Andrew Sullivan

And now the fun part begins.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller has an A1-promoted story headlined Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps, in which she reveals all about the Republican candidates' failed bid for the White House. This comes a day after Newsweek broke new ground on the Governor's campaign trail spending spree and Carl Cameron told FOX News (FOX News!) that the woman New York Times columnist Bill Kristol favorably compared to Andrew Jackson didn't know what countries were in NAFTA or that Africa is a continent. (This clip comes via Andrew Sullivan.)  read more »

As you probably know by now, Ashley Todd, the Texas woman who claimed she was attacked in Pittsburgh and had a 'B' scratched in her face because of her support of Senator John McCain was lying.

There had been doubts expressed about her story from the moment it broke on the Drudge Report yesterday, including from conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, but the strongest statement came last night from Fox News' executive vice president, John Moody, who wrote on his FOX Forum blog:

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.  read more »

The Atlantic's PR reps just sent out some PDFs of the magazine's new look, as overseen and conceived by editor James Bennet and Pentagram's Michael Bierut.

In an essay in the November issue of the 151-year-old magazine, Mr. Beirut writes:

I was both honored and daunted to receive the commission to create a new design for The Atlantic. I know the magazine well, having been a faithful reader for the past 20 years, and unlike many designers, I have a sometimes unhelpful suspicion of change. How could we make it new and better without threatening the things that readers like me enjoy so much? It's a hard problem.

One possible solution: Andrew Sullivan. A lot of Andrew Sullivan. Like, full-page spreads of Andrew Sullivan's face, as the above layout shows.

 

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg is reporting on his blog that photographer Jill Greenberg has been dropped by her photo agency, Vaughan Hannigan Artists. A call to the agency by Media Mob confirmed the news.

As you may have already read elsewhere, Ms. Greenberg created controversy by posting unflattering and grotesquely retouched outtakes from her John McCain cover shoot for The Atlantic on her site, The Manipulator. Among the retouched photos is one showing the Republican Presidential nominee with bloody shark teeth beneath the headline "I Am A Bloodthirsty Warmonger" and another showing a primate defecating on Mr. McCain's head. (As far as choice of target and sharpness of message goes, Ms. Greenberg's photos were far from Heartfield-level attacks on the candidate.)  read more »

The September 1/8, 2008 "Special Convention Issue" of The Nation features a striking cover of Barack Obama as a mosaic composed of hundreds of smaller images of other people, suggesting that Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, doesn't just stand for himself: He is all of us united. The cover line says it all: "What He's Made Of." (Like Soylent Green, he's made out of people.)

But the image, credited to "Gene Case & Stephen Bling/Avenging Angel From a Poster by Shepard Fairey, Illustrations by Christopher Serra," is also striking for its similarity to the cover of The Atlantic from December 2007, which also featured Senator Obama as the sum of many, many parts.  read more »

Buzz Bissinger is the author of the Texas high-school football book Friday Night Lights and Prayer for the City, which is about Philadelphia under former Mayor Ed Rendell. Mr. Bissinger also wrote the Vanity Fair article on which the movie Shattered Glass was based. He is 53 years old, with a wide, almost froglike face and glasses, and on the night of Tuesday, April 29, he participated in a panel discussion on HBO’s Costas Now, hosted by NBC sportscaster Bob Costas, on the subject of sports and the Internet.  read more »

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg—who joined the magazine from The New Yorker last year—has started a blog.

His first entry, which features an endearingly retro Public Enemy reference as its title, begins with the self-effacing words, "This is almost certainly a mistake." Well, it can't be as big a mistake as championing the invasion of Iraq relying (according to Harper's Ken Silverstein), "heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

In March, Goldberg offered a mea culpa on Slate:

I wanted very much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I wasn't sure there was an alternative to Saddam's removal, in part because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that Saddam's nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism.  read more »

One of the more exciting conversational themes in Albany today is Errol Louis' column in the Daily News about gay marriage. In it, he writes that the effort to legalize gay marriage, which passed the state Assembly this week, has provided a template for efforts around the country to legalize polygamy and incest.

Gay marriage advocates have reacted furiously, with a number of them emailing and calling me to express their outrage.

Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, said, “I found it absolutely disgusting.” Capelle pointed out that the sexual deviants Louis cites in his column are actually all straight people.

“So don't drag us down with the bottom of the heterosexual group,” he said.

Louis, when told of Van Capelle’s comments, emailed me to say, “One possible response is dismissive ‘disgust.’ A more serious strategy would be to craft an argument for why stable, consensual, adult same-sex relationships should be recognized by the state but stable, consensual, adult sibling sexual relationships should not.”

The full Van Capelle-Louis exchange is after the jump.  read more »

“Andrew, did you see David?” said authoress and blogger den mother Arianna Huffington to writer Andrew Sullivan  read more »

Ann Coulter doesn't like inconsiderate liberals in East Hampton: "It does not occur to them that someone has to manufacture the tiles and steel and glass and solar panels that go into those 'eco-friendly' mansions... Liberals are already comfortably ensconced in their beachfront estates." But who else is ensconced? Ms. Coulter has a $1.7 million waterfront estate in Palm Beach. [The Atlantic/Andrew Sullivan]

First came Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Now Park Slope's ongoing quest for namebrand hipster coolness scores another victory: Ryan Schreiber, the godly editor of uber-music Web site Pitchfork Media, is moving in. [New York D.I.]

Not only is green home-construction hip--and a primo way of making sure the world doesn't prematurely end in a fiery inferno and whatnot--but it's a good move for folks who like tax breaks. [Forbes]

Tragedy strikes REBNY's plans for a global Manhattan real-estate Web portal! This is a sad day for New Yorkers who were hoping to further fuel their firey Internet real-estate addiction. [Real Deal] - Max Abelson

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Ben notices an Orwellian purge from the campaign website of Sean Maloney.

Rudy Giuliani will hire more fund-raisers and key staffers in early primary states in an effort to prove he's really running.

Andrew Sullivan wonders if Barack Obama has a James Frey problem.

Sheldon Silver will be attending the February 11 event hosted by a social service organization that received $3.4 million in state funds over the last three years.

Jerry Skurnik remembers another time when a governor appointed a state senator from an opposing party to a cushy state job.

Craig Johnson is a having a fund-raiser with bloggers.

A Democratic lawmaker in Erie County is running for re-election after pleading guilty to tax fraud.

Did Jeanine Pirro's former secretary testify in front of a grand jury?

The Village Voice didn't hear much about Mayor Bloomberg's poverty plans in his state of the city speech yesterday.

DMI has a map showing that hospital closings in New York City tend to happen minority communities.

The Forward looks at how the mayor of Kiryas Joel helped elect Rep. John Hall.

A blogger turns to Billy Martin to explain why he's not getting linked more often.

And above is a commercial for Republican Maureen O'Connell featuring the wife of the Republican state senator whose departure to Spitzerland created the vacancy.

-- Azi Paybarah

Bill Thompson told a local paper he didn't want to replace Alan Hevesi because, basically, he couldn't run for mayor from an office in Albany.

Andrew Sullivan warns against underestimating Al Gore.

Greg Sargent wonders why CNN called Rudy Giuliani a "moderate conservative."

Sue Kelly conceded her race, finally, to John Hall. But she wants the ballot counting to continue for "historic purposes."

Long after Andrea Stewart-Cousins declared victory, Nick Spano also conceded.

Ben says that nobody lost too badly in the Hoyer-Murtha House Leadership race. Which, if true, is a fortunate outcome for Anthony Weiner.

The city got $650 million to build schools.

Wikkipedia is no longer blocked in China.

The face of Alarming News's Karol Sheinin is revealed.

Joe Crowley and Greg Meeks both want a seat on the Ways and Means Committee.

And pictured above may be one of the last times we see a ballot on a mechanical voting machine. Thank you WFP.  read more »

-- Azi Paybarah

Real Clear Politics says that Democrats will pick up 19 seats (slightly less than the 25 they predicted earlier).

Andrew Sullivan wonders about the turnout among young voters.

Don Imus voted for Eliot Spitzer.

Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island smells some hypocrisy in Bill Clinton's attacks on his position on Iraq.

Ben gets his hands on an unusual ad from John Spencer.

If Democrats win today, they'll owe a lot to organized labor, says TNR.

Mystery Pollster has a history of exit polls, which or may not be available today.

BlueJersey has some early (and partisan) exit poll numbers, with Bob Menendez leading Tom Kean, Jr.

Tom Reynolds and his opponent are not campaigning much today.

For poll numbers on some of the closets races, and a steady, late-into-the-evening Politicker feed, check out the Observer's action-packed homepage.  read more »

And pictured above, from the Wall Street Journal's blog about blogs, is the ballot Connecticut voters are seeing today, which has Joe Lieberman listed all the way at the bottom.

-- Azi Paybarah

Today, Newsweek entered the political blogging arena with The Gaggle.

The weekly magazine's reporters will write the daily items, according to senior editor Weston Kosova, who is one of the blog's editors.

"We've been kicking it around for a while," said Mr. Kosova. "With the elections, it seemed like a good time to do it."

But was Newsweek's decision motivated at all by developments over at Time? Over the past year, Newsweek's rival has hired star political bloggers like Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) and former Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox (Political Bite).

"It really wasn't," said Mr. Kosova. "It seems like such an obvious thing to do. Everyone in the universe has one. We didn't feel a push from [Time]."

And the name?

"It's kind of a Washington expression for reporters," said Mr. Kosova. The idea was "to come up with something that said 'politics,' was catchy, and hadn't been used by someone else," he said.

- Michael Calderone

Yesterday, Time's blogger Andrew Sullivan announced that the new editor of Out magazine is a heterosexual. "Seriously, I think it's great that a straight guy is now heading up a gay magazine," he wrote.

While that idea fits nicely with Mr. Sullivan's theories on the continued blurring of straight and gay culture and identity, it doesn't quite deliver, as Out's new editor, Aaron Hicklin, is actually not a heterosexual.

Mr. Hicklin and Mr. Sullivan have never met, although Mr. Sullivan did once write approvingly of a review by Mr. Hicklin in Gear magazine of a Moby album.

"He's going to be very disappointed when he sees my first issue devoted to Judy Garland," Mr. Hicklin said from the Black Book offices. "And the Cher issue!"

Mr. Hicklin is staying at Black Book long enough to close the June/July issue; he will then immediately transfer to Out, without a break.

—Choire Sicha

The "plantation" remark seems mostly forgotten, but Arianna Huffington piles on Hillary nonetheless, countering what she sees as the conventional wisdom that Hillary is a lock. I think there may be a new "Hillary: Not Such a Lock?" bit of conventional wisdom emerging actually...and there's a lot of time for yet more conventional wisdom between now and 2007. Huffington loves the (overstated) notion that Hillary's success upstate has no bearing on national politics, and offers a usuful compendium of anti-Hillary polemics, ranging from Molly Ivins to Andrew Sullivan.  read more »

Speaking ill of Rent has always been comparable to tearing up a red AIDS ribbon on Eighth Avenue, or  read more »

The Montana writer Walter Kirn, guest-blogging on Andrew Sullivan's site today, drops this in passing:

"I do have some insight into Hillary and it makes me dislike her. A couple of years ago I had an office over a clothing store in my small town and the woman in the office next door was ghostwriting Hillary's memoir, of all things. She started out all excited and impressed. Hillary's so 'down to earth' and so on. (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.)

"Then she went to Washington. She was away for a long time, but on each occasion she came back to Montana I could see her spirit dimming. The problem, the woman said, was Hillary's people, who were ghostwriting the ghostwriting, angling every anecdote for effect and literally rejiggering their heroine's life. I was there in the woman's house the day the book arrived and the first thing she did with her copy was angrily hurl it against a wall.

"Why? Because she'd discovered that there was no Hillary, really, just a creature concocted by her people who was happy to be a concoction of her people. Oddly, my friend, a deep-down liberal, considered Hillary a conservative, basically, with a lot of goody-goody suburban attitudes and pretty conventional good-government views. Another class president type, in other words."

That Hillary's memoir was ghosted is hardly a shocker; little more that it was scrubbed of character.

But if this is what it appears to be, it's one of those rarer and rarer indiscretions out of Hillaryland. And a reminder of how little can be seen through the bubble in which Hillary has lived for a decade and a half.  read more »

Oh, and of the three women who get ghost-like credits in Living History, one, Maryanne Vollers, is described here as living in the same Montana town as Kirn.

In June 1985, a centerpiece float in San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade bore a giant mock tombst  read more »

It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, that two expatriateBrits-Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitc  read more »

When the attacks came on Sunday, my friends were as unsettled asanyone.  read more »

Every day we are told that everything has changed, but some things have remained depressingly consis  read more »