Uncategorized – Page 2 – Gin & Bitters

Voting Matters

Americans in 2020 got the message, voting matters, and days before election “day,” record numbers of people have already voted early or by mail. By this writing, about 92 million votes have been cast, or roughly 2/3 of the total votes cast in 2016.

Now the question is, whether all of those ballots will be counted. While there has been a record voter turnout, there has also been a record number of legal actions taken to limit voting and ballot counting.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed around the country, by Republicans, to stop voting, or counting votes. After slowing the U.S. Postal Service, the GOP is fighting to make sure ballots received (but not postmarked) after election day are not counted.

As Politico noted a few days ago, “Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump.”

Since 2016, Trump has made no secret of his authoritarian desire to be President for Life. But now it seems he wants to be “President for Life” because it may save his life. Notwithstanding all the likely prosecutions awaiting Trump once he is no longer President*, when he leaves office he will not be of much value to those he owes hundreds of millions of dollars, or to Putin. The Secret Service will no longer be around to protect him.

Another part of the analysis from Politico said, “The president’s inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary attempts to limit the number of votes cast across the battleground state map — a massive campaign-within-a-campaign to maximize Trump’s chances of winning a contest in which he’s all but certain to earn less than 50 percent of the vote.”

As a Chicago Cubs fan, I have my own theory about why counting all the votes will bring an end to the Trump presidency. In 2016, shortly before Trump “won” the presidency, the Cubs won the World series for the first time since 1908. When Trump “won” the election, I felt guilty. The Cubs ending their curse must have brought on a new curse, the Curse of Trump. Another thing happened in 1908, 65.4 percent of all eligible voters in America voted in the Presidential Election, won by William Howard Taft. No election since 1908 has seen that high a percentage of voters cast ballots. We are poised to break that turnout percentage in 2020. I believe breaking that record should undue the Cubs-Trump curse.

The amount of voting we have seen shows that Republicans have not been as effective at suppressing the vote as they would have liked. Now they are working on suppressing the vote counting.

In addition to limiting the time for valid ballots to arrive, they have also limited the processing time frame for vote-by-mail ballots, ensuring results will not be known on election night Tuesday. Republicans have made it clear they will then claim votes tallied after election night are illegitimate and seek to have their partisan-stacked courts decide the election in their favor to preserve minority rule.

As you prepare for Election Day, have a Suppressor #21, a low alcohol cocktail from the Ticonderoga Club in Atlanta. While Georgia is a hot spot for Republican voter suppression efforts, the Ticonderoga Club Suppressor cocktails are about the low ABV and that’s good as you’ll want to keep your wits about you to be on your toes for GOP shenanigans.

Via Punch, the Suppressor #21 is:

1 oz Barolo Chinato

1 oz Cynar

1 oz Amontillado sherry

2 dashes orange bitters

Garnish grapefruit twist

Stir over ice and strain into an Old fashioned glass over one large cube, garnish with a grapefruit twist.

Cheers!

Super Spreader

We don’t know for certain whether the President* is still transmitting disease, but he clearly surrounds himself with those who are. The announcement of Tump’s pick of a nominee to ram into the Supreme Court became a maskless super spreader event at the White House, as dozens of staffers and advisors tested positive for COVID 19 following the event. We still don’t know the full extent. Trump himself was hospitalized, encapsulating his whole failed approach on controlling the virus.

Today we have the potential for a continuation of that super spreader event as the Senate Confirmation Hearings get underway for Amy Coney Barrett with maskless Mike Lee, Trump Senator from Utah, in attendance. He tested positive for the virus after the White House event, but today he was in place at the Senate and freely spewing germs.

Mike Lee also provided evidence that Trump is a super spreader of more than just Coronavirus. Lee has also been infected with Trump’s authoritarian disease, saying last week that America is not a democracy, and that is not a bad thing. (I think Mike is in for a surprise come November). A few days later we learned that a still functioning part of the FBI had uncovered a plot to kidnap and potentially assassinate the Governor of Michigan, over lock down restrictions, by domestic terrorists associated with the white supremacists Trump refuses to denounce who want to stoke a civil war. The plot included a plan to kill the governor’s law enforcement protection detail. This news brought nothing from Trump except more denunciation of the democratic Governor of Michigan, meanwhile Trump and his supporters, who love to say “blue lives matter” and call for “law and order” once again show they do not care about anyone they think is in their way.

Trump showed this explicitly while he was “in” the hospital, King Donald would not be denied a car ride around the hospital to feed his narcissistic needs, forcing his Secret Service detail into the enclosed vehicle with him while he was highly contagious. Naturally, many former Secret Service agents called this stunt inexcusable, but there were rumblings from active agents at the time, an almost unheard of event. This extraordinary expression of dissatisfaction from this group of conspicuously non-partisan group of agents may bode well for next January. As long as Trump hasn’t infected all of the white House Secret Service agents by then, if Trump is not leaving the white House to make way for duly elected President Biden, then Trump can expect no sympathy or favor from the people he’s tried to kill.

As you think about that day that Trump exits the White House, raise a Secret Service cocktail, and remember what former special agent Joseph Petro told the Washington Post, “the Secret Service cannot protect the President from himself.”

The Secret Service cocktail is a Negroni variation from Sother Teague’s great book “I’m Just Here for the Drinks” it is:

2 dashes mole bitters

1.5 oz Plymouth gin (a favorite gin of mine, so I’m out, but substituted Dorothy Parker gin, different, but still tasty)

.75 oz Maurin Quina

.75 oz Ancho Reyes

stir over ice and strain into a rocks glass on fresh ice, garnish with an orange twist.

Cheers!

Fear Fest ’20

The latest Trump reelection strategy is not new to Republicans. Fear is what George W Bush used in 2004 with new Terror warnings whenever his poll numbers slipped.

In typical Trump style, of course, the fear strategy is being carried out in a cartoonish fashion by the junior varsity team compared to Bush. At least Bush understood what Americans feared after 9/11. And he never tried to claim that he alone could fix it.

Bush was able to use the fear of “radical Islamic Terrorists”^TM so that rural Americans who didn’t live within 500 miles of a legitimate terrorist target would vote for him.

On the other hand, Trump ignores the real fears of Coronavirus that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans on his watch, preferring to stoke the fever swamp fears of his base that Black people might move into their neighborhood and lower property values instead.

Biden rightly noted in Pittsburgh this week that the images Trump is using in his campaign ads of violence and unrest and suggesting this is what would happen in “Joe Biden’s America” but are in fact happening in “Trump’s America.”

Trump has never really understood America, certainly not as well as his Russian handlers, anyway. There are no plane loads of black-clad Antifa thugs deploying around the country. Even trying to turn Antifa into some kind of Bogeyman is about as effective as raising the alarm about impending Sharknados.

America is an Antifa country, we proved that in the 1940s. While there aren’t many veterans left now, across American are people who’s grandparents fought, or worked in the factories turning out the armaments, planes, tanks, ships, etc that helped us win World War II and defeat Fascism.

Ultimately, the more Trump claims Antifa is his enemy, the more people will do the math and realize it must be because he is a fascist.

This is where the Trump campaign use of fear is different that how Biden is using it. Trump is trying to use made up fears, while Biden is pointing to actual events, such as the mishandling of the virus response and the consistent effort to put Russian and Putin’s interests above those of the U.S.

As we head into the next two months of the Campaign of Fear, have a Fear Itself cocktail and make your plan to vote. 80 years ago today, the Japanese signed the documents of surrender on the USS Missouri, officially ending WWII. On November 3 we can celebrate VT Day. But in the meantime, the Fear Itself cocktail, via KindredCocktail is:

2 oz Rye

1 oz Braulio

.5 oz Genepy

Stir over ice and strain onto a large cube

Cheers

Union Victories

Union

Everything Trump touches dies. During a global pandemic, that has mostly not been good. However, because Trump chose to be the second President of the Confederacy, and applied the Trump touch (the same one that bankrupted casinos) we may now – 155 years after Lee surrendered to Grant – finally be done with the “heritage” of traitorous racist scum.

Trump and Moscow Mitch McConnell – a long-time operative in the Confederate underground insurgency – have been working hard follow their Russian overseer’s orders “divide so we can conquer,” but they overstepped during protests against systemically racist policing.

With many thousands of Americans in the streets of cities and small towns alike, mostly peacefully protesting the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police, Trump and the Republicans pulled out the tried and true appeals to “law and order,” and the thinly veiled white supremacist dog whistle of Confederate “heritage.” In typical Trump incompetence he took the GOP playbook too far and displayed his total ignorance of, and disdain for, the Constitution and norms of American governance.

By attempting to “dominate the streets, and use the U.S. military against protesting Americans, Trump has sparked a backlash that may continue for a while. His use of the National Guard to clear Lafayette Park for his photo op with a bible showed him to be very much the fascist dictator wannabe his critics claim. You just know he wanted to put on a uniform with full Mussolini-fascist regalia for his walk to the church.

Since then, Confederate monuments have been toppled at an increased rate, NASCAR – NASCAR!!!! – has banned the Confederate battle flag from its events, and a serious discussion has begun about renaming U.S. military bases for people other than Confederate generals.

In the midst of all of this there is still a pandemic going on, with more than 100,000 Americans dead and 2 million infected. The second wave has begun with cases spiking in states that prematurely opened, largely around the Memorial Day Holiday Weekend.

With that second wave of virus on the way, it may be time to put aside another historical flag, the Gadsen flag – the Don’t Tread on Me snake popularized recently by the Tea Party Republicans. But now is not the time for thinking of oneself, but uniting to defeat the virus, wearing masks, washing your hands and keeping safe social distance. If we must have a historic snake flag flying, make it Ben Franklin’s Join or Die flag with the sliced snake to unite the colonies.

At this moment, with the Confederacy fading, and fascists in the White House, Americans need to be united about what this country is supposed to stand for. So pull out your copy of the Constitution and have A More Perfect Union cocktail. Via KindredCocktails from Imbibe magazine the drink is:

1.25 oz Lillet Blanc

.75 oz vodka

.75 oz Apricot liqueur

Stir with ice and strain into a coupe, garnish with a grapefruit twist

Cheers!

By Any Means Necessary

Preservation

The 2020 Presidential election is a little more than 23 weeks away, and the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic is approaching 100,000 Americans. Preservation is the watchword of the day. This is not only true with regard to preserving health against the virus, which is only made harder by the President* leading his cultto ignore the masks and social distancing that could help preserve health. As always preservation is a guiding principle for Trump, but self-preservation, not the fight against the virus.

As the number of Coronavirus cases and deaths mounted over the past couple of weeks, Trump has been focused on keeping his finances and activities with the Russians hidden from the public now that the cratering economy has forced a change in his re-election strategy. Trump’s focus on preserving his hopes for re-election are at the heart of the impeachment case against him, and now his minions in the Senate will continue that cause for him.

For the rest of us, this points to how the American system and institutions are in need of preservation, if it’s not too late already. The Lincoln Project ad that has really gotten under Trump’s skin, Mourning in America, asks the right question at the end regarding preservation. On this Memorial day weekend, a time originally set aside to remember the Union soldiers who died to preserve the United States during the Civil War, have a Means of Preservation cocktail and make your plans for Nov. 3. From the Boston bar Drink, via Frederic Yarm at cocktailvirgin the Means of Preservation is:

2 oz Beefeater Gin
1/2 oz St. Germain Liqueur
1/2 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth
2 dash Celery Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a grapefruit twist.

Cheers!

Dust, Wind, Dude

Arbitrary

Whether your Governor has issued a Stay at Home order or not, many Americans are staying at home to socially distance themselves during the pandemic. Some are “fortunate” enough to work from home, or as one twitter wag put it: stuck at home during a crisis trying to work. Others are trying to use this time to learn a language or learn how to bake bread. To these folks, I would remind them of Bill’s immortal words, “Dust, wind, dude.”

In Washington, we’d all be better off if they were spending their time learning to bake bread. Instead they are spending it thinking up unconstitutional ways to endanger people or enrich themselves and their friends with tax law changes.

The President* is wasting the time he should be leading the country through the crisis with by inappropriately using press briefings as re-election campaign rallies. We are also finding out more everyday about the administration’s ineffective use of time early on in the crisis, and the cost we will pay for that.

Our collective sense of time has gotten weird. But these strange days didn’t have to be this way. A properly functioning democratic government (like we used to have) works to prepare for a crisis. Even the George W. Bush Administration had preparations for a pandemic, but for King Donald I, who believes he alone can fix things, and dismantled those preparations that were in place, the cost of incompetence must be paid by the entire GOP.

As you go through another Blursday, make your plans to vote the Orange Disaster out of office in November, by mail if we can, or start sourcing your hazmat suit to go in person if necessary. Your cocktail tonight is The Arbitrary Nature of Time via Frederic Yarm at Cocktail Virgin, it is:

1.25 oz Wild Turkey 101 Rye (Rittenhouse 100)
1 oz Campari
.75 oz Cherry Heering
1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters
2 dash Bittermens Mole Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a rocks glass containing a large ice cube. Garnish with an orange twist.

Cheers!

Remember

Until Donald Trump, George W. Bush was slated to go down in history as the worst President ever. Now, Trump is making Bush look good by comparison. Trump isn’t even as good as Bush at the bad things about the Bush presidency.

Most recently we have sen this with ineffective attempts to use the Memory Hole. The Bush Administration was much more accomplished at making inconvenient facts disappear. To be fair – though – because of the Bush Administration, people are on much higher alert for this type of activity. So when Jared Kushner took over a recent Virus press briefing and made ridiculous statements about the Strategic National Stockpile, and then went to the website to make changes aligned to Kushner’s comments, people caught that right away.

Endeavor to Persevere

Perseverance

Local and state governments are putting large parts of the country on lockdown. Who knew that being stuck in the house could be so tiring. With no end in sight, it is getting hard to look on the bright side of life. But my inner Terry Jones reminds me I have a fully stocked bar and lots of movie channels, so I shall endeavor to persevere. I have not reached the point where I miss the NJ Transit commute yet, but I can see that day coming. At least Gov. Murphy has allowed us to go out and take walks while practicing appropriate social distancing. That should help keep a level of sanity.

While our “leaders” in Washington look for ways to prop up stock prices, make yourself a Perseverance cocktail, because we may be here a while. Via Kindred Cocktail, the Perseverance is:

2 oz rye

.5 oz Ramazzotti

.5 oz Dubonnet Rouge

.5 oz sweet vermouth

2 dashes orange bitters

Stir over ice, strain over a large cube in a rocks glass, garnish with an orange twist.

Cheers! Stay safe!

Stupid and Contagious

Home range

I am by nature rebellious and insubordinate (my Army personnel file would confirm that), and it is not simply because I’m Gen X. But Gen X is also nothing if not pragmatic, with a “whatever it takes” attitude, (it’s time to do what they tell ya!) so the images from Florida of Spring Breakers gathering in large numbers in a state full of old people, or hitting the bars in NYC (endangering some of my favorite bartenders), got me a bit pissed off. There are some older and immuno-compromised folks I’d like to keep around a while longer.

Even Moronavirus Patient Zero in the White House may be starting to grasp how serious this is (but probably not) and the need for social distancing. Now that state and local governments are closing bars and restaurants, and setting curfews, you’ll need to do your drinking at home. Hopefully, while you were stocking up on toilet paper and canned goods, you made a stop by your liquor store. Gen X did, because we drink and we know things. While you’re doing your drinking from home, don’t forget to pay attention to what Cheeto Mussolini is trying to slip through while we’re distracted, like helping Putin and abandoning prosecution of the Russians Mueller found to have interfered in the 2016 election.

As you stay home to work on your home bartending skills, try the Home on the Range cocktail. Via Kindred Cocktails, The Home on the Range comes from the 1945 Crosby Gaige’s Cocktail Guide. And it’s worth keeping in mind how sacrificing for the good of the country in 1945 meant a lot more than staying home on the couch and watching NetFlix.

See you at the bar in a couple months when we get through this.

The Home on the Range is:

2 oz rye

.5 oz Cointreau

.5 oz sweet vermouth

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir and strain into an Old Fashioned glass over a larger cube, garnish with an orange twist. (If you don’t have these ingredients but do have more than three rolls of toilet paper per person in the house, you need to rethink your priorities.)

Cheers!