Conservative warrior Andrew Breitbart dead at 43

Andrew Breitbart collapsed and died shortly after midnight [Thursday, March 1]. He was a new media entrepreneur, author of Righteous Indignation and former liberal turned conservative defender, who spoke recently at CPAC (full speech). Andrew Breitbart was a pioneer of new media websites including BREITBART (News), BIG GOVERNMENT, BREITBART TV, BIG HOLLYWOOD, BIG JOURNALISM and BIG PEACE. All websites featured an In Memoriam message by Larry Solov, President of Breitbart.com, LLC. Close friend and collaborator Matt Drudge wrote,

"DEAR READER: In the first decade of the DRUDGEREPORT Andrew Breitbart was a constant source of energy, passion and commitment. We shared a love of headlines, a love of the news, an excitement about what's happening. I don't think there was a single day during that time when we did not flash each other or laugh with each other, or challenge each other. I still see him in my mind's eye in Venice Beach, the sunny day I met him. He was in his mid 20's. It was all there. He had a wonderful, loving family and we all feel great sadness for them today... MDRUDGE"

Rush Limbaugh describes Breitbart as a "Bulldog for the Cause." BIG GOVERNMENT has been posting comments from conservative notables all day (see list of links below the fold). Rest in peace Andrew Breitbart and heartfelt condolences to his family. His life was way too short but he packed a lot into it... fearlessly. Photo: foia.tv

1. In Memoriam: Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

2. Breitbart's death to be reviewed by L.A. County coroner

3. Walsh: 'We must continue his good fight'...

4. ...'not the end of his crusade, but its beginning'

5. Palin: 'Thank God for his inspiration and leadership'

6. Carlson: Andrew 'willing to do things that scared him'

7. Breitbart’s Greatest Moments: ‘Man Against The Mob’

8. Rep. McCotter: Breitbart 'Gave His All to Serve His Fellow Human Beings and This Country'

9. Reuters: 'He knew how to take a punch. And he liked throwing them.'

10. Romney: Breitbart 'brilliant entrepreneur'

11. Rick Santorum Reacts To Andrew's Death

12. Congressman Gohmert Makes Touching Tribute To Breitbart On House Floor

13. Liberals celebrate death of Andrew Breitbart

14. MSNBC Mocks Breitbart with Cartoons

15. Huffington Praises Breitbart's Passion, Exuberance, Fearlessness

16. Rush: Breitbart Exposes Liberal Media Bias Even in Death

17. Guardain: Breitbart married new media with political principle

18. Gutfeld: 'He Was Fun Personified'

Farewell, Andrew Breitbart

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Local author releases new book: "No Lilies or Violets"

Johathan Hayes' book, No Lilies or Violets, Reminiscences of a Fighter Pilot, is about to be released, just in time for Veterans Day! Hayes is active in local Republican politics and conservative causes.

Title: No Lilies or Violets, Reminiscences of a Fighter Pilot
Publication Date: November 4, 2011

Book Description (Amazon.com): No Lilies or Violets, Reminiscences of a Fighter Pilot, the first book written by author Jonathan A. Hayes, is a fast-paced, in-your-face trip into the world of an F-4 Phantom II fighter pilot and his exploits during eleven years and three tours into the tumultuous Vietnam war. Hayes recounts his reminiscences forty years after the experiences, lending a mature insight into the raucous adventures of a man and his machine. Visceral recollections are dished to the reader in a shotgun of images. This is a man putting his life on the line numerous times a week, having to react at lightning speed in concert with pilots around him as they pursue the ever-moving enemy in hostile and explosive environment. One of the weird things about aerial combat is how quiet it is. The air around you will be filled with explosions from anti-aircraft shells and missiles and the only thing you will hear is your backseater's quiet breathing and the occasional radio transmission. You are totally cut off from the sonic part of your surroundings. They lived hard and played hard in an effort to maintain their sanity and balance so that could go out there and do it again the next day. No Lilies or Violets puts the reader in the mind of a fighter pilot. Daily on-the-ground routines are predictable, but the mind and body are always braced and torqued for the next bombing run. Join Hayes for a journey into war.

Note from the author: Buy a copy for yourself, one for each member of your family and for all your friends, coworkers, people you ride the bus with. It's a great book (says he, modestly) and you'll love it!

Check six,
Jonathan Hayes
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Amethyst Moon Publishing, Tucson, AZ
ISBN: 978-1-935354-67-67-3 (13 digit) Read More......

'Obama's Wars': The gang that couldn't shoot straight -- or shut up

WASHINGTON POST, 9/30/2010 by Eliot A. Cohen (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - Senior Washington officials, in this administration or its predecessors, talk to Bob Woodward for all kinds of reasons -- to fluff up their vanity, to avenge slights, to neutralize rivals, to gratify egos or, most laughably, to shape the historical record. Their bosses may even instruct them to blab. But the leakers do not control their audiences, and the following fictional interior monologues, as plausible as any recorded by the author of "Obama's Wars," suggest some of the unintended consequences that may result. Read more at Washington Post...

Eliot A. Cohen is a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime." Read More......

Republicans repealed the Fugitive Slave Act

GRAND OLD PARTISAN, 6/28/2010 by Michael Zak - On this day in 1864, the Republican-controlled 38th Congress repealed the notorious Fugitive Slave Act. The law had enabled slave catchers to operate freely in northern states and to kidnap any African-American residing there. Merely by attesting that the person was an escaped slave, a slave catcher could chain him and drag him away to a southern slave market. Moreover, the law required all free people as well as all local and state and federal government officials to assist slave catchers. ∴ A pair of Democrats, Senator James Mason (D-VA) and Senator Andrew Butler (D-SC), had written the Fugitive Slave Act. ∴ The bill repealing the Fugitive Slave Act was written by a Republican congressman from Ohio, Rufus Spalding [pictured]. A Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, signed it into law.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. --Abraham Lincoln, 1864 Read More......

Mark Steyn: The End of the World as We Know It

Welcome to the “post-American era.” By Mark Steyn - According to an Earth Day survey, one third of schoolchildren between the ages of six and eleven think the earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and the eco-propagandists of the public-education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.

Call me crazy, but I’ll bet that in 15-20 years the planet will still be here along with most of the “environment” — your flora and fauna, your polar bears and three-toed tree sloths and whatnot. But geopolitically we’re in for a hell of a ride, and the world we end up with is unlikely to be as congenial as most Americans have gotten used to.

For example, Hillary Clinton said the other day that Pakistan posed a “mortal threat” to . . . Afghanistan? India? No, to the entire world! To listen to her, you’d think Pakistan was as scary as l’il Jimmy in the second grade’s mom’s SUV. She has a point: Asif Ali Zardari, the guy who’s nominally running the country, isn’t running anything. He’s ceding more and more turf to the local branch office of the Taliban. When the topic turns up in the news, we usually get vague references to the pro-Osama crowd controlling much of the “northwest,” which makes it sound as if these guys are the wilds of rural Idaho to Zardari’s Beltway. In fact, they’re now within some 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad — or, in American terms, a couple of I-95 exits north of Baltimore: In other words, they’re within striking distance of the administrative center of a nation of over 165 million people — and its nuclear weapons. That’s the “mortal threat.”

What’s going to stop them? Well, not Zardari. Nor his “summit” in Washington with President Obama and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. The creation of Pakistan was the worst mistake of post-war British imperial policy, and all that’s happened in the six decades since is that its pathologies have burst free of its borders and gone regional, global, and soon perhaps nuclear. Does the Obama administration have even a limited contingency plan for the nukes if — when — the Pakistani state collapses?

It would be reassuring to think so. But I wonder.

What’s the greater likelihood? That, in ten years’ time, things in Pakistan will be better? Or much worse? That nuclearization by basket-case dictatorships from Pyongyang to Tehran will have advanced, or been contained? That the bleak demographic arithmetic at the heart of Europe and Japan’s economic woes will have accelerated, or been reversed? That a resurgent Islam’s assaults on free speech and other rights (symbolized by the recent U.N. support for a global Islamic blasphemy law) will have taken hold in the western world, or been forced to retreat?

A betting man would check the “worse” box. Because resisting the present careless drift would require global leadership. And 100 days into a new presidency, Barack Obama is giving strong signals to the world that we have entered what Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post calls “the post-American era.” At the time of Gordon Brown’s visit to Washington, London took umbrage at an Obama official’s off-the-record sneer to a Fleet Street reporter that “there’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” Andy McCarthy of National Review made the sharp observation that, never mind the British, this was how the administration felt about their own country, too: America is just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. In Europe, the president was asked if he believed in “American exceptionalism,” and replied: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Gee, thanks. A simple “no” would have sufficed. The president of the United States is telling us that American exceptionalism is no more than national chauvinism, a bit of flag-waving, of no more import than the Slovenes supporting the Slovene soccer team and the Papuans the Papuan soccer team. This means something. The world has had two millennia to learn to live without “Greek exceptionalism.” It’s having to get used to post-exceptional America rather more hurriedly.

It makes sense from Obama’s point of view: On the domestic scene, he’s determined on a transformational presidency, one that will remake the American people’s relationship to their national government (“federal” doesn’t seem the quite the word anymore) in terms of health care, education, eco-totalitarianism, state control of the economy, and much else. With a domestic agenda as bulked up as that, the rest of the world just gets in the way.

You’ll recall that, in a gimmick entirely emblematic of post-exceptional America, Hillary Clinton gave the Russians a (mistranslated) “Reset” button. The button has certainly been “reset” — to September 10th, to a legalistic rearview mirror approach to the “War on Terror,” in which investigating Bush officials will consume far more time and effort than de-nuking Iran. The secretary of Homeland Security’s ludicrous re-classification of terrorism as “man-caused disaster,” and her boneheaded statement that the September 11th bombers had entered America from Canada (which would presumably make 9/11 a “Canadian man-caused disaster”) exemplifies the administration’s cheery indifference to all that Bush-era downer stuff.

But it’s not September 10th. In Pakistan, a great jewel is within the barbarians’ reach, the first of many. At the U.N., the Islamic bloc’s proscriptions on free speech will make it harder even to talk about these issues. In much of the West, demographic decay means the good times are never coming back: Recession is permanent.

Hey, what’s the big deal? Britain and France have been on the geopolitical downward slope for most of the last century and life still seems pretty agreeable. Well, yes. But that’s in part because, when a fading Britannia handed the baton to the new U.S. superpower, it was one of the least disruptive transfers of global dominance in human history. In the “post-American era,” to whom does the baton get passed now? (Z: As Obama neglects to figure out where Gitmo detainees might go after announcing to the world he's shutting down Gitmo, there seems to be a lack of "thinking about consequences" in this administration, I believe the Left has also been unable to extrapolate that when America's no longer the world power, who WILL it be? It won't be the UN, no matter HOW much they dream for that..China? Russia?)

Since January, President Obama and his team have schmoozed, ineffectively, American enemies over allies in almost every corner of the globe. If you’re, say, India, following Obama’s apology tour even as you watch the Taliban advancing on those Pakistani nukes, would you want to bet the future on American resolve? In Delhi, in Tokyo, in Prague, in Tel Aviv, in Bogota, they’ve looked at these first 100 days and drawn their own conclusions.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn Read More......