Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2714

Gunning For Butters, Ctd

Now it's getting scary:

Randall Terry has announced a four-city series of demonstrations in South Carolina where protesters plan to "burn, hang, or beat" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his recent vote supporting Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. In a press release, Terry explains that the effigy tour is necessary because Kagan supporters are the "enemy" of

"If a man brings the enemy into your camp, he is helpingthe enemy; when he helps the enemy, he has become the enemy...

Q Is Working For The Other Side

Schneier is astute:

An article from The Economistmakes a point that I have been thinking about for a while: the moderntechnology makes life harder for spies, not easier. It used to be thetechnology favored spycraft -- think James Bond gadgets -- but more andmore, technology favors spycatchers. The ubiquitous collection ofpersonal data makes it harder to maintain a false identity, ubiquitouseavesdropping makes it harder to communicate securely, the prevalenceof cameras makes it harder to not...

The Partisan Tools At Journo-List And Trig

Remember all those liberals and lefties huffily denouncing this blog's attempts to make sense of Sarah Palin's bizarre stories about the pregnancy and birth of her alleged fifth child? I was nuts, crazy, vile, disgusting, etc etc to indulge in what Dave Weigel, with no working knowledge of the story, calls "nonsense." You may also recall that the liberal media didn't touch this with a barge-pole  - and still hasn't (apart from a NYT puff-piece that I found utterly credulous at the time)...

After November

In case you were suffering from an excess of optimism this morning, Bruce Bartlett :

What happens if we have a double-dip next year? Is it realisticto think that any stimulus at all is possible on the fiscal side? Giventhe likelihood of Republican gains in the November elections and thestrong Republican incentive to make the economy as bad as possiblegoing into 2012, I don't think it would even be possible to pass astimulus package that was 100% composed of tax cuts—the only...

McCain On Iraq

The war is over, apparently, and we already won it. This is the kind of utopianism that now passes for analysis on the right, with respect to the fiasco of Iraq.
















Iraq - Iraq War - Warfare and Conflict - John McCain - International Policy

That Gallup Poll

Blumenthal takes a look at the poll from last week showing Democrats resurgent. Bottom line:

The case for true "jump" in Democratic performance on the generic House ballot is weak. If we add the context of other recent polls, it gets weaker still. Their results scatter around a dead-heat margin in ways that are more or less consistent with their typical house effects on the generic ballot.

As always, more data next week will likely settle the issue, but Iwouldn't be surprised to see the...

The View From Your Window

Oriental, North Carolina, 6.47 pm

North Carolina - United States - Business and Economy - Health - Science and Environment

Shit Guys Do

My two cents. But this one has a stark simplicity to it:

"Reading on the toilet."

James Franco, actor

James Franco - Education - Arts - Products and Services - Recreation

Why Wikileaks Matters

Alexis Madrigal deems the latest document dump "a milestone in the new news ecosystem":

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; thenewspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, anddistribution. ... Traditional mediaorganizations are increasingly reaching out to different kinds ofsmaller outfits for help compiling data and conducting investigations.NPR is partnering with several journalism startups to deliver their information out to a larger audience. The...

On Walt, Mearsheimer, Weiss, Greenwald And Me

Pejman does his best to profess "shock" at some writers' view that the Israeli government has been damaging US interests and its own survival by its policies for the past few years, and that the immensely influential pro-Israel lobby bears some responsibility for enabling this. But in trying to find anti-Semitism in any of our writings, he comes up short. In fact, he honorably bears witness to the opposite:

For the record, Stephen Walt was a professor of mine for two classes back when he was...