matt Frenette played drums for Loverboy:
One death of note today in 1988: Gordon Huntley, pedal steel guitarist of Matthews Southern Comfort:
Last week’s kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh’s comments about the Georgetown University law school student who opposes the Roman Catholic Church’s position on birth control (got all that?) got me thinking a few slightly subversive thoughts.
The controversy contains enough red herrings for hors d’oeuvres before a winter dinner. The student called out by Limbaugh (whose choice of language succeeded in obscuring Limbaugh’s larger point about whether an organization that believes birth control to be immoral should be forced to supply birth control to anyone) was no early-20s naif who spoke before thinking of the consequences, but a 30-year-old woman who has a long history of advocating for her definition of women’s rights. The stated $3,000 figure also suggests a level of, shall we say, social activity about which novels are written, or a failure to look for the lowest price.
This tempest and the Obama administration’s current war on Catholic conscience are an inadvertent argument against employer-provided health insurance. Those who believe that life begins at conception (the official position of the Roman Catholic Church) should oppose forms of birth control that terminate a pregnancy after conception by, for instance, preventing implantation of the fetus in a woman’s uterine wall. (Which includes such birth control methods as the Pill, intrauterine devices, the Ortho-Evra patch, and Depo-Provera or Lunelle injections.) Why should an employer be forced to provide (which means pay for) coverage for medical procedures or treatments that the employer believes to be immoral?
(If you are honest, you have to admit that any answer besides “the employer shouldn’t have to,” whether the medical procedure or treatment in question is birth control, Viagra, cosmetic surgery, hair-loss treatment or anything else indicates disrespect for morals different from yours. Here’s another example of disrespect for morals different from the writer’s.)
It’s not clear that access to a woman’s preferred form of birth control paid for by someone else counts as a fundamental human right. (Nor the “right” to its precursor, consequence-free sexual activity.) On the other hand, policy decisions do have consequences, including unintended consequences. Answer this multiple choice question: If forced to choose one of these three choices, you would prefer:
Paying for birth control for those who can’t afford to buy it.
Paying for abortions for those who can’t afford to pay for their abortion.
Paying for various welfare programs for single mothers who don’t have access to options 1 and 2.
Viewed strictly fiscally, given the failure rates of various forms of birth control, option 2 probably would cost less than option 1, and either 1 or 2 would certainly cost less — not just fiscally, but in terms of the growth of various social pathologies — than option 3.
(One of the more interesting side points of view in all this is the suggestion advanced by libertarian Virginia Postrel to make the Pill an over-the-counter medication as opposed to available only by prescription. The counterargument is that without medical advice, Pill use is likely to be less effective. The countercounterargument is that, based on comments about Postrel’s proposal, doctors may not be especially thorough telling their patients about what to do and not do on the Pill.)
Do you think what you’ve read so far is heretical? Well, since we’ve gotten abortion into this, here’s more heresy: Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party really want to change current abortion law, because the abortion issue is a useful tool to generate votes and campaign donations. My evidence is that, between 2001 and 2006 (except for part of 2002 when New Hampshire Sen. Jim Jeffords changed sides), a Republican was in the White House and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. And no serious attempt was made to pass a law or a constitutional amendment that would have invalidated the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Moreover, from 1977 to 1980, in 1993 and 1994, and in 2008 and 2009, a Democrat was in the White House and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And no serious attempt was made to write a law paralleling Roe v. Wade’s provisions to legalize abortion rights as permanently as possible in this republic.
Since Roe v. Wade, opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans have, well, nuanced positions about abortion rights. (By Roe v. Wade, abortion was already legal in several states, including California, signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan.) Polls have shown consistent majority support for first-trimester abortion rights, as well as abortion rights in case of pregnancies caused by rape or incest, or pregnancies that threaten the life or health of the mother. A majority of Americans also have consistently supported parental notification and waiting period requirements, and oppose government funding of abortions.
To suggest that this issue is going to cause lingering damage to the GOP in November requires you to believe that women voters have just one position on birth control (and for that matter abortion rights) and vote that issue before any other. This is a distraction, and a dumb distraction because it distracts from what should be the real issue this fall, Obama’s stunning incompetence on the economy. (For one thing, people with more money have more money to spend, including on birth control.)
The most ridiculous statement I’ve read yet is that the Catholic Church in opposing the ObamaCare contraception mandate believes it’s above the law. It’s not ridiculous because it’s false; it’s ridiculous because only someone with complete ignorance of the Bible would say something like that intending to generate umbrage. Every Christian, Roman Catholic or not, is supposed to answer to God’s law before man’s law. To suggest otherwise makes that whole crucifixion business merely a story, as well as, more recently, religious opposition to Germany’s Nazi Party, communism in the late Soviet Union, the civil rights movement as led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and the post-King political activities of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others.
Jim Pethokoukis reveals 13 economic reasons Barack Obama should not be reelected in November.
The charts that make the point the best way include:
Essentially, this is the weakest economic recovery, in terms of GDP growth and unemployment improvement, since the Great Depression. (Contrary to what the big-government types want you to believe, the Great Depression was finally ended not by the buildup to World War II, but by the victory in World War II.) There have been predictions after past recessions of a “jobless recovery”; well, this is a jobless recovery. And what do you suppose will happen to economic growth after the effects of $5-a-gallon gas hit the economy?
Pethokoukis summarizes:
To me, it all adds up to Stagnation Nation rather than a Return to Prosperity. What voters will have to decide is whether Obamanomics—the $800 billion stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, anti-energy regulation—has been a net plus or a net minus. Did Obama make things better or worse?
If you vote for Obama in November, none of this will get better. In fact, stagnation would be preferable to what will be coming with an Obama victory and Democratic gains in Congress.
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, an album was released to pay for the defense in a California murder trial. You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
The number one British single today in 1973:
The number one album today in 1982 was the Go-Gos’ “Beauty and the Beat”:
Today in 2004, David Crosby was arrested and charged with possession of a weapon and marijuana after he left his bag in his New York hotel room.
Today in 2008, a British charity claimed that nine of 10 young people had experienced hearing loss due to loud music. The nine all replied, “What?”
Birthdays begin with Sylvia Robinson, of Mickey and Sylvia:
David Gilmour of Pink Floyd:
Mary Wilson of the Supremes …
… was born one year before Hugh Grundy, drummer for the Zombies:
Who is Pauline Matthews? You know her as Kiki Dee, backup singer for Elton John:
Andrew was without pretension – he really didn’t care who you were. He just wanted to lead other conservatives into the fight. This is a guy who mingled with titans like Rush Limbaugh, but just as easily with people none of us have ever heard of – yet. …
Those who knew him would laugh at the hatemongers who called him “racist” or “homophobe” – things that were the very opposite of who he was and what he believed. There is a great difference between Andrew and the people who despised him. He was angry because people failed to live up to basic standards of decency; the haters hated because he defied them.
For different reasons, Andrew’s friends and his enemies are both testaments to his character. …
Our movement lost a visionary and a leader, a guy who could see the challenge but inspire others to fight beside him. There will never be another conservative warrior like Andrew, but thanks to him, there will many, many more conservative warriors.
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg had one of the best tributes:
If you don’t know who Breitbart was, you haven’t been paying attention. A conservative activist, entrepreneur, author, muckraker, media pioneer, and performance artist of sorts, in his heart he was a radical.
His friends saw him as a fearless truth-teller and provocateur. (The word “fearless” will have to be retired from overuse when all of his obituaries have been written.) His enemies, and they are legion even in death, saw him as the most vile creature who ever slithered upon the earth. …
Andrew relished such attacks, truly, because they proved to him that he was having great effect in his work and that his opponents had run out of serious arguments. …
This is not to say that Andrew was beyond criticism. He made mistakes. He took full swings at some pitches he should have just let go. He overstated some things that needed to be said, and said some things that didn’t need to be said at all. He was a human run-on sentence who showed deference to no punctuation mark save the exclamation point, a conservative Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons we both grew up on, whirling and whizzing through anything in his path. Giving him a dose of Ritalin to treat his hyperactivity would be like throwing a glass of water on a five-alarm fire.
Andrew had profound contempt for those on the left who claimed a birthright to a monopoly on virtue and tolerance. …
He rejected in the marrow of his bones the idea that conservatives needed to apologize for being conservative or that liberals had any special authority to pronounce on the political decency and honesty of others.
Indeed, when liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.
He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.
The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.
60 Minutes won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people — and if you don’t let those who don’t like what you say define you.
He left an electronic media legacy that will be hard to top, having helped launch the Drudge Report, the HuffingtonPost, Breitbart.com, and his collection of “Big” sites. He was an unapologetic conservative, but one who defied the media’s template; pro-civil rights, pro-drug legalization, pro-gay rights, to the point of boycotting CPAC when it barred the gay conservative group GOProud. Other than his mainstream pro-life views (he was, after all, adopted) you would be hard pressed to characterize him as a right winger on social issues.
So how did this socially liberal Jewish RINO from Brentwood become the Emmanuel Goldstein of the left’s unhinged 2-Minutes Hate? A lot of it, I suspect, is a viral strain of mindless repetition. I have appalled a few nice progressive friends by revealing my friendship with Breitbart. They know good people, like me, are supposed to despise him, but pressed can’t quite articulate why. Or cite his reported support for slavery and gay concentration camps or somesuch. Its most concentrated form takes place in the anonymity of comment threads and Twitter feeds. My personal favorite is the frequent taunting of Breitbart as gay, where the taunter either (a) assumes Breitbart considers it an insult, or (b) actually means it as an insult.
Breitbart, of course, reveled in it, and took great delight in retweeting and exposing that hate, the real source of which is clear: unlike meek approval-seeking chickenshits like me, he relished poking at hornets’ nests, lifting up rocks, calling out the bullies on the playground. He made himself an enemy of corrupt political con artists who operate on latent threats of thuggery, called them out on it, and, best of all, knew exactly how they would react before they did. He deserved a Pulitzer, but got something better: their opprobrium.
Doug Giles provides high praise for personal reasons:
I initially met Andrew Breitbart over the phone when I called him on September 8, 2009. That was the day before my daughter Hannah’s scandalous ACORN videos were released on the public’s head.
Andrew was on the road, and I was in Vail about to speak at a men’s conference and wanted to know, from a man I didn’t know, if he was going to make certain my girl would be “safe” in every sense of the word because the ACORNs were fixin’ to hit the fan.
Having seen several of Hannah’s devastating undercover vids and knowing the weight of what was about to land on my 20-year-old, I told Andrew that if he allowed anything bad to happen to Hannah that I would hurt him. And I did not mean that metaphorically.
Breitbart said he would defend Hannah with his life and treat her as if she were his own daughter. I thought, “good answer,” and with that we began a relationship and went through a tornadic, grueling, and thrilling war against a corrupt organization and a crooked media that covers and defends such sleaze.
Every step of the way, through vicious, non-stop media attacks, death threats to our family, and multiple lawsuits, Breitbart kept his word to me and ran interference for Hannah and the ACORN story like a champion. He made certain that the proper people got crushed and the truth tellers remained afloat. …
Here’s my takeaway from a man I didn’t seek to meet but am sure glad I did:
As stated, Breitbart kept his word and stayed in the volatile fray with Hannah just like he promised. Few people keep their word nowadays.
To Andrew, crap was crap no matter how one framed it. Andrew was an equal opportunity offender. Everything smells, so attitude sells.
Breitbart was bold. Would to God more men who love God and country had his moxie. AB was a provocateur par excellence.
He inspired young people who are sick of lies, hype and spin to take their talent and tools and use them against the tools of the machine.
Andrew understood the importance of conservatives getting involved in Hollywood and not just in DC.
Breitbart, by example, showed us all that if you aren’t drawing enemy fire then you’re not over the target.
If you didn’t agree with Andrew on all the issues, he was okay with that and reveled in robust discussions over cold beer.
Breitbart also gets credit for taking down U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D–New York) after this bizarre press conference:
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has quite the description of Breitbart:
Like [Saul] Alinsky, Breitbart employed unorthodox and sometimes unethical tactics to expose the corruption of the powerful. His targets were generally representatives of what he called, in an 2009 interview with this columnist, “the Democrat-media complex”: politicians (most notably ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner), journalistic organizations (NPR) and left-liberal advocacy groups (Acorn, the NAACP, Common Cause). Also like Alinsky, he was modest about what he could accomplish: “I’m not looking to slay the dragon,” he told us in 2009, “but I wanted to embarrass the dragon into being a more reasonable dragon.”
One key to understanding Breitbart’s effectiveness is Alinsky’s fourth rule: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” He demonstrated tolerance for bigotry at NPR and the NAACP, for violent partisan rhetoric at Common Cause, and for exploitation of the poor at Acorn. And he exposed Weiner, the sanctimonious male feminist, as a concupiscent con artist.
One key to understanding Breitbart’s effectiveness is Alinsky’s fourth rule: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” He demonstrated tolerance for bigotry at NPR and the NAACP, for violent partisan rhetoric at Common Cause, and for exploitation of the poor at Acorn. And he exposed Weiner, the sanctimonious male feminist, as a concupiscent con artist.
Breitbart’s foes typically responded in one of two ways, both ineffective: by faulting his ethics or by raging impotently against him. The first came closest to being effective with his 2010 exposé of the NAACP, which was based on a tendentiously edited video of Shirley Sherrod, then a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, confessing at an NAACP dinner to having harbored antiwhite sentiments. (Sherrod has since sued Breitbart for defamation.)
The episode occasioned a back-and-forth between this columnist and David Frum, a writer who seems to aspire to be a sort of court conservative to the liberal elite. We faulted Frum for describing Breitbart as “the conservative Dan Rather.” …
But the main reason Frum’s comparison was silly was that Rather’s act reflected a corruption of authority. By contrast, as we wrote, Breitbart “has no authority, only the inexpensive integrity of a rascal who is honest about what he is.”
Based in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles, Breitbart viewed himself as a one-man conservative gang and he took to the task of delivering rhetorical body blows — primarily via the web but also through television appearances — with a gusto rarely seen even in these hyperpartisan times. …
His untimely passing raises a fascinating question about our modern world: What did Andrew Breitbart mean to politics?
That may be among the most loaded questions in the political world due to Breitbart’s divisive — and proud of it — personality. ,,,
The legacy that Breitbart leaves on the political world is a mixed one. He was, without question a pioneering force in the rapidly-growing field aggregation of political news — both during his time at Drudge and HuffPo. …
And, Breitbart also understood before many others that the world of politics — and the way in which it was covered — was rapidly transforming itself into a form of entertainment for the public. The fusion of celebrity and politician — best epitomized by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin — was something that Breitbart (and Drudge) grasped longed before much of the mainstream media.
At the same time, Breitbart’s methods walked a fine line between envelope pushing and downright scurrilous at times. The Sherrod incident raised questions about whether Breitbart was a journalist with a conservative bent or simply someone willing to do whatever it took to bring down Democrats.
For those who preached the need to elevate the public dialogue about politics, Breitbart was enemy number one — a symbol of the small and petty nature of the world in which politicians were forced to reside. …
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.
Some of Breitbart’s opponents showed some class — Touré on time.com:
When he was here, I thought of him as a dangerous though barely effectual ideological comedian/Internet shock jock/wannabe public intellectual. But the moment I realized he was gone, he transformed in my mind into nothing less than a committed soldier for his side, by which I mean both conservatism and the family for whom he so ably provided. That is not hypocritical; it’s human. Death should temper how we think of people or at least how we speak of them. It’s inhuman to celebrate the death of an enemy unless they were engaged in trying to kill you or succeeding at oppressing you. Breitbart was not nearly that powerful. We gain nothing and our spirit loses in hating him now that his body is in the ground.
As for the others … well, National Review’s Jim Geraghty describes them:
You probably heard Matt Yglesias’s first response on Twitter: ”Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with@AndrewBrietbart dead.”
I don’t usually suggest physical violence toward others. That’s certainly not the way I want to see myself or the kind of example I want to set for my sons. But, if you’re going to say things like that — just an hour after word arrives that a man suddenly died, leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless — I don’t think you should be terribly shocked that some folks will want to register their disapproval over the bridge of your nose. And you’ll have it coming. …
I had observed, yesterday, that there were not merely a handful of folks on the left sneering about how happy they were that Breitbart had suddenly died. There were gobs and gobs of them, all over Twitter and the web at large. If you need examples, Charlie Spiering collected plenty here, though I’d urge most of sound mind to avoid putting themselves through reading that.
You can call this whatever you like — the Daily-Kos-ification of the Left, perhaps — but it confirms what many of us suspected and/or feared. I didn’t want to believe it, really. I personally know too many people I’d identify as Democrats, if not liberals, who are too decent to ever express such raw hate and cruelty. But a large chunk of the rank and file of the Left — way more than a small percentage — really don’t believe that their opponents deserve anything resembling basic human dignity or respect.
We’re not really people to them. It’s not an accident that New York Times columnist referred to his critics on Twitter as “right-wing lice.” They’re not good, decent Americans who just have some different ideas about how to make the world a better place. They run on hate. It appears their entire sense of self-worth is driven by demonizing those who disagree with them and celebrating their political viewpoints as the cardinal measurements of virtue and good character. They are positively energized by the thought of lashing out at those of us who have the audacity to think differently than they. They really do project and accuse the opposition of all their worst traits: rage, closed-mindedness, cruelty, intolerance, bigotry, and an inability to empathize with others. And they completely lack self-awareness. They are blind to the irony of their actions. As someone said on Twitter today (I can’t find the comment now), “How many of the people celebrating Andrew’s death have a ‘NO H8′ icon on their avatar?”
If, in their minds, we’re not deserving of that respect they clamor for endlessly — if their instinct, upon seeing us mourn is to “get in our faces” (a phrase that our president once strangely used) — they really cannot be entrusted with any power. They really would do away with us if given the chance.
Breitbart was the George Patton of the right side of the blogosphere. Patton’s Third Army captured more enemy prisoners and liberated more territory in less time than any army in history. Patton was highly controversial while doing so, with a U.S. letter-writing campaign to get Patton fired after one of his two soldier-slapping incidents. Someone once said that wars are won on the road, and Breitbart would appear on whatever media outlet would have him, even those unsympathetic to conservative points of view.
I think conservatives loved Breitbart not just because he expressed the right ideas, but because he expressed them ferociously and fearlessly, similar to Rush Limbaugh. His goal was not merely to outdebate, but to nuke his opponents. A lot of people like to say they don’t care what others think of them. Not only did he not care, but he didn’t care about the sensibilities of those he offended by blasting them for their wrong ideas or viewpoints.
That last paragraph could also explain the lurching popularity of Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. But Breitbart was more socially liberal, or libertarian, than Santorum, and from his friends it appears that Breitbart lived his life better (he leaves a wife and four children) than Gingrich. I don’t know if Breitbart ever met Ronald Reagan before Reagan’s Alzheimer’s Disease disabled him in the 1990s, but wouldn’t you have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation?
Breitbart’s death came in the same week as Limbaugh’s making a public apology for comparing the Georgetown University law school student who testified before Congressional Democrats to a slut. Breitbart was in the process of being sued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture official whose speech Breitbart’s website selectively edited. And Breitbart was, shall we say, less than complimentary about Ted Kennedy on the day of Kennedy’s death. (Which someone repeated on Twitter, to which I replied that Breitbart was responsible for one fewer death than Kennedy, which led to an accusation that I was stuck in the ’60s. To quote Taranto, Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.) When a commentator goes off the deep end or repeats inaccuracies, he impugns his own credibility and takes attention away from what he’s arguing for or against.
How you feel about Breitbart depends on how important you feel the battle between conservative and liberal values is — if what’s happening now is really a cultural war, or just the latest shifting political winds. You need not think Limbaugh used appropriate language to question why a college affiliated with a church that opposes artificial birth control (because some forms cause what those who believe life begins at conception would consider to be abortion) should be required to provide its students with contraception. You need not believe Breitbart never went too far to believe that this country is moving in the profoundly wrong direction with Barack Obama in the White House and his amen corps in government, the entertainment world and the news media cheering on every move of Obama and his supporters, and using far worse language to describe their opponents. (Look up Bill Maher’s description of Sarah Palin. I’m not going to repeat it.)
We’ve seen that here in Wisconsin with a governor trying to install fiscal discipline in a state that has not known fiscal discipline in decades. And his reward is an attempted coup d’état, which remains the best description of the recall movements of last and this year (possibly the stupidest thing that has happened in Wisconsin politics in the history of this state), along with a politically motivated John Doe investigation. (Not to mention a Madison talk show host who wasn’t exactly complimentary about Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, though he did apologize.) As I’ve said here numerous times, politics is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other loses — and if a war is taking place between the left and the right, you had better win.
… became an avid conservative and advocate for America’s constitutional order — which he rightly believed was the one thing that guaranteed our freedom.
The Los Angeles Times described him as a “Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative.” Well, not really. Breitbart loved Hollywood and its grand traditions. In conversation, he often mentioned how much he respected and loved his father-in-law, the talented comic actor Orson Bean.
What he didn’t like was that Hollywood had been seized by a kind of leftist groupthink that permeated everything from its screenplays to its selection of actors. He hated leftist cant, regarding it as lazy.
As for the mainstream media, he didn’t loathe it so much as get angry at the left-wing, agenda-driven journalism it practiced. Even so, he was a frequent guest on “mainstream” TV and radio, and loved the news.
He was among the first to take the Tea Party seriously, and worked nonstop to advocate its back-to-basics brand of bedrock conservatism. As the huge media flaps over former Rep. Andrew Weiner, Acorn and Shirley Sherrod show, he loved to puncture the powerful and hypocritical — and that included Republicans.
I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies…. Three years ago, I was a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a popular website…. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in…. I’ve lost friends, sure…. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies.
At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep well at night.
You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 