Author: Andrew Sullivan

Here’s a heart-warming video of a rescue of 90 beagles who had spent their lives being experimented on in a laboratory in New Jersey. The lab had gone bankrupt and these admirable volunteers found the dogs and freed them. The activists believe that the beagles had never been outdoors in their entire lives. And yes, this happened on July 4:

Jonah Lehrer is all for a soda tax:

Just look at cigarettes: If you want to decrease the numbers of smokers, raising the price of cigarettes is the only proven solution. In fact, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes causes a 4 percent reduction in demand. Teenagers are especially sensitive to these price changes: a 10 percent increase in price causes a 12 percent drop in teenage smoking… And let's not forget that nicotine is an extremely addictive substance. (While high fructose corn syrup might taste good, it's not chemically addictive.) So I think there's good reason to think that a 10 percent hike in the price of sodas might be even more effective than a cigarette tax.

Joel Wing updates us. We're on schedule.

Josh Green hedges his bets a little.

In a must-see clip, David Boies describes how he persuaded opposing witnesses in the Prop 8 trial to come to his side:

The WSJ reviews "The Kids Are All Right":

"Gay marriage is a hot-button issue, but "The Kids Are All Right" doesn't push buttons or advance an agenda. The film plays fair with love in its myriad forms, and insists on the need for close and stable connections, whatever the home's configuration may be; in that sense it's almost conservative."

Mercifully, they do seem as if they are finally taking sexual abuse as seriously as they should. But in the same document, according to insiders, they also elevate another act to that of  "most grave crimes." The act in question? Attempting to ordain a woman as a priest.

Abusing children and ordaining women? The same level of obloquy from Benedict. That tells you a lot, I think.

A reader writes:

The answer to The Unstoppable Sarah Palin is in the post directly below it. If she becomes president I will freeze myself until it's over. The scary part is thinking about what I would wake up to.

It tells you something about the laws of unintended consequences (something missing from the neocon handbook) that the man they championed as Iraq's "democratic" leader, Nouri al-Maliki, recently went to Beirut to pay his respects to a Hezbollah mullah regarded as a terrorist by the neocon chorus. It also tells you something that the neocon attempt to impose crippling sanctions on Iran is now being undermined by … large amounts of oil supplies getting to Iran by road via Iraqi Kurdistan.

What has neoconservatism achieved? In Afghanistan, the best possible option is a country dominated by an increasingly Islamist and nuclear-armed Pakistan. In Iraq, the best possible option is a country dominated by Shiites far more aligned with Iran than many Sunni Arab states. And so the upshot of the Bush-Cheney years is an empowerment of both Iran and Pakistan, the two Muslim countries either with or close to nuclear capacity. That is the end result of a policy designed above all to prevent WMDs getting into the hands of terrorists. I mean: you couldn't make this up.

And still they want more war. In fact, they are now angling for American support for Sunni Arab states (and Israel) to launch a war against the Shiite power of Iran. Not content with enmeshing the US in two intractable wars, they actually want America to take sides in the ancient intra-Muslim feud between Shiite and Sunni. Yes, that sounds like something brilliant doesn't it? No unintended consequences could come from diving into that briar patch.

And, remember, nothing in the neoconservative mind exists that can actually take account of flaws in their own thinking. Because neoconservatism is a doctrine, and a doctrine cannot have flaws, just as neocon columnist can never make errors, or account for them.