Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2652

A New Tax For The Super-Rich?

Given the desperate need for new revenues (along with drastic spending cuts), Nate Silver explores the idea. Money quote:

At least based on this back-of-the-envelope sketch, creating one or more tax brackets at $1 million and up, and levying taxes upon them at a 3-5 percent marginal rate, could fairly easily offset a 1 percent or perhaps 1.5 percent tax increase on the middle class. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't eventually need to consider middle-class tax increases as well, although my...

Creepy Ad Watch

Blogger Pamela Geller, one of the most outspoken critics of Cordoba's "insensitivity" to 9/11 families, successfully pressures the MTA to put her ad on New York City buses.

New York City - Metropolitan Transportation Authority - United States - NEW YORK - Metro Areas

Correction

There are errors and then there are errors. For the Dish to confuse Stan Marsh with Kyle Broflovski is as bad as it gets. We beg for absolution for our brain fart. And we wish the very best for every red-headed Jewish kid who wants to be Lebron.
















Kyle Broflovski - Stan Marsh - art - Literature - Shopping

Marriage Equality To All Of Mexico

Joe My God celebrates. Dan Savage sighs. The US now abuts two very different countries with vastly different cultures, both of whom have allowed gay citizens full equality in marriage. And yet Washington still treats gay couples - even those legally wed in various states - as strangers to one another in every aspect of federal law. And more than 30 states have amended their very constitutions to keep gay citizens in a permanently stigmatized second class status.



Dan Savage - Uni...

Chart Of The Day

Yglesias considers this chart "the key to understanding today's political economy":

Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol
Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every
major political reporter is a college graduate. What's more, we have a
large amount of social segregation in the United States—college
graduates tend to socialize with each other. And among college
graduates, there simply isn't an economic crisis in the United States.

L...

Hathos Alert

The spawn of the spawn of Kristol:

Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Sports Related - Business

Hillary In 2012?

As running mate, that is. I think she is far too valuable as a secretary of state. And the project she and Obama have constructed needs eight years together. That's tells you how ambitious he is; and how smart she is.
















Barack Obama - United States - Running mate - Secretary of State - President

Remembering What The Taliban Is

A useful jog to the memory:

A pregnant widow was flogged and killed in public after being convicted of adultery by the Taliban in a grim reminder of the militant group's six-year rule of Afghanistan.

The woman, named as Bibi Sanubar, was given more than 200 lashes before being shot in the head three times, police said...

(Hat tip: Jeff Weintraub)

Afghanistan - Taliban - Adultery - Asia - Flagellation

"Why Think When You Can Just Feel?"

"Where to start with this part-pathetic and part-sinister appeal to demagogy? To begin with, it borrows straight from the playbook of Muslim cultural blackmail. Claim that something is "offensive," and it is as if the assertion itself has automatically become an argument. You are even allowed to admit, as does Foxman, that the ground for taking offense is "irrational and bigoted." But, hey — why think when you can just feel? The supposed "feelings" of the 9/11 relatives have already deprived ...

At The Hour Of Our Death

Damon Linker is, in my view, one of the most arresting and honest writers of his generation on the subjects of faith and politics. And now he takes the extraordinary composure and rational grace of Hitch facing his own mortality and compares it with Primo Levi's refusal to succumb to religious temptation at the hour of his death. Levi wrote about the concentration camp he survived:

I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in...