lummi island wine tasting Aug 22-23 ’25

Posted at August 21, 2025

Hours this weekend:  4-6 pm Friday  & Saturday 

 

 …Saturday afternoon ladies catching up…

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week’s wine tasting 

Robert Hall Sauv Blanc   ’22       CA        $15
Refreshingly dry and light-bodied with aromas of green apple, citrus, and lemongrass, with bright,crisp, lively acidity.

Chiarlo Barbera d’Asti   ’21           Italy        $18
Ruby red with violet hue; elegant nose of rich plum and berry with notes of flowers and bark; palate of red cherry and red currants with a savory finish.

Rocks of Bawn Cab Sauv  ’20     WA       $20
Blend from several WA vineyards delivers bright fruit flavors, silky tannins, nice balance and intensity. 

 

 

 

Economics of the Heart: The Republican Party: A Narrative of Good and Evil

Looking for inspiration for this week’s post, I first found that Texas Republicans have gone ahead with their plan to gerrymander Texas House districts yet again to take five more seats away from Democrats. If California voters authorize the highly publicized counter-gerrymander put on the upcoming special election proposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, it  would certainly help to level the patently unfair playing field. If you click through the different red and blue states in this graphic, it looks as if there are very few other States that are both large enough and “gerrymandable” enough to make any difference.

More browsing suggested that the reason we are in this pickle in the first place is a Supreme Court decision six years ago (RUCHO ET AL . v. COMMON CAUSE) in which the Republican wing of the Roberts court “declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.”  Everybody who has been paying attention has known for many years now that the Roberts Court is the best Court that Big Money has been able to buy through the efforts of Leonard Leo’s billionaire-funded Federalist Society and their buddies at Heritage Foundation.

As we mentioned last week, these highly visible recent efforts by California Gov. Newsom have been evoking participation of voters across the country to fight for truth, fairness, and adherence to our laws and our country’s heritage. We can all feel it and get behind it.

More significantly and unexpectedly, today’s browsing came across a particularly interesting and somewhat obscure piece of scholarship on the history of the Republican Party. Published in 2020. and titled “The Republican Party: A Narrative of Good and Evil” it is a Master’s thesis by a student named Lawrence Cranor that explored the history of the Republican Party from Lincoln to the present. It serves as a great road map for how we got here.

Mr. Cranor explores in detail the party’s transformation since 1980 to a politics of self-righteous anger incessantly casting “blamable others” as the enemies of “ordinary” (white, Christian, male, working-class) people. Sound familiar? This has been The Schtick of right-wing radio and TV hosts since the 80’s, constantly stoking fear, anger, and violence, and now bringing us to the brink of full-on destruction of our democracy. The changes he noted just a few years ago detail the deliberate steps taken to bring us to our current existential crisis from the more traditional Republican policies of the Cold War before abandoning centrism in the 70’s and 80’s.

We have all lived through that transition, beginning with constant angry screeds from Gingrich in the early 90’s, putting the Republican Party on full-time attack mode for the first steal of the White House in 2000, and it has been getting worse ever since. Right here in Whatcom County one particularly inept Republican state representative took the State House floor in the late 90’s to rail against a proposal to teach some classes in Spanish in schools with heavy Hispanic enrollment, saying (I am not making this up!) “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!” 

Seriously, spend some time with the above article.

So…we keep fighting!

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting

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