For years, Andrew Breitbart, second-in-command at the Drudge Report, labored in the shadows cast by his boss's legendary fedora. Now, he's known as a major media player in his own right, the architect of a burgeoning conservative news network that's far more ambitious than anything his boss has ever attempted. In 2005, he created Breitbart.com, a streamlined news portal that carries the latest articles from the Associated Press, UPI, and other major newswires. In 2008, he created Big Hollywood, a group blog that counters liberal bias emanating from a dangerous fifth column of Malibu gasbags, statist puppets, and singing schoolchildren. In 2009, he introduced Big Government, a group blog that counters the liberal bias emanating from liberals. And perhaps just in case it turns out prime numbers emanate liberal bias too, he's even registered Big23.com.

Breitbart has a reputation for ideological transparency. "At no point have I attempted to hide my political leanings as I have endeavored to create Big Hollywood and Big Government. There is a need for a checks and balance against the New York Times and the rest of the supposedly neutral traditional press," he exclaimed at Big Hollywood. In an interview with the Financial Times, he reiterated his commitment to openness. "I make no bones about coming from an ideological and partisan point of view. But at least I'm honest about it."

But he's not just outspoken. Taunting his own nipples on Red Eye, trash-talking Upton Sinclair at a Tea Party rally, he's entertainingly outspoken. Catch him in an especially playful mood, and he practically pukes candor. "This is the Abu Ghraib of Abu Ghraib," he exclaimed to the Washington Independent about his ACORN video series. "Abu Ghraibs for everyone! NEA Abu Ghraib! White House Abu Ghraib! ACORN Abu Ghraib! Journalism Abu Ghraib! You've all been exposed, you corrupt bastards."

NO COMMENT

When an interview subject delivers quotes like that, you pretty much just turn on your tape recorder and let the magic happen. So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I called up Breitbart, asked him about a long-term business deal he has with Reuters, and he declined to comment.

I was hoping he'd brag about how much money he's made from the deal. And fire off some zingers about how unlikely it is that he, a guy so conservative he once suggested to the New York Observer that it would "almost disgust" him to have sex with the liberal movie star Maggie Gyllenhaal, had hooked up with Reuters, an international newswire with a reputation for anti-American bias, anti-Israeli bias, and anti-conservative bias.

And maybe if I had caught in a particularly expansive mood, I figured he might brazenly exclaim that while Reuters is charging its MSM brethren thousands of dollars a month to license its content, it's paying him, the anti-MSM upstart, for editorial links he places on his two news portals, Breitbart.com and Breitbart.TV, and even on the Drudge Report.

At which point, I would have probably said something like, "Dude, you're living the blogger dream! Mainstream media's paying you to link to its content, and you're using the money you make from them to fund sites which, as you told the Wall Street Journal, aim to ‘attack the media and to expose them . . . for the partisan hacks that they are.' They're paying you to say they suck! I don't think it gets any better than that."

At which point, Breitbart might have replied, "It doesn't. It really doesn't. It does not get any better than that."



Unfortunately, Breitbart isn't talking.

Instead, he suggested I take my questions directly to Reuters. Reuters, in turn, is being tight-lipped about the deal as well. This isn't that surprising. Reuters is a major international news agency — it reports on either people's business, not its own. Finally, there's the third party in this odd menage, Matt Drudge. He hasn't responded to email requests for an interview either.

What are they trying to hide?

MATT DRUDGE: UNHERALDED WEB ALTRUIST

This particular story started in 2005, when Breitbart decided to create Breitbart.com, a streamlined news portal for hardcore information junkies seeking access to every single story produced by the major newswires.

The genius of this simple idea cannot be fully appreciated unless you understand how the Drudge Report works. To the average hard-working blockhead who's never figured out how to make millions of dollars simply for rewriting AP headlines, the Drudge Report may seem like little more than a lazy parasite. But it's actually more complicated than that. Because while Matt Drudge realized early on that the best way to make money on the web is to leverage other people's content, he's also one of the web's most generous sugar daddies, giving away tons of potential revenue to rather arbitrary beneficiaries in the newspaper industry.

That's because a large percentage of the stories the Drudge Report links to are newswire stories, which can be licensed by any entity willing to pay for them. An Associated Press story, for example, may be carried on literally hundreds of sites – and Drudge is free to link to whichever one of those sites he chooses, for whatever reasons. In turn, the lucky site he links to is rewarded with a huge blast of monetizable traffic through no reportorial work of its own.

In the early days of the Drudge Report, the Washington Post was a frequent recipient of Drudge's largesse. Take, for example, this Drudge Report screenshot from February 8, 2000. It contained eight links to the Washington Post's website, and yet to get all the traffic that resulted, the Post's reportorial staff didn't even have to investigate a press release, much less wear out any shoe-leather — every single link went to an AP story carried on the Post's site.

Over the course of a year, the Drudge Report links to thousands of AP and other newswire stories. At some point, Breitbart realized this was basically like pouring money down a drain, only worse. It was like pouring money down a drain that some random newspaper publisher was sitting under, cackling gleefully as the money poured down on him.

Why, Breitbart must have wondered, couldn't he be that cackling publisher? A newswire portal would require little investment other than the newswire licensing fees, and yet with the Drudge Report sending it a thundering river of traffic every day, it could potentially make millions of dollars in advertising too.

That Drudge didn't pursue such a plan himself is just one more reason he remains, like Morocco's tree-climbing goats, an inexplicable phenomenon of nature. Maybe he figured he was making enough money as it was. (In 2001, Drudge told a reporter that he first started earning more than "seven digits" a year in 2000.) Maybe he thought running AP articles on his own site would diminish his carefully cultivated persona as a renegade citizen journalist working outside the bounds of the traditional news media.

In any case, Breitbart.com officially launched in 2005. Over the years, both Breitbart and Drudge have maintained that Drudge has no financial interest in the site. In a 2005 CNET article about Breitbart.com, Drudge exclaimed that he had "never owned a share of any company that [he's] linked to." In 2007, Breitbart told the L.A. Times that Drudge has "zero creative or business interest in the site."

Breitbart, however, does have a business interest in the site, and as soon as it launched, he began sending Drudge Report readers to his new, extremely hungry baby.

On August 29th, 2005, for example, the Drudge Report linked to Breitbart.com 48 times. On the following two days, it linked to Breitbart.com a total of 82 times. Over this single 72-hour period, it linked to Breitbart.com more times than it linked to Slate, The Huffington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, The National Enquirer, Rushlimbaugh.com, AnnCoulter.com, Rolling Stone, and Rosie.com, combined, in six years.

These numbers come from a database compiled by Kalev Leetaru, Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the University of Illinois Cline Center for Democracy.While the Drudge Report has never maintained an archive, DrudgeReportArchives.com, an independent site, has been taking snapshots of the Drudge Report's front page since 2001. In July 2009, Leetaru analyzed every snapshot taken between January 1, 2002 through December 31, 2008 — 171,717 pages in all — and published a report of his findings.

According to Leetaru's report, 25% of all links from the Drudge Report in August 2005 led to Breitbart.com. Needless to say, Breitbart.com flourished. In its first month of operation, the new site attracted 2.64 million unique visitors.

Incredibly enough, his good fortune was about to get even better.

CODE GREEN ALERT: PAID LINKS AT THE DRUDGE REPORT

In the early days of Breitbart.com, Breitbart licensed content from the Associated Press and Reuters, as this archived page shows. But according to documents generated in a 2005 legal dispute between Breitbart and two other parties, Reuters terminated its contract with Breitbart.com in late September.

In October 2005, however, Reuters approached Breitbart with the kind of offer that generally occurs only in the less believable tales in Penthouse Forum or when a Nigerian vicar is planning to rip you off. To wit, Reuters wanted to pay Breitbart "a fee for traffic to driven to Reuters [sic] own website."

Typically, newspaper sites pay newswires to license their content, and that's what Breitbart was doing until Reuters cancelled its original contract with him. Now, it wanted to switch things up.

Under the terms of the new proposal, Breitbart would not be able to publish complete Reuters stories on his own website. Instead, he'd merely publish headlines and summaries that would link to Reuters' own page.

Breitbart agreed to the new deal on October 14th, 2005. Six weeks later, on December 2, 2005, Reuters returned to Breitbart.com with a splash. Indeed, before December 2, Associated Press headlines occupied the most prominent position on Breitbart.com's home page. In the wake of the new deal, Reuters became the house brand.

At Breitbart.com, Breitbart's goal is to present the latest news stories as they break, regardless of their importance. If it goes out on the AP wire, or the Reuters wire, it goes on his site: Breitbart aims to carry every story the wires are producing, with the newest stories getting top billing. Thus, in his function there, he's not so much a news editor making judgements about what stories are most important as he is, say, a news grocer, assembling the widest, freshest stock of journalistic produce available.

In privileging Reuters stories over AP stories simply because the former was paying while the latter was charging him, Breitbart was merely bringing the values of the grocery store world to onlines news distribution. Supermarkets across the nation charge companies like Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble a slotting fee to reserve the most desirable shelf space and floorspace for their products. At Breitbart.com, Breitbart was doing the same with Reuters. (Over time, the site's design evolved. In the current version of Breitbart.com, no one newswire receives favorable placement over any other. Stories from all newswires are combined into a single feed, with the most recently published stories at the top.)

At the Drudge Report, Breitbart isn't just a news grocer, however. He's a body double for the man the Daily Telegraph has dubbed "the world's most powerful journalist." Drudge enjoys this title because of his ability to direct millions of eyeballs to a specific story or issue. And since thousands of those eyeballs are attached to cable news producers, newspaper editors, White House correspondents, and radio hosts with hours of air-time to fill each day, Drudge can single-handedly turn a story into the story in a way that few others can.

Indeed, when Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza canvassed more than a dozen campaign strategists, communications directors, and other high-placed political operatives, each one agreed that "there is no single tool more powerful in the modern media for breaking a story or turning up the volume on a little-noticed comment" than the Drudge Report.

"[Drudge] serves as an assignment editor for the national press corps," Kevin Madden, former campaign press secretary for Mitt Romney, told Politico in 2008. "If he has a story up, you know the cable networks are going to cover it all day."

Thus, there are expectations – enormous expectations — that Matt Drudge and anyone working for him are not just amassing journalistic produce but are instead performing important editorial functions. Millions of readers believe the Drudge Report finds the most interesting, relevant, and entertaining needles of truth buried in the dull, biased, and sloppily reported mountains of journalistic hay the media dumps on us every day. Thousands of reporters and editors believe Drudge's nose for news is so sharp he can sniff out a scandal in the third paragraph of a story everyone else thought was so inconsequential they didn't get past the second paragraph.

No doubt Breitbart has a good nose for news too. After he made his deal with Reuters, however, a new scent began filling his nostrils-the sweet intoxicating aroma of easy money.

In a document arising from his legal dispute, Breitbart admitted that he had "at times, caused there to be hyperlinks to Reuters' website from the Drudge Report, and that some of those links have contained the same tracking code as links to Reuters' website from www.Breitbart.com."

Here, of course, would be a great place for Breitbart and Reuters to chime in with some specific information about the nature of their deal.

For example, were the Drudge Report links a formal part of their arrangement?

Was Reuters paying Breitbart a flat fee for the paid links he was placing on Breitbart.com and The Drudge Report, or was it paying him based on the amount of traffic he was driving to its site?

These questions, alas, remain unanswered, because Breitbart declined to talk about his deal with Reuters and Reuters has been nearly as silent.

If you examine the links to Reuters.com at Breitbart.com, however, you'll find that that they all contain a common feature — a string that reads "RPC=22" or "RPC=23."

On this single subject, Reuters did shed a little light. According to Erin Kurtz, PR Head of Thomson Reuters' Americas and Media Division, the RPC string in a Reuters.com URL is "a parameter that enables [Reuters] to track clicks from URLs on our newsletters, from/to partner sites, etc."

Examine the Drudge Report's links to Reuters.com links and you will see that the RPC string can be found in some of them as well. See, for example, the URL associated with the "Hope" headlines that leads The Drudge Report on December 15, 2005.

But how often, exactly, was this happening?

Kalev Leetaru's database of Drudge Report snapshopts reveals that before Breitbart agreed to his new deal with Reuters, the RPC string never appeared in any of the nearly 700 links from the the Drudge Report to Reuters.com that were published between January 1, 2002 and October 14, 2005.

After the new agreement, however, the RPC string began to appear, well, it was just like Breitbart said. The RPC string began to appear "at times." What Breitbart didn't say, however, was that the RPC string also began to appear at other times. And other other times. Which is to say, it basically started to appear in almost every Reuters.com link the Drudge Report featured. Meanwhile, the frequency with which the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com began to increase.

How much? The Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com just 29 times from January 1, 2005 to October 14, 2005. Then, Breitbart signed his new deal to drive traffic to Reuters.com for money. From October 15, 2005 to December 31, 2005, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 229 times.

In all fairness, it may be that this abrupt 2900% increase in Reuters.com links didn't have all that much impact on the Drudge Report's content.

Like most news outlets, Reuters produces a certain number of commodity stories — a summary of a White House press conference, a field report from a candidate campaign appearance — that numerous other sources are reporting on as well. If, suddenly, the Drudge Report started favoring Reuters' accounts over the Associated Press's or the New York Times', well, the Drudge Report's readers were still getting information about whatever events its editors deemed most important.

In addition, it's not as if Breitbart had struck a deal with a spammer or a lobbyist looking to promote a specific product or policy. The Reuters.com links led to news stories, not penis-enhancement ads or campaign talking points.

Still, it's pretty clear that with the new deal in place, Breitbart began to look at Reuters.com the way Sarah Palin looks at the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In his case, however, he had unchecked authority to drill, baby, drill!

In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times. At this point, it trailed only Breitbart.com as the Drudge Report's favorite destination. Meanwhile, 1852 of those links, or 98% of them, contained the RPC strings that Reuters was presumably using to keep track of how much traffic Breitbart was sending it.

Over the following two years, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 2368 times, with 82% of those links containing the RPC strings.

While Kalev Leetaru's database does not include data for 2009, the Drudge Report still regularly features Reuters.com links containing the RPC=22 and RPC=23 strings. See, for example, the link associated with the IT'S UNDER$900,000,000,000.00 headline that appeared on October 20, 2009.

At Breitbart.com, all links to Reuters.com continue to use those two RPC strings as well. From all appearances, the synergistic three-way between Breitbart, Reuters, and the Drudge Report remains in effect.

From 2005 through 2008, the Drudge Report featured more than 4000 links to Reuters.com that included the RPC strings.

How much money did Breitbart make from them?

Don't expect an answer any time soon. But when you're single-handedly taking on what Breitbart calls the Democrat-Media Complex, every bit helps. And any money that actually comes from the Democrat-Media Complex itself must be extra appreciated.

"Newswires are, I don't know, 70% of the action, and I wanted to begin my business based on that platform," Breitbart exclaimed in a recent interview at Technorati. He then revealed that he's planning to hire reporters for Big Government and Big Hollywood, and buying up numerous domain names to expand his network of sites. "I've spent way too much money these URLs. Those guys have to be living on an island the way they're able to sell crappy URLs for $20,000," he joked.

He didn't provide any details about where the money to buy crappy $20,000 URLs comes from, but maybe the world's most powerful journalist, Matt Drudge, will eventually break that story. In the meantime, if you can't wait to see sites like BigClimate.com and BigNannyState.com, you know what to do. Every time you see a Reuters.com link at the Drudge Report, click on it at least a dozen times!

Breitbart launched his news aggregator site as a way to monetize traffic generated by the Drudge Report. Why send all those ravenous Drudge readers to newspapers by linking to commodity-news stories when Breitbart could subscribe to newswires himself, start up a site, host the stories on them, and—as Matt Drudge's understudy—send that traffic to his own site? It's a smart idea. Another smart idea is to charge a company like Reuters for linking to their stories, which is what Breitbart started doing in October 2005, according to Beato.

Instead of charging Breitbart for the right to host their stories—an arrangement Breitbart has with the Associated Press and a variety of other wire services—Reuters started paying him to post headlines and summaries of Reuters stories with links to the Reuters web site. The downside is that Breitbart loses potential ad revenue when a reader clicks through to the Reuters stories, because they see ads served by Reuters. The upside is he gets paid.

All of which is an interesting business story, one that neither Reuters nor Breitbart would comment on. But Beato engaged in some internet forensics, and was able to draw the Drudge Report into Breitbart's little arrangement. It turns out that all the Reuters links on Breitbart's site carry the same bit of code in the URL—either RPC=22 or RPC=23. The only thing a Reuters spokesman deigned to confirm to Beato was that those codes are "a parameter that enables [Reuters] to track clicks from URLs on our newsletters, from/to partner sites, etc." So a Reuters story with a URL containing either of those codes, Beato deduces, is one that Breitbart gets paid for linking to. So do any Reuters stories linked directly from the Drudge Report contain the magic money code?

In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times. At this point, it trailed only Breitbart.com as the Drudge Report's favorite destination. Meanwhile, 1852 of those links, or 98% of them, contained the RPC strings that Reuters was presumably using to keep track of how much traffic Breitbart was sending it.

Interesting! Of course, as Beato notes, there's nothing particularly nefarious about the way such an arrangement might affect Drudge's, or Breitbart's, news judgment. Reuters is a purveyor of breaking and commodity news, and their stories are usually just as useful as the AP's or any other wire's. So the fact that, when Breitbart is at the helm of the Drudge Report, he gets a nickel for linking to a Reuters story about, say, a hurricane doesn't necessarily mean there's an ethical issue at stake. Still, it's...interesting.

And it doesn't really matter anymore, because Breitbart quit his side-gig as Drudge's alter ego more than a year ago—at least if you trust what you read on Gawker. Indeed, the URL to the Reuters story currently linked as the lead item on the Drudge Report doesn't contain the RPC code that's going to put Breitbart's kids through college.

Beato sources his information about the Reuters deal to "documents generated in a 2005 legal dispute between Breitbart and two other parties," which turns out to be a federal lawsuit that two of Breitbart's former partners in an advertising venture filed against him. In 2005, Breitbart got together with Bradley Hillstrom and Brian Cartmell, the producers of Michael Moore Hates America, to form GenAds, a company that was to exclusively sell ads for Breitbart.com. When Breitbart struck the Reuters deal, he cut GenAds out of the picture on the theory that the paid links were a content deal, rather than advertising. Cartmell and Hillstrom sued, and the case was settled in 2006.

We looked through the court documents, and here's the reason the trio thought GenAds would be a good idea—Hillstrom personally knew the folks in charge of the massive ad budgets at the National Rifle Association, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.:

And here's an account of the night that the deal to create GenAds was sealed:

So, in case you were wondering, no—there is no vast right-wing conspiracy. Just a series of dinners with powerful GOP politicians at which ideas to make people like Andrew Breitbart wealthy beyond imagination are discussed. Move along.

"This is the Abu Ghraib of journalism!" said Breitbart. "Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, everywhere you go. I heard that two million times, from when they reported in 2004 to right now. This is the Abu Ghraib of Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraibs for everyone! NEA Abu Ghraib! White House Abu Ghraib! ACORN Abu Ghraib! Journalism Abu Ghraib! You've all been exposed, you corrupt bastards."

What does it mean? Exactly. Abu Ghraib!

In a suit filed yesterday, ACORN attorney Alan Z. Schwartz accuses that O'Keefe and his cohort Hannah Giles of "trying to destroy an organization whose principal purpose is to help poor people," which isn't much of an accusation. O'Keefe has made no secret of his disdain for ACORN, whose CEO Bertha Lewis once thanked O'Keefe for exposing her staff's dark side. They have a funny love-hate thing going on here.

Schwartz and company also filed a suit against conservative web guru Andrew Breitbart because he posted and distributed the videos. Breitbart doesn't seem that concerned, though, and called the suit "intimidation tactics by bullies."

This legal drama's just one of ACORN's many headaches. Longtime friend Barney Frank has distanced himself from the group, which he says is guilty of "gross impropriety" and shouldn't receive public funding.

Through a misunderstanding with a member of my staff, it was incorrectly reported that I said I would have voted against the motion to defund ACORN. In fact, I would have voted for the motion at that time. I am very disappointed in the actions that were taken by members of ACORN, and I do not believe that ACORN's response has been adequate for an organization that has received public funding.

Meanwhile, the IRS said it revoked ACORN's powers to prepare people's taxes for no fee. ACORN, however, claims it severed that relationship itself.

We knew these videos would set off a big story, but we had no idea it would be such an intricate web of compelling political drama. Can a cable series be far off?

Image via cygnus921's flickr.

Carrie California's Still Standing (oh what a strong and courageous title!), about the whirlwind of unfairness that erupted after she told a bunch of beauty pageant people that they shouldn't be able to get married, will drop in November of this year. Which means this little lady has a lot of thinkin' and typin' to do in just four short months. (Good thing she won't actually write it.)

Regnery is home to a whole host of notable, non-loonybird authors. Authors like Newt Gingrich, Laura Ingraham, teen sex scaremonger Meg Meeker (not a big fan of the gays herself), and Ollie North.

So, good news for everyone, really! But mostly a victory for Miss Prejean, whose First Amendment rights were violated because she said something distasteful and then she was criticized for it. Poor thing deserves this success, really.

Go ahead, listen. Breitbart is angry that anyone would call a neo-Nazi a "right-wing extremist." Here's a sample:

It's such a fucking slander on people like me. This guy's political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campuses that delineates us by group and not by individuality.... It's deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain.

We were going to draw up a reasoned response, and talk about the roots of right-wing radicalism, nativism, the John Birch Society, etc. But you know what? He's right. James von Brunn is exactly like a lesbian studies major. Well played, Andrew.

Breitbart has a website all about how dumb Hollywood people are so dumb, because they are liberals even though they are rich, and this is a life-consuming obsession of his, cataloging the dumbness of the opinions of people famous because of their ability to say the words other, smarter people wrote. It eats away at his soul, the fact that Matt Damon is a Democrat!

This is a very common cause among the conservatives in Hollywood, and from what we understand there are plenty of them, but they all pretend to be endangered, secretive outcasts, even they are just as rich and dumb as the rest of the population, out there. And their dumb beliefs are generally just as unimportant and inconsequential, except when they kill people, like Jenny McCarthy.

But yes, on the whole, who gives a shit that Jon Voight is a psycho right-winger and Ed Begley Jr. drives a solar-powered Segway or whatever? What does it matter? It just offends Breitbart to his very core that these successful people can be kind of dumb and knee-jerk in their politics. They are elitists!

So the other day, Breitbart is out with his wife at "Shutters, an elegant, white-veneered hotel along the ritzy Santa Monica shoreline." (Don't worry, this is a "rare" trip to a "special-occasion place," he is not one of those elitists!) And some protesters go by. And Andrew Breitbart's response, during a fucking romantic dinner with his wife, when confronted with people marching by on the beach, is to run to the balcony and flip them off, because they hate America.

As they passed, the protesters stared sourly at the second story where we sat. Fellow patrons wondered aloud what this now massive conga line was all about. About 300 people into the procession, I spotted a sign that had "war" written in it. One T-shirt read, "Stop forcing our children to be your soldiers."

It's a voluntary army, you stupid kids!

A thousand marchers into the protest, the sour looks aimed at the hotel's clientele began to wear on us. The marchers' defiant smugness started to make an enemy of me.

"Oh, no," I thought. The antiwar movement that I saw growing only days after Sept. 11, 2001, was at it again. I thought: Even with a new president - and one who mostly shares their point of view - the I-love-a-protest-parade political left couldn't help itself. It likes ruining nice sunny days. Protesting is what these people do. Sneering at their fellow citizens is their chief skill. Projecting arrogance is their birthright.

So with the antiwar sign, the T-shirt and the thousand-strong parade right under our noses, I began to seethe. These anti-warriors were trying to destroy the peaceful seaside vibe and our pleasant Jose Cuervo buzz.

Knowing that Susie considers a true escape a day when politics isn't on the menu, I kept my observations to myself. I even restrained my natural impulse to run down to the sand to go mano a mano with the rabble-rousers.

But when one dude raised his fist like runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, I could not hold myself back. I jumped from my seat and bolted to the center of the balcony, where the American flag waved furiously in a now-harsh wind. Positioned next to Old Glory, I countered the young punk and reached out my right arm directing my middle finger in his direction.

Can you guess what actually happened here? The hint is the bit about "children" being "forced" to be "soldiers." Andrew Breitbart just flipped off a demonstration by Invisible Children, a group dedicated to raising awareness of the plight of child soldiers in Uganda.

And as those quoted paragraphs from his self-serving "apology" basically show, he is still fairly proud of his seething hatred for the "defiant smugness" of "stupid kids" who just go out marching against wars because they enjoy "sneering at their fellow citizens" (per the guy who flipped the fucking bird at his "fellow citizens").

So don't try to harsh Andrew Breitbart's pleasant seaside mellow with your boring, smug talk of sending aid money to help abducted child soldiers return home, stupid kids!

Breitbart is known as "the friendly half of the Drudge Report" for running the site while Drudge is sleeping or flying to Europe or dancing to Junior Vazquez. He took the reins of the site "almost every day," according to the Los Angeles Times, and—because, unlike his boss, he answers his IMs—has served as a vital contact for website and newspaper editors desperate for Drudge links and the resulting traffic.

But he's told people that he's no longer doing regular shifts at the Drudge Report, and hasn't been for nine months or so. Breitbart's been very busy lately launching his conservative blog Big Hollywood and generally fashioning himself into a hip right-wing pundit.

We asked Breitbart to confirm that his arrangement with Drudge is over, and here's what he had to say:

Breitbart's departure raises two interesting questions:

Who are editors going to go to for links now? Breitbart is said to be the force behind the Drudge Report's ongoing bonanza of links to shoddy Politico stories, but it seems like Drudge himself has been continuing that practice in Breitbart's absence. But for the Drudge Report to become, like Drudge himself, an uncommunicative puzzle that links with wreckless abandon must be a terrifying prospect for the people who rely on his traffic.

And can Drudge really do it all by himself? After a decade of relying on Breitbart to fill in, can the 43-year-old keep up the site's pace on his own? Or has he found another young trainee to teach the Ways of Drudge? Let us know.

Because, yes, a dumb liberal actor said a dumb qualitatively true thing about a professional political commentator—"He's an idiot," Damon told some newspaper, "he wrote that we should be grateful to George Bush because he won the Iraq war. We! Won! The! War!"—and so Breitbart, in his continuing effort to prove that he and his poor beleaguered persecuted Hollywood conservative friends are so much smarter than those goddamned limousine liberals is going to pay Matt Damon a tenth of what he'd make for an hour of commercial work to debate a singing frog about the war.

Why we'd expect our famous people to not have dumb political opinions like all the rest of us, or why we'd blame them for said opinions being considered "newsworthy," and also why we'd assume anyone but persecution-imagining conservatives would care what Matt Damon thinks of a nonentity like Bill Kristol? Unexplained, by anyone.

But, you know, he's a millionaire movie star, this Damon, and so repeating something Kristol said and calling him an idiot means it is time for the final showdown between rich conservative commentators and evil liberal celebrities, and so Matt Damon and Bill Kristol will enter the Thunderdome.

GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Publisher Andrew Breitbart had promised BH for a while, with a few early posts teasing us since Sunday. But now, with editor John Nolte's official welcome and a (literal) raft of vaguely movie-centric contributions from his like-minded associates, we have a better idea of what to expect. In short, this is your grandfather's Defamer.

We've scoured pretty much the whole site to date and recommend a sort of five-course, welcome-to-the-neighborhood meal for your own first visit:

· Hors D'oeuvre: "Hollywood Loves Higher Taxes," by Melanie Graham
Tasting Notes: Flaky, with sharp, bitter aftertaste. Goes down easy in 59 words, but eat too many (e.g. "It’s the hypocritical secret here - the lefty actors and writers all incorporate themselves to avoid higher taxes but expect everyone in Rube State America to pony up"), and you'll be full before you know it.

· Appetizer: "Big Hollywood Loves the Arts," by John Nolte
Tasting Notes: Tender, if slightly greasy: "[W]e believe the arts must improve, but know that’s an impossibility until the discussion includes the ideas and ideals of everyone."

· Salad: "Does Hollywood Love Christians Now?" by Dallas Jenkins
Tasting Notes: Salty, not too heavy, with unusual and intrepid flavor pairings: "When Sony released Brokeback Mountain, they didn’t shy away from a few explicit gay sex scenes, as that would have been compromising; one wonders if they would extend the same treatment to explicit prayer or churchy scenes in a faith-based film that had a budget above $5 million."

· Entree: "'C-List' Casting Call: Will Hollywood Conservatives Come Out to Play?" by Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter (R-MI)
Tasting Notes: Robust and buttery. A bit overcooked but likely satisfying to discriminating palates:

Republican oriented artists, however, have been involuntarily subjected to Big Hollywood’s new version of the old “blacklist’: the “C-List” of conservatives who are marked for censorship and career ruin for deviating from Left-wing orthodoxy. Nonetheless, though our specific struggles differ, we are equally embattled and immutably bonded, because we suffer for our love of America.

· Dessert: "Where Are All the Cinema Heroes Today?" by Orson Bean
Tasting Notes: Sweet, soft, falls apart when you cut into it: "[T]he movies represented a lot more than escape to me. They represented moral guidance. What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don’t give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it’s always darkest before the dawn."

Bon appetit!

• Big Hollywood

The plan is for Big Hollywood to be kind of like a conservative version of the early plan of Huffington Post, where Hollywood Republicans—whose voices have been squelched for so long, by Alec Baldwin—can finally have their say.

Big Hollywood is not a “celebrity” gabfest or a gossip outpost - it is a continuous politics and culture posting board for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.

Big Hollywood’s modest objective: to change the entertainment industry. To make Hollywood something we can believe in - again. In order to give millions of Americans hope.

Ambitious! But we'll get back to the McCarthy era yet, just you watch. So far the top stories on the site are mostly about Big Hollywood itself, and how it will, you know, change the entertainment industry and give millions of Americans hope. Among the "big minds from the fields of politics, journalism, entertainment and culture" who already have posts up: veteran actor and Calvin Coolidge's second cousin Orson Bean, US Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter, and others.

Breitbart is a savvy guy, so we expect this site to be just professional and snappy enough to give us lots of good scoffing material. Of course, launching this on the eve of Obama guarantees it will become a cult site for a small minority with delusions of persecution and when the nation inevitably swings Republican again it will be looked back upon wistfully as the germinator of a flowering conservative Hollywood revival, just watch. [Big Hollywood]

"There's an undeniably vicious attitude against those who dissent," Breitbart said. "Hollywood is the most predictable place on the planet, not exclusively because of politics but because of narrow-mindedness."

Breitbart maintains that liberals have pushed conservatives too hard in Hollywood and that Americans have noticed. His intent is "to stop the bullying." [...]

[Screenwriter and "BH" contributor Andrew] Klavan also said liberalism seeps into too much Hollywood content nowadays and offers as proof the several anti-Iraq war movies that have been boxoffice bombs.

"These aren't even movies about the war on terror," he said. "They're Vietnam War movies, made by people who sit around at Skybar discussing their pacifist world view."

As such, the failure of films like Body of Lies to find popular traction must provide at least some solace to the Breitbart and Co., who pass along rumors of make-up trailers "warning Republicans to keep out" and a particularly troubling allegation of a $10,000 Democratic campaign extorted from a closeted GOP producer who feared his politics might cost him his job. Worse yet, they've been abandoned by their own candidates, with nonstarters Cindy McCain and Todd Palin sitting in at events hoping to raise money and awareness for their spouses.

Meanwhile, "Big Hollywood" has yet to launch (though you cansign up for a "first-look invitation" for whenever Brietbart gets around to flipping the switch). Until then, the right is in unfailingly good hands: The Hollywood Congress of Republicans is all the way up to 160 members, with noted, nutty Christian firebrand Victoria Jackson recently regaling the organization with a handstand filibuster in the service of the McCain/Palin ticket. Next up, we hear: A carefully coordinated Charlton Heston seance to help get out the vote in Indiana, Ohio and other battleground states. He would have wanted it that way, no doubt.

• Republicans in biz feel stifled, bullied [THR]

It's not like the man has to start something new. His own news site, Breitbart.com, does huge traffic because it's where all of Drudge's wire report items link to. He also has a video site, and he worked on the launch of the now-successful Huffington Post (though he's since divested—he's a true conservative believer).

Breitbart works the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report. The two have remarkably seamless editorial styles, though some feel Breitbart has a lighter touch. More importantly, while Matt Drudge himself rarely speaks to the press or flits about in public settings, Breitbart is actually popular, and even a bit of a real-life schmoozer:

Before we left [a party at the Republican convention], the pundit Jonah Goldberg accused him of being the most popular guy in the room.

At the National Journal party, publisher David Bradley was delighted to finally put a face to the name. “That’s Andrew Breitbart?” he exclaimed. Walking into the Weekly Standard party, a friend from L.A. greeted him. “Have you had a chance to take a shower yet?” joked Steve McEveety, who is Mel Gibson’s producing partner.

Okay big shot! Breitbart is truly Dr. Jekyll to Drudge's Mr. Hyde. And a good man to know. We plan to get a good deal of comedy value out of his new venture.

[NYO]

Crossroads School: A Feb. 19 story about Crossroads School head Roger Weaver stepping down included a comment from Weaver that the book “Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon — The Case Against Celebrity” — which includes allegations of student sex- and drug-fueled scandals at Crossroads — was filled with fabrications. The article should have included comment as well from Mark C. Ebner, one of the book’s authors, who denies that the book contains fabrications. The Times regrets the error.

[Regret the Error]