The controversy over Andrew Breitbart's smear of Shirley Sherrod has been burning up the blogosphere this week. For those new to the story, Breitbart's conservative website Big Government posted a highly-misleading, heavily-edited clip of Sherrod speaking at an NAACP dinner in Georgia early this year. It subsequently resulted in her being fired as the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development. Yesterday, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized for the department's premature action.
But there's now a local angle on this story, as well. This morning, Rep. Jan Schakowsky drew a connection between Breitbart and her GOP challenger, Joel Pollak. Specifically, she noted that Pollak has repeatedly published blog posts on Big Government and that Breitbart even hosted a fundraising event for his campaign. From her statement:
Andrew Breitbart’s web site, BigGovernment.com, has proven to be a major source of misleading and inaccurate attacks on individuals and organizations that work for social and economic justice. [...] I call on my Republican opponent Mr. Pollak to denounce Brietbart’s intentional distortion of the truth and to end any further association with his website, BigGovernment.com.
