American Digest points out that Sullivan's "bandwidth costs" have skyrocketed at just about the same time he can begin expecting a new, friendly audience of Kerry Democrats who probably haven't donated to him yet.

Thanks to CCWBass/Way Off Bass.

In related news, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that George Soros is really a heck of a guy, extraodinarily generous in supporting causes he believes in.

I'm reluctantly beginning to agree that we should have legal, government-subsidized pot and on-demand euthanizations. And whatever else he believes in, actually.

He's also a strikingly-handsome man, the sort of man that women want to be with, and that men want to be. Or even be with, too.

I can be had, George. You name it, buddy, you got it. Nothing's off the table. Nothing. You know what I mean there, Sexy? All access, Stud.

Sweet Victory: One reader tells me that his donation to me was one that previously would have gone to Sully. He calls it a "redirected" donation.

Redirect away!

Now, should my Ducati be black or red? Black is cool, but it's very common. Red is a little "Hey, look at me!," but then, it is an ultra-high-end racing bike, and I intend to ride it without wearing pants.

Hmmmm...

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (7)
Post contains 226 words, total size 2 kb.

As you're probably aware, the costs of caring for and feeding a foul-mouthed, sex-crazed time-traveling bologna sandwich have skyrocketed in recent months.

I can't keep paying for Johnny Coldcuts' upkeep out of my own pocket. Bailing him out of the drunk tank every weekend is putting me into the poor house.

And, as you know, he's not even pulling his weight. He tells me he's still "researching" his long-anticipated What's Your Beef? advice column. His "research" seems to chiefly involve setting a course record on Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 and dialing up phone-sex services.

My nights are haunted by the patter of golf-claps and screams of "Give me the Dijon, you dirty, dirty whore!"

Don't donate to Andrew Sullivan. He's a cheesedick. Donate to me, or I swear, I'm going to put this perverted bologna sandwich down. I'm just crazy enough to do it.

I want to live. I want to live, damnit!
I'm pleading for your charity and mercy, fuckface!

Photo Credit: Used with permission of Enjoy Every Sandwhich. "Sandwich for Skippy" pic created by Zombie and Rowan.

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (22)
Post contains 202 words, total size 1 kb.

That's what I call "working your sources." Give this reporter a Pulitzer.

Ace of Spades HQ also has some scoops:

Item! Max Cleland will compare the wound he suffered in Vietnam to the wounds inflicted on him by Saxby "Charlie in the Bush" Chambliss.

Item! I have it on good authority that Bush's positions on social issues will be frequently referred to as being "out of the mainstream" or even "extremist." Furthermore, the media will seem to actually agree with these assessments while reporting them.

Item! John Edwards will smile an a lot. He will use the words "positive," "optimistic," and "hopeful" while he paints a picture of an Apartheid America divided between "gated communities" and "Hoovervilles."

Item! John Kerry will employ grandiose but ultimately baby-talk meaningless oratory to conceal his actual position on the war and terrorism while sending messages to both pro- and anti-war voters that he's *really* one of them.

Note that coming by these scoops cost me an awful lot of money. Please donate $1-5000 dollars if you've read through this post until the end.

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (2)
Post contains 203 words, total size 1 kb.

Wunderkinder wants to know why Sullivan's pitching his latest drive for donations as required due to the fact that "bandwidth costs have risen."

Wunderkinder estimates that Sullivan's bandwidth costs $500 a year, at the very most, assuming 30x his actual traffic. On the other hand, his most recent pledge drive raised over $120,000.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin.

In related news:

Please send me money to cover the rising costs of my cutting-edge, top-of-the-line commenting interface.

I need thirty three million dollars.

Thank you.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (15)
Post contains 99 words, total size 1 kb.

Although the indefatiguable Josh Marshall attempts to spin, spin, spin the facts as some sort of Republican nefariousness or fear about prosecution, he can't quite spin away the basic fact that Valerie Plame's identity as a "covert" (ahem) CIA paper-pusher mayb have been disclosed as far back as 1990, by Aldrich Aames.

The media seems to have been embargoing this fact. Marshall talks about it as if it's common knowledge, but oddly enough, no one in the liberal media ever before alerted me to this fact. (Marshall apparently mentioned this once, a year ago.)

Funny that a fact with such a seemingly dispositive impact on the investigation would be so woefully underreported by our strictly-neutral, right-down-the-middle media.

This information would seem to clear up a question we've all had for a long time: If this woman was "covert," why the hell was she based apparently exclusively in Chevy Chase, Maryland? (Or wherever she was based.) It turns out she was on the list of agents the CIA believed had been compromised, and thus kept from any missions requiring actual covertness.

Marshall seems genuinely beside himself that Republican evildoers might get off on a "technicality." Well, Josh, requiring that Plame actually be undercover -- not nominally undercover, but actually & factually undercover -- is not a mere "technicality." It is an element of the crime of which you wish to convict her "outer." If she wasn't actually undercover, there is no crime.

Posted by: Ace at 07:31 PM | Comments (6)
Post contains 255 words, total size 2 kb.

And he's telling him, through an intermediary, all sorts of interesting things.

Via Allah.

Meanwhile, there's this Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article claiming that Berger's greatest crime might have been not taking documents or notes, but rather inserting documents and notes into the record.

A commenter (forget who) just raised that possibility this past week.

Posted by: Ace at 06:50 PM | Comments (1)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

An extended excerpt was added to the original post below at Allah's request.

Also, despite having written this endorsement of Kerry, Sullivan's website so far makes no mention at all of it, and does not yet link it.

Update: He's now linked his Kerry endorsement, as well as (yet another) tirade against Bush for "dividing" this country by raising an issue that does, in fact, divide the country.

Liberals' calls for unity always seem to involve conservatives yielding on important disagreements to liberals in the interests of "uniting us." Oddly enough, it never seems to occur to these ultra-unitarians that unity could also be had by liberals conceding "divisive" issues to conservatives.

Update: AllahPundit is crowing about picking July 30th as the day Sullivan would come out of the Kerry closet (see first comment). Not perfectly bang-on, but the best prediction of the lot.

Frankly, I don't know I avoided picking a date myself. I think I just was mad that others were horning in on my favorite indoor sport, Extreme Sullivan Precognition.

Posted by: Ace at 02:56 PM | Comments (3)
Post contains 177 words, total size 1 kb.

Thanks to NRO's K-Lo, and thanks to George for the tip.

Well, Andrew Sullivan has, surprise surprise, not only endorsed John Forbes Kerry for President but, get this, endorsed him as the "conservative" choice for President. He endorses Kerry despite his admission that...

On the most fundamental matter, ie the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realise that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers.

But nevermind all that. There are other equally-important considerations, like Sullivan's alleged right to get hitched to a man (a right he has not, as of yet, seen fit to take advantage of).

At the tone, the Andrew Sullivan Kerry-Endorsement Watch displays a time of

(bong)

12:00AM midnight -- endorsement made

In a way, I'm peeved that NRO discovered this article and publicized it. I would have liked to have seen how long it took Sullivan to finally admit his blatant, but unacknowledged, Kerry partisanship had he thought his remarks, like those made in the Advocate, might have remained secret from his blog-audience.

As Donald Luskin first noted (and I have repeated consistently since then), Sullivan is an intensely personal, emotional, and ad hominem analyst. Part of this tendency was unseen by many conservatives for a while, because his intensely personal, emotional, and ad hominem style of hyperventilating hackery often was in praise of Bush or Reagan ("A Mash-Note to Reagan"... ewwww) or directed at conservatives' opponents (Howell Raines, the Stalinist gay left), and people have a tendency to miss unfairness when that unfairness inures to their own benefit.

But now the mask is off, and thus so are the gloves, and the basic viciousness of Sullivan's "analysis" -- a viciousness common in both areas of Sullivan's political education, the British political tradition and the Stalinist gay-left tradition -- will be brought fully to bear on the one person in the world keeping Sullivan from getting married...

...apart from Sullivan himself, I mean.

Extended Excerpt Update: AllahPundit said he was having trouble accessing the piece and wanted an excerpt. What Allah wants, Allah gets. Here's a longish excerpt, his bits in quoted plain text, my bits in italics, because it's a pain in the ass reading italics for a long piece:

"If you are a conservative, whom should you be rooting for in the American elections? I am not being entirely facetious here. The conservative “movement” in the United States is still firmly behind the re- election of President George W Bush."

Nice "scare" "quotes," "Andrew."

"...

And yet if you decouple the notion of being a conservative from being a Republican, nobody can doubt that the Bush administration has been pursuing some highly unconservative policies.

"Start with the war. Almost overnight after 9/11 Bush junked decades of American policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of the oil supply and instead forging a policy of radical democratisation. He invaded two countries and is trying to convert them to modern democracies. "

This is a funny criticism from someone who supported the war on these very same grounds, and in fact continues to do so (as he admits later on).

"Nothing so liberal has been attempted in a long time. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of “nation building” as liberal claptrap. Now it’s the centrepiece of his administration. The fact that anti-American lefties despise the attempt to democratise foreign countries should not disguise the fact that Bush is, in this respect, indisputably a foreign policy liberal. He has shown none of his father’s caution, no interest in old-style realpolitik. "

Again, he would seem to be arguing that the war was wrong because it was undertaken for traditionally-"liberal" motives. And yet: He actually supported it.

I suppose he's a bit like John Kerry on that point. He sorta supports it, but not in the details, we need our allies, Bush misled us, etc.

"At home Bush has been just as radical. He has junked decades of conservative attempts to restrain government and pushed federal spending to record levels, dismissing the idea that this will have damaging consequences. He has poured money into agricultural subsidies, he famously put tariffs on foreign steel, he has expanded the healthcare programme and increased the role of central government in education.

"He has little or no concern for the separation of church and state, funnelling public money to religious charities, and he has appointed some of the most radical jurists to the federal bench. Just try finding a coherent theme in Bush Republicanism. It is in fact one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency ever tarted up as an “ism”.

"There has also been, itÂ’s safe to say, a remarkable recklessness in BushÂ’s approach. Was it really necessary to insist that the Geneva conventions do not apply to detainees in the war on terror? "

Yes.

"When so many people warned that the hardest task in Iraq would be what happened after the fall of Baghdad, was it sensible to junk all the carefully written government reports for reconstruction and wing it? Was it wise to brag in the days after the first military victory in Iraq that it was “mission accomplished”? When the insurgency was growing, was it sensible to apply the methods of Guantanamo Bay to the hundreds of petty criminals and innocents hauled into Abu Ghraib?

"At almost every juncture where prudence might have been called for, Bush opted for winging it. This approach can scarcely be called conservative. "

Winging it. Note how well this criticism just happens to dovetail so nicely with one of John Forbes Kerry's biggest applause lines, the one about Bush "not having a plan."

Sullivan has always been fundamentally flighty and unserious about this whole effort. His passion in favor of the war was appreciated, simply because it was so gushing; but he's always been childishly unrealistic and, well, liberal about what war actually means. War means deaths. War means sacrifice. War means occasionally having to act in a fashion you might otherwise not like to in order to achieve some important goal.

Andrew has always been a very weak link in the chain, as he's always insisted, with the sputtering tantrums of a three-year-old, that war means never having to, you know, actually hurt anyone.

"So where is conservatism to be found? Maybe you should cast a glance at Boston, where this week the Democratic convention will anoint one John Forbes Kerry, a northeastern patrician who is fast becoming the eastern establishmentÂ’s favourite son. "

Fast becoming? Ummm, fast becoming? You mean there's been a point in the last two years when he wasn't the eastern liberal establishment's favorite?

I suppose he's "fast becoming" the establishment's favorite the same way he's "fast becoming" Sullivan's favorite. I.e., he's been a favorite of both for at least a year, but only now are they growing more comfortable about saying so.

"Yes, KerryÂ’s record on spending, defence and social policy has been liberal. But that is not the theme of his campaign."

Oh-- it's not the theme of his campaign. I guess the theme of a campaign is a better predictor of future decisionmaking than a lifetime of votes and speeches.

I guess Bush needs only to announce "Fair Play for Gays" as a "theme" to win Andy's support back.

" Kerry says he is as dedicated to seeing through nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan as Bush. But where Bush has scrapped AmericaÂ’s long-standing military doctrine of attacking only when attacked, Kerry prefers the old, strictly defensive doctrine. "

Sullivan just announces this without comment, but this is in his brief in favor of Kerry. Notice he avoids mentioning an inconvenient fact: that he himself argued passionately (and I don't mean that in a positive way, necessarily) against the Kerry position for three fucking years.

"Where Bush has clearly placed American national interest above international concerns, Kerry demands that the old alliances — even with old Europe — need to be strengthened. Kerry insists that he is a fiscal conservative, aiming to reduce the deficit by tax increases. He has argued that stability in some parts of the world should take precedence over democracy or human rights.

"He opposes amending the constitution and supports legal abortion, the status quo that Bush wants to reverse. He has spent decades in the Senate building an undistinguished but nuanced record. He is a war veteran who plays up his record of public service. HeÂ’s a church-going Catholic who finds discussion of religious faith unseemly in public. In the primaries he was the safe establishment bore compared with radicals such as Howard Dean and the populist charmer John Edwards.

"His basic message: let’s return to “normalcy”. The radicalism of the past four years needs tempering. We need to consolidate nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan before any new adventures in, say, Iran. We need to return to the diplomatic obeisance to the United Nations. We should stop referring to a “war” on terror and return to pre-9/11 notions of terrorism, best dealt with by police work in co-ordination with our democratic allies. "

Ahem. Once again: Sullivan was a passionate, indeed, often loopy, proponent of that very "radicalism."

"At home we need to restrain the unruly religious right. We must balance the budget again. We need to redress some of the social and economic inequality that has so intensified during these past few years. Kerry’s biggest proposal — one sure to be modified by Congress — is a large increase in the number of people with health insurance. It’s far more modest than that proposed by Bill and Hillary Clinton a decade ago.

"Does that make Kerry right and Bush wrong? On the most fundamental matter, ie the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realise that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers.

"Much of the hard work has now been done. Nobody seriously believes that Bush will start another war. And in some ways Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation building than Bush.

"At home Bush has done much to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government and he has been almost criminally reckless in his conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing WMDs. He and America will be hard put to regain the moral high ground after Abu Ghraib.

"The argument that Kerry must make is that he can continue the war but without BushÂ’s polarising recklessness. And at home he must reassure Americans that he is the centrist candidate, controlled neither by the foaming Michael Moore left nor by the vitriolic religious right.

"Put all that together and I may not find myself the only conservative moving slowly and reluctantly towards the notion that Kerry may be the right man — and the conservative choice — for a difficult and perilous time."

Anyone else notice that in this long, detailed piece, which even mentions some fairly small-bore issues like agricultural subsidies and the now defunct steel tarriffs, Sullivan deliberately and dishonestly omits any clear mention of the one issue that obviously drives him (to distraction, and then back again)?

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (40)
Post contains 1964 words, total size 12 kb.

Daniel Okrent is generally useless to read, as he simply defends the Times' party line, down the line. True, he's at least polite and respectful about it, and he at least appears to be willing to give grievances an airing, but goshdarnit if he doesn't usually end up telling you the Times is fair and balanced.

So what an absolute shock it was for me to read this piece, in which the Times' "public editor" declares that on social questions, and most particularly on gay marriage, the NYT has been a cheerleading section for the left:

But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine ("Toward a More Perfect Union," by David J. Garrow, May 9) that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.

But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that "For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy," (March 19, 2004); that the family of "Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home," (Jan. 12, 2004) is a new archetype; and that "Gay Couples Seek Unions in God's Eyes," (Jan. 30, 2004). I've learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I've met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I've been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.

Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn't even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you'd have the makings of a life insurance commercial.

I'm actually interested in Andrew Sullivan's reaction. On one hand, Okrent takes on Sullivan's fourth biggest theme, NYT bias. But on the other hand, Sullivan's first three biggest themes are, in no particular order, gay marriage, gay marriage, and gay marriage, and here is Daniel Okrent saying that on this question, the NYT bias Sullivan likes to criticize just happens to be pushing his favorite issue.

Since this would be a tough issue to confront, I expect Sullivan to do what he usually does and completely ignore it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:48 AM | Comments (7)
Post contains 555 words, total size 3 kb.

Shortly after 9/11, some politician told the press about some phone conversation intercepted the day before, saying something like "The feast is set" or some other codephrase later determined to mean "the attack is on."

This was a bad thing, because the fact that we interecepted a call is itself a closely-guarded secret. I think Bush, Cheney, and/or Rumsfeld sternly rebuked Congress for this leak.

It was just leaked that a Senator is now the focus of investigation in the case. That Senator -- Richard Shelby of Alabama, on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Republican.

Keith Olbermann reported this on his godawful show tonight. Oddly enough, there was no talk of this leak impugning a Republican being "timed," "suspiciously" or otherwise, to take the focus off of Sandy Berger, or to give the Democrats a laugh line during their convention.

Nope. The only story was the information conveyed by the leak. Not the leak itself, nor the likely political affinity of the leakers, nor the possible motive or agenda of the leakers. No aspersions whatsoever were cast upon those supplying the information; indeed, they weren't even mentioned at all.

Funny, isn't it?

(P.S., Keith: Craig Kilbourne called. He says he wants his act back. Oh wait, that isn't even Craig Kilbourne's act, he stole it from David Letterman. And, actually, wait again: neither man wants the act back, because you're so howlingly unfunny they say you've "tainted" the act and turned it into something ugly and hateful.

On the other hand, Margaret Cho wants to have drinks.)

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 PM | Comments (5)
Post contains 296 words, total size 2 kb.