Obama's Alinsky-Style Power Analysis

New York Times columnist Jodi Kantor’s book, The Obamas, tries very, very hard to paint a sympathetic picture of her eponymous subject matter–she gets her digs in against the supposedly racist tea party everywhere she can–but every once and a while the truth cracks through. Take this interview at the Texas Book Festival for example:

The Obamas often don’t mingle freely – they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community organizing boss, and he’s so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, “I’m still organizing.” It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once – “The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.” How fully has this guy resolved himself to what he’s really doing? On the one hand, he’s passing these backroom deals to pass health care reform, but on the other he’s telling his old boss he’s still a community organizer. I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.

Jerry Kellman was Barack Obama’s former boss, a student of Saul Alinsky’s in the 1970s, and a permanent fixture of the progressive left in Chicago.

While some have downplayed Obama’s connections to Saul Alinsky, Kellman’s link is pretty easy to discern.

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Fresh on the heels of an exclusive report detailing a 7-day Caribbean cruise that National Education Association staffers are currently enjoying, Education Action Group has learned that dozens of teachers unions around the country are running out of money.

According to reports published by the National Staff Organization – a group made up of NEA and state affiliate union staffers:

“Fifteen states are considered to be financially distressed because of membership loss and their very survival is in jeopardy. And because of financial hardship, 41 state executives are on NEA’s payroll instead of being paid by their state. Two states—Indiana and South Carolina—remain under an NEA trusteeship.”

Teachers union accounts are buying red pens by the box these days.

NSO President Chuck Agerstrand called it a lesson in “trickle-down economics.”

Or maybe it’s just “trickle-down karma.”

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Mitt Romney’s father, liberal Republican George Romney, met with and endorsed infamous progressive activist Saul Alinsky; meanwhile, in a defense of Mitt Romney against charges of racism, the National Black Chamber of Commerce points out the significant influence the elder Romney had on son Mitt and credits the Romneys for a long history of progressive activism. Emphasis mine.

No, Mitt Romney is not a racist. As I researched history, over the years I have come to find that the opposite is the case. The Romney Family has a legacy of pro-civil rights, progressive activism and an understanding of how poverty and inequality can hurt people.

This portrait would jibe with Mitt Romney’s image as a progressive Governor of Massachusetts, while suggesting any serious conversion to conservatism would not only entail a change in viewpoint but a rejection of Mitt’s Father, George — someone he has regularly mentioned as a major influence while campaigning. Taken as a whole, the new information could serve to fuel existing significant doubt amongst an already skeptical conservative base that Romney’s already vague conversion to conservatism is more one of electoral convenience than a principled decision.

During all of this advocacy, his son, Mitt, was evolving as a man. He idolized his father and emulated his legacy. Mitt Romney lived amongst Blacks in metropolitan Detroit. He went to the prestigious Cranbrook School. One of our board members, Claude McDougal, is a fellow alumnus of the school.

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Richard Trumka is a thug’s thug, and a crafty one at that.

The AFL-CIO boss believes the end justifies the means. Breaking the law is acceptable if it advances the cause. Unions should “forget about the law; this is about more than that,” he said at the “Future of Unions” roundtable in Detroit on April 7th.

Like many union leaders, occasionally the slippery Trumka pretends to like capitalism. He supports vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, not because he actually believes in them but because his members work in industries that depend on their enforcement. Turning a blind eye to the manufacture of counterfeit machine parts could put union members out of work.

But unlike most high-profile leftists, Trumka doesn’t even make an effort to conceal his radicalism. “Being called a socialist is a step up for me,” he told Bloomberg News in June. In 1994, Trumka proudly accepted the Eugene Debs Award named after the five-time presidential candidate and labor organizer who founded the Socialist Party of America.

As an AFL-CIO executive, Trumka helped to create “Union Summer,” a program for training young people as organizers and political activists. Participants were made to recite a pledge called “Working Class Commitment” that included the Marxist idea “that we [union workers] produce the world’s wealth … [and] will end all oppression.”

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Evidence suggests that ACORN, the left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.

Left-wing billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.

The SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on Craigslist dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change.

The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.

WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET [sic] ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERNENCE [sic] GET PAID!” It states:

The WFP is seeking immediate hires.

You must be an energetic communicator, with a passion for social and economic justice.

Only outgoing, articulate dedicated, determined candidates will be considered for the positions.

For those candidates that qualify WFP offers substantial paid-training provided by senior leadership, on varied issues such as: advocacy, public speaking, mobilizing, fundraising, networking and organizing. We invest in passionate people with excellent communication skills and a full benefits package is offered to those candidates that qualify. In addition, there is opportunity for advancement and travel to our satellite chapters and out of state affiliates.

This is not a policy job! Through direct action you will be shaping NY state politics for the next 20 years.” [emphasis added]

As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.

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During Bibi Netanyahu’s 2010 visit to the White House, in the middle of a tense settlement concession conversation an irritated Obama left Mr. Netanyahu sitting in a room to rush upstairs for din-din with Shelley and the girls. Abruptly walking out of the room, the President said “Let me know if there is anything new.”  Either the Israeli Prime Minister was being officially dissed, or Michelle refuses to tolerate any excuse for Barack showing up late for dinner.

However, in the future, should the Prime Minister desire another sit-down with the President of the United States, he’ll have the option of purchasing a roll of tickets for the “Sometime soon, can we meet for dinner/Reelect Barack Obama” raffle.

Before the “Sometime Soon, Can We Meet For Dinner?” initiative, Netanyahu didn’t stand a chance in hell of getting Barack to sit through an entire conversation.  Now, at least Bibi has as much opportunity as anyone else willing to contribute five bucks.

Now, if by chance Bibi’s ticket is pulled out of the spinning drum, Obama, albeit under duress, will be obliged to endure eating blintzes and can no longer escape a Jerusalem settlement discussion using dinner getting cold as an excuse.

The President of the United States selling dinner raffle tickets may indicate that the man is forlorn and in need of genuine companionship. Begging to be shown love by the people who just three years ago were showering him with confetti and weeping at the mere mention of his name, frankly, is both “creepy” and pathetic.

Barack Obama’s dine-with-me/love-me idea started when the 2012 reelection campaign sent out an email with this subject line: “Sometime soon, can we meet for dinner?” Why would an American president ask such an unusual question? Obviously, to goad supporters into donating money in hopes of winning face time with Mr. Lonely.

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It is a time-honored tactic of radicals to accuse their enemies of what they do in order to convert a negative into a positive, as the master of political agitation Saul Alinsky taught.

This explains the Left’s newfound interest in the lie that the Tea Party is comprised of “terrorists.”

Unless you think petitioning the government for lower spending is somehow akin to flying airplanes into buildings, you’ve got to agree with Sarah Palin, whose recent salvos on the topic are dead-on.

As President Obama and his merry band of Marxists continue driving America off a cliff, Palin (and columnist Charles Krauthammer) have been pushing back hard against the liberal talking point that Tea Party supporters are terrorists.

Her comments came after Vice President Joe Biden, Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and their socialist buddies at MSNBC recently breathed new life into the “terrorist” smear. Because President Obama, who himself has ties to real, live terrorists, has not upbraided the vice president, we can safely assume he agrees with Biden.

Said Palin on Fox News Channel:

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Like the ACORN mobs who would barge into banks to demand that they not foreclose on homes, our country is being community organized by our “Alinsky-ite in Chief” Barack Obama. The “Rules for Radicals” disciple knows that it is more important to cause a ruckus with a loud and angry mob than it is to have the truth and the will of the people on your side. That’s why, in his nationally televised address to the nation, he called on Americans to call Congress on his behalf to intimidate and bully a capitulation from the GOP.  All that was missing were the whistles and the screams for “justice”.

The stories in the Washington Post and other compliant media outlets were damning:

The Capitol switchboard was on the verge of being overloaded with calls from across the country Tuesday morning after President Obama called on Americans in an address to the nation Monday evening to contact their members of Congress about the high-stakes debt battle playing out in Washington.

Of course, as the stories unfolded, it turns out that a whole lot of those calls were from Americans warning their Congressmen not to cave-in to the President’s demands and to hold firm on the debt ceiling and the tax increases Obama desires. So much so that by the end of yesterday afternoon, the 80-strong freshman class (who were sent to Congress largely by the Tea Party voters intent on finally changing Washington and the establishment GOP) held strong and withheld support for Speaker Boehner’s debt plan. The President’s plan to intimidate a tax-laden compromise out of the House backfired.

Clearly, the wrong people got the message in the President’s speech and somehow those Tea Party extremists learned how to use a telephone.

This will never do. Don’t you people realize that when the President calls on Americans to contact members of Congress, he’s really just talking to his radical and dedicated base? Don’t you realize he really only means that the agitators and “No Justice, No Peace” radicals are the ones who are supposed to make noise and push the agenda?

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Newly created ACORN front groups across America have signed on to SEIU’s economic terrorism and sabotage campaign. ACORN, long associated with President Obama, is participating in the disruptive campaign through its newly renamed state chapters. Mortgage and student loan strikes, crippling bank boycotts, intimidation, and who knows what else are all on the agenda.

I reported on the emergence of the “new” ACORN groups in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Although ACORN filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy last Election Day, its state chapters have been quietly restructuring under assumed names. Mortgage bubble generator ACORN Housing changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America while ACORN’s vote fraud factory Project Vote continues operating out of ACORN’s old Washington, D.C. office.

The subversive plan hatched by Stephen Lerner, an international board member of the radical Service Employees International Union, aims to destroy the nation’s financial system. Lerner is influential in leftist organizing circles and has reportedly visited the Obama White House at least four times.

After Greeks rioted over austerity measures, the stock market fell, Lerner observed. “The folks that control this country care about one thing: how the stock market does; how the bond market does; and what their bonus is.”

Lerner said a strategy was needed that addressed the following questions: “How do we bring down the stock market, how do we bring down their bonuses, how do we interfere with their ability … to be rich?” It is important “to politically isolate them, economically isolate them and disrupt them,” he said.

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The criminals at ACORN, President Obama’s former employer, never stop ripping off American taxpayers.

The massive conglomerate ACORN Housing Corp. and its subsidiaries owe an eye-popping $162,813 in back taxes, according to the Nexis public records database.

The money is owed to the IRS, California, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, the city of Philadelphia, and the California counties of Fresno and Santa Clara. (The 106 tax liens are listed at the bottom of this article.)

Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (AHCOA).

ACORN Housing grew out of crime: trespassing and breaking and entering. It emerged from a 1982 squatting campaign in which ACORN built a squatters’ tent city behind the White House. Rampaging ACORN activists routinely break in and illegally occupy property already owned by others – and your tax dollars subsidize this criminal activity, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

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Why is the Obama administration defying federal law by funding ACORN?

Judicial Watch discovered that the president is flouting the will of Congress by surreptitiously giving federal taxpayer money to ACORN, his former employer and legal client. This is the first such grant to surface this year but more are certain to follow.

Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave a $79,819 grant to a Florida office of the largest branch of the ACORN tree, the massive conglomerate known as ACORN Housing Corp. (AHC). AHC filed papers last year legally changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). Despite the nifty new moniker, it’s the same old corrupt, antisocial organization.

As I wrote in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN Housing grew out of crime: trespassing. It emerged from a 1982 squatting campaign in which ACORN built a squatters’ tent city behind the White House. Rampaging ACORN activists break in and illegally occupy property already owned by others – and your tax dollars subsidize this criminal activity.

The secretary of HUD is Shaun Donovan. Donovan and ACORN are tight. (Donovan and ACORN’s then-chief organizer Bertha Lewis are seen in the above screen grab from footage shot for the documentary film Battle for Brooklyn.)

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Andrew Breitbart and ACORN critics everywhere have been vindicated yet again.

That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court denied an ACORN appeal, effectively ruling that Congress was absolutely entitled to cut off federal taxpayer funding of ACORN. Earlier today the high court denied the petition for certiorari in ACORN et al. v. United States (docket 10-1068) without comment.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now had asked the high court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which found that the funding cutoff enacted in 2009 was not a “bill of attainder” forbidden by the Constitution. ACORN had advanced the novel, nonsensical argument that Congress had no power to stop funding the group unless it could prove it had done something wrong.

As I write in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, the ACORN network has taken in an astounding $79 million in federal funding, not just the $53 million figure previously reported.

At least 54 individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. ACORN itself was convicted of felony voter registration fraud in Nevada in April, the book reports.

ACORN became well known nationwide in 2009 for its advocacy of brothels for pedophiles. Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe caught the group on undercover video offering advice on tax fraud and on importing underage illegal alien sex slaves from El Salvador.

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It should come as no surprise that on the campaign trail, President Obama refused to be interviewed about Saul Alinsky, the community organizing guru who wrote Rules for Radicals, a how-to guide for destroying American capitalism and democracy.

Presumably Obama, who taught courses on Alinsky’s brutal, sometimes violent organizing techniques, declined to speak to reporters about the late guru. He must have realized that such an interview would throw an unwanted spotlight on Alinsky’s radicalism, and by extension, his own. Such counterproductive publicity would also have undermined the candidate’s efforts to reinvent himself as a moderate. Alinsky’s adherents now dominate the modern Democratic Party establishment. Apart from President Obama himself, they include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, Federal Communications Commission diversity chief Mark Lloyd, Obama’s ex-green jobs czar Van Jones, former DNC trainer Heather Booth, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to name just a few. “Who the hell isn’t [an Alinskyite] in this administration?” asks conservative author David Horowitz.

And President Obama hasn’t been the only longtime ACORN operative working in the White House. There’s also the low-profile Patrick Gaspard who, until recently, was White House political affairs director, one of the titles Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

In a move that ought to disturb anyone who cares about the integrity of the democratic process, earlier this year Gaspard took over the reins of the Democratic National Committee as its executive director—just in time to begin initial preparations for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Gaspard hails from the same world of radical left-wing community organizing that made Barack Obama who he is today. Gaspard is an expert in the harsh, street-smart organizing tactics taught by Alinsky. He’s the hatchet man Obama sent to New York over a year ago to strong-arm then-Gov. David Paterson into dropping his reelection campaign. As executive director running the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard will oversee Organizing for America, a project of the DNC supposedly modeled on Alinskyite organizing principles.

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“Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives,” said the small-c communist tactician Saul Alinsky, who is now worshipped by the Obama administration and the activist Left. The thuggish, in-your-face activist group ACORN was the vehicle that 1960s radicals created to bash Americans’ heads in to get them to accept a radical transformation of American society. The antisocial group also led the way in destigmatizing welfare by pushing people to abandon their job searches and get on the public dole.

When Barack Obama was a little boy surrounded by parents and grandparents and mentors sympathetic to communism, likeminded people were building ACORN’s parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization. Armed with tax dollars, left-wing extremists Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Alinsky were at play in the 1960s, wreaking havoc on society in an effort to induce revolutionary change. All three of these at the time relatively obscure figures labored to create NWRO along with a vast constellation of tax-supported groups determined to destroy the American society they loathed.

Changes in federal social policy in the early 1960s helped to lay the groundwork for this artificial activism and the welfare-related unrest it caused. President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty in America” really should have been called an unconditional war on American values. For four decades, ACORN destroyed property, forcibly occupied banks, assaulted employees of the companies they targeted, intimidated executives and government officials at their family homes, and engineered home invasions in order to seize foreclosed properties. ACORN took money from powerful special interests to produce instant rent-a-mobs to harass their clients’ competitors.

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If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book.  Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.”  Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.

By the way, great news!  Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011.  It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book.  It’s a fun interview and a great read!

I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?

Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.

So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.

Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….

Oh, the tragedy of my life.

(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?

Read the entire review at RightWing News.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Army wife and blogger Jaci Greggs wrote this fantastic citizen book review.  We just had to have it, and she was gracious enough to share it with us.  Please visit her blog, Me and My Soldier Man.

“Make no mistake: America is in a media war.”  ~ Righteous Indignation

If you ever watch the news, listen to the radio or check the headlines on msn.com, you must read this book.

I’ve been telling y’all this for weeks, months now. There is a battle going on for the information gateway of our country: the news media complex.

And the great general leading the charge, the brilliant strategist who has been literally on the forefront of this fight and has seen it from the inside-out and the ground-up, who makes it possible for you and I to literally hear “the rest of the story”…. is Andrew Breitbart. And his latest book, “Righteous Indignation,” was released last Thursday.

I’ve mentioned Breitbart on here before, mostly in passing or in reference to his Big sites (linked on the right). Anything we know today, about the JournoList, about ACORN, about Pigford is directly because of Andrew Breitbart. (And if you don’t know about any of the things I just mentioned, start researching, because this affects YOU)

And, on a personal note, I had the great pleasure of meeting Breitbart a couple of years ago, when I went to LA with Sister. Granted, I just shook his hand and then stood in the group listening to him talk, but you’ve never met a more approachable, friendly guy who’s excited and passionate about what he’s doing. Any media portrayal of him as this frothing bitter-clinger makes me laugh and roll my eyes.

“Righteous Indignation” is part memoir, part treatise, part history lesson. It begins with the infamous ACORN sting investigation, in which James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles went to multiple ACORN offices around the country and asked ACORN to help them find tax breaks for their brothel, in which they claimed to employ underage illegal immigrants. Yes, they explicitly stated that was their business – underage human trafficking.

And Breitbart dropped the videos, one by one. Aside from the moral repugnance of the actions of the ACORN offices, the bigger story was that ACORN was doing this using taxpayer dollars. Within weeks, Congress unanimously voted to defund one of the largest community activists groups in the country.

All because of some bloggers and a couple of kids with a camera.

Continue reading the entire review here.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Derek Hunter gives a thoughtful, thorough review of Righteous Indignation at The Daily Caller:

You won’t find too many people who are indifferent toward Andrew Breitbart. But love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. With his ever-growing collection of “Big” websites (Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism and Big Peace so far), Andrew has redefined how the political right views and uses the Internet. He makes no apologies for his “in your face” style, nor should he. That style has won him many victories and many enemies. He seems to occupy the time of a disproportionate number of left-wingers, including many employees of the ultra-left-wing censorship factory called Media Matters. Those “senior fellows” are about to have their weekends ruined as Breitbart moves from the virtual world to the book world with Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World (2011 Grand Central Publishing) this Friday, April 15th.

If you know Andrew, or have ever cornered him for a few minutes of conversation, you know his brain is like a shotgun — going a thousand miles an hour in every conceivable direction at once. He attributes this to ADHD, but constantly being pulled in 50 directions at once by everyone in the room doesn’t help either. But in Righteous, Breitbart is more focused than he’s ever been. He has a tale to tell — three, actually. (more…)