A fantastic book about drinks & drinking!

Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis is an excellent read and highly entertaining. And it's about booze.

It's available in its entirety on Google Books (link above).

Enjoy your well lubricated week-end.

Boston. Drunks!

Surprise, surprise! Boston is the nation's drunkest city!

Lovely

http://www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/

Reaganomics Fucked Us Over

This graph should make you very angry:

The poorest half of us has been getting poorer. Where did it trickle down to?

Fuckers.

Ahhh...So Obama is a Crackhead now?

From C&L Brent Bozell: Obama Looks like a Skinny Ghetto Crackhead.

BOZELL: How long do you think Sean Hannity's show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead? Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does. Everybody on the left would come forward and demand he be fired within five minutes for being so insulting towards a leader of the United States.

Class. Pure Class.

Goddamn Christwire is Hilarious!

This shit is funny as hell:

THE CHRISTIAN GUIDE TO NOT BEING MISTAKEN FOR A HOMOSEXUAL, PT. 1

It seems that some people think I have repressed homosexual tendencies. This is not true. I am attracted to Jesus and to Christianity and to Morality and nothing else. I suspect it is because I am slender, young and attractive, and that is a favored type of the obsessive compulsive athletic homosexual. However, desperate times call for desperate measures, so I will be discussing in this article and the next cautionary measures I am taking so that people stop mistaking me for a somdomite.

This guy then goes on to elaborate about expensive clothes and exercise and being near women is all actually part of some kind of secret, limp-wristed, satanic plot to turn him and other young jesus-freaks gay.

Highly fucking entertaining.

Fuck Ron Paul Some More.

To those who ask if Ron Paul can actually win in Iowa, Jonathan Chait has this:

No, he really can’t. It would be nearly impossible to imagine the Republican Party nominating a candidate who spent years and years publishing a racist newsletter and has deep associations with the fringe far right. (Here he is speaking to the John Birch Society on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.) It would be even more impossible to imagine the Party nominating a candidate who favors total withdrawal from world affairs and takes a Chomsky-ite line on American power. The notion that the Party might nominate a candidate who does both these things is totally preposterous.

...

Paul’s supporters seem to believe that the media ignoring him is the only thing keeping him from challenging for the Party nomination. More likely, it’s the only thing that’s allowed his candidacy to progress to this point. If more people actually understood the full scope of Paul’s fringe-right views, a huge portion of his support would peel off.

Ron Paul is a atavistic racist scumbag. Yeah, he's good on foreign policy (some), but other than that he's a crazy fundamentalist christian right wing nut job. Fuck him, and if you're too lazy too look into what his actual policy proposals are and where he's been fuck you too.

Fuck Ron Paul.

What Digby said: Paul Fever Entering Our Precious Bodily Fluids and Corrupting Our Purity of Essence.

At the John Birch Society 50th anniversary gala, Ron Paul spoke to another favorite theme of the Reconstructionists and others in the religious right: that of the "remnant" left behind after evil has swept the land. (Gary North's publication is called The Remnant Review.) In a dispatch on Paul's keynote address, The New American, the publication of the John Birch Society, explained, "He claimed that the important role the JBS has played was to nurture that remnant and added, 'The remnant holds the truth together, both the religious truth and the political truth.'"

Yes, Ron Paul is essentially part of the John Birch Society. He's also a Christian Reconstructionist. Also, Ron Paul is a bigot and an asshole and a misogynist (no-exception abortion ban!). His economic policies are fucking retarded (gold standard, really?).

Re-thinking American foreign policy and leaving other countries the fuck alone is a an admirable policy position, but it is very nearly the only one Paul holds that is not fucking insane.

People who died

Well, Christopher Hitchens is dead. Say what you will about his advocacy for the Iraq War, but he was a great writer and a brilliant debater. Some say that scotch and cigarettes did him in, but one does have to live, no?

Also: Kim Jong Il is dead. Apparently his son is taking over and N. Korea has already agreed to suspending its nuclear weapons program in exchange for expanded food aid. Progress?

Hacky Hackingtons

Alex Parene at Salon brings us perhaps the only valuable journalistic year end round-up: The Hack Thirty.

His thoughts on:

Richard Cohen: "There’s no subject on which Richard Cohen is not completely inessential. "

Mark Halperin: "At the very least, Halperin’s TV chyron should read, “ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING.”"

Thomas Friedman: "He’s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men."

David Broder: "He has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself."

Not only does he point out why these people are the hackiest hacks in journalism, but he provides examples!

Thank you, Mr. Parene, and thank you Salon.

Class Conflict Comix

http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Comics

Screaming into the void

Blogs and Facebook are scarcely a substitute for face to face conversation. With a whiskey.

Newt Gingrich Wants to Return to 19th Century Child Labor

GOP Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich wants to eliminate paid janitorial positions in schools and replace them with child labor. Really. He thinks this will promote a strong work ethic amongst the poorest Americans (right wing code for minorities).

From Crooks and Liars: Confessions of a Child Janitor.

Working (even scrubbing toilets) should mean making a living. If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.

I had never considered the angle that these amount to subsidies of the private sector, but it is in fact completely true. If people work full time for shitty wages and still need food and housing assistance, it's the employer, not the employee who is really being subsidized with tax dollars.

Example: If you pay someone minimum wage they will make roughly $15000 a year for 40 hour weeks. They will almost certainly need food stamps (around $250 per month) on top of that to merely not to starve to fucking death. The food stamps don't buy much, but they keep families alive.

When working people need SNAP benefits (food stamps) the employer (the asshole that pays only $7.25) is the one being subsidized, not the worker. The worker is working full time. The employer is not providing them with sufficient compensation to live and eat, but instead relying on GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS (oogie boogie!) to make up for the wages he is not paying his employee.

Now suppose you pay someone not the just the minimum required by law ($7.25 per hour), which translates to $15080 per year (full time), but pay them an additional $1.57 per hour ($8.82 total). They will now have the same purchasing power they would at minimum wage plus food stamps, and you, Mr. Job Creator McGalt, will have been the one to add that power to the economy, not the socialistic, Kenyan, Muslim federal government.

This boils down to "job-creators" being cheap shitheads who lack the compassion and empathy to pay someone $1.57 more per hour.

Q.E.D.

The Federal Budget Explained, in one Graphic.

Here is the embiggened version: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/125xx/doc12577/budgetinfographic.htm. It is from the Congressional Budget Office, and it does a fine job of explaining what costs what.

The only quibble I have is that it could clearly show that Social Security is not paid for with general funds, but rather its own trust fund that is solvent all by itself and has nothing to do with the deficit. Not a small quibble, either.

Democratic Party Backed Laws are Laws too Fuckers.

From Charles Pierce: The Truth About Consumer Protection and the Laws of the Land.

In merciful brief, Congress passed the law creating the CFPB. It did so narrowly, and that law is popular neither among the members of the Republican base nor among the plutocrats who gin them up. But the law did pass. You could look it up. So, now, the Republicans have decided simply to pretend that it didn't pass. They have decided to make sure that a law duly passed by Congress cannot function. They don't like it, so they are trying to will it out of existence. If they succeed, then, in the legislative process as it has in so many other areas of the government, the democratic process becomes nothing more than a dumbshow.

This is the type of shit that led to the fucking Civil War. Really. Nullification.

What the fuck.

Thank a Republican for shitty mail service

From The Atlantic: Who Killed the Postal Service?

Today, the Postal Service announced roughly $3 billion in service cuts that will slow down the delivery of first-class mail for the first time in 40 years. Starting in April, it plans to shutter more than half of its 461 mail processing centers, stretching out the time it will take to ship everything from Netflix DVDs to magazines. One-day delivery of stamped envelopes will all but certainly become a thing of the past....

And should you wonder why, (hint: it was a privatization scheme), from Think Progress:

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

The outgoing Republican controlled congress of 2006 did this for the express purpose of making the USPS go bankrupt so they can sell off its assets to private companies like UPS and FedEx. Fuckers.

And for the uninformed who says "gee that's no so bad, I like UPS!", look at the fucking costs. It costs $.44 to send a letter anywhere in the United States by mail. The absolute cheapest UPS option is over $26. Assholes.

Crazy laws? Subversion of democracy? Look to ALEC

This is fucked. And wrong. From BusinessWeek: Pssst...Wanna Buy a Law?

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit based in Washington, brings together state legislators, companies, and advocacy groups to shape “model legislation.” The legislators then take these models back to their own states. About 1,000 times a year, according to ALEC, a state legislator introduces a bill from its library of more than 800 models. About 200 times a year, one of them becomes law. The council, in essence, makes national policy, state by state.

ALEC’s online library contains model bills that tighten voter identification requirements, making it harder for students, the elderly, and the poor to vote. Such bills have shown up in 34 states. According to NPR, the Arizona bill that permits police to detain suspected illegal immigrants started as ALEC model legislation. Similar bills have passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah, and have been introduced in 17 other states. Legislators in Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, and New Mexico have sponsored bills with identical ALEC language requiring states to withdraw from regional agreements on CO2 emissions. Sound a national trend among state legislators, and often you will find at the bottom of your plumb line a bill that looks like something that has passed through the American Legislative Exchange Council.

These are the assholes that brought you SB1070 in Arizona and the new anti-immigrant legislation in Alabama that resulted in millions of dollars of crops rotting in the fields because no one wanted to pick them. Classy fucks. Check out the whole BusinessWeek article for more depth.

Telemarketers are the spawn of Satan

Have you ever been robo-called for some product or service you want nothing to do with? Maybe five, six times in one day from the same number? Then you know.

Call this number: 302 394 9573. Or text it. Or spread it around. Make these terrible bastards pay! Perhaps I'll print up flyers listing this number as the source for free hookers or the best crank in town? Ideas?

Sometimes it's the smokes, not the booze.

I have, on occasion, noticed that the worst part of a hangover seems to be too-many-cigarettes-last-night feeling rather than the ill effects of overindulgence in amber-colored liquids. Someone should do a study.

That said, I'm sure I'll do it again, and I expect you will too.

Labor 65 Years Ago

On this day in 1946, the AFL and CIO workers of Oakland Caligfornia staged a general strike to protest insufficient wages during the post-war price boom.

From Libcom.org comes this fine account: This Day in Labor History: The Oakland General Strike.

And, fuck you if you don't like unions.

Rich dude speaks sense

This guy is not talking like a Galtian asshole: Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators.

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

Great googly-moogly! It's as if the Randian poison is not the ultra-contagious virus we thought it might be!

This shit is pretty cool

Wolfram Alpha.

Tunes that are good

In other news:

Still awful:

Soda still tastes like shit. The corn-syrup hyper-sweetness is not as some may think, refreshingly delicious, but rather leaves a cloying aftertaste that makes one thirst most thirstily for a frosty cold brew or even some really cheap tannic box wine.

I probably only have 6 sodas a year or something on that level. It usually takes about two months for me to forget how shitty the last one was and then dupe myself into getting the Sprite or Mountain Dew for the extra $.25 cents or whatever the fuck it is in the special at the sandwich shop. This isn't really a health thing at all; I consume an ungodly amount of bear and cheap liquor, which must be a drain on proper organ function somewhere in the realm of high-fructose corn syrup. What I suppose I'm really getting at is that I don't like sweet things to hit my tongue unless they have booze in them. Whiskey, wine, ale, gin etc. are all tip-fucking-top fine by me.

On a last note, not at all fond of soda with booze in it. It ruins perfectly good booze. If you need to sweeten your drinks to enjoy them, just fucking put some simple syrup or grenadine or red vermouth in it. Fuck.

Last last not: Mexican Coca-Cola is delicious if you can find it. The above rant does not apply.