andrew sullivan c/d

I just heard David Brooks on NPR saying something similar: deep down GOP realizes Obama has a mandate to raise taxes on the rich, but they need some time to get their head around it, so Obama needs to be gentle with them.

"I can't believe he's acting like the president he said he was going to be!"

It's a classic time for magnanimity

It was tried in the past with the very same people and they responded, let's say, poorly. Why repeat a failed experiment?

my idea of magnanimity: everyone making over 100 G gets their fucking taxes raised back to 1980 levels

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mebdkuJ2ey1qz4zx9o1_1280.jpg

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110527083832/lotr/images/b/bf/Lurtz_2.jpg

so I went to Mass in Chelsea tonight, and exchanged the ritual Sign of Peace (ie, a handshake) with a bearded, squat congregant -- guesswho?

...Santa?

think more British and "tortured"

Shoulda told him about this place.

Anyway, going independent/pay model, 19.99 a year.

lol

sofa's reallly not working for me, but maybe its just a big dog bed

You get a free sofa if you sign up?

Free used beagle sofa.

Beagle not included.

Anyway, already making bank:

Basically, we've gotten a third of a million dollars in 24 hours, with close to 12,000 paid subscribers (at last count). On average, readers paid almost $8 more than we asked for....If our goal was an annual income of somewhere around $900K (we erred on the safe side), we have gotten a third of the way there in 24 hours, which is why we're all somewhat gob-smacked.

I guess if I peace him in church again, slipping him a $20 is... something I won't do.

I'm not sure that would be any worse than the collection plate...

Twenty bag might be appreciated by him though

At the Movies with Morbz and Sully

oh I don't give cash to Cardinal Dolan.

Hallelujah

Responding to a critique of Girls:

So few qualities in the men? Have you seen Adam with his shirt off? Have you never fantasized about fucking a carpenter with sawdust under his fingernails just after he fixed your creaking door? (#SullyTMI: I pulled that one off in real life in 1989).

if i fucked a carpenter

fucking a carpenter

this is some weird catholic shit, right?

Sawdust under fingernails sounds really uncomfortable.

"See, when I meant 'no glove no love'..."

I see he's in a major retrospective/info dump mood today

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/22/flies-collecting-on-a-wound/

In the summer of 2000, when I foolishly found myself wanting Al Gore to lose (Excelsior!), it was not a strong emotion. In the campaign, Gore was the advocate for a larger defense budget and Bush was all about being a “humble” nation. I figured there wasn’t much difference between them (and I still think Gore would have launched the Iraq War as well).

pretty sure sully becomes a rabid anti-war activist from day one in this alternate universe.

I started reading him regularly in 2002. Was he a pill or what. My memory is of he running a play by play of the troops reaching Baghdad while he called out pussies, wimps,.and traitors

lol @ Gore invading Iraq

yeah, that's just stupid. i can imagine gore doing some clinton-style bombings but the iraq war happened because cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz, et al got into power, not because it was some kind of inevitable black hole that any president would've been sucked into. pretty much any president who wasn't as stupid and arrogant as W would've held off on an actual invasion.

Saddam never tried to kill Gore's daddy

I'm sure someone can find remarks on ILX in which I said Gore, going by what I knew of him as the hawk in the Clinton White House, might have invaded Iraq. To call for war when necessary doesn't mean an endorsement of all wars, of course.

i think we def would have been at war in afghanistan had gore been president, beyond that it's hard to play carnac

i mean, assuming 9/11 still happened

we might be at war in pakistan or iran instead! or the gulf!

yeah Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion after 9/11. Iraq, not so much

of course, had we been under a gore admin from 01 to 09 we probably would not be under an obama admin now. assuming the economy stayed on a similar track (no reason to think it wouldn't) we might be under a GWB44 at the moment

confounding variable is that the right would have done everything possible to destroy a president gore from 9/12 onward. if the 02 midterms went similarly, maybe they would succeed in impeaching him. a president lieberman! we might be in iraq no matter what...

Lieberman woulda gone for Iran imho

who knows? butterfly effect, man. We'd probably be speaking American English, but with clicks instead of consonants. and frozen yogurt would've come back strong by now.

This fucking guy.

Most influential political writer of the generation?

nah

dipshittiest political writer of his generation for sure

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney’s convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

His diatribe against Alec Baldwin the other day--one of the early ones; there've been a few now--was good.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/29/you-are-worthless-alec-baldwin/

(Don't go looking for anything via his archives, use search instead, unless you enjoy a barrage of subscription pop-ups.)

NYT conservative columnist quotes libertarian writer to make unsupported broad point

Most influential political writer of the generation?

I think he deserves a lot of credit for being way out in front on this issue, and reading his 1989 New Republic essay, its surprising how prescient his thinking was. However, its very hard to assess how much the huge swing in national opinion on this was due to his personal influence. For one thing, he was making the "conservative" case for gay marriage, and from my reading of the political history, it hasn't been conservatives out in front on this issue, so I'm not sure how much impact his arguments had.