July 1st was National Wine Cooler Day. This called to mind Bartles & Jaymes. Others hear “wine cooler” and think Bruce Willis for Seagrams Golden Wine Coolers. “Cooler” led to “cool” and then to “Kool,” and therein lies a policy puzzle. Reflecting on where the market has gone since those days, an apparent contradiction emerges […]
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Are state and Congressional Republicans playing into Democrats’ hands once again, helping Democrats realize their vision of a permanent electoral majority coalition of people herded into identity groups? Is there any good reason to abandon and alienate the youngest, newest segment of voters? Would we do better to treat all competent adults as adults, whose support we would like in 2020?
I was a scofflaw. In my state it is against the law to provide alcohol to any person who is under age 21. When my sons were underage, I broke this law on a few occasions. Neither of them ever embraced the binge-drinking culture when they went to college. Teach your kids how to drink.
If it shed any light on the subject at all — and it doesn’t remotely — I might be tempted to elaborate on the actual term “moonshine,” and where it originated (i.e., rural England, circa 1780), when country smugglers hid illicit barrels of French brandy in shallow ponds to avoid the taxman, but were discovered one fated summer night, when the moon shone down so brightly on the surface of the pond that it looked as if a wheel of cheese were floating there. These bootleggers told the taxmen that they were raking the water not for contraband but for a creamy piece of that cheese.
Brandy is the brown-eyed beauty of distilled spirits, the one from whom you can never quite get away, despite her flawed and fugitive nature. What I like most about brandy is what I like most about people: the almost inexhaustible versatility.
I’d like to make a prediction: driverless cars — which are 
On the Right these days, we’re apt to say that, however bad things might be at the federal level, they’re going relatively well within the states — particularly in those places with Republican majorities. But while outliers always exist, it’s hard to square that stereotype with 
Alcohol regulations in the United States are — to use a technical turn of phrase — completely insane. As anyone who imbibes and has travelled throughout the country knows, sales are regulated in completely different ways from 
I live in a town called Seal Beach in the “Old Town” district where there are no fewer than four Irish bars on the same block of our very short Main Street. I noticed lately that I seem to be making friends in these establishments with the parents of old friends of mine. During the folly of our youth, we drank too much and caused too much trouble, and so did our parents I imagine. Those of us still alive had to have help lest things got irreversibly out of control.
