lummi island wine tasting June 20-21 ’25 Summer Solstice
Hours Weekend Friday & Saturday, 4-6 pm

Stonehenge Summer Solstice courtesy space.com
Friday Bread This Week
For some years now, each Friday we have hosted bread deliveries from Island Bakery to those on the bakery’s mailing list who pre-ordered earlier in the week, and listed those delicious breads here on the blog.
Since the mailing list has now maxed out the bakery’s limited capacity, for the time being the mailing list is closed. 🙁 wahh! ):
This week’s wine tasting
MAN Chenin Blanc ’22 South Africa $14
Free-run juice preserves a crisp, clean, natural character; light, bright flavors of quince, pear, and pineapple, palate of fresh stonefruit and apple, and a round, soothing mouthfeel.
Wolftrap Red ’21 South Africa $14
Consistently appealing aromas and flavors of ripe plum, red currant, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices; vibrant flavors of dark berries and spicy plum with hints of orange peel that linger on a juicy finish. (read more)
Chakana Estate Selection Malbec ’20 Argentina $25
Opaque, bright purple in color; pleasing nose of plums and ‘spicy attic dust’ (?) ; full-bodied palate of plums and spice with good length, balanced acidity, soft tannins, and lingering finish.
Economics of the Heart: Equal Rights vs. Tipping the Playing Field
L to R: Peter Rutledge, Leonard Leo, Mark Paoletta, Clarence Thomas, Harlan Crow (Painting by Sharif Tarabay) link
In recent years we have often mused about the seminal significance of the Reagan Administration’s 1987 elimination of the FCC “Fairness Doctrine” in broadcasting. The spurious Republican argument for its repeal (made by, of course, Heritage Foundation) was that it interfered with a broadcaster’s (Fox News, say) Constitutional rights to “make its own editorial decisions concerning controversial issues of public importance.” For a deep dive into why that is pure BS, take a look at this piece from the Syracuse Law Review right after it happened in 1988. The takeaway is that this coup has been cooking for 40 years, it is well underway, and we are now officially in a civil war to get our democracy back.
In retrospect it is clear that this single change, by very effectively opening the floodgates of the right-wing propaganda machine, across all public broadcasting media, very quickly spawned a nationwide army of 24/7, angry white radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. These changes were decidedly not to open the door to “righteous alternative views.” These decades of nonstop “alternative facts,” outright lies, and character-assassinating insults have been explicitly for the purpose of normalizing outright lying in broadcast media and brainwashing the gullible. You know, the same “alternative facts” Satan assures you are gospel!
By repeating the Lie of the Day 24/7, for decades, against an ever-increasing list of “liberal enemies,” from gays to immigrants to Democrats, the Fox propaganda machine would have made Goebbels proud. This single seemingly tiny change in the FTC law opened a nonstop torrent of Fascist propaganda tidily labeled “alternative facts.” Combined with the evolution of social media platforms for fomenting anger, it opened the door wide enough and for long enough–nearly forty years– to have built a base of millions of people whose view of the world is completely based on lies they have heard over and over and over.
Curiously, within the last few days, the Tweetster publicly criticized conservative arch-activist and former head of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo, who was personally responsible for getting six of the current right-wing Justices onto the Supreme Court, including the T’s own nominees Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Leo was the kingpin of the long term plan for an ultra-conservative takeover of the government by a handful of already-wealthy-and-powerful white fundamentalist Christian men. And you can be sure Jan 6 was all part of it.
The Federalist Society included many wealthy conservative activists who collectively hand-picked six of the current Supreme Court justices for Republican Presidents, overturned Roe v. Wade, passed Citizens United (removing all limits on corporate campaign donations), and invented and pushed numerous spurious cases to the Supreme Court on such topics as a business right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, or a woman’s lack of a right to use birth control medication or obtain an abortion regardless of personal circumstances or health implications.
These are the architects of everything we are now living through in Magaland, where no one counts except the very wealthy few. Each day delivers yet another incursion into our Constitutional rights, as we just saw in LA with the illegal mobilization of the California National Guard; across the country with bands of armed young men with neither ID’s nor badges. physically grabbing thousands of “illegal immigrants” from streets, homes, and workplaces and “disappearing” them to deportation or confinement, and separating parents and children for the sheer meanness of it. And in just the last few days they have been filmed forcibly detaining a Democratic a Congresswoman, a Senator, and a Senatorial candidate.
Heritage seems to have evolved from the post-WWII demise of the John Birch Society, and not has almost certainly laid the groundwork for Trumpism, Project 2025, the intellectual lobotomization of Congressional Republicans, and the ongoing dismantling of our Constitutional “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Right now they are winning. But last week’s marches showed we are many, and each over-reach they make (like LA National Guard mobilization) turns more against them.
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