the blog of DC Drinking Liberally
DCDL Thursday regular Ian Fried is one of the people behind Blue Catapult, a political action committee whose philosophy is expressed on its “Why” page:
Incumbents of either party rarely have problems raising money. They can use their voting records to curry favors; they have developed campaign networks; they have people and interest groups who use contributions to gain access to them. Most challengers have no such advantages.
Blue Catapult PAC seeks to overcome this inequity by focusing solely on Democratic challengers against Republican incumbents or who are running for open seats. While other PACs and the DCCC want to defend their endangered incumbents first, Blue Catapult will aim at expanding the map of Republican seats under Democratic challenge.
Monday, June 19, Blue Catapult is holding an affordable fundraiser for Phyllis Busansky, who is running for the House seat in Florida’s 9th district — a seat currently occupied by Republican Mike Bilirakis. (Her likely opponent is the congressman’s son Gus Bilirakis, so you might support her simply on the principle of opposition to dynasties.) The event is from 7 to 9pm at Tabaq Bistro Lounge, 1336 U St NW (near the U Street stop on the green line). Suggested donation levels are $100, $45, and $25. RSVP to launch@bluecatapult.com, and find more details at the Blue Catapult site.
We are pleased and proud to present a post book-signing happy hour with Air America host and author of FUBAR, Sam Seder, this Tuesday, June 20, starting at 8:45 PM.
The happy hour will be held at Dr. Dremo’s Taphouse, 2001 Clarendon Blvd., Arlington VA (Court House Metro).
More on FUBAR at Harper Collins.
Tonight at a special event hosted jointly by the Wednesday and Thursday chapters of DC Drinking Liberally, blogger and author Glenn Greenwald(who’s in town for the Take Back America conference) will be reading from and signing his book How Would a Patriot Act?: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.
Happy hour starts at 6:30 tonight (Wednesday, June 14) at Mark & Orlando’s, 2020 P Street NW (Dupont Circle Metro). Glenn will speak at 7:30, but get there early, since space is limited. The book will be available for $12.
Update (June 17): There are photos of the event here and here, and others may appear under the DCDL tag at Flickr.
If you think liberal bloggers are hard on Joe Lieberman, check out this piece by Paul Bass from the Hartford Courant.
If you’re tired of Lieberman and are in the DC area, you have an opportunity to meet the man who hopes to put an end to his time in the Senate as Bush’s favorite Democrat. Ned Lamont, a Democrat who’s running in the August 8 primary, will be at the Take Back America conference:
Tuesday, June 13, 5-7pm
Solar Suite, Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC
RSVP
You don’t have to go to the conference to attend the event. Donations are requested, but you’re welcome to come and support Lamont even if you can’t afford to give.
Thanks to all who came out last night to make our dinner-and-a-movie outing to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” a success. There were about 25 of us, and everyone seems to have been impressed by Gore’s delivery of his message. AltHippo has posted his thoughts.
Anyone who hasn’t seen “An Inconvenient Truth” should go see it. As it said at the end of the film, there’s more about steps you can take on the film’s website.
The industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (recently mocked webwide for its “CO2: They call it pollution, we call it life!” ads) has come out with ads attacking Al Gore that feature numbers that are wildly off and seem to be completely made up.
Salon has an article talking to actual scientists about whether Gore got the science right. One of the scientists, Eric Steig of the University of Washington, has posted a review on the RealClimate website (and while looking at the site I saw an interesting article about carbon offsets).
Our favorite deranged-megalomaniac-owned newspaper provided a gift for wingnuts everywhere with this story by Amy Fagan yesterday:
Democrats call Zarqawi killing a stunt
Some Democrats, breaking ranks from their leadership, today said the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq was a stunt to divert attention from an unpopular and hopeless war.
Predictably, right-wing bloggers seized on the inflammatory language as yet another example of supposedly angry, supposedly unhinged Democrats. The problem is that the Times provides no examples of Democrats actually using the word “stunt”.
Someone must have called them on it, because there’s now a toned-down version of the article online, with the “stunt” references removed (though the original remains online as well):
Some Democrats dismiss air strike
Some Democrats, breaking ranks with their leadership yesterday, said the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq wasn’t significant and is being used to divert attention from an unpopular, unsuccessful war that should be ended.
Producing a corrected version allows the Times to pretend to adhere to professional journalistic standards, but at this point the damage has been done, and a new fake story for bashing Democrats has been established.
Today is the first anniversary of the inaugural post on this blog. In the succeeding 12 months, we’ve had 295 posts and 418 comments (not counting the more than 1,000 spam comments, few of which have penetrated our formidable spam defenses), and these are our 20 most read blog posts during that year:
This cartoon by Tom Tomorrow is now 16 months old. I wonder if it will ever become out-of-date. Another commentary might be this doodle:
Tuesday, June 13, is the primary in Virginia, in which Democrats will determine who will face Senator George Allen in the November general election. The choices are Jim Webb (warning: background sound), former secretary of the Navy, and Harris Miller, IT lobbyist. Feel free to post about your candidate in the comments.
If you’re in Virginia’s 11th district (parts of Prince William County, Fairfax County, and Fairfax City), you have another choice to make. The Democratic opponent for Rep. Tom Davis will be either Andy Hurst or Ken Longmyer.
If you’re registered in Virginia, please vote. For more information, see Virginia State Board of Elections.
Following on the heels of yesterday’s “marriage protection” foolishness, Bill Frist in his wisdom has decided that the next priority for the Senate to address is the growing gap between rich and poor. The Republican strategy, as you might have guessed, is to make the gap larger. With luck, they won’t be any more successful with this than they were with yesterday’s legislation.
Since the Republicans like to call it the “death tax”, you might think the estate tax applies to everyone who dies. In fact it currently affects only 1 in 200 estates. Nevertheless, the Republicans don’t just want to lower it or tinker with it — they want to do away with it entirely, so that even billionaires can leave their entire estates to their heirs without paying a penny in taxes. It fits in with the general plan of eliminating taxes on all forms of income for the rich (like capital gains), leaving the working class to shoulder the entire burden of paying for government services through taxes on wages.
On the other hand, some of us think that a tax that affects only people who have done nothing to earn the money (other than having the luck of being born into the right family) is not a bad kind of tax to have, if you must have taxes — which we must if we want to have a government. Let’s hope the forces of sanity prevail, and this repeal is defeated again.
The photo above is from a Billionaires for Bush event I participated in back on April 25. It was part of a press conference by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy reporting that lobbying for the estate tax repeal was largely funded by 18 ultra-wealthy families who stand to gain billions if it passes. Note that the figures on the graph showing the percentage gain from “investing” in lobbying for the legislation are actually missing two zeros.
Update: The repeal attempt failed again, falling three votes short of the 60 needed for cloture. Most Democrats voted on the side of the average American, along with Republicans Lincoln Chafee (RI) and George Voinovich (OH). Democrats Max Baucus (MT), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), and Bill Nelson (FL) inexplicably voted for cloture. Unfortunately, the issue will likely return before the end of this Congress.
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