You have absolutely no idea who Andrew Sullivan is, do you?

I don't know who he is but I agree with him. Maher's a dumb shill if he thinks Hilary isn't totally corrupt.

Nnnnnnope!!

I'm guessing from your tone he's super important, though! Is he always this annoying?

Not at all. He's a charming motherfucker, and probably the most influential blogger ever. His readers include Obama, Colbert, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the mayor of London, and Hitchens, in addition to virtually every other political analyst on earth. And he's been blogging longer than anyone else on the planet. He can dissect Oakeshott or Kristol or Burke one sentence, and talk about video games the next. He recently adopted a three-legged dog and made it his mascot. He's a conservative Christian that argued for gay rights decades before anyone else was. He was one of the first writers to come out in favor of an Obama presidency, back when the idea was novel, and one of the earliest to warn about the dangers of the Tea Party. He was head of the debate club at Oxford and spent many nights high with Hitch. He briefly supported Ron Paul and the Iraq War, and wrote books apologizing for it when he realized he made a mistake.

And Bill Mahrer is a smirking cunt running a third-rate Daily Show knockoff with no actual jokes.

I agree with what you just there Sexy Duck Cop.

said there Sexy Duck Cop

Wow, those are some impressive credentials, and I happily retract my 'insect' line. Nevertheless, this might be a case of pre-established knowledge of and respect for someone colouring your impression. Taking this video by itself, the guy doesn't come off well. His chief debate tactic seems to be, "Ask a broad question, then shout your opponent down when they try to answer." I doubt that flew at Oxford!

Anyway, I don't know about this guy, and I've already met my "argue about things I don't know about on the internet" quota for today.

You really have no idea who Andrew Sullivan is, do you? He's an Oxford-educated gay British conservative with AIDS who essentially founded the concept of modern blogging, and remained arguably the most influential blogger in the world until he retired earlier this year. He's very good friends with Obama and Colbert, and jettisoned the Republican party because, to him, it wasn't actually conservative in the intellectual sense, but rather an incoherent mishmash of identity politics predicated on radical anarchism.

Sully gets worked up, but he's brilliant, consistent, and thorough in his argumentation. He openly attributes this to his years on the Oxford debate club, which encouraged throwing chairs one minute and getting a beer together the next.

I'd definitely get a beer with Sullivan, kind of like the pope would get a beer with Maher. He's probably the smartest person in the room, but it's like Maher said. It's like getting a shot or a tooth yanked out. And for the record I don't like the Clintons that much and this goes all the way back to the Vince Foster days, not just the e-mail thing, which is really about as relevant as the blowjob thing. Even writing this I feel like I'm scripting a Jerry Springer episode.

I'll also admit that I would've voted for McCain in 2004 over Kerry if it came down to that, so I'm not one to boo the democrat haters and cheer on the republican haters, whether it's Fox News or HBO, but since Sullivan is so smart he should understand that his party of choice is the political equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot and posting it on youtube.

I don't agree with the guy, but any conservative who wants to show up on Bill Maher's show gets my respect by default, and I can't hold it against him for being feisty. I didn't see the episode, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was the only time he got a word in edgewise.

IZ: Sullivan is emphatically NOT a Republican. Not by a longshot. Most of his final posts were dedicated to assailing the cowardice and ignorance and despicable opportunism of the GOP. If you asked him "Are Republicans conservative?", he would reply "No, they're a leaky grab-bag of identity politics fueled by incoherent rage and people too dumb to know they're anarchists." He wrote a cover story for Newsweek called "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" It got letters.

Sully is that rarest of beasts: A true conservative. Not a screaming hillbilly or condescending bigot or trust-fund plutocrat. A conservative in the vein of Oakeshott or Burke. Someone who believes in the promise of change but is suspicious of how quickly we can achieve it. Someone who recognizes institutions as both vital and imperfect, but is leery about the consequences of knocking them down overnight. He hated Pope Benedict but loves Francis. And honestly, as a conservative, he encapsulates liberal values better than anyone here.

If we're meaning the same thing by "security", Hillary running a private server is (potentially) way more secure than using a state department server. A mail server dedicated to managing a handful of accounts can be made paranoid secure in ways that would be unworkable for hundreds or thousands of users.

Think of a security guard trying to monitor the hundreds of people going in and out of a government building: it's not necessarily going to be easy to identify someone who's up to no good, but you can't lock down the whole facility just to make sure because nothing would get done. Now imagine a security guard stationed at the end of a hallway, in front of a door, with a very simple instruction: shoot anyone who comes down this hallway except for (very short list of people).

I remember when the Email scandal first started, and people were crowing about how Hillary was using an unsigned certificate, "haha, what a stupid bitch" people were saying, until they realized the state department was using unsigned certificates too. My guess as to why: getting a signed certificate means letting someone else see your certificate request, which introduces a security risk -- probably so close to zero as to be ignored, but why take the chance?

What's truly upsetting about the e-mail issue is that it's a sign of unprofessionalism, mainly a lack of respect for security.

It's mostly a sign of being over fifty. I'll bet this shit is so common among politicians and exectutive. I've gotten pretty good with Linux, but I just stumble through my android applications. I've had a new phone for two weeks, and I haven't got the 3G internet working yet.

I don't know what sort of security was set up on Hillary's private server, but if someone handed me a suitcase full of money and told me to sketch out a secure E-Mail system for a single party this very second, here's how I'd go about it.

1) House the server somewhere that I can physically watch it like a hawk. (And by the way, tell as few people as possible that I'm running the server.)

2) SSH/TLS on all access to the server, specifically unsigned certificates to be crazy paranoid.

3) Firewalls to lock down all ports except for delivering mail and Web (non-default port).

4) The Web access would be to support a single page at a hard-to-guess URL: visit that URL, enter your login and password, and the firewall will temporarily open a (non-default) port for reading mail, for the IP you're currently at.

5) Some sort of scheme where passwords change on a regular basis according to a pattern, and your one user happens to know the pattern.

There are more things to set up of course, but those are the things I would do that would speak to securing a mail server for a very limited number of users.

Now I'm not a security expert, but I think I can say a system like that would be pretty hard to break into, simply for the very limited number of ways to get at the system. No matter how fast the Goth chick from NCIS types, she can't get into a system that simply doesn't have any openings to exploit.

Bort, I dunno man, she types pretty fast.

... and if she isn't fast enough, McGee can do half the typing.

Update: it looks like Hillary's server was the only one in Washington that WASN'T hacked.

Even Martin Luther made some shit arguments, yo. Sullivan be using high school forensics level debate skills here.

Yeah, but what makes Sully such a beautiful, bright, shining, Dirk Diggler's penis of a star is that he, much like a massive bicurious horse cock, can swing both ways. He can do an impeccably airtight, formal debate, or he can wade into the OK Corral and punch the first person he sees. Very few people have that gift.

I like a lot of Bernie's ideas, but almost all of them are predicated upon having a Congress that is vastly more liberal than anything Obama ever had. The appeal of Bernie is promises he can't possibly deliver on ... I wonder how Bernie's current supporters will react if President Sanders finds himself repeatedly blocked by Congressional Republicans.

Pretending like Sanders is an electorally viable alternative to Hillary is far more naive.

yes but does he have his own hbo comedy show with no jokes

Hehe.. that's why I put the "wwe" tag there. I'd love to see these three get in the ring and wrassle. Actually Maher can referee, just Guy From Matchbox 20 and Sullivan. But that also brings up a point that I'm almost embarrassed to ask because I think I know the answer, but as a gay republican, how does Sullivan (or any well-educated republican for that matter) feel about the fact marriage equality was pretty much because we had a democrat in office at the time, and that any of these front-runners would actively oppose the idea in the first place?

I also could've scrolled up and read your quote; it's true that Bill embraced DOMA but that was like 20 years ago, and later fought to overturn it. Also people tend to say "The Clintons" when really it was just Bill. Really, it's like saying "The Roosevelts" instead of Franklin and Teddy respectively, and really it's been about the same amount of time between terns.

IZ: The other thing you have to keep in mind is that Sullivan (correctly) refuses to call republicans "conservative." A lot of people--even educated liberals--reflexively connect the two, even though, as Sully repeatedly pointed out, there's nothing conservative about burning down the government over petty issues, defaulting on our national debt, invading Iraq, or pretty much any part of the GOP platform.

In his "The Conservative Case For Gay Marriage," he largely argues that conservatism is predicated upon social structures, and is suspicious about just deconstructing them on a whim without considering the consequences. The Iraq war is a perfect example of why Republicans aren't conservative; they literally thought you could burn down one government and replace it with another overnight, which is literally the exact thing Burke was pushing back against in his opposition to the French revolution. However, when the change is mild, following agreed-upon principles, and seeks to expand existing, proven, time-tested principles, there is no reason to arbitrarily oppose that change.

That's how an actual conservative can support Obamacare, gay marriage, or financial reform. We already know the principles behind them: caring for the sick, maintaining the family unit, minimizing risk, and so on. They see a solid framework that can be improved incrementally, and since gay people simply want to join that institution, and live in accordance with its principles, there is no reason to prohibit them from doing so.

Vote for Stein to motivate third parties to take back the election process at the grassroots level in local politics. That's why she's there.

oh yes, we need a repeat of 2000 so badly.

you know what 3rd parties could do first before fucking up the presidential race?

Get one god damn seat in congress.

Yeah, remember when people held a protest vote for Ralph Nader? Remember how incredibly well that turned out? Remember how we forgot about Ralph Nader like six months later because the only goddamned thing that mattered was George W. Bush would now be President for eight years?

No one remembers protest votes. No one learns anything from protest votes. No one gives two shits about protest votes. Never, in the history of presidential elections, has anyone said "Boy howdy, if only we pandered to that .05% of people who registered protest votes, we'd have universal healthcare by now! Let me jot this down in my ol' Great Ideas Notebook so I can carry this lesson into the mysterious future!"

No. All we remember is a blistering hatred for those fucking Ralph Nader voters that got us eight fucking years of George W. Bush because "Both parties are the same, man! They're controlled by, like, corporations! Democracy is a fable! Al Gore and George W. Bush are the exact same person!"

goddammit kingarthur, you're making me agree with SolRo. I don't even know how to articulate how that makes me feel. It's like getting an erection after being teabagged by a skunk.

"Both parties are the same, man! They're controlled by, like, corporations! Democracy is a fable! Al Gore and George W. Bush are the exact same person!"

The thing is, a person could almost believe that in 2000, when you considered (for example) how similar the Clinton and Bush policies on Iraq sanctions had been, or how opportunistic our involvement in Kosovo was (don't even get me started on the Rambouillet Agreement). But that was 2000 and this is 2015; we've had eight years of Bush and too many years of Republican majorities to even imagine Republicans as a functional party of governance. But if you've been paying attention durning the Obama years, the thing you notice is, if the Democrats had been able to pass half of what they wanted to, this country would have been much better off.

Part of that can be blamed on so many moderate/left voters being too apathetic or lazy to vote in the other elections (you know, the ones that aren't for presidents), so most of that 2/3rds of the legislative branch is elected by highly motivated racist old people and paranoid religious fanatics.

Also primaries. Primaries ruin EVERYTHING for EVERYONE.

Agreed, there is a special level of hell for people who vote only for the most unpractical presidential candidate but let Congress go to shit. Sadly, that level of hell is known as the United States, which could actually be a pretty nice level if it weren't for the politically active assholes and the politically ineffectual idealists.

They say hell is a place where everyone starves because their ironic punishment is to be seated at a long table where their spoons are too long for them to feed themselves, while heaven is a place where everyone delights because they use their stupid ass long spoons to feed each other.

Come on. You're not going to sit here and tell me the two part electoral process in this country, funded as it is by unlimited amounts of money to basically buy and sell any candidate they want, isn't broken?

Protest votes are just that: protests.

And with election law basically enshrining the two party system, how is a third party supposed to manage much more than a protest vote without gaining some coverage to use to push their candidates in local elections?

Your logic is backwards...

First you get local candidates elected.

THEN you run for president.

Ruining a presidential election for the side you want to convert isn't how you get people elected.


Also; what makes you think a 3rd party would somehow have magical immunity to unlimited campaign bribes if anyone thought they could win?

"Come on. You're not going to sit here and tell me the two part electoral process in this country, funded as it is by unlimited amounts of money to basically buy and sell any candidate they want, isn't broken?"

The biggest way it's broken is that people aren't bothering to get informed and vote like it mattered (and BTW it does). People who have strong opinions about candidates cannot be bought into supporting the other guy. Money is only a factor because of laziness.

"Also; what makes you think a 3rd party would somehow have magical immunity to unlimited campaign bribes if anyone thought they could win?"

And that's really the tell with Jill Stein: she has no roadmap for how she'd ever become president, or how the Greens could become a dominant force, because she'd have to acknowledge the need to make deals to get there. Jill Stein is attractive only in the abstract.

I hate you for making me agree with SolRo, kingarthur, but........*big gay sigh*........he's right.

If you want to change a broken system, you need to be able to, you know, influence the system. And one of the most profoundly frustrating things about debating this point with protest voters is their complete inability to understand this simple reality.

If your dream candidate cannot get elected, nothing happens.

If you split the ticket voting for your dream candidate, you get an even worse result than if you'd just compromised. (Thank you, Nader voters, for George W. Bush)

If your dream candidate gets elected but is unable to pass her agenda, nothing happens.

And so on. Protest voters love to vaguely wave their hands and say "Oh, but it'll send a message!" or "Oh, but The People will rise up!" or "My protest vote will resonate in the history books for eons to come!" Fuck you. No one cares about the 1,000 people who voted for Ralph Nader unless we're throwing bricks at their head. Do you really think the average American is pouring over the electoral history of failed 5th-place 3rd-party candidates? Do you honestly believe, for one second, that a populace that doesn't know the difference between the House and the Senate will ever factor your opinion into who they put in charge of a nuclear arsenal?

This logic is so naive. And even if--due to Hillary, Rubio, Bush, and Sanders all slipping on a bar of soap in the shower at the exact same time--your 3rd-party outsider got elected, how would they govern? Have you forgotten how bills become laws? Barack Obama was an enormously popular, intelligent, charismatic, and pragmatic politician with a compelling history and amazing people skills, and look at the opposition he faced. With all his allies, he could barely keep the government from defaulting on its debt because the other party hated him on the SUSPICION that he might have read Marx 30 years ago.

Politics is the art of compromise. That's a good thing. It prevents any single faction from becoming disproportionately powerful. But to simply ignore that, to hand-wave it away in favor of some unworkable ideal that exists independent of reality, is worse than slacktivism.

People who won't vote for candidates that cover their issues don't get to complain when major party candidates don't support their issues. Your votes can be had already.

"Jill Stein is the most honest and appealing candidate out there by far this election cycle (and last)."

Update: Princess Wi-Fi may well have been working with Russia, if her all-expense-paid trip to Moscow and dinner with Putin is any indication. Not that she is bright enough to realize she was being played, if that's what happened. But it turns out the Green vote would have been enough to keep Trump out of office, so good job Jill Stein, you shaved just enough votes from Hillary to do Putin's bidding. Whether it was planned or not, you proved to be a useful idiot for Putin.

As for Jill's alleged honesty, she is a medical doctor who can't bring herself to denounce the anti-vaxxers lest she piss off her moonbat base. Such principles! Such honesty!

we'd be in Bernie's second term right now but It Was Her Turn