House to Try Top Democrat

House ethics investigators have accused once-powerful Rep. Charles Rangel of breaking congressional rules, following a series of high-profile allegations against the former chief of the chamber's tax-writing committee over the past two years.

Read Article

No money left to defend Britain from every threat

Britain cannot afford to protect itself against all potential threats to its security, Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, has warned.

Read Article

Andrew Breitbart: profile of a shock jock

The web's 'most combative conservative impresario' cannot be dismissed as a rightwing crank

Commentators say that the Shirley Sherrod video furore won't harm Andrew Breitbart's popularity.

Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

 

Andrew Breitbart, the rightwing stirrer-in-chief, certainly created a furore over Shirley Sherrod, although perhaps not in the way he intended.

Sherrod, a black, mid-level official at the department of agriculture was sacked after a video was aired on Breitbart's website Big Government.

The video – edited to be economical with the facts – gave the impression that Sherrod had refused to help a white farmer 24 years ago, whereas in fact she had helped save his farm as the full video makes clear (17mins in).

Breitbart had seized on the edited video for some point scoring against the NAACP, America's largest civil rights organisation, which had accused the Tea Party, the movement of disaffected rightwingers, of tolerating bigotry.

Sherrod has been reinstated amid red faces at the White House and the agriculture department. If anything, their haste in sacking Sherrod has eclipsed Breitbart's gaffe.

Breitbart – who says he feels badly about how Sherrod has been treated – may have come a cropper on the Sherrod tape, raising questions over his credibility. However, Patrick Coolican on LA Weekly doubts that Breitbart has done himself any harm, on the basis that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

In a recent profile in the New Yorker magazine, Breitbart – maybe tongue-in-cheek, maybe not – expressed a belief that President Barack Obama's election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the 1930s by émigré members of the Frankfurt School – dissident Marxists – to take over Hollywood, the media, academia, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism.

"He's a Marxist," Breitbart told the magazine. "His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view."

Breitbart, however, cannot simply be dismissed as a run-of the-mill rightwing crank.

In the words of Time magazine, Breitbart is the web's most combative conservative impresario, out-frothing those other shock jocks, Glenn Beck at Fox News and Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report.

In 2005, he founded Breitbart.com, which aggregates news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other wire services.

Last year he expanded his media constellation by setting up the Big Government website, with companion sites Big Hollywood and Big Journalism. Unpaid bloggers supply the content and the sites wield their rhetorical cudgels against what Breitbart believes is the leftist bias in American institutions.

Big Government made an impact early on, when it aired videos that appeared to show workers at Acorn, a liberal organisation that lobbies for affordable housing, offering tips on how to open a brothel. That the filmmakers were accused of entrapping their subjects and editing in footage of one of the undercover filmmakers dressed as a pimp got lost in the furore.

Breitbart, who grew up in the posh neighbourhood of Brentwood in Los Angeles, cut his media teeth by working with Drudge in the mid-1990s, when the web was starting to take off.

Breitbart spent 15 years putting together news items for databases and news agencies, and just as importantly, imbibed Drudge's anti-liberal worldview.

He went on to work for Arianna Huffington, once described as the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus, during her rightwing phase. Breitbart helped launch the Huffington Post in 2005, but they parted company when Huffington lurched to the left. Breitbart has said that he wants his sites to be conservative versions of the Huffington Post.

"Most conservatives are individualists," he told Time. "For years, they've been pummelled by the collectivists who run the American media, Hollywood and Washington. The underground conservative movement that is now awakening is the ecosystem I've designed my sites to tap into."

 

 

 

Why Blagojevich skipped the stand

Sources say Rod Blagojevich and his wife spent several days going over possible testimony. When he had difficulty wrapping words around the concepts he wanted to use, the defense team became worried.

 Read Article

With another woman, the Supreme Court can't help but change

By David S. Broder
Thursday, July 22, 2010

Buoyed by a 13 to 6 vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Elena Kagan is on her way to the Supreme Court. The talk in Washington is what the impending elevation of the former Harvard Law School dean and solicitor general will mean for the capstone of the judiciary.

Seated next to a former attorney general at a dinner party last weekend, I put the question to him -- and received what is probably the conventional wisdom. "It won't change anything," he said, because Kagan's moderate liberal philosophy is unlikely to deviate often from that of the justice she will replace, John Paul Stevens, often described as the leader of the four-member liberal minority. Not until one of the five conservative justices steps down will President Obama have an opportunity to remake the judicial branch.

That is what they say, and I have no legal credentials to challenge their conclusion. But, as I told my dinner companion, I suspect that he is wrong and that Kagan's joining Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor on the bench will change the high court in ways that no one foresees.

I say this based on what I saw happen in The Post's newsroom and many others when female reporters and editors arrived, in increasing numbers, starting in the 1970s and '80s. They changed the culture of the newspaper business and altered the way everyone, male or female, did the work.

The women who came onto the political beat asked candidates questions that would not have occurred to male reporters. They saw the candidates' lives whole, while we were much more likely to deal only with the official part of it. So the scope of the candidate profiles expanded, and the realm of privacy began to shrink.

They also changed the rules for reporters themselves. When I joined the press corps in the 1960 presidential campaign, I was formally instructed by a senior reporter for the New York Times on the "west of the Potomac rule." What happened between consenting adults west of the Potomac was not to be discussed with bosses, friends and especially family members east of the Potomac.

It was a protective, chauvinistic culture, and it changed dramatically when more than the occasional female reporter boarded the bus or plane.

I don't know how having three strong-minded female justices serving simultaneously for the first time will change the world of the Supreme Court. But I will not be surprised if this small society does not change for all its members.

Meantime, Kagan's passage through the Senate Judiciary Committee left at least two important markers for the future.

In what is undoubtedly his last Supreme Court confirmation debate, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania repeated his fervent plea that those selected to serve on that panel develop a greater degree of candor about their judicial philosophy -- and stronger adherence to the pledges they give in seeking confirmation.

While he voted to confirm Kagan for the bench after opposing her for solicitor general, Specter properly lamented her "repeat performance" of the deliberately bland responses the White House now recommends for appointees of both parties.

Ever since Robert Bork answered candidly and in full -- and was rejected -- it has become increasingly difficult for senators to learn where prospective justices stand. And, as Specter said, one of the most important aspects of "congressional power has been taken away." 

On the other hand, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the only Republican on the committee to support Kagan, once again warned his colleagues about the danger in importing the ideological conflicts of their campaigns into deliberations about the judiciary.

That "fragile" branch deserves protection, he said, not the pummeling that results from making it a battlefield. Acknowledge that elections have consequences and focus on intellectual and temperamental qualifications, he advised. Good advice for both sides to remember.

Follow the leader

Milbank: Rep. Bachmann could champion the cause of the Tea Party.

Read Opinion

 

Christie Makes Bold Moves on 2 Fronts

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in Atlantic City on Wednesday. A plan to take over the casino district and a retreat on the Meadowlands both carry political risks.

 Read Article

"America is a challenged power. China, and other emerging giants of the global east and south, may yet prove more formidable competitors than the Soviet Union ever was – or violent Islamism ever will be. Every time I come back to the United States, the airports, the roads, the public spaces look to me more tattered, battered, old-fashioned. Modernity is no longer self-evidently here. After a long sojourn in the west, it may be moving back to Asia. There are still fantastic examples of technological, commercial and design innovation in the US – think iPad – but they are islands of modernity in a torpid sea."

Read Full Opinion