Thursday, March 24, 2005

And I will call it .... Mini-Sully

It was the eagle-eared Dan Drezner who first drew our attention to this revelation from Andrew Sullivan at a Brookings Institution blogging forum on Monday:

[transcript, page 69] MR. [Jack] SHAFER: ... So I would say that I tend not to predict, because I always predict wrong, but I would venture that what we'll see is, you know, the full First Amendment rights and prosecutions of libel extending to the blogosphere that we--

MR. SULLIVAN: I bought an expensive liability insurance ... at the very beginning. Which actually took up a certain of the money that we raised. Precisely because.

And set up a [limited liability company], you know, so that the blog exists independently of me as a little company, as it were, just so--because I was nervous, given how many people might have it in for me, that I might be liable to that.


So one of the mysteries posed by Sullywatch about what Sully did with all his pledge drive cash is solved, but who exactly was likely to sue, and for what? To view things from the other perspective, was it the fact that he has always had blog liability insurance that freed him up for his most toxic rhetorical salvoes against his critics?

But mostly, because we've been watching the brilliant Ludacris video for Number One Spot so much, we can't get this image out of our heads of andrewsullivan.com being played by Verne Troyer, carried around in a Baby Bjorn by an Afro-d Andrew Sullivan. Maybe he is just like a rapper after all.

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