There will be no Drinking Liberally Seattle this evening. Tomorrow (Wednesday) we have a special Drinking Liberally with Living Liberally co-founder Justin Krebs.
Justin is on his “538 Ways to Live, Work and Play Like a Liberal” book tour. The book is about the little ideas for embracing your progressive values in everyday life, as well as the big ideas of what it means to be a “liberal” in America today.
Justin has toured the book to over 65 cities in 35 states and happily won the mockery of the conservative Weekly Standard which featured him in a cover story in July.
Bring your copy of the book (or the Weekly Standard cover, for that matter) for Justin to sign. Copies of the book will be available at the event.
We meet at our usual spot, the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00 pm.
Drinking Liberally Seattle meets weekly on Tuesday nights except for this week because of Justin’s visit.
Since the “Drinking Liberally” is usually considered an open topic, I’ll treat it as such here. After all, you can’t even make this stuff up, the Republican candidates just continue to provide their own comedy material.
1. Newt Gingrich’s fundraisers just quit. It seems they were dismayed by their inability to raise funds for him, and his travel expenses were extraordinarily high. I’m not surprised that he would have trouble raising funds, he’s not considered a viable candidate and there are lots of reasons to wonder if he’s even serious about the race. And as for his travel expenses, it seems his campaign travel had more to do with appearances in conjuction with his films and book tours, which were his seperate income, rather than dictated by campaign issues.
2. Michelle Bachman is at it again. She first claimed that the “founding fathers” fought the revolution to free the slaves. Then she claimed the Revolutionary War began in New Hampshire. And as was reported today, she now claims that Canada had lower unemployment without deficit spending or a stimulus program. Although Canada’s unemployment numbers ARE lower than in the U.S., Canada DID have a significant stimulus program.
Article: Bachman re-wrights Canadian History
@1
I’ve seen the Canadian thing popping up here and there. Nice extra zero Bachman managed to slip in there.
Canada has a, largely, a paygo system. But, they do have some debit and they have a hell of of a lot of unfunded maintenance, some of which is noted here:
Canada also has a vastly more regulated banking system than we do, socialized medicine, no restrictions on abortion, and gay marriage, so it’s a little more than a little silly for a rightie to be talking up Canada, seeing how Canada is everything they’ve been fighting against for the last 20 years.
Funny that one of the top bond traders in the world said that the private sector is NOT going to jumpstart the economy and it’s pretty much up to the government to do that and the wingnuts are so silent about it.
Barron’s magazine, hardly a bastian of liberal dogma, describes this year’s GOP candidate field as a reprise of Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 song, “Send in the Clowns.” (June 20, 2011, issue; p. 5.)
An audit of FDA food recalls during 2007-2008 shows the Bush administration systematically failed to enforce food safety laws or remove tainted foods from the market.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43.....od_safety/
Today’s top economic news is Greek prime minister Papandreou has survived a parliamentary no-confidence vote, setting the stage for avoiding a default that could have severe consequences for global financial markets.
@6
Russia and Iceland both defaulted and the world as we know it didn’t come to an end.
What happened with Greece is that a bunch of idiots decided it wasn’t an unstable, third-world country and loaned them a bunch of money at really low rates. Money that there was know fucking way they were ever going to get back. Why shouldn’t the people that made the loans take a hit for their stupidity?
Speaking of defaults, 1.65 trillion in deficit spending, 14.4 trillion in National Debt, and 61 Trillion in unfunded liabilities.
I will remind you, there is only about 56 Trillion dollars in the world in circulation…
And which country and President is presiding over this Ponzi scheme?
You got it…OBAMAMANIAC
7 – The Greek Olympics cost over 30 billion alone I believe.
This may have been brought up before but this is classic:
http://thehill.com/business-a-.....onsorships
Gotta love the priorities of these House Republicans.
@8
you believe…wrongly.
try looking data up before spewing shit out of your mouth dipshit.
@7
Oops, no fucking way. Not know fucking way. See what I’m saying? If I could figure out that was a bad idea, why couldn’t the smart kids?
@8 According to Wikipedia the cost of the 2004 Athens Summer Games was less than $10 billion, but that’s still a lot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05.....atize.html
Ok that’s where I heard that 30 billion figure. Sue me.
And the Greek Olympics cost closer to 15 billion.
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/05.....e-lympics/
Yeah a lot of money.
Olympic games really cost a lot of money. Montreal was really soaked with cost overruns which left it in the red for years.
Advocates of Olympic games argue that the tourism dollars and sponsorships will pay for the infrastructure improvements necessary to support the games, but that’s rarely the case. Most of the time the city is left with under-used facilities which require expensive maintenance and lots of money to try to convert them to other uses for which they were not designed.
In the U.S. we’ve managed to avoid the biggest financial impacts of the Olympics, due to the virtual selling of the games to corporate sponsors, starting with the Los Angeles Olympics. The commercialism got so bad that in Atlanta, the then-IOC President refused to give the traditional declaration at the end of the games that it was the “best Olympics ever”.