Andrew Sullivan's Sci Fi Torture Fetish Revealed!!!!

Sully loves to talk about the torture of brown people's genitals and whatnot.

Basically, The Daily Dish is turning in to some kind of gay S&M fantasy web magazine or something.

Yesterday's post, Star Trek and Torture, took it to a whole new level:

The new movie has a stock torture scenario apparently. The show had a more interesting take in 1992:

In a last-ditch attempt to break Picard, the Cardassian interrogator offers him a choice: Either state that there are five lights and enjoy a life of comfort, or insist that there are four and prepare for more torture. Before Picard can answer, two Cardassian guards enter and reveal that the Enterprise has brokered the captain's release. "There are four lights!" Picard shouts, in what seems like a triumph. Later, though, he admits to a fellow officer that he was on the brink of succumbing: "I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights."

How strongly did Cheney believe in the al Qaeda-Saddam connection? Strongly enough to torture this "truth" out of a human being under his total control.


Wha?

Early Voting In Georgia Over 36% Of 2004's Numbers

Here's where it stands:

Number of ballots cast:1,206,891

Number of ballots voted in person: 1,040,975
Number of mail-in ballots returned: 165,916

Turn out Demographics:

Black Female
266,350
Black Male
160,726
White Female
402,984
White Male
328,229
Asia-PI Female
3,097
Asia-PI Male
2,298
Hisp-Lt Female
3,867
Hisp-Lt Male
3,079
Native AM Female
84
Native AM Male
84
Other
36,093
Total
1,206,891

Top 5 Counties in turn out:

1. Dekalb: 108,392
2. Fulton: 92,332
3. Cobb: 66,096
4. Gwinnett: 59,121
5. Henry: 41,226

Sully talks about the black folk:

...a very heavy black turnout. I really don't think we have fully absorbed what a massive - and I mean massive - black turnout could do in this election.

Sully's First Reax

"That one."

The moment the contempt spilled over.

And this:

10.33 pm. This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain. Even on Russia, he sounded a little out of it. I've watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxofrd. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out.It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don't really see how the McCain campaign survives this.

Andrew Sullivan's "Dear WALNUTS!" Letter

Sully wrote John McCain's campaign an email asking them to admit that Sarah Palin is a big liar and that little slow baby of "hers" is actually her daughter's:

Blogger Andrew Sullivan has been drawing flak in the online world for expressing skepticism about the circumstances surrounding the governor's pregnancy. He first weighed in on the question back on Aug. 31, when Internet rumors were swirling that 4-month-old Trig Palin may have been born not to the veep nominee, but to her 17-year-old daughter Bristol. A day later, the McCain campaign announced that Bristol Palin was five months pregnant, seemingly diffusing any controversy about Trig's birth.

Here's part of Sullivan's original Atlantic post on the topic: "The circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise -- questions anyone with common sense would ask. The answers to those questions can easily be provided. . .

"Why would a 43-year-old woman, on her fifth pregnancy, with a Down Syndrome child, after her amniotic fluid has started to leak, not go to the nearest hospital immediately, even if she was in Texas for a speech? . . . Why did the flight attendants on the trip home say she bore no signs of being pregnant?"

Last week, Sullivan, a British conservative who became disgusted with the Bush administration and is a passionate advocate for Barack Obama, sent an e-mail query to the McCain campaign:

"I'm very sorry to say, it's come to this: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? . . . Since this is a crazy idea, it should be easy for you or someone to let me know, the most popular one-man political blog site in the world, what the truth is."

A day later, he followed up with a second note: "I asked a simple question akin to asking whether you can confirm that the sky is blue. Here's the question in case it got lost: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? Can I please get a response of some sort, even if it is that you will not respond?" The McCain camp, which provided the messages to The Washington Post, did not reply.

The Baby

Again, from Sully:

Did I just see Cindy holding Trig? I mean: can we have it one way or the other? Either the family is out of bounds or it is in the spotlight. Brandishing a child with Down Syndrome as a campaign statement is daring the press to ask questions about him.

A Polite Rebuttal

Yesterday was a landmark day for California gays. A nationwide community quietly smiled with the news, even those living in red states with no soon possibility of receiving the same dignity. Here's what one of Andrew Sullivan's readers wrote:

I live in Texas. Rights for gay folks around here are sometimes hard to discern. Daring to hope for a future of equal marriage rights often just feels futile. So you just tuck that precious hope in the darkest corner of your heart and cover it with the thickest of armor. Because in the absence of the dignity of equality, it’s all you have. And they can’t have it.

Today, I celebrated with my Californian brothers and sisters from a thousand miles away. I saw their faces, I read their stories and I wept with them. And I dared to hope for myself and my fellow Texans, just a little. My little hope has outgrown its dusty confines.

I don’t think I’ll need that armor ever again.

Today, Sully wrote a piece on St. Barack's position on full marriage rights:

I should add that Obama's position strikes me as transparently flimsy. His only defense of his support for full marriage rights without the m-word is a function, in his description, of comfort and religion. But he is very comfortable around gay people, gay couples and our families. And his own church actually favors equal marriage rights for gay couples - and its inclusion of gay people was obviously a reason why TUCC was attractive to Obama. Marriage is the one issue where Obama is still politically afraid, intellectually vacuous, and a moral coward.

This is the civil rights movement of our time. Whatever happened to the fierce urgency of now?


While Barack's stance on marriage rights is nowhere near what any gay individual feels as equal, atleast he's engaging them.

See here, here, and....oh, yeh....here.

He gets it. Give him a break.

After eights years of GOP fear-based campaigning, it's gonna take a while for those "hard working" folks in West Virinia, South Dakota, etc. to switch back to listen-and-judge-for-yourself mode.

It's also gonna take a while to carefully craft legislation giving all Americans their inalienable rights, building the necessary firewalls to prevent it from being a house built on sand.

In the words of the great Dr. Leo Marvin: Baby steps.

Fighting Back

"I would not be here were it not for the fact that somebody, somewhere stood up for me. Because one person stood up, a few more stood up. Then a thousand stood up, and then a million stood up. That's why Hillary Clinton can run for President. That's why I can run for President.

Because somebody stood up.

And the question now is: Will the Democratic Party stand up for the next generation? That's my Patriotism. Those are my values. That's what we're fighting for in this election."

via Sully

Hitch Calls Sully A Lesbian

When you get two of the biggest queens in the same room, hilarity ensues:

Summary: On MSNBC's Tim Russert, responding to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan said, "And now you've made me forget my second point," to which Hitchens replied, "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."



via Media Matters

Why Am I Getting Madder?

Remeber this?



Those words are really starting to sink in. Almost 2 weeks later, I'm still getting angrier.

I like Sully's take here and here:

At least now we know what this race is about: Obama versus the Clintons. Both of them. Their dynasty. Their power. Their methods. Their character. And so the question becomes: does America really want a Restoration? And if Hillary is this beholden to Bill in the campaign, what will his role be in the White House? I've long hoped he'd be given a clear job, accountable to the president and the public. But that isn't their style. When you re-elect royal families, you get their family dynamics as well. What we're seeing now is a small glimpse of what we would be dealing with for at least four years.

and

What we are witnessing is the corruption of nepotism and the abuse of a former office for the pursuit of dynastic power. Anyone who has ever followed the Clintons knows how unscrupulous they are. But even I didn't expect a former president to be as tacky as this. You want this kind of character back in the White House? You want another dynasty, defending itself and attacking others in the same party? You know what to do.

I never expected this either. But I should have. We all should have.