I'm thinking they're concocting one of their flavors to squirt into coffee. Who wants caramel or toffee nut when you can have melted conservative brain? How many pumps?
The article is actually about the supposed phenomenon of "right-wingers... falling for hoaxes." It contains this embedded tweet, which I don't find to be an effective critique of right-wingers:
Brian Kilmeade: "Maybe there's an anti-law enforcement credo that's going through [Starbucks] ... Racial sensitivity training, what about law enforcement sensitivity training?" pic.twitter.com/xbHB4seaDt— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) December 17, 2019
The real phenomenon here is: Articles must be written. Headlines must be clickable. Anger is the caffeine of the internet. The pot must be stirred. The frappaccino must be blended... and God knows what's in there — melted conservative brain, melted left-wing brain, melted everything.
That's how it looks from my outpost on the internet, where I don't get angry, and I don't melt. I'm blending my own frappuccino... with 3 pumps of cruel neutrality.
ADDED: So what's "shady" about the people who own the now-famous "wine cave"? The subheadline is "$100,000 checks, plum ambassadorships, and a $102 million settlement. The cave has been an oasis for dollar-eyed Dems long before Elizabeth Warren made it instantly infamous."
Dollar-eyed Dems — I guess those are the Democrats who are less left-wing than Elizabeth Warren. But candidates have to raise funds. Why trash a candidate for his ability to raise money? The Democrats are going to need a lot of money for the 2020 elections. Why would anyone who wants Democrats to win make fund raising into something dirty?
The cave in question—more of a wine basement, if you want to get specific, built for storing and aging wine in barrels—has been a gathering place for Democratic politicians long before Warren pointed to it as evidence that Buttigieg is too close with wealthy donors to be able to deny them access, appointments and special favors down the road. Owned by Dallas billionaires Craig and Kathryn Hall, the cave’s fundraisers have benefitted at least a hundred Democrats over the years....The only answer I can think of to my question — Why would anyone who wants Democrats to win make fund raising into something dirty? — is that this is a short-sighted focus on knocking out Pete Buttigieg and promoting Elizabeth Warren.
The Halls are the near-typification of what Warren described in the debate as “people who can put up $5,000 or more in order to have a picture taken, in order to have a conversation, and in order, maybe, to be considered to be an ambassador.”
In 1997, one year after donating hundreds of thousands to Democrats seeking reelection, Kathryn Hall was nominated and confirmed as the U.S. ambassador to Austria, a position for which she had been angling for close to a year....
Although the practice of rewarding heavy-hitting fundraisers and donors with ambassadors is common—roughly a third of such positions are traditionally given to financial backers—Kathryn Hall’s four-year tenure in Vienna was not the only benefit of the couple’s close relationship with the politically powerful....
Posts
83 comments:
If a cave isn't shady, what is?
Last two paragraphs are great.
Controversy generates audience.
Sometimes the egg nog latte tastes like brain. Not the flavor, the consistency...
they aren't serious, when they had a chance to abide by campaign finance limits, Obama left McCain in the dust,
An ambassadorship for dollars sounds like quid pro quo.
Twitter’s wonderful. Somebody with an identifiable (or assumed) political background does something shitty (or that can be interpreted as shitty). That becomes, “everyone with that political leaning is shitty.” Then someone of the opposite political leaning (or assumed opposite) says something in response and that becomes, “everyone with that political leaning is a snowflake with a melting brain.”
‘It has been my experience, dear Mrs Stitch, that the Daily Beast can command the talent of the world. Only last week the Poet Laureate wrote us an ode to the seasonal fluctuation of our net sales. We splashed it on the middle page. He admitted it was the most poetic and highly paid work he had ever done.’
Oh well, not a bad guess for 1938.
Yesterday we were out and about when the wife said let's stop at Starbucks for a treat. But the idea was dead on arrival. Who wants to stand in line to spend $5 on a cup of doctored up coffee and then wait for seat that are all taken by aloof computer users camped out for the day.
So we went to Walgreens and bought cosmetics to go into the youngest grand daughter's "Caboodle" that she wants for Christmas. She is 11 and a star cheerleader , but she has never had cosmetics of her own.
Christmas in a booming Trump economy is a hoot.
The anger is women's anger. The grudge bearers.
Perhaps some of the Starbucks outrage is fake. It is a brave new world, after all. Although the company has issues apologies for some of the incidents.
But how does that compare with the racist hoaxes? Like a neck tie in a tree, or the punch game at Army-Navy or the Juicy Smolley noose?
Starbucks hoaxes raise a small ruckus. Racial hoaxes raise mobs.
How's that cruel neutrality working out for you?
Don’t let them kid ya. If the Democrat option is a cave dwelling corrupt wine swilling billionaire-loving multimillionaire they will weep endlessly when she loses.
What's the big deal about being Ambassador to Austria? Do they have some special perks that are beyond the reach of ordinary billionaires? Paying money to be Ambassador to Austria, unlike paying money to have a seat on the zoning board, seems to be a benign and bloodless form of bribery. It's like skeet shooting vs partridge hunting.
Good money only flows to Clinton coffers.
"right-wingers... falling for hoaxes."
You mean, like, the Russia collusion hoax? Like, fabricating it and then "falling" for it? Like, getting Schiffs and the MSM spouting hoaxy statements day after day? And then refusing to get up after "falling" for it, when the hoax gets exposed for all to see?
You can put more people willing to donate in a wine cave than you can in a tee pee, lizzy baby.
Was the PIG thing a hoax? Anyone got a link?
I know zero right wingers who fell for 5he Smollett hoax. Few who fell for the Michael Brown hoax that Warren still lies about. Few who fell for the “good people” hoax that Biden bases his campaign on. How about the “Trump is holding up an empty sheet of paper” hoax? The “Trump rudely dumps fish food” hoax?
Pete lost a statewide election for treasurer, but won as mayor in a small, reliably, Democrat-majority city in Indiana (South Bend). How small does your political office victory have to be to have you considered as qualified to be president?
Dog catcher?
The real phenomenon here is: Twitter is disproportionately full of stupid, loud-mouthed people.
On the other hand, I suppose it's good to give the stupid the chance to self-identify.
Somehow, having fundraisers for Democrat candidates and congresspeople hosted by billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Seattle, Palm Beach, Palm Springs, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Boston, Boston, LA, Orange County, San Diego, Marin Co., Mercer Island, The Hamptons, Chevy Chase, Kalorama, Boca Raton, Miami, Naples, Cincinnati, Columbus, Milwaukee, San Antonio, Austin, Las Vegas...and on and on, is not a big deal. This has always gone on and always will.
But...you cross the line when you accept money from donors in a Wine Cave in Napa.
These people have secret lines that you must not cross. OK to take Harvey Weinstein's money. Not OK to take Katherine Hall's money. Or, it is, but not in a cave in Napa.
I don't get it. I don't get Elizabeth Warren. She's really a light thinker posing as a Harvard professor. Seems like there's a lot of that going on.
OK. I googled https://apnews.com/afs:Content:824813174
The PIG cup story was not a hoax. The Bobby Lewis tweet embedded here is a lie. He fell for a hoax tweet.
I think that is amusing enough I hope Althouse front pages it.
it was Schultz, who went on the flagellation crusade wasn't it, how did it work out?
Only crazed capitalists and worshippers of Mammon could countenance this “wine cave.” In the name of socialist purity, it needs to be shut down and then returned to Nature with a surfeit of explosives. Marx and Gaia demand it! It’s the only way to be sure.
remember fusion helped organize the twitter mobs against vanderslip and Adelson, as the press did before with Koch, and in the pre twitter era, mellon Scaife, but one can't say a cross word about soros, Bloomberg and steyer, underwrite half the prog infosphere,
To add to Ken B's list, I don't think right wingers were the ones claiming some Navy recruits were making white supremacist symbols when they were just playing the circle game.
Bobby Lewis "Live Tweets" fox and friends. The Left is full of SJW's (many of them Gay) who have a "thing" about Conservative women. Remember Sullivan and Sarah Palin? Bobby Lewis seems like the type that would go to Chick-fi-la and curse out the girl at the take out window.
Cruel neutrality. No politics. Starbucks coffee is garbage tier. I've had coffee all over planet earth. Garbage tier. No b.s. I've had airliner coffee that was higher quality (Swiss Air). I assume there was a time during its infancy when the beans and sourcing and qc were better but corporatism and American's complete lack of taste (i.e. ability to tell a difference) turned what was premo back into the very swill the founder said he started the company to fight.
You know who has good coffee? The Middle-f*cking-East. KSA and Dubai and Turkey for starters. These people don't drink (at least publicly) so tea and coffee (especially at majlis) is a big deal.
At my office I refrain from the pool's purchases and buy my own, and I insist on using my own vacuum pot (best method). Yes...I'm a coffee snob. That people pay $10 in coastal cities for Starbucks, i can't even.
I'm sure Pete and his donors had a Gay ol' time in the Wine cellar.
I like the fact that Warren is calling out Mayor Pete for going to a millionaire's "wine cave" to raise $$$. He's the Goldman Sachs/Establishment's choice after Biden. Their fall-back guy. The 3rd choice is probably the Dull black guy from Massachusetts.
Bernie needs to get out and throw his support to Warren, he's just splitting the vote. No one is going to nominate a 78 y/o guy with a bad heart.
I too wonder why starbucks coffee is so popular?
I think it's less about the coffee and more about the sugar.
rhhardin said...The anger is women's anger. The grudge bearers.
They say that Hillary has grudge-bearing hips.
The Hillary-Biden Deep State international Democratic family enrichment scheme must endure and remain in power.
No Buttijudge or wine cave for you!
Lucid
I have a theory about Starbucks coffee. They create an image of quality, and sophistication, and then sell basic coffee and higher priced espresso based concoctions. The coffee is deliberately burned which is a plausible “sophisticated” way to make it bad. So then you buy the pricier barista drink.
No one is going to nominate a 78 y/o guy with a bad heart.
It's interesting that apparently Biden has atrial fib. Not good. Has to be anti-coagulated or risks an embolus.
Ken B. is absolutely correct although his link didn't work for me.
I googled the incident and Snopes rates the original claim "True". https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/starbucks-police-pig/
I guess Bobby Lewis fell for a hoax...ironic no? I wonder what his opinion is on the Jussie Smollet matter? Anyone taking bets he believes (or says he believes) there is truth to the Jussie story?
When I first read the account of Mr. Lewis I felt bad to have fallen for a hoax, naively trusting that I must have missed the correction and that this was a prank by the policeman's friends...now I just feel like fuck him, stupid purveyor of false news.
Sonoma and Napa Valleys were a fruit growing and very poor agriculture areas when a few of the Portugese and Italians among the immigrant fruit farm workers got enough capital to plant their own old country style vinyards and make some wine to sell with the fresh fruit.
Being too poor to build wharehouses, they just tunneled into the hills either side of the valley and stored the wine barrels there. The oldest names in California wine still have their original caves used more as a tourist attraction.
But in the 1970-1980s the petrodollars needed a place to buy up American landmarks and Saudi Sheiks ended up owning these old Wineries. The area was also a great place to raise high cost horses. The rest of the wealth winners seeking to own something they could tell their kids was their "career" bought up the area.
So you go to where the wealth is. And the wealthy guys get show off their palatial wine caves to their wealthy friends invited to meet the latest politician for sale.
Here's the problem: the internet gives morons like this a chance to be parsed by Althouse.
By the way, that "cruel neutrality" thing that you harp on--that's a come-on to Meade, isn't it?
They suck. Classic predatory-marketing to stay-at-home suburban white women who don't (and never did) know any better. The $ is the only indication they can use to tell quality for anything ever, so sure, burn the beans and put pumpkin spice on everything.
If their primary market ever had a taste of legitimately good coffee they might end up running home, cleaning the entire house before noon while finishing a learn to speak french for beginners audio book all before noon before calling their husbands to come home for lunch and quickie.
Lord knows we can't have that. Those beans won't burn themselves you underpaid undergrad baristas! More sugar! More pumpkin spice! Paint it green, the color of money!
Why would anyone who wants Democrats to win make fund raising into something dirty?
They just can't resist the moral preening?
Lucid
I have a theory about Starbucks coffee. They create an image of quality, and sophistication, and then sell basic coffee and higher priced espresso based concoctions. The coffee is deliberately burned which is a plausible “sophisticated” way to make it bad. So then you buy the pricier barista drink.
The argument I've heard is that Starbucks doesn't sell coffee, they sell coffee-flavored candy. They make their money from people buying sugary drinks with a shot of coffee flavor mixed in, so the coffee has to be stronger than normal to cut through the other additions. This makes it taste worse on it's own.
Althouse (in a Marlene Dietrich voice):
I practice cruel neutrality. No man can make me care.
Meade (in Clark Gable voice):
You need to be kissed--and often--by someone who knows how.
it's not just twitter,
https://www.steynonline.com/9936/brave-new-gate
back in the 90s cnn might have been rank garbage, but it didn't seem so,
If they're busy fumigating about a PIG label on a coffee cup, then they're not out shooting our brothers-in-law, teh black gays.
Why would anyone who wants Democrats to win make fund raising into something dirty?
Because they're stupid?
By the way, if $5000 is all it takes to become an ambassador, then it looks like my wife and I are moving to Slovenia. You sure they didn't leave off a zero there?
Is the “cruel neutrality” tag because the post is about hoaxes?
Althouse:
I wasn't sure you were the same. Let's see, the last time we met...
Meade:
Was La Belle Aurore.
Althouse:
How nice, you remembered. But of course, that was the day the Germans marched into Paris.
Meade:
Not an easy day to forget.
Althouse:
No. I was cruelly neutral.
Meade:
I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.
burn the beans and put pumpkin spice on everything.
Saw pumpkin spice cream cheese in Aldi's yesterday. When will this madness end?
Speaking of hoaxes, this nation has just suffered through the Russia hoax for three long years.
If the FISC denied the FISA warrant then none of this happens.
If people don’t go to jail for this then we are fucked as a country.
Wine and Dems-- meh.
The great thing about Althouse is that I can find intelligent company, like the people who agree with me (in a completely non-political way y'all) that Starbucks coffee is shit and anyone who favors it over the stuff down at the Exxon (I get 12oz 'refill' cups for .97 [hey didn't there used to be a 'cents' key?]) is a pretentious twit, and probably a Democrat donor.
Narr
But Starbucks pastries are better, granted
Amadeus 48
Stop! You are making me horny!
yes I have to concur on the pastries, which would obviously be banned in the new order,
Ken B--Stop using your imagination.
Have what Althouse is having.
Be cruelly neutral.
Conservatives are the half of the country riddled with hoaxes and false narratives, not the party of Russiagate, Covington, Jussi Smollet, UVA rape, Oberlin's bakery, Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, the list is practically overflowing.
but bombshell!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/amy-robachs-interview-with-jeffrey-epstein-victim-virginia-guiffre-left-out-of-abc-special?ref=home
We should be suspicious of BS prog buzzwords like "Shady" or "Dark".
REcall the film maker who was used as a scapegoat for the failures of Hillary-obama after the Benghazi fiasco.
The film maker was slimed as "dark and shady"
The Wine Cave soiree is perfectly emblematic of the disconnect between the Democratic Party's massive institutional hypocrisy between what it demands ordinary people (the ones it keeps claiming to represent) must give up in order to fight the existential crisis that is "climate change," while they, the anointed party elite, make it clear that they are absolutely unwilling to give up jack squat, refusing to even give up their ostentatious displays of wealth.
Ordinary people are supposed to give up cars, toilets that flush, and lightbulbs that work. Ordinary people are told to give up meat, eat bugs and recycle, while the party elite who look down on their backward ways continue dining in crystal-bedecked wine caves. Sacrifices, like laws against insider trading and foreign influence, are for other people. It's the unmitigated gall of railing against "the 1%" while insisting on their own right to live the same lifestyle and expecting ordinary people to ignore the hypocrisy.
Remember, peasants: It's not your place to question the privileges of your betters...
A caveat about wine caves. Many wine varietals -- white and red -- should be enjoyed at "cave temperature"." This means that many drink their white wines too cold and their red wines too warm. Caveat emptor.
"It's interesting that apparently Biden has atrial fib. Not good. Has to be anti-coagulated or risks an embolus."
I have to say that Biden looks good for 77, but as you write, he's a health risk and an obvious one-term President. That's why the D's should be going for Warren. But then they're D's so you have to dumb-down your analysis to understand them.
BTW, i'm reading a bio of Sinclair Lewis, and its amazing how many men of his generation were dropping dead of heart attacks in the 1940's and 50s. Wilkie dead at 54, Carl Van Doren dead at 65, Robert Benchly dead at 56, wolcott 55, Robert Sherwood 59, Heyward Broun 52, Harold Ross 59, Wolcott Gibbs 56. I guess it was all the smoking and drinking. Lewis died at 65.
The American Taliban at play in their caves.
The Washington Redskin lives in a $4 million home in Cambridge. She has taught a generation of Children of The Wine Cave at Harvard.
Mayor Pete’s Dad was a professor, just like Warren’s kids. Except Mayor Pete is younger than Warren’s two kids.
And smarter. Much smarter.
Starbucks is mainly popular because it seems to be on every corner and has driven so many local coffee places out of business. There was a comedy TV show where the two lovers met when one at Starbucks sees the other across the street in ANOTHER Starbucks.
remember when Matthews said Obama visiting west point was going to the other side,
https://twitter.com/TPCarney/status/1208095867821068289
I am going to fall for this hoax.... if it *is* a hoax:
Trump’s acceptance to Pelosi
" have to say that Biden looks good for 77, but as you write, he's a health risk and an obvious one-term President.”
Vote for him, and get his radical left-wing veep.
L o L
Now do the cadet’s “circle game” when young men who wish to serve their country, side by side with Americans of all races, were smeared as “white supremacists."
Starbucks coffee is garbage tier.
Starbucks is an improvement on what came before it. They spurred competition in coffee, but that competition has now surpassed them in quality. It's good to have choices. Thanks, free market!
(Althouse kisses Meade)
Meade- What did you do that for?
Althouse- I've been wondering whether I'd like it.
Meade-What's the decision?
Althouse-I don't know yet. I’m cruelly neutral.
(They kiss again)
Althouse-It's even better when you help.
Meade-Sure you won't change your mind
about this cruel neutrality?
Althouse-Cruel neutrality belongs to me, and so do my lips.
Meade-Okay.
Althouse-You know you don't have to act with me.
You don't have to say anything
and you don't have to do anything.
Not a thing.
Maybe just whistle.
You know how to whistle,
don't you, Meade?
You just put your lips together and blow.
Amadeus 48: “Don’t think of Lauren Bacall in a bikini”
Ambassador in 1997.
Also funding Fulbright Austria Foundation.
It's dig at "Lady Voldemort" shewhoshallnotbenamed.
Ken B—Thanks. I can’t not think of her.
Touche
By the way, did Althouse take a little 45 minute break from posting after I started these posts?
It’s probably nothing
Have anyone seen Schultz drinking Starbucks coffee?
Liz dissed Pete regarding finances. Petey comes back with I am the poorest person up here ,and, Liz is has 100 times the money I do.
Seems like Warrens attack was not particularly well thought out, and literally stupid.
Kind of like those you tube vids of the guy spoiling for a fight, then getting knocked out with one punch
Along similat lined
https://mobile.twitter.com/aelfred_D/status/1208406323311894533
"and its amazing how many men of his generation were dropping dead of heart attacks in the 1940's and 50s." The doctors of the past didn't have ways to see blocked arteries and correct them with balloons, stents and medication. My father's mother died of leaky valve that would be trivial to correct today. Give thanks to Big Pharma and the medical device manufacturers that heart troubles don't kill as many middle aged men these days.
Remember, peasants: It's not your place to question the privileges of your betters...
One would think that after 6000 years of recorded human history, one would be able to see a pattern....
Who knows how many Starbucks outlets there are here in Eugene (I count four, from memory), but they had had one, on the edge of downtown, in a tiny rental space for years before seizing the opportunity to move into a larger space in the heart of downtown. They closed it after... perhaps two years, perhaps a bit longer, for reasons they didn't disclose to me. My guess is that they gave up trying to manage the numbers of their homeless customers. I miss the place only because that was where I used to buy my monthly copy of the Times (for the sake of the crossword puzzle); but they had stopped carrying it some months before the end.
Why would the Democrats want to trash the good names and reputations of the liberal Democrats who own the winery and who have loyally and generously supported the Democratic Party for many years?
Hillary outspent Trump two to one and lost to an untested Trump. Warren might have to spend four times as much against a tested and proven Trump. Just to lose in a landslide.
Does "wine cave" have creepy connotations? A Cask of Amontillado? Sex/Torture dungeons?
And is it another phony "purity test" when a thirtysomething guy congratulates himself for having less money than people twice his age?
And Bernie and Joe? Aren't they a little bit like an old vaudeville team? Or Martin and Lewis?
"The Democrats are going to need a lot of money for the 2020 elections."
Why? They can lose cheap.
Is Warren repudiating superpacs?
DNC money if she's the candidate?
Well, then.
If you read the article, it's not the ambassadorship that's the scandal: it's the bailout personally delivered from Congress to the husband's failed S&L at his request.
So they are sleazy. And so is Buttgeig for taking their money.
“Why would anyone who wants Democrats to win make fund raising into something dirty?”
Seriously? We’re talking Fauxcahontas here. She is probably the most unprincipled candidate since Hillary. Anything to win.
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