The full autopsy report will be released next week. Meanwhile Breitbart.com tells us the coroner has said the cause of death was what was suspected . . . a heart attack : Chief Coroner Investigator Craig Harvey told Breitbart News that the final autopsy report would be released next week. A press release issued by the Department of Coroner (below) notes: “No prescription or illicit drugs were detected. The blood alcohol was .04%,” a negligible amount. Those who suggested that he was on some kind of illicit drugs should apologize, but of course they won’t. UPDATE: Commenter Dana links the piece I had been thinking about. It is on AlterNet and is by Maer Roshan and Hunter R. Slayton, and is titled What Really Killed Andrew Breitbart? The Likely Cause of Death The Mainstream Media Ignored . Nonetheless, soon after his death was announced, blogosphere back channels—and numerous emails to The Fix—began buzzing with speculation that drugs or alcohol had played a role in his passing. But despite their private discussions of the topic, not a single mainstream media outlet or website dared to publicly raise the question of substances. None but these Courageous Journalists, who raised it, and then doubled down. “Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43 from ‘natural causes,’” read a tweet that echoed hundreds of others posted after his death. “Yes I suppose wine is pretty natural.” A commenter on an addiction site noted that Breitbart’s enraged appearances reminded him of his own behavior after an extended cocaine binge. “You can’t summon up that kind of insane rage naturally,” he said. “No one can be so angry all the time.” There is no more reliable source for solid facts than random hateful Internet commenters. But there has been some public speculation that Breitbart’s drug use didn’t end in college. A source close to the blogger told The Fix on condition of anonymity that he’d done cocaine with Breitbart as recently as last October. On the day after his death, Anthony Cumia, of the radio show “Opie and Anthony,” said of Breitbart, “I went out drinking with him, and boy, can he party.” “He liked to stay awake,” added Anthony. “That’s all I’ll say.” A source close to Maer Roshan and Hunter R. Slayton told Patterico.com on condition of anonymity that they made up the above quote. Well, not really — but that assertion has the same credibility (especially now that I have admitted it’s not true). Given his erratic behavior, it’s curious that the mainstream media Breitbart so derided has been more willing to report on charges that he was killed by the White House than that he may have had a problem with alcohol or drugs. Consider the reaction to the death of Whitney Houston, whose body was not even in the ambulance before blogs and news outlets—including Breitbart’s own BigHollywood—began speculating that her death was alcohol- or drug-related. Given the endless coverage of celebrity addictions, we’ve almost come to expect pop stars to be battling something or other. But politicians, businessmen and reporters generally get a pass. “Drugs,” one editor noted, “didn’t really go with the Breitbart brand.” What explains this apparent double standard? Fear certainly has something to do with it—in this instance, fear on the part of an embattled mainstream media of conforming to right-wing allegations of liberal bias. Maybe what explains it is that there was a basis to suspect it with Houston — and it turned out to be true. There was no basis to suspect it with Andrew — and it turned out to be false. But these jerks won’t apologize. Go ahead, ask them. Then repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall. The latter will ultimately be more satisfying.
Read the original here:
Coroner: Andrew Breitbart Died of a Heart Attack
I highly recommend Shelby Steele’s piece in The Wall Street Journal concerning Trayvon Martin or more precisely the naked opportunism of so-called civil rights leaders and the liberal media: In fact Trayvon’s sad fate clearly sent a quiver of preverse happiness all across America’s civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the “poetic truth” that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth. The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this “truth” has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites. If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this – a call “to turn the moment into a movement” – it would be to have a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites. I would say the civil rights establishment and the liberal media are feeling more than a quiver of happiness from Trayvon Martin’s death. They are deriving pleasure from
The Republican presidential race has become a frustrating process for supporters of all candidates involved. Mitt Romney is winning, but slowly and painfully, without decisively crushing his opponents’ hopes to deny him the nomination. He’s ahead by a substantial margin, but still far from the 1,144 needed to clinch on the first ballot. He’s won most of the big contests, but everytime he seems to have the nomination in the bag, Rick Santorum wins another state. Large numbers of Republicans remain resistant to Romney. They continue to support the other candidates, mainly Santorum at this point. Santorum does just well enough to give them (likely false) hope that Romney can be beaten, but doesn’t do well enough to actually overtake him in the delegate count or popular vote. Santorum voters are further irritated by their sense that they could win if Newt Gingrich would drop out and give them a clean shot at Romney. Meanwhile, the Romney supporters feel as if their candidate’s success isn’t being recognized by either the party faithful or the mainstream media. Supporters of Gingrich and Ron Paul feel that their choice is being devalued. These kinds of things happen in a primary contest, but are especially likely in one that remains so unsettled. All in all, a bit of a mess.
More here:
The GOP Silly Season
Newt Gingrich told
Newt: “I think Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American” — except Glenn Beck
See the rest here:
Newt: “I think Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American”
