lummi island wine tasting july 24-25 ’26
This week open Friday only, closed Saturday
crescent moon sunset
crescent moon sunset
Friday Bread This Week
Spelt Levain – Spelt is an ancient wheat grain with a nutty, slightly sweet flavor and a milder gluten than modern wheat, from a levain of traditional bread flour, spelt flour, fresh milled whole spelt and fresh milled whole rye, and just a touch of honey. It is a great all around bread – $5/loaf
Italian Breakfast Bread – Made with bread flour eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla as well as dried cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast as toast or even better for french toast – $5/loaf
and pastry this week:
Brioche Almond Buns – Made with a delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Rolled out and spread with an almond cream filling. The almond cream is a delicious creamy filling made with lots more butter, sugar and eggs as well as almond flour. Yum, yum! – 2/$5
This week’s wine tasting flight
Bread & Butter Chardonnay ’22 California $16
Essentially this is a mass-produced California chardonnay blend from many sources and engineered to mimic the pleasantly rich texture and smooth, vanilla-y, oakiness of CA chards of the past…surprisingly tasty and balanced.
Duck Pond Red Oregon $14
Curiously the thirty-year old family winery with a great reputation has no notes on this wine…puzzling, see what you think.
Angels & Cowboys Proprietary Red ’22 California $22
Attractive nose of red berries, orange peel, spices, and crushed stone; medium to full-bodied and succulent, with silky, mellow tannins and flavorful finish.
Economics of the Heart: Calling Out the Rascals
The topic of the day as we write was Heather Cox Richardson’s post containing the text of a lengthy presentation to the U.S. House of Representatives by Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern. She quotes it at length because it lays out in great detail the vast and somehow-still-growing Gulf between the planet the Republicans think they live on and the one their voters actually inhabit.
In a great speech, McGovern goes chapter and verse through the 24/7 litany of Republican lies, misrepresentations, fantasies, excuses, and crimes as they dissemble, assert, talk too loud, and keep their heads down as they dismantle democracy and kill the Planet. Their primary goal (pun intended) is to cover their own butts by giving the Tweetster complete freedom to tear apart our 250-year-old democracy and sell it to our enemies for bitcoin and favor with a handful of billionaires. Is a mere seat in Congress worth that depth of humiliation? Really?
All in all, McGovern’s tongue-lashing is a great example of the turning tide of public outrage at the trashing of everything that is noble and good about our 250-year national experiment with Constitutional Democracy. The underlying Republican principle that every person matters, deserves respect, an equal voice, opportunity, freedom, and agency is an anathema that aspiring oligarchs despise and fear.
Above all, McGovern is naming what a substantial majority of Americans are now feeling. Everything that has happened since this so-called Administration slimed itself into office has wrought a cheapening, a shallowing, a lowest-denominator dismantling of the entire social, legal, and governmental structure defined by our Constitution. Below are a few excerpts from his speech.
“Let’s talk about the Republican Party. A party that worships one man above the Constitution in a cult of personality. A party that demonizes immigrants and says they poison the blood of our country. A party that calls the free press the enemy of the people and sics the Justice Department on journalists who they don’t like. A party that says their political opponents are internal enemies and calls them, quote, the enemy within. A party that is okay with invading our allies, including other democracies…”
“The Republican Party has become the party of…far right fascists who are hell-bent on destroying our country and our way of life. And every single time they call us communists, it is nothing more than a projection of their own radicalization…they definitely don’t want to talk about the Tweetster’s increasing prices of groceries, gas, health care, housing, and taxes for their new, endless, illegal war which has now cost over $100 billion.”
One especially powerful section of Rep. McGovern’s caustic commentary noted that “in 1945, the United States War Department explained to U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II that Fascism “is government by the few and for the few to seize complete control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state…The People run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.” Hmm, I guess that does sound like a typical Republican platform.
Every day more and more Americans are seeing, feeling, lamenting, and beginning to rebel against this ongoing Republican effort to privatize public assets, restrict individual freedoms, and reorganize the economy into the hands of a small group of vaguely autistic multi-billionaires who seem to live, as James Joyce described his main character in A Painful Case as “living at a little distance from his body.”
It remains a mystery to understand what in the world a handful of multi-billionaires are pressing Republican politicians to get from a national economy in which they already own some 20% of everything.
And it’s even more of a mystery why so many Republican politicians seem so willing to surrender their dignity in such a pursuit. It would seem that all honor has been completely sold out in favor of some Scrooge-like need to have the biggest money bin. Or, maybe worse…getting primaried by failing the Tweetster’s daily loyalty tests.
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