Coroner: Andrew Breitbart Died of Heart Failure
Conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart died March 1 of "heart failure and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with focal coronary atherosclerosis," the Los Angeles Coroner's Office revealed Friday afternoon.
"No prescription or illicit drugs were detected," the office announced in a press release.
Breitbart had spent two hours that evening at the Brentwood Restaurant in LA's Brentwood district and had drunk some alcohol but "he wasn't drinking excessively," Arthur Sando, a marketing executive he met there for the first time that night, said in an account to Hollywood Reporter.
The coroner's office said Breitbart's blood alcohol content was .04 percent.
He was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center at 12:19 a.m. March 1 after being seen by witnesses collapsing on a public street. Media reports have conflicted about where Breitbart was when he was stricken.
After leaving the restaurant sometime around 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 29, Breitbart crossed the street and fell down in front of the Starbucks coffee shop in the vicinity of 148 S. Barrington Avenue.
Paul Huebl, a detective and former Chicago police officer, wrote on his crime news blog March 2 that he went to the scene and interviewed an eyewitness who had seen Breitbart collapse. The man, Christopher Lasseter, told him he was walking his dog after midnight when he saw Breitbart cross the street. Huebl wrote, "Once Breitbart stepped up on the curb, as Lasseter put it, 'He fell hard like a sack of potatoes.'"
Huebl wrote that he sold video of his interview with Lasseter to TMZ.Com. The photos he published on his blog match the location confirmed by the coroner's office as the place that Breitbart collapsed.
"I know Christopher was actually there because I asked him to describe Breitbart's clothing and he did so accurately down to his Converse tennis shoes," Huebl told me Friday in an email. "Christopher did not seem to know who Breitbart was other than that he was somebody who seemed important because of the media attention."
Though Huebl and others have speculated that Breitbart could have been murdered, the coroner's office dismissed the notion. "No significant trauma was present and foul play is not suspected," it stated in the press release.
A final coroner's report will be available within two weeks.
Developing ...
George Zimmerman Contradicts Himself on Stand
During the bond hearing today in his second-degree murder trial for the Feb. 26 death of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman said something in his testimony that is clearly contradicted by his original call to police on the night of the shooting. After his attorney Mark O'Mara told the court that Zimmerman wanted to make a statement, Zimmerman took the stand and made brief comments directed at Martin's parents, Tracy Martin and Sabryna Fulton, who were present in the courtroom. He said:
I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son. I did not know if he was armed or not. I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am.
Since Zimmerman is 28, this statement indicates he thought Martin was in his mid 20s.
That's not what he told a police dispatcher when he called to report a suspicious person in his neighborhood minutes before the fatal incident. Here's the relevant part of the call transcript:
Zimmerman: Yeah, now he's coming towards me. He's got his hands in his waist band. And he's a black male.
911 dispatcher: OK How old would you say he is?
Zimmerman: He's got something on his shirt. About like his late teens.
911 dispatcher: Late teens?
Zimmerman: Uh, huh.
Zimmerman correctly identified Martin, who was 17 when he died, as someone in his late teens.
The prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, did not point out this discrepancy to Zimmerman while he was on the stand, but in another question he claimed that there were inconsistencies in what Zimmerman told police that night about the shooting. The prosecutor could not elaborate on what he meant because O'Mara objected and the judge sustained the objection.
After O'Mara asked for $15,000 bond and De la Rionda sought that it either be denied or set at $1 million, Judge Kenneth Lester set bond at $150,000 with GPS monitoring and other conditions.
Andrew Breitbart's Closing Argument
Thursday morning shortly after midnight, the conservative media provocateur Andrew Breitbart collapsed while walking his neighborhood in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. He could not be revived at a hospital and died, exactly one month after his 43rd birthday. My condolences go out to his wife Susie (the daughter of the actor Orson Bean), his four kids and the many friends he had in public and private life.
As publisher of the Drudge Retort, I've followed Breitbart's career going back to the days when he was doing half the work on the Drudge Report and getting none of the credit. Matt Drudge liked the mystique of the I-work-alone myth, and stories would be written that mentioned he had a collaborator without naming the guy. It was Breitbart, who had befriended Drudge and operated a legal defense fund for him after Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal sued Drudge for libel.
When Breitbart was still working at the Drudge Report in May 2001, I caught the site fabricating a source. In a story slamming the New York Times for being slow to cover Blumenthal settling his suit, the following paragraph appeared:
"What the NEW YORK TIMES is doing with its sin of omission is no doubt a form of libel of its own, corporate news slander of the highest degree," said Professor Emeritus Andrew Breitbart of the Cashmere Institute of Media Studies.
That institute was fake. Cashmere was a reference to the street he lived on at the time. Breitbart had quoted himself in an article he reported.
Four years later, when he helped launch Huffington Post, I sent the site an email congratulating him on the launch and asking if he brought Drudge's siren with him.
Breitbart replied back, "No, I left it at the Cashmere Institute for Media Studies."
After watching him rise up from anonymous Drudge lackey to infamous journalism mogul, I could never figure out why Breitbart sounded so angry all the time. He operated in a constant state of rage that seemed bigger than politics. He was still bearing a grudge, as a middle-aged man, against a high school principal he believed had turned other kids against him, he told the New York Observer in 2009. He once ruined a date with his wife at a Santa Monica restaurant by flipping off a procession of anti-war protesters, only to learn later that they were actually protesting the conscription of child soldiers in Africa.
Breitbart cultivated liberal enemies all day long on Twitter, like he was afraid they might lose interest and start hating somebody else.
Today, a link was shared with me that provided some insight into his personality -- a Usenet post he made in 1995 to the online discussion group alt.support.attn-deficit:
Two weeks ago, I was clinically diagnosed with ADHD; the psychologist stated that the diagnosis was a "no-brainer" after just one meeting, one in which I rambled semi-coherently and excitedly about my life. MY FAVORITE SUBJECT!!!!!!!! ...
I feel my condition is well worse than those I read about. I do not take much joy from this distinction, but true concentation is simply not an option, ever. ...
Ironically, I am not depressed by my myriad of symptoms of ADHD. I love myself -- maybe too much. I love TV, radio, the news, books, movies, coffee, etc. The problem is -- jobs, occupation maintanence, and conforming to the work standards of others is a bit hard with my dependencies that obviously conflict with workplace norms.
Breitbart never had to worry about workplace norms. His plate-spinner personality was perfectly suited to this media age. Last year, I posted on Twitter that "Andrew Breitbart's baked expression on the cover of his new book explains a lot." He retweeted it within minutes.
As much as I hated what he was doing to politics and journalism, I would have liked much more time to make that case in the years to come. At the GOP presidential debate in Jacksonville I covered last month, two seats were reserved on my row at the media center for Breitbart.Com. I walked over a few times to see if he'd turn up in one of them, but unfortunately nobody showed. He was a nemesis I wanted to meet.
Credit: The photo was taken by Gage Skidmore and is available under a Creative Commons license.
My First Trip into a Debate Spin Room
I was granted media credentials by CNN to report on the GOP presidential debate last night in Jacksonville for the Drudge Retort, the first time I've had the opportunity to cover a debate. The University of North Florida squeezed around 400 journalists into a campus ballroom, putting online media together in one corner. I was sandwiched between the Huffington Post and The Guardian.
A misprint on a sign led the British journalist Toby Harnden to think that Matt Drudge had come up from Miami to attend. When Harnden came over looking for the international newsman of mystery, I had to break it to him that instead of Drudge, he'd found me. He did not mask his disappointment.
The debate began with the National Anthem, which inspired only one in four of the journalists around me to stand up, though some of them were foreigners and are thus excused. A woman down my row from the conservative American Spectator rocketed out of her seat with patriotic super-speed.
During the debate, the second-loudest laugh was when Newt Gingrich began answering Wolf Blitzer's praise-your-wife question by complimenting the other candidates' ladyfolk instead. "I think all three of the wives represented here would be terrific first ladies," he said. The guy can't help himself. He just likes wives.
The loudest laugh was in the final answer of the night, when Gingrich referred to Saul Alinsky. Journalists laughed so hard at the mention of the name you'd think a drinking game was going on.
After the debate, I walked one floor downstairs to the spin room, where each candidate sent spin doctors to explain how his guy just mopped the floor with those other no-hopers. The first to arrive was former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, sporting an impeccably tailored suit and a Mitt Romney lapel button to identify his allegiance. The reporters crowded 20 deep around him, and I quickly found myself experiencing body contact that's a sin to Rick Santorum.
I retreated to the peaceful solitude around Ron Paul's spinmeister, his national press secretary Gary Howard. I asked him this: The University of Chicago asked 37 economists if it was a good idea to return to the gold standard. All 37 said no. If returning to the gold standard is such a good idea, why is it that no mainstream economists agree with Rep. Paul?
Howard challenged me to identify the economists. "I need to know who these economists are," he said. "They could all be Keynesians."
Another reporter asked Howard how Paul, the leading vote-getter among Republicans under 30 despite being the oldest candidate in the race, had so successfully targeted young voters.
"I think they targeted us," Howard replied.
After asking questions of Bill McCollum and J.C. Watts, I approached Fred Thompson but something he was asked by another journalist caused him to skeedaddle. A reporter for Mother Jones blogged, perhaps jokingly, "I asked Thompson to speak about Gingrich's stance on the regulation of reverse-mortgages. He didn't respond."
A lot of the media kept asking process questions -- "how'd your guy do?", "will he win Florida?", "will he drop out if he doesn't?", blah blah blah -- so I stuck to issues.
The crowd thinned around Pawlenty, so I asked him about Lynn Frazier, the Jacksonville woman who had lost her job and could not afford health benefits. I thought this was the best question in the debate and the least adequately answered. The Republicans running for the White House love to talk about repealing President Obama's health reform but aren't saying much about what they'd do afterward for the 1-in-6 Americans who are uninsured. Frazier explained her circumstances and asked the candidates, "What type of hope can you promise me and others in my position?" The responses she received didn't offer anything more concrete than getting a tax deduction on purchasing insurance for herself as an individual. Paul's answer was particularly bleak. "Well, it's a tragedy because this is a consequence of the government being involved in medicine since 1965." I guess the uninsured need a time machine.
When I asked Pawlenty if Frazier should be happy with the answers she received, he said yes because Romney will bring down the costs of health insurance as president. "We need to make health insurance more affordable," he said, mentioning the tax deduction again.
I followed up by asking about people who can't obtain insurance at any price because of pre-existing conditions, one of the main problems addressed by Obama.
He replied, "Mitt Romney will be making it so people aren't excluded by pre-existing conditions."
After this, I horned in on a conversation Bay Buchanan was having about Newt Gingrich's body language during the debate. The first time Romney took shots at Gingrich, he stared daggers at him and Gingrich wouldn't make eye contact. After watching Gingrich silently debate his own shoes while Romney scolded him, I thought it was going to be a long night for the Speaker.
"That was extremely weird," said Buchanan, who is way hotter than her brother Pat.
When around 45 minutes had passed, the last of the spin doctors all left, like people at a family gathering who realize if they stay any longer they'll be asked to help clean up.
Dumb Reasons to Form Your Political Beliefs
A reader to National Review Online says that he became a conservative because of how his fellow college students at Kent State University responded to President Reagan's shooting:
I came back to my dorm to see the TV lounges filled with students fervently wishing for the president not to survive the surgery. The worst of will was being expressed toward "Ronnie Ray-gun," to use just one of the epithets.
Right then, I knew that, whatever side I belonged on, it wasn't the one where people were wishing for the death of the democratically elected president. For the first time, I started to pay real attention to American politics, and to investigate what American conservatism really was.
I don't comment often on right-wing sites, but I made an exception here because conversion stories like this one always seem a bit ridiculous to me. I was 13 when Reagan was shot in March 1981 and vividly recall following the news at my grandmother's house after Frank Reynolds of ABC broke in with a bulletin during One Life to Live [1]. I deplore the sentiments of people who wanted the president to die.
But as I asked on NRO, does the reader not recognize the same irrational hatred directed at President Obama today on the right that was directed at Reagan back then on the left?
The nine responses I've received answer my question. None of them thinks Obama is hated today the way Reagan was hated back then. As one person stated, "Death wishes for political opponents is something that's almost entirely confined to the left."
I'm a save-the-abortion-rights-of-gay-whales liberal, but I would never make a statement as blinkered as that against conservatives. One of the most foolish things in politics is the belief that your side is reasonable and fair while the other side engages in all of the bad acts. There are numerous examples of Obama hatred today as rabid as the Reagan haters in college who converted the reader to conservatism. There will be plenty of jerks who wish death on the next elected president, too. These folks are easier to find today than in 1981 -- just read any newspaper's poorly policed comment section or the feedback on rabid political blogs.
Left vs. right isn't the only meaningful divide in our politics. There's also ragemonkeys vs. everybody else. If the formative moment in the establishment of your ideological beliefs is the time you heard repugnant things said about the current president, you're just as likely to have become a liberal as a conservative. It just depends on when you heard them.
1: If anyone knows what Brad Vernon told his sister Samantha about Asa Buchanan's late wife Olympia, let me know.
Highway Deaths Amuse Justin Timberlake
The San Francisco Chronicle is running a story on a terrible highway accident in Indiana that killed seven people in a minivan Thursday night. A tractor trailer slammed into the van, possibly after it hit a deer and slowed down or stopped, and only three of the 10 passengers in the van survived the crash.
The story is illustrated by a photo of Justin Timberlake and host Matt Lauer laughing it up on the Today Show:
As you might expect, commenters aren't happy that Timberlake and Lauer find the crash funny.
New York Post Smears Occupy Wall Street Mom
The New York Post is running a story today about Stacy Hessler, a 38-year-old Florida mom who's gone from her family while she takes part in the Occupy Wall Street protests at Zucotti Park. Hessler is raising four children at home with her husband in DeLand, Fl., but she came to New York City to join the protests on Oct. 9 and has no plans to leave:
I have no idea what the future holds, but I'm here indefinitely. Forever. ... Military people leave their families all the time, so why should I feel bad? I'm fighting for a better world.
The story makes it sound like she's just ditching her family, especially the nudge-nudge part about "keeping herself warm at night" in a tent with a male protester. The right winger Jonah Goldberg calls her mom of the year on National Review Online. When I read the Post story this morning, I used snap judgment skills honed in a decade of blogging to conclude that momma's getting her freak flag on.
But her Facebook wall tells a different story. She's extremely involved in her childrens' schools and sports and has posted hundreds of photos of the kids engaged in family outings. Hessler made this post when she decided to turn her week-long stay into something longer:
I have a plea for my friends. I need your help and support. I want to stay occupying wall st. I feel my presence is very important in the support of non-violent communication and sanitation(keeping the park clean) I am willing to work tirelessly on these efforts. I need help with getting my kids to activities and stepping up with the things I help lead, such as one small village, jr roller derby, bee-attitudes, 4H, for his glory co-op. Please respond if you are willing to help my kids so I can stay here and help this movement. I have a train ticket for tomorrow that I want to change but I need to know I have support from my community back home for my family in order to change the ticket.
No less than 12 of her friends are offering to help out. Sound like a bad mom to you? As Hessler's story is fed into the media sausage mill, I hope some reporters do a much better job telling it than Kevin Fasick and Bob Fredericks in the Post.
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