Democrats throw a 5 minute temper tantrum in the well of the House chamber as the vote to censure Adam Schiff passes, yelling "shame" at Kevin McCarthy and refusing to allow him to finish reading the resolution. pic.twitter.com/kqQocSoZPi
I've clipped out the "Shame!" chant. There's much more on the video I recorded and edited, and the highlights are identified in the post. To hear the voice of Andrew Breitbart, scroll to 3:36.
"In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, 'viral' rates, unseated old power structures. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success. A new one, such as BuzzFeed News, won largely by being linkable and first.
When it came to the Steele dossier, which a number of news organizations had in hand, Smith’s concern that someone else would beat him to the link made him feel physically unwell. His site wanted the traffic. And, when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper summarized the contents on air one day, Smith knew that viewers would be Googling for the goods. He and his colleagues, snatching the keyboard back and forth, composed a brief introduction that noted the dossier’s 'specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations' then posted the document itself, in PDF form. In his book, Smith recalls meditating on 'the viral power of an object... something that readers would fixate on and pass hand to hand.'"
So Smith had a temporary grip on clickbait, but can the man write a book? I see the hardcover, released last Tuesday, is #2,216 at Amazon. But who'd buy that in hardcover? Anyone interested in Smith's musings on virality would go with the Kindle, don't you think? I know I would, because I'd want to be able to cut and paste, using my own skill for presenting something you'd find delectable. But the Kindle version is at #5,107. I'm not interested in reading Smith's insights. Who wants the deeper thoughts of someone who figured out how to ride the moment for thrills?
So I'm sticking with The New Yorker, which operates in the middle ground between clickbait and books. Nathan Heller pulls some quotation from the book:
"... with those first chords that chimed the songbook we were now all singing from. The initial inductees were Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley; not a woman in sight. Sister Rosetta didn’t get in until the Rock Hall was publicly shamed into adding her in 2018. (She was on a US postal stamp two decades before the Rock Hall embraced her.) Big Mama Thornton, whose recording of Ball’n’Chain also shaped this new form of music? Still not in. Today, just 8.48% of the inductees are women... If the Rock Hall is not willing to look at the ways it is replicating the violence of structural racism and sexism that artists face in the music industry, if it cannot properly honour what visionary women artists have created, innovated, revolutionised and contributed to popular music – well, then let it go to hell in a handbag."
Why hasn't Love written off the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? However much contempt she has for the place, she says it's "a bulwark against erasure... game recognising game, history made and marked... a king-making force in the global music industry." It makes "the difference between touring secondary-market casinos opening for a second-rate comedian, or headlining respected festivals."
"He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, 'Me and the Orgone.' (The orgone was a pseudoscientific theory about a universal life force.) When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children and for years led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and 'househusband,' casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization. 'We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,' he wrote in a 1977 Op-Ed in The Times. 'We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.' In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another."
If you remember Orson Bean, it is probably not for his hippie phase. As the NYT puts it, he is "remembered for early panel shows, which, in contrast to the culture of greed, noise and kitsch of modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated." You know, stuff like this:
He also acted in plenty of of movies and TV shows, notably the "Mr. Bevis" episode in the first season of "Twilight Zone." Clip:
Another distinction: Orson Bean was the father-in-law of Andrew Breitbart.
ADDED: Bean did not die of old age. He was struck by a car as he crossed the street in Los Angeles.
Bean said Breitbart resonated with so many people because he was fighting to right that culture, which he said is decaying, with optimism and joy. And he did it in an unconventionally fresh and unique way that warranted Breitbart’s name to be a trademarked, one-of-a-kind brand. Bean said it was Breitbart’s larger-than-life spirit that makes people come up to him to this day with tears in their eyes, saying, “you’re Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law!”
Breitbart, who once was a fierce liberal, may never have been a conservative or built the foundation for his media empire had he not seen a Rush Limbaugh book in Bean’s library.
“Take it home and read it, Andrew,” Bean recalled telling his son-in-law.
"It isn’t really camp, but some people said he looks like a white James Brown impersonator. Which he does now. But that’s not camp. You have to like what’s camp. It has to be so bad, it’s good. He’s so bad, he’s bad.... When I was on Bill Maher with Andrew Breitbart, [Breitbart] said to me, 'I do the same thing you do; we’re just on different sides.' Which is true. So I get why Trump supporters like [Trump], because he is doing what he said he was going to do and we hate him so much he makes us crazy.... I think I love everything I make fun of, and certainly Trump does not love what he makes fun of. Although he used to be what he makes fun of. He was a liberal, wasn’t he?... [Does he make you laugh?] Never. But neither do most of the Democrat character candidates running now either. And you could argue it’s not a funny time, which is true.... There are 40 [Democrats] that are going to divide it all up. You know, the gay one I like. I’d vote for any of them, even though it would be really hard for me to vote for Elizabeth Warren who has never once said a funny thing in her entire life.... I think she will lose. Any of the ones that have already been out there will lose, big time. And any of the ones that try to be super left wing will really lose, too. And all the other ones just haven’t been around. I don’t know. I’m very much against Kamala because she is a prisoner’s enemy.... What’s the one, Mayor Pete? Is he the gay one?... It’s a civil war, and I believe that it could be decided by one vote.... It’s just exhausting to me. But I get why they like [Trump], because he infuriates us."
Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said.
Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. “Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,” said one person familiar with the situation....
It's good to have 5 sources, but I can't tell what happened that justifies the verb "clashed." That could mean a lot of things, and I'm suspicious that journalists antagonistic to Trump are eager to impose a chaos template. (It seems to alternate with the evil template.)
Politico observes that Kushner's power has "ballooned":
He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy. The national security directive removing Bannon from the NSC explicitly authorized Powell to attend the National Security Council's Principals' and Deputies' Committee meetings.
I'm familiar with the name Gary Cohn only because I just read — in a NYT interview transcript — Trump's reaction when Gary Cohn sneezed:
TRUMP: God bless you. You O.K., Gary? That was a pretty tough one. I’ve got to make sure my man is all right.
I don't know if Trump and Cohn have a sneeze-and-response routine to break the tension. It happened right when Maggie Haberman was bearing in, looking for specifics about which U.S. airports really deserve to be called — as Trump had put it — a "horror show." But I'll assume it was a random sneeze, and Trump loves to spontaneously switch topics. It's fun. It makes him look cute and smart (or so he may think). And it makes it hard for others to keep up even as he looks as if he's not racing ahead. He's manifesting distractability, and it makes them think he's less competent. But everyone laughed, and Trump got away with never saying exactly which airports are a horror show.
Oh, yes — do I seem distractable? — there's all that chaos around Trump. Bannon and Jared are clashing. Cohn is sneezing.
[Robert Mercer] poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News.... By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.”
Much more about Robert and Rebekah Mercer at that New Yorker article. Back at the Politico piece, we see that Jared Kushner supposedly thinks that Rebekah and Robert Mercer "have taken too much credit" for Trump's victory and that he has "misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda."
“If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer.
"Why did the anti-Palin protesters think it was right and good to shout her down?" — I wrote in April 2011. It was a Tea Party rally featuring Sarah Palin at the Wisconsin Capitol, coming at a time when the Capitol had been dominated by anti-GOP protesters for 2 months. In video shot by Meade and me, we are surrounded by protesters chanting, booing, and blowing vuvuzelas. We were near a loudspeaker but could barely hear Palin:
About a minute into that, I turn around to the man who's been yelling "shame, shame, shame" right behind me. He doesn't like being on camera. He vigorously asserted his right not to be photographed depriving me of my right to hear Palin. He switched to a threat of violence: "I will knock those cameras out of your hands." And Meade says, "No, you won't. That would be assault." He says: "You're here to see the damned rally. Turn around and watch it." "Watch" was the right word, because I couldn't hear, since he went back to shouting "shame."
I have another video montage of that day. In this you hear a 14-year-old girl, speaking from the podium and getting heckled. A woman actually bellows "Corporate thief!" and "Koch suckers!" at this child. Hang on until the end and you will hear a voice you may remember — beginning at 3:35 — telling the protesters to "go to Hell."
That's Andrew Breitbart. The protesters laugh at him.
Here's one more video from that day featuring a little boy banging on a plastic bucket "drum" and lots of cowbell ringing. The 14-year-old speaker is heard over chants of "Go home! Go home! Go home!" and when the girl ends with "God bless America" the protesters boo:
So for those of you who think Donald Trump has given rise to a new phenomenon of protesters aiming to destroy a rally, I can tell you with personal experience and my own video evidence that this was done 5 years ago in Wisconsin. And a lot of the protesters came here from Chicago. Keep an eye out for the CPD hat — CPD = Chicago Police Department — and the White Sox jacket. We were very familiar with the Chicago presence at the Wisconsin protests. I'll never forget the band of union protesters who marched onto the scene with the chant: "Chicago is up in the house! Chicago is up in the house!"
ADDED: If the anti-Trump protests continue, Trump has a fine opportunity to do an endorsement press conference, if, in fact, Scott Walker supports Trump. Walker could bring some great perspective on these issues of protest and free speech.
The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.
For an older variation on this sort of lawsuit — a real lawsuit, not just a threat to sue — recall Shirley Sherrod's defamation claim against Andrew Breitbart for presenting a quote of hers out of context. That lawsuit is still pending (incredibly, against Breitbart's widow). A couple years ago, I commented:
Don't we constantly extract quotes and clips from larger contexts? I do blog posts by that method all the time. I find the juiciest line and quote it often deliberately out of context or with intent to misdirect for humorous or shocking effect. It's the reader's responsibility to figure out what to do with it. I'm not ashamed to operate that way. For one thing, I give links, so you have a path to the larger context. And, more important, by depriving you of a pat, self-contained package, I'm forcing you to read critically and keep going.
There's always more to the story. When we purport to put something "in context," it's never the whole context. We're choosing the frame of information that serves our interests, interests that may include but are rarely limited to the pure understanding of the truth. Traditional newspapers may have led their readers to think that they'd processed all the information and digested it into a simple-to-read article, and they often abused their readers' trust. The web doesn't work like that. The web activates its readers, and I think that's for the good....
When can it work to select an actual well-known dead person as a character in your joking about dying young? Jennings is more of a quiz-show whizz than a comedy writer, and Twitter boxes everyone in with the short format and wide dissemination, so it's hard to judge from this one example, but this is a case of selecting a dead-young person by his political position to demonstrate the truth of the opposite political position, and if the joke-teller isn't someone who has and wants the comic persona of asshole, this is a bad idea.
But I do like the standing of his ground, after he made the decision to joke about the dead man Breitbart. That takes nerve, and that can be funny. Commit to comedy and don't let the first critics scare you into taking it back and apologizing. It's at this point, when the critics step up, that you have a big opportunity to say something especially funny. Prudes will always be pushing you back. They'll always want everyone to stop laughing. A man died! No one should laugh.
But laughing at death is a good move. If you can't laugh at death, life will be nothing but crying, and that would be true idiocy.
Speaking of true idiocy and commitment to comedy, I got an assist in this post from The 3 Stooges! Bonus points to the reader who can guess what question I had, writing the text above, that led me to Google and resolved my question with help from The 3 Stooges....
A federal judge delivered a severe tongue-lashing to a Justice Department lawyer Thursday, slamming the Obama Administration for its handling of demands for government records in the libel lawsuit fired Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod filed against conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.
During a 40-minute hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon repeatedly ripped into the government and DOJ trial counsel David Glass for resisting requests from both sides in the case for government files and e-mails that might be of use in the litigation....
Release the email! We here in Wisconsin are deluged with internal emails relating to Scott Walker. Freedom of information is a bitch.
At the outset of Thursday's hearing, Leon lit into Glass for filing a 21-page statement outlining the government's position—a filing submitted electronically just after midnight Thursday along with a stack of nine exhibits. The judge called it "a self-serving pleading, not requested by anyone" and repeatedly suggested it was filed for "public relations" reasons rather than because it might be useful to the court....
"This is not a typical case.....This case involves someone who was fired by a cabinet officer....The government is not going to be able to slow roll this case," the judge insisted.
Leon, by the way, is the judge who ruled last December that the NSA surveillance program is a likely violation of the 4th Amendment, saying "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen...." He's a George W. Bush appointee and a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.
"Slow roll" is an intriguing expression to hear from a judge. It seems to originate in poker and to refer to some annoying taunting approaches to revealing your winning hand.
The government is willing to produce the evidence that is directly relevant to matters actually at issue in the litigation. But as a non-party, it doesn’t want to get dragged into this mess more than necessary....
Eighty-three categories of document requests, plus a raft of deposition subpoenas, issued to a third party? This sounds a bit like a fishing expedition to me.
"In this case it was almost as if the columnist was so eager to seize upon the Godwin's reference that she failed to even attempt to comprehend why Scalia said what he did, and instead relied on knee-jerk preconceptions to inform her judgement. If that's not the epitome of bias there, I don't know what is." A comment, at an Instapundit post about my supplying the NYT with the context it missed. But I only had the context because when I wrote about the NYT piece, someone who was at the conference emailed me with a detailed account. That information wanted to be heard, and somehow I was the portal for it. I think the NYT had to be actively looking for crap to throw at Scalia and keeping its door shut to the flow of information. And I think my blogging the context only resulted in a correction because it was picked up by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, and that got the NYT's attention, but initially only to try to shrug off the problem:
Only joking. Ha ha. Get it. Joking about the Holocaust. Heh heh. What's the problem?
Taranto kept up the pressure: "Ahhh, I did not realize your post was comedy!" And the NYT thought better of its don't-you-get-the-Holocaust-jokes stance and put up the correction.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall, the other target of Taranto's tweet, stood his ground: "Again, anything in the Althouse post that in any way contradicts my post? Or are you just trolling?" And: "Hey Jim, You might want to read what I actually wrote since nothing in that post contradicts it." That is: So what if I left out the context as long as I didn't have any incorrect statements?
Context is a funny topic. Remember when Andrew Breitbart was pilloried for quoting Shirley Sherrod out of context?
Context itself must be understood in context. If your rules about putting quotes in context depend on whether you're quoting people you like or people you hate, then you are a hack. I think both Marshall and Lapidos showed themselves to be hacks here, but at least Lapidos or the organization that controls her is ashamed when exposed and tries to cover its tracks. Marshall is out and proud.
Some of this is interesting, but watch out for distortion:
It was fun! Telling the truth was fun, having the American people behind him was fun, fucking with the heads of nervous journalists and helping the mainstream media commit suicide was fun. Breitbart went on Real Time With Bill Maher and stood up for himself and Rush to the politically correct hometown mob of an audience, and it was an incredibly committed moment in his life. He found himself the leader of a loose band of patriotic malcontents, and right in front of him was the same opportunity that the Founding Fathers had had—to fight a revolution against the complex.
And if he happened to get an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod fired by releasing a deceptively edited video that seemed to show her making anti-white comments when in fact she was doing just the opposite—fuck it, did the other side play fair? Anyway, Old Media’s rules about truth and objectivity were dead. What mattered was getting maximum bang from a story, changing the narrative. That was why Breitbart was winning, with ample help from his media enemies, and why he must have been at least semi-sober during his college classes on moral relativism.
Just the opposite? Packer answers the question he attributes to Breitbart: did the other side play fair? Obviously not. Packer's side is playing and is playing unfairly.
ADDED: George Packer has been unfair to me (discussed here and here).
Via Instapundit, who says: "Sorry comrade, but what you’re offering is mere bourgeois truth, concerned with tedious facts. The higher truth is 'revolutionary truth,' which is any narrative that advances the revolution."
Loesch is seeking her freedom from the company and at least $75,000 in damages.
Breitbart.com is "binding Loesch to what amounts to an indentured servitude in limbo," she charges in the suit....
Mixed metaphor: Limbo is a place you can never get out of. Indentured servitude is marked by a specific period of time. Come on, lawsuit drafters. Sharpen up.
Could the people inclined to inform us about this Fast & Furious episode please write more competently? I went to that link (at RedState) after reading this story at Breitbart where I couldn't find a quotable sentence. It seems like an important story. How about making it easy to share?
IN THE COMMENTS: mariner said:
"Treating with" is "making nice with" or "allying with".
I haven't seen that usage in a long time.
So "treat" in the sense used in "treaty"? I don't remember ever seeing that. But let me check the OED. The oldest meaning of "treat" as a verb is:
intr. To deal or carry on negotiations (with another) with a view to settling terms; to discuss terms of settlement; to bargain, negotiate.
I'm surprised at this usage, which I think I would have picked up if I'd seen it written in something from the 19th century or earlier....
1617 F. Moryson Itinerary i. 195, I‥. was forced to treat with unknowne Merchants for taking money upon exchange.
I would have understood that easily. I'm not sure that's the usage needed in the quote in the original post, since the point is that the DOJ and Media Matters were already in an alliance, and it was showing, not that they were negotiating in public.
And Meade took some of the pictures, like this one of the big crowd:
See the Hans Christian Heg statue in the back?
"Walker fixed it/Let's not Falk it up/Wisconsin Can't Barrett" (references to the upcoming recall primary and election):
"Why do I have to work 'till I die so you can retire at 55?"
A year ago, Breitbart was here.
The other side of the "He's got nads!" shirt refers to Scott Walker, but it could just as well have referred to Andrew Breitbart, who was here today in spirit:
That's from last year's Tax Day protest and counterprotest. Today it's a sunny day and 60°. We'll see what kind of scene there is on what might still be the "front lines," as the Scott Walker recall election looms. It's April 14th, and we e-filed our taxes last night. TurboTax informed me that I paid over $9,000 less this year than last year. I don't know who made that happen — Scott Walker? Obama? Bush? I'm not sure I really noticed. I guess we were supposed to feel stimulated and buy some extra stuff, but we did not.
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
NBC now serves up a weak apology. I hope Zimmerman sues.
Flashback: Remember when Shirley Sherrod sued Andrew Breitbart for presenting the center section of a speech she gave, where she admitted discriminating against a white man, and left out the ending, where she talked about her realization that what matters isn't race, but class. I wonder if those who were outraged at Breitbart are outraged by the much more outrageous editing done by NBC.
ADDED: Some commenters question the way I referred to the Sherrod-Breitbart conflict. I will answer by referring to what I wrote at the time, back in July 2010.
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