This is my last post as Editor-in-Chief of Big Journalism.

A year ago this month, Andrew Breitbart and I, along with the rest of the team at Breitbart.com, began planning this site, designing the logo and the layout, recruiting the writers and generally establishing the tone of a new conservative website devoted to all matters media, including the Mainstream Media, New Media and the blogosphere, and the intersection of politics, culture and the press.  We launched on Jan. 6, 2010, and we’ve never looked back.

So thanks to my colleagues — and most of all of to you, our readers — for making us a success, one of the top conservative sites in the country and, along with our Big sister sites — Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Peace — a force to be reckoned with, with not only in the blogosphere, but in Hollywood, on Capitol Hill, and at the Pentagon.

Dana Loesch, whom you all know from her work not only as a blogger and St. Louis radio personality but also as a force in the Tea Party, will guide you on our collective journey from here on out. Please join with me in wishing her nothing but the best. (more…)

Otherwise known as “political correctness.”

Not just Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands for the crime of “hate speech” –

– we all are:

To quote Wilders:

All there is to say has been said.

Except maybe this: (more…)

Dick Blumenthal is a nasty piece of work, the NPR-voiced Attorney General of Connecticut and “Vietnam veteran” who thought he was going to waltz into the U.S. Senate by default. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum: he ran into a spunky dame named Linda McMahon.

Oops.

Sgt. Toys for Tots’ tenure as state AG has been marked by a relentless campaign of “lawfare” against his private-sector enemies, in the guise of “fighting” for a basket-case state with one of the highest tax burdens in the country as well as the highest utility rates, a state whose cities are a disgrace (the Mayor of Hartford, Eddie Perez, just went to jail; he’s a Democrat of course). A state that boasts the highest per-capita income in the Lower 48 and yet… is broke.

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To say I’m extremely flattered by El Rushbo’s very kind endorsement would be an understatement:

You can get the first book in the series, Hostile Intent, on Amazon or at any Barnes & Noble or other fine bookstore, and read a review here.

Ditto, so to speak for the sequel, Early Warning, of which you can read a review here. (more…)

I last heard the old Soviet Union anthem as I left Moscow two weeks before the coup against Gorbachev in 1991. That pretty much marked the end of the line for the Old Left, which had invested so much in the success of “socialism in one country.”

Their children and grandchildren are with us today, marching in our own capital city and busily undermining every single institution in our nation. Their smiles don’t disguise the loathing they feel for what America is, but they do reflect their joy at what they hope she becomes.

Unfortunately for these useful idiots, malevolent fools and active seditionists, many of us remember the old USSR and what it looked like and what it smelled like. We’ve been hearing this same propaganda for decades; the only difference now is that they’re out and proud.

They sense victory. This is what victory looks like to them. This is paradise when the velvet glove comes off: (more…)

This week, after three years of writing satirically about Hollywood and politics as “David Kahane” on National Review Online, I published Rules for Radical Conservatives, from which this excerpt is taken:

Look, I have to admit there’s nothing wrong with either the conservative or Republican base. Frankly, you guys terrify us, you and your damn fascist Tea Parties. Is there anything more frightening than seas of grandmothers waving American flags and singing “patriotic” songs? I don’t think so. But the bozos driving your clown car need a complete upgrading in order to meet the new challenges of the twenty- first century, and one that the current crop of “leaders” is simply not up to. You morons need smart, ruthless, and savvy leadership, younger than your basic World War II veteran—hell, we’ve run a self- confessed draft dodger and a guy who quit on his comrades after a few months in Vietnam—not that there’s anything wrong with that! If you’re going to bring fruit salad and scrambled eggs to a knife fight, you might as well make sure your fighters are under fifty and are actually, you know, armed and ready to party.

You can’t afford colorless Speakers of the House, or go- along, get-along collaborationists like most of your senators. You need officers who are going to inspire the troops, not dispirit them, commanders who’ve earned the love of their followers precisely by not crossing the aisle, instead preferring to stand on principle. These brave men and women are going to have to step out of the ranks and step up, and when they are attacked by our side—as they surely will be—you must defend them. Nobody wants to lead troops into battle and, halfway across the killing fields, find out he or she is all alone.

Elections are not about programs, but principles.

Hey, Dumbo—“programs” are our thing. Our candidates churn out books on “programs” all the time. They answer endless rounds of questions about “programs,” helpfully posed by our plants in the media. In fact, we’ve made it seem that running for President or any other higher office is all about having the most ten- point plans, or five- year plans, or whatever. But what would you expect from a party that reveres FDR, but really hankers after the cultural revolutions and thousand- year plans that big- time statists of the past century so proudly hailed? We’ve got a “program” or a “plan” for everything, and you chumps have accepted the idiotic notion that one can plan further out than, say, five minutes (no wonder you’ve bought into the farce of “global warming”). Whereas those real military men you ought to be recruiting understand, like football coaches, the first rule of plans: that they go out the window the minute the first shot is fired. After which you rely upon the wisdom and guts of your commanders and the courage, training, and discipline of your troops to see you through to victory.

Principles are what counts. So stop trying to outdo us by rushing to the microphones with a silly plan to solve every social ill this side of halitosis whenever our pet frogs in the media croak about a new “crisis” in the daily news feed. In fact, forget about programs completely. Just say no! And if we call you out and demand to know—which we will, you can bet on that, it’s part of the playbook—the details of your “plan,” laugh and tell them to shove it and start talking about principles. (more…)

One of the greatest battles in Marine Corps history, and one of greatest examples of gallantry and bravery in military history, period.

Long past time these warriors, patriots and fathers got their due from the country they have served so long and so well. (more…)

He was the quintessential Timesman back in the days when that meant something. A New England neighbor, I used to see him at the train station, impeccably dressed for his foray down to New York City, tie perfectly knotted, silver hair befitting the reportorial, authorial and editorial legend he was.

He was best known as the Times’s correspondent in Moscow, where his work was sometimes criticized for being too friendly to the Soviets (Salisbury blamed the Russian censors), but he also wrote an acclaimed book about the city of Leningrad’s 900-day siege by the Wehrmacht and later became the first editor of the newspaper’s Op-Ed page, which celebrated its 40th anniversary earlier this week.

“He can report, he can write, he can edit, he can see story ideas, he can direct others,” [Times managing editor Turner Catledge] said. “He can do all these things because, besides having natural talent, he has a passion to excel.”

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Custer at the Little Bighorn, the Kennedy Assassination, the Titanic: some disasters linger in the mind and the memory, coloring the way we look at the world, but bringing the dead past back to vivid life.

So far, the biggest surprise has to do with how spread out the debris was. Gallo said he expected to see one or two well-defined debris trails, but “the breakup was a little more complicated than that.” Unlike the largely intact (and iconic) bow section, the back section of the ship was “absolutely mangled by its trip to the bottom,” he said.

“It’s almost like you cracked it open and spilled everything out,” Gallo said. “You see pieces of the engine, boilers … where we thought there might be one or two big things, we found five. … When we start to piece together how Titanic actually made its way to the bottom, those pieces will be key.”

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From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel comes this revealing little window into the Democrat-Union-Media Complex:

Organized labor is hatching a plan to use prominent Democratic officials and TV ads to pummel Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker over the O’Donnell Park garage accident to try to keep him from being elected governor.

So says a local union official with loose lips who was secretly recorded yakking away outside an east side bar earlier this month.

But this story isn’t really about an undercover tape, so please read on, as the plot thickens:

Here’s what he said everyone can expect in the next six weeks:

TV spots will hit Walker for neglecting county facilities; supervisors will continue to call for an independent investigation of O’Donnell Park; Walker’s opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, will push legislation on the subject; and Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration may let state engineers come in to inspect the county facility.

“I’m kind of at the center of a maelstrom right now in terms of kicking Scott Walker’s (expletive),” said John-david Morgan, a lobbyist and spokesman for the Service Employees International Local 1, on Sept. 10 outside the Y-Not II tavern on E. Lyon St. “I’ve been kicking Scott Walker’s (expletive) for two months now. We’ve been on TV; we’ve done all kinds of stuff.”

Using his cell phone, a Walker campaign staffer recorded a 15-minute talk in which Morgan laid out what he said were his union’s plans to tie the problems at the O’Donnell Park garage and the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex to the Republican nominee.

Getting more interesting, isn’t it? The SEIU – that’s the Service Employees International Union — is once again at the heart of Democrat skulduggery, if not (this time) outright thuggery. The union that represents a sizable group of people whose salaries are paid by the American taxpayer, and thus should be non-partisan, is openly going to war against one political party, the Republicans. (more…)

Tammany Hall, the greatest criminal organization of its age, spanning the era from Aaron Burr to Boss Tweed to Boss Croker and Charlie Murphy, was the perfect marriage of Democrat Party politics and organized crime. Though thought dead and buried with Carmine DeSapio, it never really went away. In the 1930s, it molted and set up shop in the small city of Hot Springs, Ark., where gangster Owney Madden established a Tammany South, an open city that welcomed gangsters like Frank Costello and politicians like Sen. John McClellan alike, and sent a young William Jefferson Clinton back as its gift to America.

Thinly veiled — and sometimes not so thinly veiled — shakedowns were a way of life for Tammany politicians. At first they were backed up by the power of muscle, of Tammany’s fleet of thugs and gangsters who made sure their voters got to the polls and made equally sure the other guy’s stayed well away. In New York, informal precinct bosses — called “sheriffs” — were recruited from the city’s notorious street gangs, including the Eastmans, the Five Points Gang (whence sprang Al Capone) and Madden’s own Gophers, the terrors of the west wide in what is now Chelsea. The New Black Panthers, standing outside that Philly polling place with billy clubs, are nothing new in American politics. If you knew what was good for you, you voted for the Tiger early and often and you gave and gave and gave.

Illegal? So what? Effective? You bet. (more…)

Those of you who wish to understand the criminal organization masquerading as a political party — that would be the Democrats — need only to remember one thing: the very first Democrat vice-president, Aaron Burr, shot and killed one of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton. Although charged with murder in both New York and New Jersey Burr, of course, skated. The tone was set right from the start.

Of even greater lasting impact, however, was Burr’s transformation of the Society of St. Tammany into Tammany Hall, from a social club into the most rapacious big-city political machine in the country, one whose power lasted well into the 20th century and formed the model for similar machines — in Chicago, Kansas City and elsewhere — across the country.

If and when Tammany is thought of today, it conjures up images of Irishmen in bowler hats and three-piece suits, mustaches bristling. But Tammany’s position at the nexus of the Democrat Party and New York City’s burgeoning gangland, especially at the turn of the century, is where it really made its mark. Tammany employed fleets of shtarkers — “strongmen” like the great Monk Eastman, leader of the ultra-violent Lower East Side street gang, the Eastmans — to beat up Republican voters and otherwise intimidate the electorate.  It doled out patronage (Tammany was unalterably opposed to the civil-service system, although it later co-opted it). And it never missed an opportunity to take an opportunity: “I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em” may as well have been the official motto of the Wigwam on 14th Street. (more…)

Today is the 223rd birthday of the Constitution of the United States of America. And do we ever need her, now more than ever. The Bill of Rights came along two years later, but now’s a good a time as any to open a thread about the First Amendment and what it means to you:

It is only right and just to let the Majarushi have the last word on today’s Topic A — last night’s Delaware primary between Christine O’Donnell and Mike Castle, and the emerging schism between the Washington establishment and the heartland conservatives, a split that is pitting Rove, Dana Perino, and a sizable chunk of the conservative blogosphere against the major talk-radio hosts (Limbaugh, Hannity, Mark Levin) and the rest of the right-wing blogosphere:

Over to you. (more…)

From Sarah Ricard, Digital Content Manager of the Dennis Miller Show, who writes:

The Dennis Miller Show is now accepting submissions for its “Time Capsule Accountability Project.” Tired of certain celebrities and politicians making outlandish, baseless claims (Al Gore, we’re looking at you), Dennis Miller has decided to archive these proclamations for posterity. “We need to put together the most outlandish, overstated arguments from the Left,” Miller said of the time capsule during his talk radio program, “and bury them in a safe for 100 years.”

Phase 1 of the project is occurring online at DennisMillerRadio.com. Listeners are encouraged to submit predictions on the website, and the best ones will be noted on air. “The Time Capsule Accountability Project is really the only thing of its kind,” said the show’s co-host and producer, Christian Bladt, “but, we can’t do it alone. We really need our listeners help to make this a success.”

Once the online submissions are in, Westwood One, the parent company of the Dennis Miller Show, will hire an archivist to compile materials related to each prediction. The artifacts will be entombed in a safe donated by Gary Haneberg at Superior Safe in Chicago and then buried for 100 years in a plot of land, donated by a listener, Dan Banks in Jasper, AL. (more…)

After years of being thought of mainly as the dedicatee of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as the famous author’s third wife (and, oddly enough, his third consecutive wife from St. Louis), Martha Gellhorn has begun to come into her own, with a recent biography by Caroline Moorehead, an HBO film in the works and a possible feature film as well.

On D-Day, Gellhorn was first on Omaha Beach after the beach was secured (while her estranged husband Hemingway — also a great war correspondent — stewed on board a troopship in the English Channel).  For Collier’s, which gave her her start as as a war correspondent, she had been in the middle of the fighting during the Spanish Civil War, was at the liberation of Dachau and the liberation of Paris, and later covered Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. She hated her years with Hemingway and later in life refused to discuss him or their time together.

Here’s a sample of her work, written in Madrid while the city was under siege from Franco: (more…)

Despite the abject failure of leadership at the top, the Navy and Marines still know how to fight and win.  From the U.S. Naval Institute blog, here’s an eyewitness account of the takedown of some Somali pirates by Capt. Alexander Martin. It’s written in military-ese, but the narrative will give you a glimpse into how the military actually works.  It should be required reading in the White House:

I was in my stateroom that morning having a cup of coffee when Major Mike “Honcho” Ford, a burly southerner with a cowboy’s drawl, knocked on my door. “Hey man,” he said calmly, “we got a ship that’s been pirated. No official tasking yet, I’ll pass you a sitrep when I get it. Go ahead and put the guys on alert-120.” As the 15th MEU’s Maritime Raid Force Commander, the platoon and I had been training with “Honcho” for nearly a year for this mission, so what happened over the next 60 minutes was by now a well-rehearsed standard operating procedure.

I called down to the men’s berthing. Few words were exchanged between my acting-platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Hartrick, and myself. “Staff Sergeant, skipper” “Yes sir.” “A vessel’s been taken by pirates – I don’t have much else for you at this time. Set alert-120.” “On it, sir.” We both hung up.

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Amazingly, he did it all without a TelePrompter:

Do you think they’re still listening? (more…)

Never heard of Mark Kellogg?  Well, you should: he was the New York Herald reporter who perished with Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He deserves to be honored in the same breath with Ernie Pyle and all the other war correspondents who died in battle.

One of his last dispatches described Custer thus:

And now a word for the most peculiar genius in the army, a man of strong impulses, of great hearted friendships and bitter enmities, of quick, nervous temperament, undaunted courage, will and determination; a man possessing electrical mental capacity and of iron frame and constitution; a brave, faithful, gallant soldier, who has warm friends and bitter enemies; the hardest rider, the greatest pusher, with the most untiring vigilance, overcoming seeming impossibilities, and with an ambition to succeed in all things he undertakes; a man to do right, as he construes the right, in every case; one respected and beloved by his followers, who would freely follow him into the “jaws of hell.” Of Lieutenant Colonel G. A. Custer I am now writing. Do not think I am overdrawing the picture. The pen picture is true to life, and is drawn not only from actual observation, but from an experience that cannot mislead me.

Four days later, they were all dead. (more…)