DCDL

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:

1. Freedom Walk Description Changes (August 15): the first of a series obsessively tracking the Pentagon’s Freedom Walk site (far and away the most read post because it was linked by Atrios)
2. Bizarre Smear Campaign in Ward 3 (November 5): a report on an odd local political campaign
3. The Next Nuagmire (January 14): a little joke about a serious thing
4. Our Liberal Media (September 26): one of many examinations of bias in the Washington Post
5. Post Wants Democratic Surrender on Social Security (October 31): highlighting a Washington Post editorial asking Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on Social Security
6. The DLC Rises Again (July 26): ranting about the Republican wing of the Democratic Party
7. HUD Joins Freedom Walk Promotion (September 7): further word about the Freedom Walk, and the pressuring of government employees to participate
8. Milquetoast Democrats Strike Again (July 23): criticism of wimps in the Senate
9. A Skunk at the Freedom Walk Party (August 30): an alert about anti-everything religious wacko Fred Phelps’s attendance at the Freedom Walk
10. Glenn Reynolds, Supergenius (March 20): a bit of fun at the expense of Instapundit
11. Where Is Home? (July 10): recognition of the Poor Man’s ridicule of the flypaper strategy
12. Separated at Birth? (October 6): a suggestion about who should play Judith Miller in the Plame movie
13. Cillizza Strikes Again (November 29): more Post criticism, focusing on the blogger of “The Fix”
14. Bush Diagnosed With Abramoffoma (February 12): the first photo of the president with the most famous lobbyist in the country
15. It’s All About Dubya (August 15): one of a series on the character defects of Bush and others in his administration
16. Where Are the Slimers? (October 26): idle speculation about the Republican smear machine
17. Webb Enters Virginia Senate Race (February 8): an announcement about a promising challenger to George Allen, which now ranks very high in results for popular Google searches like “Virginia Senate race”
18. Cillizza Update (December 8): more on Cillizza
19. Ready, Aim, Sing! (October 3): introduction to the Right Brothers, a Bush-supporting musical group who surprisingly are not a parody
20. Rule of Law (October 21): an explanation of Republicans’ idea that laws apply to everyone but them

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.

As expected, today Senate supporters of the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would change the US Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, failed to muster the votes needed to end debate — and fell far short of the two-thirds vote that would have been needed for passage. The vote was 49-48, slightly better than the 48-50 on an identically worded amendment two years ago (what a coincidence that these votes come up only in election years!).

But the Republicans have gained 5 seats in the Senate since the 2004 vote, so why was there only 1 more vote in favor of the amendment? I decided to get into the details and see exactly what happened.

(more…)

So, here’s the plan for An Inconvenient Truth followed by dinner at Au Pied Bistro.

1.) Buy tickets in advance for the 7:40 showing at the AMC Loews Theatres Georgetown
3111 K St. NW.
2.) Meet up at 7:00 on Saturday, June 14. We’ll be the ones wearing the Drinking Liberally buttons.
3.) After the show we’ll meet up at 9:45 at Au Pied Bistro, 2815 M St., NW.

Here’s a menu from Au Pied Bistro: