Artisan Wine Gallery

Lummi Island Wine Tasting

lummi island wine tasting march 5 ’21

NOTE:  We have been closed for wine tastings since March 2020. We currently anticipate opening for restricted tastings this Spring for those have completed an approved Covid vaccination sequence. Stay tuned!

(Some photos will enlarge when clicked)

Sorry, No Bread This Week!  😥

The wine is named for and by Ashley Trout, its youthful and daring first winemaker. It is made from 100% Columbia Valley Grenache. She opened the winery began in the mid-2000’s, when she was spending February until May making wine in Mendoza, Argentina and the rest of the year in Walla Walla.

In 2010 she merged her winery with Tero Estates in Oregon, which built new facilities in Walla Walla.  In 2016 Ms Trout moved on to other pursuits, and her brand stayed with Tero. Having recently lost its winemaker, it is in a two year process of closing down, and has bottled and is closing out its remaining barrels of FT Grenache.

We just brought in one case to try it out, and are trying hard to order a bunch more (stay tuned!) We admit a soft spot for grenache in general, and this is a pretty good one. For the unfamiliar, think of grenache as the feminine side of syrah; a little less forward, a little softer, a little more graceful, a little more enchanting.

 

 

Solid Foundations

We have had new Leadership in our country for a modest six weeks, and already everything feels very different. And in a Deeply Relieving way.

Metaphorically it’s like when the interrogators finally stop firing the retina-burning light into your eyes screaming “VERE VER YOU ON ZE NIGHT OF..?”). Or when the water-boarders finally take the hose and washcloth off your face; or when the Dentist finally stops drilling and starts filling. We can all feel it…a deeply healing (but not yet trusted) sense of Quiet and Relief after five Very Long years of This.

These are good things, welcome things. But we have grown skeptical and wary of optimism. It is one thing to have intellectual disagreements with our neighbors over values and ideology. It is quite another to be forced to take up arms to defend ourselves against fellow countrymen who no longer believe in our founding principles. The fundamental glue that holds any country together is a mutual will among its citizens to support a common set of values and rules. Right now in our country millions of people are now expressing a strong preference for racial, economic, and social autocracy over plural democracy. This is the essence of Trumpism, and the longer it endures, the more divided we will become.

We are on the verge of a new Civil War in our country. Every day it becomes clear that the Republican Party has become the New American Fascist Party, committed to White Domination over people of color and their white egalitarian sympathizers, and an increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of hateful and paranoid billionaires. Almost without exception, Republican Senators and Representatives are now touting Trumpism over the old Republicanism. Already the majority of Congressional Republicans have closed ranks around the idea that the only way to save the country is by not increasing the minimum wage, not providing extended relief packages for Covid-unemployed, not combating climate change, and not negotiating with Democrats on anything of substance.

So things are kinda quiet right now, but conditions remain rife for more violence.

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting feb 26 ’21

 

click on photos for larger images

Bread This Week

 

 

Making Elections Fair Again

We read an interesting article this morning discussing several reforms that could protect our elections from the power of extremist politics and candidates. The past four years in general and the past three months in particular have shown stunningly the relative ease with which our institutions can be undermined by Authoritarian cabals.

In view of the increasing political appeal of to the now-dominant Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, the article makes a persuasive case for the need to reform: 1) the Presidential nomination process; 2) the Party Primary process; 3) Replacing legislative gerrymandering with balanced redistricting, and 4)  Campaign finance reform.

 Reforming the Nominating Process Toward Moderate Candidates
Several decades ago the standard nominating arena was the Party Convention, in which the week-long process of horse-trading generally led to balanced compromises; the more radical a candidate, the less likely to survive the winnowing.  Over recent decades the process has shifted more toward primaries, which favor more polarizing candidates who make it to office on small pluralities, not majorities. Ranked-choice voting would bring more of the old convention format leveling by including each voter’s first and second choices when picking the overall winner, making the election behave more like the compromises of the old Convention Method.

Reforming Primaries
In many states, candidates who lose in primaries cannot then run as independents in the same election. Allowing such candidates to run under third-party flags would be another balancing force for competition in the primary process along with ranked-choice voting.

Reform Gerrymandering
In recent decades, State House gerrymandering decisions have succeeded in allowing the party in legislative control in a state to design Congressional districts that effectively maintain their party’s legislative control of a disproportionate share of Congressional seats in the state by manipulating the number of constituents a seat represents in each district.

Reforming Campaign Finance Rules
In general, recent legal decisions on campaign financing lean toward more political narrowing of viewpoints compared to public financing. On the one hand, small donors are more politically motivated than large donors. Various formulas for providing additional public funding proportional to cash raised by small donations raise questions about whether this would increase or decrease polarization.

These ideas are a lot to think about. In addition to all of that, at some point we have to ask the question, “Why are these reforms even necessary? And when we explore that question, we see that there is an implicit assumption that politicians will tell the truth about their positions on issues and voters will vote for the candidate who best represents their values. But since “free speech” in media has come to mean “lying with impunity,” facts themselves have ceased to have common acceptance across political divides.

In the ideal world politicians would adjust their platforms to appeal to enough of their target constituencies to gain a majority of voters. But that’s not what Republicans do. They don’t compete for votes with appeals to logic. They compete for votes by making it harder for their likely opponents to register to vote, to cast ballots, and to have their votes counted. So while we believe the above rules are good ideas, we are left with the Quandary of our Moment in Time: how to tell Truth from Lies.

 

lummi island wine tasting feb 19 ’21

click on photos for larger images

Bread This Week

 

Bringing Back the Fairness Doctrine

Established in 1949 by the FCC, the Fairness Doctrine required holders of broadcast licensees in the U.S. to cover both sides of controversial public issues with honesty, equity, and balance. The Doctrine evolved from the Mayflower Doctrine of 1941, in which the FCC ruled that, because the public airwaves were a scarce resource, publicly licensed radio stations could not favor any particular political position or candidate.

The Fairness Doctrine clarified the Mayflower Doctrine with the requirement that licensees could not use their stations “for private interests, whims, or caprices , but (only) in a manner which will serve the community generally.” The Fairness Doctrine governed the content of public newscasts for nearly forty years until its demise in 1986, when Judges Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia of the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that though the Fairness Doctrine did apply to television, the FCC was not required to apply it. Huh? Say What…?

The next year, in 1987, the same appellate court decided further that since Congress had not mandated the doctrine, the FCC did not have to enforce it, saying in the Syracuse Peace Council decision that “the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters … [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists.” 

A wee bit of contemplation shows clearly how these naive changes to media regulation led directly to the decades-long manipulation of political polarities that has dominated our political landscape for the past thirty years, culminating in the mob assault on the Capitol on January 6 by people who were deliberately misinformed and manipulated into those actions.

In a time when all of us are vulnerable to manipulation from all sides on any issue, it seems very appealing to go back to a “Fairness Doctrine,” where “fair and balanced” means exactly that.

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting feb 5, ’21

click on photos for larger images

Bread This Week

 

Mutiny and Betrayal

For the last couple of weeks at least some of us are feeling a modicum of increased Security. The incessant tinnitus tweetsteribus that has plagued our nation for the past five years has begun to fade. We can hear the wind again, and the rain on the roof. The crackle of the fire in the stove, and the snoring of the dog on his cushion. And the beginnings of…what is that feeling…ahh, yes, we begin to remember…intimations of what we used to call relaxation. Yes, we think, “more feelings like this one, please!”

At the same time, the relentless dissonance of the last four years lingers in our bodies as a fatigue, like the exhaustion one would feel after countless days in the desert, parched and directionless. Finally we have reached an oasis, but we will need time to regain our center. So it’s a good time to sit back and take stock.

On a decidedly positive note, the Mutiny has been quashed, at least for the moment; we have regained control of the Ship and placed reliable people in strategic positions who are reshaping priorities and policies by the hour. At the same time, due to the depth and breadth of betrayal in recent events, long-term investigations have been opened which may go on for some long time. For the moment we are left with questions about how we got here and what happens next. There follow a few insights from today’s readings.

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
Written some ten years ago about the rise of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources including especially Fox News, the movement recruited people who were generally of middle age whose self-image was of having worked hard all their lives to achieve a modest sense of economic stability along with a resentment of people who, to them faced similar hardships but turned to government for handouts rather than work as they had done.

Curiously, as a group they are in favor of social security and medicare payments for people like them who worked hard all their lives, and were therefore deserving of such benefits. But they have deep resentment against perceived “handouts” to “undeserving” groups, the definition of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes.  According to a CBS/New York Times national poll, 63 percent of Tea Party supporters regularly watch Fox News.

Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF)
This fund is a 501(c)(4) arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), most of whose members signed on to the lawsuit filed by the Texas AG to overturn the 2020 election. The organization played a major role in organizing the Capitol protest preceding the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The RLDF is a political organization to help elect Republican attorneys general and can accept unlimited contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations. Recent supporters include Koch Industries ($375k), Comcast Corporation ($200k), Walmart ($140k), Home Depot ($125k), Amazon ($100k), TikTok ($75k), 1-800 Contacts ($51k), Chevron ($50k), The National Rifle Association ($50k), Monsanto ($50k), Facebook ($50k), Fox Corporation ($50k), Uber ($50k), Coca Cola ($50k), Exxon ($50k), and Google ($25k).

How Inexperienced Candidates and Primary Challenges are Making Republicans The Protest Party
The GOP has become the more disruptive, volatile party in the last ten years. Since the 1994 Gingrich revolution, candidates with no political experience have more often defeated experienced candidates in Republican primaries than in Democratic primaries. That trend continued in 2016 and 2020, paving the way for today’s stripping of committee assignments from undisciplined Republican Representative Greene. As we have seen over the past four years, the rising stars of the Republican Party are consistently angry, dismissive, and personally insulting to their Democratic colleagues while offering little substantive argument to support particular positions. And these attitudes have in turn shaped the volatile new Republican coalition of racist white supremacists and evangelical Christians who consistently show little respect for the offices they hold or the responsibilities they bear.

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