I am now outsourcing all Sullivan discussions for the remainder of the week.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
People are complicated. Love is not.
Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.
The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.
Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.
The worst democrat is better than the best republican.
“More of this”, i said to the dog.
Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.
Republicans in disarray!
Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.
Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.
“But what about the lurkers?”
I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.
Bark louder, little dog.
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
Come on, man.
Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.
A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires
After roe, women are no longer free.
Republicans do not pay their debts.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
You are here: Home / I Can’t Quit You Baby, So I’m Gonna Put You Down For a While
Roger Moore
Oh, great. By normal Cole logic, this means at least 5 more Sullivan posts before the end of the day.
Maude
@Roger Moore:
I asked the FSM for intervention. Hope it works.
Anyone live in WI?
WTF is going on there?
joel hanes
I loves me some Led Zeppelin blues, and that one starts so well …
Just Some Fuckhead
WAI????????
Baud
@Roger Moore: Double that if John says he’s decided to take a break from blogging tonight.
Mark S.
Sully:
Who gives a flying fuck what some guy’s budget is going to do in 2050? Who can predict what will happen in the next 40 years? Is every single future president and Congress going to adhere to it?
God, Sully’s an idiot.
Martin
@Maude:
Looks like the voter fraud squad will be put on hold until the Dem retakes the lead after they count absentees, provisionals, etc.
lllphd
nnnnnggghhrrrrrkk –
got this feeling like my ol’ buddy who says he’s gonna quit smoking for a couple days, just to prove he can.
sigh
john. please. just quit. would make us all so happy.
Maude
@Martin:
This is going to be a strange one.
If this is corruption, the people of NJ won’t be at all happy. We have the reputation of #1 in the corrupt department and we mean to hold onto it.
JGabriel
Convenient:
.
Dennis SGMM
@Mark S.:
Hey! It’s important to me. I’ll only be 102 years old in 2050. Gotta’ think ahead ya’ know.
stuckinred
MSNBC reports a clerical error discovered in a republican stronghold has given Strosser a considerable lead.
Martin
@Maude: I have no doubt that you will. Jersey is a ‘special’ place.
7,000 is a lot of votes, but in the last few years Dems have been winning the absentee vote counts, often as a means to get volunteers on the ground. I don’t think this one is over.
Lev
@Maude: I think that Louisiana and Illinois would disagree with you on that one.
JGabriel
And more from the Journal Sentinel:
Not looking good.
.
Roger Moore
@stuckinred:
Edited for likely truth. This stinks to high heaven.
eemom
sure, he says he’s gonna quit…..but you just KNOW he’s got a Sully post stashed in the sock drawer…..behind the toaster…..in the glovebox. Hell, he’s probably even packing a flask of Sully posts.
Maude
@Lev:
But we have Jimmy Hoffa in a 50 gallon drum buried under the stadium end goal.
They may start making Jersey Lightning again.
What is the bit in WI about a personal computer? Were the vote data ever put on one? If so, NJ will cede the corrupt state of the union title to WI.
Lev
Why Donald Trump is where he is: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/07/fox-news-poll-24-percent-believe-obama-born/
Zifnab
This “ball is in your court” nonsense annoys me. We are not playing tennis. You are not “sharing” a ball.
I know the Zen Art of the Empty Agenda is an old and proud tradition. And I would never want to speak ill of its adherents. But as far as I can tell, the ball is in both courts. The Democrats control the Senate. The Republicans control the House. And Obama controls the Presidency.
But while I do hear the GOP drumbeat “Throw mama off the train! We can’t afford her!” loud and clear, I still don’t hear the Democrats firing back. The Democrats should be going to the mat against military spending. The President should be singling out the Bush Era tax cuts or farm subsidies or something and announcing “This needs to go!”
And I think part of the reason is that the Democrats really don’t want to cut anything. Obama isn’t serious about getting out of Afghanistan or Iraq even remotely ahead of schedule. The Democratic Senate won’t cut oil, gas, or coal subsidies if they can avoid it.
Every bit of spending is an effing sacred cow to these people. They won’t cut anything the Republicans don’t suggest gets cut first. And I think that really is a problem. For too long, Dems have caved on the budget because they don’t want to upset anybody. They don’t want to cut NPR or Planned Parenthood. But they don’t want to cut the NASCAR advertising budget either. They don’t want to cut NASA. They don’t want to cut bases in Korea. Don’t cut education. Don’t raise taxes.
It’s making me really uncomfortable. I honestly don’t think the Democrats will balance the deficit on their own. That leaves it to the GOP Reapers of Doom to gut every program that doesn’t have a billionaire as its personal sponsor. And the Dems will go along with some of it, because they refuse to find anything else actually worth sacrificing.
MikeJ
Why don’t you read the goddammed budget Obama released in February that cuts the military?
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
OT: More up-is-downism regarding corporate taxes.
Dem. Rep is on Fox Business talking about oil company subsidies. When the subject of their profits come up, the host lays into the Rep. about how the oil industry pays the most taxes in the world and has miniscule profit margins.
There is literally no response on corporate tax rates from the right, it seems, except ‘THEY PAY TOO MUCH!’ even when they pay negative tax.
zach
Noticing that True/Slant is now Forbes and wondering… where is Steve Forbes right now? Shouldn’t he be king of the Tea Party or something? It seems right in his wheelhouse.
M. Bouffant
Maybe if you draw Sullivan a picture he’ll get it.
The Thin Black Duke
O.K., I know I’m the new kid in school, but could somebody please explain to me why Mr. Cole obsesses about Andrew Sullivan so much? To me, he’s just another nasty overstuffed douchebag with a byline and a fat checking account who hates poor people. Honestly, the last straw for me was when I heard about his trolling for anonymous bareback sex online while hiding his HIV+ status, and that was eons ago.
And don’t get me started on the hateful “bell curve” nonsense…
stuckinred
@The Thin Black Duke: It’s fucking useless, it’s not going to stop especially if people keep talking about whoever the fuck he is.
SST
Dunno if people saw this, but I thought it was good. Found via a blogger from the Daily Beast.
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/04/ultimate-litmus-test-for-republican.html
IndyLib
Since this is being treated like an open thread –
I really hate these fuckers.
I feel for all of the federal employees that are going to get financially screwed during the shutdown, but we have military personnel in combat for fuck sake and they’re not going to get paid April 15. There are also thousands of military dependents that voluntarily evacuated from Japan 2-3 weeks ago and are still living in temporary housing and hotels that won’t be getting the allowances that pay for it.
I fucking hate that the Repukes still get credit for being the party that supports the military despite the obvious reality bias that when they say “support the troops” they mean support the wars, fuck the troops.
General Stuck
@The Thin Black Duke:
OCD is an awful blog affliction. only curable by repeatably joining bands of traveling gypsies all of which are named McCardle with a few DougJ’. Sounds crazy cause it is.
Maude
@The Thin Black Duke:
There are these types of phases here. You’ll get used to them.
Sully is irritating and that is the nicest thing I can say about him.
freelancer
I’m so sick of hearing him talk nonsense that I finally purged him from my feed reader.
Martin
@IndyLib:
That may be true, but the marxist in the WH wants to build a database of consumer complaints about financial products, and that simply cannot stand. If people need to die to protect our freedom to have our complaints about being screwed by banks be left unheard, then people are just going to have to die. I mean, did Jefferson build a database of consumer complaints? Free men don’t learn SQL.
Mark S.
@IndyLib:
Christ, I read a couple articles about the Gooper resolution and none of them mentioned any of the Dem proposals. Our damned liberal media.
SST
@The Thin Black Duke: He writes just enough sane stuff on foreign policy to have a decent piece every once in a while. Yeah, opposing torture and Afghanistan is low-hanging fruit, but given the number of page hits he gets, at least it’s good to have one person with that status sort of occasionally close to being right.
Also, he updates constantly. That blog is a fucking content machine (which leads to one of its main flaws, imo, but that’s besides the point). So, it’s a good thing to follow when you’re bored.
Some of the mental health break/whimsical shit is kinda cool, too. Usually not, but every once in a while.
Arclite
@The Thin Black Duke:
That’s a pretty serious charge. Links?
Southern Beale
Well, well. Over 7,500 Prosser votes “magically” appear in Wisconsin’s most conservative county. Imagine that!
PeakVT
@Arclite: Bareback sex with other HIV+ people, IIRC. But, yes, it’s true.
The Thin Black Duke
Uh, I get it. I think.
Still, it occurs to me that this recurring quirk of Mr. Cole’s has the potential to become an oddball but provocative independent film:
“The first rule of Balloon Juice is no discussing Andrew Sullivan!”
“The second rule of Balloon Juice is no discussing ANDREW SULLIVAN, Goddamnit!!!”
It’s the never-ending sequel that nobody wanted.
P.S. Is it true that Quentin Tarantino is working on a hush-hush project with the working title “Kill Andy”? We can only hope.
Mnemosyne
@Arclite:
I was going to Google it, but I really don’t want those results on my work computer. It’s not recent — I think it happened about 10 years ago.
Arclite
@PeakVT:
Uh, then why hide his HIV status?
SST
@Southern Beale: Yup. Free market takes care of its own. That’s that invisible hand again, don’tcha know.
Poopyman
@Southern Beale: Dunno what the cutoff is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those extra votes were juuuuust enough to untrigger an automatic recount.
Anybody have any real data to counter my wild speculation?
(In my best Marty Feldman voice: -Frau Blucher!- Andrew Sullivan! )
IndyLib
@Mark S.:
That would be because the fucking “liberal biased” media buys into the crap that the Rethuglicans are the party that supports the military.
Unfortunately this is not an uncommon mistake made by some military members as well. My husband gets into political arguments at work all of the time with his fellow sailors. He debates mostly with fellow senior enlisted, so they are a little more old school and a lot of them reflexively believe that any good stuff done for the military should be attributed to the Republicans. He had an argument a month or so ago in which one of his fellow Chief’s insisted that the new GI Bill came about because of John McCain. The guy was totally convinced he was right on this issue, with no evidence other than his belief that something that was good for military people had to be sponsored by a Republican. It was inconceivable to him that it came about through the efforts of Democrats.
It doesn’t fucking help that the damned televisions on the ship are almost always set to Faux News, either.
Omnes Omnibus
@IndyLib: It was Rush on the radio back in my day.
lllphd
have to add this, as i just watched me a little rachel from last night.
and i happened to remember sully whining about rachel being “condescending.”
jealous, much?
and completely lacking in self-awareness! i could hardly stop laughing. and did not even try to resist the impulse to rip him a new one.
if there has ever been a condescending soul in our current media, i would have to nominate the bearded irish catholic gay brit.
just … stunning.
superluminR droid
*Today On The Juice*
John talked about sully here, here, here and here. Also here, here and here.
Mistermix mentioned Sully here. Other front pagers avoided him, but readers of the juice know he will be discussed tomorrow.
View From Johns Add today was of some white beached Whale or something.
John decides not to talk about Sully here. We all get a well deserved Mental Health Break.
WaterGirl
That gave me a good laugh!
SFAW
Ah, but is there a sixth rule?
N W Barcus
Arclite, HIV mutates very frequently, which is why it’s been hard to develop a vaccine for it. It’s actually possible to trace to some extent who gave it to who by following successive mutations.
Anyhow, when his hypocrisy (Sullivan was on a moral scold schtick accusing most other gay men as having irresponsible promiscuous sex) was exposed by Michaelangelo Signorile, among others, Sullivan tried, as you do, to minimize the risk involved by saying his doctors had told him there was no danger. Maybe it was bad advice, or perhaps the source was really, as so many of his opinions, nestled among the velvety inner folds of his no doubt capacious rectum, but it’s actually possible for an HIV+ person to become “superinfected” with another strain via unsafe sex, which could seriously complicate treatment, such as it was at the time.
Aside from any medical issues, it was a near pitch-perfect example of Rovian-style projection, of accusing others of unseemly behavior that oneself is committing. Whatever presumption of high moral standing he might have had to tell others, especially gay men, how to live their lives evaporated upon the altar of his libido, and it appears he has never learned the humility, grace or Christian forgiveness that a whole-souled person might, as all this preceded his “fifth column” calumnies, among many other insults to the human spirit and the truth.
IndyLib
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, this crap has been going on for years. My husband used to go turn the TV off in the Chief’s mess if I went in with him, he said he was always afraid I was going to pop a blood vessel in my head and make a mess.
freelancer
@superluminR droid:
WIN.
parsimon
Thanks for belaboring the Ryan budget issue, Cole; not enough people writing on popular forums are. And thanks for the pointer to E.D.’s writing about it.
I don’t usually get my panties in a twist about Sullivan, myself.
Triassic Sands
It’s fine with me if you make that the end of the century.
darkmatter
So you hate Kain that much.
PeakVT
@Arclite: What N W Barcus said (quite well).
Tonybrown74
@N W Barcus:
It was more than just that, however. If I recall correctly, he insisted that he was infected via oral sex. And he used that “fact” to justify his scolding of gay men’s supposed promiscuity.
Bondo
@Mark S.:
More to the point, why is 10% of GDP our goal for debt. I’d be aiming at stabilizing debt at 30-40% of GDP. After all, the Republicans of 2000 told us that running a surplus and paying off the debt would be bad.