"With retailers struggling to find credit and ordinary Russians being forced to change their spending, a vast lake of undrunk vodka is accumulating in distilleries across Russia." [Telegraph via Maura]

When does America care about a Jersey City Councilman? When a Jersey City Councilman urinates on people in Washington, DC. Steven Lipski was arrested in our nation's capital this weekend, because he went to the 9:30 Club to see a Grateful Dead tribute band, got wasted, and peed off the balcony. Idiot drunk middle-aged politicians are DC's cross to bear, of course, and Lipski has given the 9:30 Club staff trouble before:

This is Adam Smith, "also known as Steve Zacharanda," in Chicago on Election Night. He is a reporter for the Birmingham Mail, a newspaper in the UK. He's just been approached by a friendly Dutch person with a video camera. He seems to be filing a story, and he's definitely been drinking. Please watch his hilarious reportorial style—"I'm just a little bit pissed.... Thank god for the BBC, because I'm cutting and pasting, baby!"—after the jump. Click to view As the Telegraph reports:

Hey, this Sunday's Times Magazine features an awesome "Domains" interview with everyone in the world's favorite tee vee pundit Rachel Maddow! We read an advance copy and can officially break the news that Rachel Maddow is totally cool. She lives way out in western Massachussetts with her partner Susan (pictured). She is seemingly the most normal and charming and totally well-adjusted cable news host in America. Seriously! Totally without the crippling ego of everyone else on every other cable network! She still has no television of her own, she is annoyed at having to dress like "an assistant principal" in order to be allowed on tv, she identifies with Wally Cleaver, and after learning her favorite hobby we decided conclusively that we want to be her friend:

Now that her messy, messy divorce from Knight Rider/Baywatch star David Hasselhoff is finally over, Pamela Bach is freely dishing about the poor man's troubles. And, really, it behooves us to read every last detail. In 2002, for example, Hasselhoff called Bach from a hotel one dark night. "I'm drunk and I think I'm dying," he said. Then the line went dead. Berlin's most beloved singer went into rehab after that, but it didn't stick. "'I called the clinic and discovered he had checked out. I knew I had to go to him. I chartered a private plane and flew from LA to Palm Springs.’ Pamela learned that David had been taken to a local hospital, but didn’t know which one. ‘I got into a taxi and went to every hospital until I found him.’ "She discovered later that he’d drunk the entire contents of the minibar and had been found by a maid, semi-conscious and half-naked on the floor. The police had been called. This sordid episode, like so many before, was covered up by Pamela and a team of minders." And, says Bach, don't buy it if the Hoff seems to have gotten his act together lately: "To the woman who recently divorced him... Hasselhoff’s image as a self-aware, post-modern celebrity is a sham. ‘David is a falling-down drunk and I covered up for him for years. Alcoholism destroys you whether you are a regular Joe or the biggest star on the planet.’" Dayum, lady. Get a blog! [Daily Mail]

Dear, sweet, precious, life-sustaining alcohol has starred in more movies and TV shows than any actor or actress could ever hope to star in. And tonight let us give the nectar of the gods its due. What's your favorite hooch scene? As ever, I'll humbly recommend one after the jump.

"Trinity Church, which became an emotional refuge amid the fallout at ground zero, is offering services to its neighbors during a time of crisis: free spiritual and psychological counseling for workers who have been affected by the current Wall Street financial turmoil." Oh ha, it's the 9/11 of bankers getting fired! Will the free spiritual counseling encourages downtown assholes to renounce materialism or something? (Is that likely from the this particular church?) More: "And because they are typically measured by the size of their paychecks - bonuses, in particular - their self-worth is deeply threatened when the money evaporates." Words fail! Anyway. Free counseling! As usual, self-medication is by necessity self-financed. So far that's not stopping anyone!

"An even bigger clash involved a proposed city ordinance backed by Stambaugh to close the town bars at 2 a.m. instead of 5. Stambaugh says he believed this would help curb late-night drunken driving at a time when, according to Stein, the former mayor, 'people were driving out from Anchorage to the valley for more alcohol and crashing.' But Palin, as a council member, had voted against the measure-making her the favored candidate among bar owners, one of whom held a fund-raiser for her." [Newsweek, Photo]

Headed to the Twin Cities for the GOP convention? Here are the bars that will be observing the temporary 4 a.m. bar-close in convenient map form! The thing is tho they're pretty much the worst fucking bars in Minneapolis (and St. Paul, which has like one good bar period). Stick with the strip clubs! [SaintPaulitan]

It's time for the Democratic National Convention in lovely, boring Denver! Are you psyched? Journalists are! Because they're going to be drunk for a week, thousands of miles from home! Just two of the many venues in which hardworking journalists will be getting their drink on the over the next few days are the bars taken over by the cable news networks. Fox's hip FOX Experience and the down-home CNN Grill. Which one looks more like the worst possible place you could ever get drunk? Let's see!

Click to viewThe mysterious Young Manhattanite writes: For months now I have been looking for a classic clip of Larry King drunk on his radio show that I heard way back in the dawn of the public Internet when my friend downloaded it from a newsgroup. It's NOWHERE online now. My friend finally found the cassette tape he transfered it to back then (yes, a cassette tape!) and redigitized it. After some digging, it appears this recording was made between 1987 and 1994 when his radio and tv shows overlapped. This witching hour call-in segment was called Open Phone America. According to Wikipedia, the phones would open up at 3 a.m. for callers to discuss any topic they pleased with Larry. Give it a good listen. Really picks up halfway through. Update: Transcript below!

A Yale professor of physiology has scientifically proven that's impossible to get drunk on beer. It's true! The numbers don't lie! So drink away, citizens—at work, at home, at breakfast, anytime! Of course, there's a catch: this scientician decided this in 1955, when things were simultaneously much more uptight and also sooo much cooler.

This is the single most important story of this terrible summer Friday. RUPERT MURDOCH LOST HIS WEDDING RING. Seriously! He got drunk (Australians!) at a lodge bar in Sun Valley (where this week's mogul summit is being held) last night, and after all the other moguls went back to their rooms, Murdoch hung around the lobby looking for his ring. "So began a frantic 15-minute scramble among reporters hungry to please the mogul," Reuters reports. But alas, it's still missing. Idaho readers: find it and, uh... send it to us so we can give it back to him. [SiliconAlleyInsider]

Listen, we know you're all excited about the news of InBev's $46 billion bid to buy Anheuser-Busch. But have you considered the possible side effect? Fewer beer ads! A-B spends half a billion dollars a year on commercials, and another $300 million on sports sponsorships. But InBev—the maker of fey non-American beers like Stella Artois—is run by Belgian cheapskates who do comparatively little advertising at all. Watch out, Budweiser Clydesdales, Spuds MacKienzie, and American sportsmanship: foreigners are coming to destroy you!

How much did President Bush drink? When did he quit? Did he quit? And what else did he do? There are absolutely no definitive answers to any of those questions, and most of the witnesses and parties involved are suspect or worse. Still, with the publication of former press secretary Scott McClellan's book, complete with re-airing of those old cocaine rumors, it might be fun to investigate the out-going president's drug history, as found both in the public record and the fever dreams of conspiracy artists.

Just why is everything so lovely and happy and just plain yay! when we get snoggled on super-magical fun juice? Science knows! "Jodi Gilman and her colleagues at the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, used MRI to observe the brain activity of 12 healthy "social drinkers" both when sober and after they had been given alcohol intravenously and their blood alcohol levels had reached nearly 0.8 grams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood - the legal limit for driving in the UK and the US. In both conditions they were shown pictures of either frightened or neutral faces."

This fictional ad for the "Steinway Beer Garden" in "Dukes" is maybe supposed to be the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden in Astoria. Oh, and it's from the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV. Warm Beer and Misogyny! What New York—and video games—are all about.

Lawmakers in Boston just banned bottle service, the preferred method by which douchebags imbibe their shitty vodka. Have we been wrong about Boston this whole time? Wait, Happy Hour is illegal there too. So no, we were never wrong. Phew! [Daily Swarm]

When Facebook isn't invading privacy, it's occasionally rolling out features we don't despise. Their new application Lexicon culls words and phrases from users' walls to create fun charts. In the "party tonight" "hangover" match-up, the latter curiously tends to spike shorty after the former. (Click image to enlarge). Another comparison reveals that people "lol" way more than they "omg." Well, if the kids don't have god, at least they have laughter. Hit up the comments with other fun conclusions about the modern era drawn from the Facebook lexicon. [via Fimoculous]

Hillary Clinton spent Saturday appealing to blue collar voters in Indiana. Which means drinking like a frat boy, obv. At a little neighborhood place called Bronko's in Crown Point, Indiana, Senator Clinton hoisted a mug of beer and then partook in a round of shots with the assembled locals. A shot of whiskey! A shot of blended Canadian whiskey. Dammit Hil, America makes the best whiskey in the world—who's reponsible for ordering Crown Royal? Wolfson? An Associated Press photog was there and captured the whole sad scene. We've got a charming gallery of hot Clinton party photos after the jump. Blue states truly lost.