Andrew Breitbart Talked Politics in L.A. Bar an Hour Before Dying (Exclusive)
2:33 PM PST 3/1/2012 by Matthew Belloni
Marketing executive Arthur Sando tells THR about his lengthy debate with the conservative activist at The Brentwood; they said goodbye around 11:30 p.m., 50 minutes before Breitbart was pronounced dead.
Andrew Breitbart spent his final hours much like he lived most of his life: passionately talking politics.
Breibart, the 43-year-old conservative pundit and provocateur who died suddenly early Thursday while walking near his Los Angeles home, had stopped into The Brentwood, a nearby bar and restaurant. There, he struck up a conversation with Arthur Sando, a marketing executive who didn’t know Breitbart but likely was the last person to talk extensively with him before he died.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sando says he arrived at the bar in the tony Brentwood section of L.A. around 10 p.m. and soon the empty seat next to his was filled by a man with a familiar face.
“I tried to figure out how I knew him,” says Sando, a veteran publicity and marketing executive who works for dietary supplement company MonaVie and has worked at CBS, King World Prods and Turner Broadcasting. “He was on his BlackBerry. And I said ‘Andrew?’ I told him I had seen his work.”
Sando says the duo quickly struck up a conversation that would last a little less than two hours.
“He was friendly and engaging,” Sando recalls. “I said, ‘You can’t be very happy with the slate of Republican candidates’ and he said, ‘Why would you say that?’ I said, ‘Well, they’re talking about contraception,’ and he said, ‘The conversation is being framed by the liberal media.’ I said, ‘Well, the media isn’t writing Rick Santorum’s speeches for him.’ We had a back-and-forth for awhile until we said we weren’t going to agree on some things.”
The friendly debate continued in the bar as Breitbart sipped red wine, says Sando. “We just hit it off, he was delightful. There were other people who sat down and joined the conversation.”
Sando also mentioned that he hadn’t seen Breitbart as a guest on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher recently; Breitbart told Sando he enjoyed going on Maher’s show because it taught him how to deal with a hostile audience and how to react when getting booed.
Breitbart had stopped in for a drink but wasn’t there to meet anyone in particular, Sando says. Nor were there any signs of health or other problems.
“He wasn’t drinking excessively,” Sando recalls. “He was on his BlackBerry a lot.”
After the two hours, Breitbart said he was leaving. “We exchanged contact information,” Sando says. “We were going to get together.”
Sando says he was “shocked” to read Thursday morning that Breitbart, who had a history of heart problems, had collapsed while on a walk near his home in the same neighborhood as the bar. Breitbart was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead at 12:19 a.m., according to Reuters, less than an hour after leaving The Brentwood.
The exact cause of death has not been revealed but initial reports said it was natural causes.
“There were no signs that anything was wrong,” says Sando. “It’s very sad.”
POSTED: 5:58 pm EST March 1, 2012
UPDATED: 6:34 pm EST March 1, 2012
PALM BEACH, Fla. — The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad is en route to Rush Limbaugh’s Palm Beach home to assist the Palm Beach Police Department, WPBF 25 News has learned.The nature of the emergency at 1495 N. Ocean Blvd. is not known at this time.This information just came in to the WPBF newsroom moments ago.WPBF’s Ari Hait is en route to the scene.This story is being updated. Please refresh this page for updates.
“A little boy said to his mother; ‘Mommy, how come I’m black and you’re white?'” the email joke reads. “His mother replied, ‘Don’t even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you’re lucky you don’t bark!'”
Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is facing criticism for her upcoming appearance at a fundraiser hosted by an American Muslim leader who was placed on the Federal Terrorist Watch List.
Wasserman Schultz is set to keynote an annual fundraising dinner for EMERGE USA, a Muslim community group led by Khurrum Wahid, a controversial attorney with a track record of defending accused terrorists and associating with Muslim Brotherhood-backed groups.
Democrats and Republicans alike are wondering why Wasserman Schultz, described by the Jewish Daily Forward as a “proud Jewess,” would associate with Wahid.
Born in Pakistan, Wahid honed his legal chops post-9-11 when he started “representing immigrants detained for questioning in the wake of the terrorist attacks,” according to the Miami News Times. He also co-founded Florida Muslim Bar Association and serves as its current president.
Since 2004, Wahid has represented a man convicted of plotting a subway station bombing, as well as a Florida doctor who was sentenced for “conspiring to treat wounded al Qaeda militants,” the News Times reports.
Wahid currently represents a father-son team of imams who stand accused of providing material support to the Pakistani Taliban. The 20-page federal indictment against the duo claims that they bankrolled the purchase of guns and paid to send kids to an Islamic school that taught them how to slay Americans in Afghanistan.
According to a report by the Sunshine State News’ Kenric Ward, “Wahid has spoken at an event sponsored by the American arm of the South Asian Muslim Brotherhood (Jamaat-e-Islami) and the Islamic Circle of North America, an organization that has been connected to the financing of both al-Qaida and Hamas.”
One prominent Jewish Democrat told the Washington Free Beacon that Wasserman Schultz’s actions are troubling.
“I’m not sure how much money they will raise at this event, but there is no amount that is worth having the head of the Democratic Party associated with anyone who appears to have a soft spot for terrorism,” the Democrat said.
Wasserman Schultz’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Joe Kaufman, a Florida Republican who hopes to unseat Wasserman Schultz in November’s elections, told the Sunshine State News that the DNC chair has a “false pro-Israel persona.”
“Wasserman Schultz likes to flaunt her Jewish identity and false pro-Israel persona, but how can she begin to do so when the organization she will be addressing maintains staff who display animosity toward the Jewish state?” Kaufman told the paper.
The Democratic National Committee did not return multiple requests for comment.
UPDATE: Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz may be backing out of a scheduled appearance at a fundraiser hosted by an American Muslim leader who has been on the Federal Terrorist Watch List, according to a press release from her Republican opponent Joe Kaufman.
Jonathan Beeton, a spokesman for Wasserman Schultz, tells the Free Beacon “there was a miscommunication, she is not speaking to the organization,” clarifying that “we never agreed to do a fundraiser, nor this event.”
“President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate released by the White House on April 27, 2011, is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery, not a scan of an original 1961 paper document as represented by the White House when the long-form birth certificate was made public,” Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said at a press conference today in Phoenix.
This is the major preliminary finding of a six-month ongoing Sheriff’s Cold Case Posse law enforcement investigation into the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate and his eligibility to be president.
Having developed probable cause to believe the long-form birth certificate was most likely a computer-generated forgery, investigators began examining other evidence of President Obama’s life history.
Investigators additionally have developed credible evidence suggesting:
• President Obama’s Selective Service card was most likely a forgery, revealed by an examination of the postal date stamp on the document;
• Records of Immigration and Naturalization Service cards filled out by airplane passengers arriving on international flights originating outside the United States in the month of August 1961, examined at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., are missing records for the week of President Obama’s birth, including the dates Aug. 1, 1961 through Aug. 7, 1961.
Beginning in October 2011, the Sheriff’s Cold Case Posse, consisting of former law enforcement officers and lawyers with law enforcement experience, examined dozens of witnesses and hundreds of documents, as well as taking numerous sworn statements from witnesses around the world.
In August 2011, 250 members of the Surprise, Arizona, Tea Party, residents of Maricopa County, presented a signed petition asking Sheriff Arpaio to undertake the investigation.
The Tea Party members petitioned under the premise that if a forged birth certificate was utilized to obtain a position for Barack Obama on the 2012 Arizona presidential ballot, their rights as Maricopa County voters could be compromised.
The Cold Case investigators further determined that the Hawaii Department of Health has engaged in what Sheriff’s investigators believe is a systematic effort to hide from public inspection whatever original 1961 birth records the Hawaii Department of Health may have in their possession.
“Officers of the Hawaii Department of Health and various elected Hawaiian public officials may have intentionally obscured 1961 birth records and procedures, to avoid having to release to public inspection and to the examination of court-authorized forensic examiners any original Obama 1961 birth records the Hawaii Department of Health may or may not have,” said Mike Zullo, the lead investigator in Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse.
The Cold Case investigators have not yet determined who, when, or precisely how the long-form computer-generated birth certificate released on April 27 may have been forged, but investigators say the evidence contained in the computer-generated PDF file released by the White House as well as important deficiencies in the Hawaii process of certifying the long-form birth certificate establish probable cause that a forgery has been committed.
The Cold Case Posse investigators advised Sheriff Arpaio that the forgers most likely committed two crimes: first, in fraudulently creating a forgery that the White House characterized, knowingly or unknowingly, as an officially produced governmental birth record; and second, in fraudulently presenting to the residents of Maricopa County and to the American public at large a forgery the White House represented as “proof positive” of President Obama’s authentic 1961 Hawaii long-form birth certificate.
“A continuing investigation is needed to identify the identity of the person or persons involved in creating the alleged birth certificate forgery, and to determine who, if anyone, in the White House or the state of Hawaii may have authorized the forgery,” Arpaio said.
Among the evidence released at the press conference were five videos the Cold Case Posse produced to demonstrate why the Obama long-form birth certificate is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery.
The videos consisted of step-by-step computer demonstrations using a control document.
The videos were designed to display the testing used by the investigators to examine various claims made by supporters of the April 27 document.
The videos illustrate point-by-point the investigators’ conclusion that the features and anomalies observed on the Obama long-form birth certificate were inconsistent with features produced when a paper document is scanned, even if the scan of the paper document had been enhanced by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and optimized.
Additionally, the videos demonstrated that the Hawaii Department of Health Registrar’s name stamp and the Registrar’s date stamp were computer-generated images imported into an electronic document, as opposed to actual rubber stamp imprints inked by hand or machine onto a paper document.
“That we were able to cast reasonable suspicions on the authenticity of the Registrar stamps was especially disturbing, since these stamp imprints are designed to provide government authentication to the document itself,” Zullo said, stressing that if the Registrar stamps are forgeries, the document itself is likely a forgery.
The investigators also chronicled a series of inconsistent and misleading representations that various Hawaii government officials have made over the past five years regarding what, if any, original birth records are held by the Hawaii Department of Health.
“As I said at the beginning of the investigation,” Arpaio said, “the president can put all this to rest quite easily. All he has to do is demand the Hawaii Department of Health release to the American public and to a panel of certified court-authorized forensic examiners all original 1961 paper, microfilm, and computer birth records the Hawaii Department of Health has in its possession.”
Arpaio further stressed the Hawaii Department of Health needs to provide, as part of the full disclosure, evidence regarding the chain of custody of all Obama birth records, including paper, microfilm, and electronic records, in order to eliminate the possibility that a forger or forgers may have tampered with the birth records.
Arpaio went on to say the President should also authorize Kapiolani Hospital, the birth hospital listed on the Obama long-form birth certificate, to release any and all hospital patient records for Stanley Ann Dunham Obama, his mother, and for the newly born Barack Obama, in order to provide additional corroboration for the original 1961 birth records held in the Hawaii Department of Health vault.
“Absent the authentic Hawaii Department of Health 1961 birth records for Barack Obama, there is no other credible proof supporting the idea or belief that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, as he and the White House have consistently asserted,” Zullo said.
“In fact, absent the authentication of Hawaii Department of Health 1961 birth records for Barack Obama, there is no other proof he was born anywhere within the United States.”
Arpaio concluded the press conference by suggesting a congressional investigation might be warranted and asked that any other law enforcement agency with information referencing this investigation be forwarded to his office.
President Obama said his formal apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the burning of Korans by U.S. troops last week has “calmed things down” after the incident sparked an outbreak of violence across the country.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Obama said in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Bob Woodruff at the White House. “But my criteria in any decision I make, getting recommendations from folks who are actually on the ground, is what is going to best protect our folks and make sure that they can accomplish their mission.”
The president’s comments came just hours before a formal White House dinner to honor Iraq War veterans, some of whom have also served in Afghanistan and may be redeploying there to assist ongoing U.S. military operations. Woodruff was the only journalist invited to attend the dinner.
Obama said his letter to Karzai aimed to curb further danger to U.S. troops on the ground. It reportedly expressed regret for the apparently inadvertent burning of the Korans, the sacred text of Islam, on a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.
Still, the president’s critics and some members of the military have questioned the appropriateness of the move, given the subsequent murder of two U.S. military officers at the hands of an Afghan inside one of the capital’s secure ministry buildings.
“Everything else — the politics or second guessing of these various decisions — I’m not worried about,” Obama said.
Even as he honors the service and sacrifice of veterans who have returned home, Obama said he will tonight urge troops still fighting in Afghanistan not to recoil from the short-term challenges and to learn from the successful mission in Iraq.
“As difficult as Afghanistan has been, we are making progress because of the extraordinary service of our men and women in uniform,” Obama said. “The overwhelming majority of Afghan troops have welcomed and benefitted from the training and partnering that we’re doing.
“When you think about it, the same thing was true in Iraq,” he said. “War is a tough business, and never goes in a perfectly good path. But because of the stick-to-it-ness of our teams, I feel confident that we can stay on a path that, by the end of 2014, our troops will be out and will not be in a combat role, and Afghans will have capacity, just as Iraqis, to secure their own country.”
Tonight’s event, themed, “A Nation’s Gratitude,” is the first of its kind to mark the end of a major war and comes just two and a half months after the last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq.
A hand-picked group of 78 service members selected proportionally from across all military branches, ranks and states will attend, officials said, joined by members of military families, Gold Star families and wounded warriors. They are said to reflect the diversity of the more than 1.5 million Americans who served in Iraq during the nearly nine-year war.
The dinner “is a celebration of the men and women who carried out an extraordinarily difficult mission and did so with honor, integrity, and courage and, as a consequence, were successful in being able to give Iraq a chance to build a representative, democratic country,” Obama told Woodruff.
“I am always in awe of the sacrifices they’ve made and the excellence of their work,” he said. “And I think this is just one small gesture among many gestures across the country of gratitude for those folks who gave extraordinary service.”
Widely read conservative Internet publisher Andrew Breitbart has died, his attorney confirms.
The websites he founded ran a statement Thursday morning announcing that Breitbart, 43, died “unexpectedly from natural causes” in Los Angeles shortly after midnight.
“We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior,” the statement said. “Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.”
Breitbart was a prolific commentator who founded several websites devoted to covering politics, entertainment and everything in between. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Drudge Report before breaking off to start his own outlets — including Big Government, Big Hollywood and Breitbart.tv.
The statement on his sites quoted the concluding passage from his book, Righteous Indignation.
“I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and-famously-I enjoy making enemies. Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands — who knows? — of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night,” Breitbart wrote.
The statement ended: “Andrew is at rest, yet the happy warrior lives on, in each of us.”
Breitbart was walking near his house in the Brentwood neighborhood shortly after midnight Thursday when he collapsed, his father-in-law Orson Bean said.
Someone saw him fall and called paramedics, who tried to revive him. They rushed him to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, Bean said. Breitbart had suffered heart problems a year earlier, but Bean said he could not pinpoint what happened.
“I don’t know what to say. It’s devastating,” Bean told The Associated Press.
Those who knew and worked with him described Breitbart almost uniformly as “fearless,” sharply intelligent, witty and devoted to his work.
“He was the modern conservative iteration of a 1960s radical,” conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg told Fox News, minutes after Breitbart’s death was reported.
“When I say he was the most fearless guy I ever knew, it really is true. I mean, he truly loved the fight,” he said.
Breitbart considered his charge to expose corruption, hypocrisy and media bias, and leveraged his network of websites to reach for that goal.
He was on the forefront of reporting several controversies, notably the salacious tweets former Rep. Anthony Weiner had sent to young women before his resignation.
Breitbart became embroiled in a controversy of his own, though, for his reporting on a web video of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod. The edited video appeared to show Sherrod making a racist comment, but the full tape later put the remark in context and made clear that Sherrod was actually talking about bridging racial differences. Sherrod was fired after the edited video surfaced, and later filed suit against Breitbart.
Breitbart, though, went on to report on one of the biggest congressional scandals of 2011 — the tweets sent by Weiner to young women he met online. The former New York congressman, who is married, adamantly denied the reports at first, before admitting to them in a tearful press conference and resigning.
One of Breitbart’s most memorable moments came when he commandeered the podium before Weiner’s final New York conference, holding court with reporters and demanding an apology from Weiner — while Weiner waited to attend his own press conference.
Goldberg recalled how one of Breitbart’s favorite past-times was to retweet the nasty things other people said about him. “He considered it a badge of honor,” Goldberg said.
Breitbart’s final tweet, posted shortly before he was reported to have died, typified the combative and blunt tone he took with his online debaters. “I called you a putz cause I thought you were being intentionally disingenuous. If not I apologize,” he wrote to the individual he had been arguing with.
News of Breitbart’s death reverberated on Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail. Rick Santorum said he was “crestfallen.”
“What a powerful force,” Santorum said. “What a huge loss, in my opinion, for our country and certainly for the conservative movement.”
Breitbart is survived by his wife Susannah Bean Breitbart, 41, and four children.
Va. lawmaker calls for removal of ‘disrespectful’ Metro ad
Wednesday – 2/29/2012, 6:02pm ET Adam Tuss, wtop.com
WMATA issued a statement saying its advertising has been ruled by the courts as protected under the First Amendment, and the Authority does not decline ads based on their political content.
“WMATA does not endorse the advertising on our system, and ads to not reflect the position of the Authority,” says the statement.
In response to their statement, Congressman Jim Moran says, “I am disappointed by WMATA’s defense of this inappropriate advertisement. If their current advertising guidelines do not prohibit profane advertisements on taxpayer-funded property, then WMATA should take the initiative and update them. Profanity has no place in the public forum.
“The specific language in the WMATA-approved ad that should be removed is not political, it’s profane. It defames the President of the United States in a way that coarsens the public discourse. All Americans have the right to make their voice heard under the First Amendment. But when we are talking about an advertisement on tax-payer funded facilities, as is the case with Metro, it should meet the minimum standards of propriety. I repeat my call on WMATA to exercise appropriate judgment and remove this offensive ad.”
Wednesday – 2/29/2012, 4:06pm ET
WASHINGTON – It’s a Metro ad that a local Congressman says goes too far.
Northern Virginia Democrat Jim Moran says an ad in the Clarendon Metro station aimed at President Obama that contains the phrase “Go to hell Barack” should be taken down immediately.
The context of the ad centers on the recent health law.
Moran says families and tourists should not have to be subjected to the ad.
(CNN) – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has won the Wyoming caucuses, CNN projects.
Based on straw-poll results compiled and released by the Wyoming Republican Party, Romney won 39% of the votes cast in straw polls conducted at county-level caucuses.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum came in second with 32% of the straw poll vote, followed by Texas Congressman Ron Paul with 21% and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with 8%.
The delegate count may be closer. Of the 26 delegates at stake, CNN estimates Romney will pick up 10 delegates, while Santorum will take in nine delegates, Paul will receive six, and Gingrich one.
Throughout the month of February, Wyoming Republicans held caucuses and cast votes in straw polls in 22 of the state’s 23 counties. The final county, Sweetwater County, held its caucus Wednesday night.
A little more than 2,000 people caucused this year in Wyoming, the state with the country’s smallest population at just over half a million residents.
The February caucuses and straw polls are the first step in Wyoming’s delegate selection process. County-level delegates to the national convention in Tampa will be chosen at county conventions on March 6-10, and statewide delegates will be selected at the state GOP convention in April.
Romney is making his second bid for president and was widely expected to win the state, as he carried Wyoming by a large margin during the 2008 Republican primary.
Sen. John McCain won the state in the general election later that year with 65 percent of the vote over Barack Obama’s 33 percent.
The Wyoming caucuses mark Romney’s third victory this week, after the former Massachusetts governor pulled much-needed wins in Arizona and Michigan on Tuesday.
However, Romney’s Michigan win comes with an asterisk. The latest CNN delegate estimate indicates that Romney and Santorum will evenly divide the 30 Michigan delegates at stake in Tuesday’s primary.
Voters next head to the polls in Washington on Saturday and in 10 more states on March 6, also known as Super Tuesday.
“President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate released by the White House on April 27, 2011, is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery, not a scan of an original 1961 paper document as represented by the White House when the long-form birth certificate was made public,” Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said at a press conference today in Phoenix.
Phoebe's Detention Room 