Bye-Bye Bourbon?

Before you think I have lost my mind or have decided to start drinking clear alcohol, hear me out.

The odious asshat pictured at the top of the page is Indiana Governor Mike Pence. He is a not-very-smart man. He recently proved this by signing a bill into law which, under the rubric of "religious freedom", allows for discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Not surprisingly, a lot of the country is calling this bullshit out.

The snark in me wants to say the best way to protest this would be for companies in Indiana that are opposed to this law to use it to refuse service to right-wing Christians. Because they always seem to be shocked that a good portion of their poorly-written laws can be used against them.

But no. There is another way. That dovetails nicely with a pet peeve of mine.

When it comes to booze, I am a stickler for truth. If you say your scotch is aged 12 years, it damn well better be 12. If you say your beer has three different kinds of hops, you best not be lying about it.

And if you are going to say your bourbon is "hand-crafted" like you spent a decade+ making it? Well, you had better be telling the truth.

That is where Lawrenceburg, Indiana and MGP enter the story.

Lawrenceburg, Indiana (not to be confused with bourbon-locale Lawrenceburg, Kentucky) is home to a massive brick complex that cranks out mega-industrial quantities of beverage-grade alcohol. The factory, once a Seagram distillery, has changed hands over the decades and was most recently acquired by food-ingredient corporation MGP. It is now a one-stop shop for marketers who want to bottle their own brands of spirits without having to distill the product themselves.

Their products are well-made, but hardly what one thinks of as artisanal. And yet, much of the whiskey now being sold as the hand-crafted product of micro-distilleries actually comes from this one Indiana factory.

I encourage you to read the whole piece as it is quite enlightening. And you can also find out the companies that use MGP as their source of whiskey. And then stretch the truth about where it comes from. And there are some big names on there as well, like W.H. Harrison Bourbon, Breaker Bourbon and Hooker's House.

So you have a state wanting to legalize discrimination in the name of God (which I personally think He is not cool with, BTW) and that same state housing the source of a lot of whiskey-laced lies. What to do, what to do, what to do...

This Is What You Give People When You Wish They Were Dead

I am blessed to live in a part of these United States where the craft beer movement is deep and strong. Within a 15-mile radius of where I live I can access some of the best beer being made in the US, if not the world. And we have the specialty dealers who can get us the beer from further away.

I am less blessed in having a physique that rivals Pablo Sandoval's, but without the innate ability to hit a baseball for millions of dollars a year. And as I move firmly into middle-age, it's become apparent that has to change.

I could stop drinking beer. But let's be honest, that's insane. There's a reason it's one of the oldest beverages created by Man. Not drinking beer is going against a biological imperative passed down through the ages.

So you have to find the right beer to drink. A good one you can find in stores is Founders All Day IPA. It's not a light beer, but it is lower in calories than most other craft beers. There is a style of beer called Berliner weisse that is pretty low-calorie. It's tart but light (a German sour to be precise), definitely a warmer-weather beer. This is much harder to find but there are a few breweries in the US (New Glarus in Wisconsin, Bear Republic and The Bruery in CA among others) making this beer.

Then there are the mass-produced stand-byes. If you grew up in the 70s and your dad drank beer (told you I was middle-aged), then Miller Lite is a part of your childhood memories. If you want to go foreign, then Kirin Light is actually pretty-damned tasty. You can drink these and still be satisfied, even if it is not up to the quality of a craft light beer.

And then there are the evil beers.

Let's be clear - I am not talking about Keystone or the Beast here. Those beers never pretend to be more than they are; cheap alternatives for broke college students. You can't hate on a product that is honest about what it is.

Movie Review: Highlander (1986)

“I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel. And I am immortal.” – Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert)

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Writer: Gregory Widen , Peter Bellwood and Larry Ferguson

Producers: E.C. Monell, William N. Panzer and Peter S. Davis

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Major Stars: Sean Connery, Christopher Lambert, Clancy Brown, Roxanne Hart, Jon Polito

Highlander always struck me as a film that just needs to be remastered to become a very good movie. Better special-effects, clean up the film stock, and get rid of the wrestling intro (the latest version cleaned the film stock nicely). There has to be a better way to get MacLeod and Fasil into that parking garage.

Despite the horrendous sequels that followed it (and a moderately-decent television series), Highlander remains a fun little film about Immortals, the price they pay for eternal life and why they all want to kill each other. We aren’t talking classic here, but it’s not crap either.

You all know the story, yes? So I don’t have to re-hash the anguished tale of Connor MacLeod? Good. Suffice it to say, Christopher Lambert’s almost-lazy, sometimes undecipherable speech works very well in this role. If you were a 400-year old Immortal, wouldn’t life bore you to tears as well?

Clancy Brown is fantastic as Kurgan, one of the best movie villains ever. Completely evil and insane, he steals every scene he is in. I love Brown as an actor. If you want to see him absolutely kick-ass on-screen, check out HBO’s Carnivale on DVD, where he played Justin Crowe. Or, for a more kid-friendly product, he’s also the voice of Mr. Krabs on Spongebob Squarepants. A multi-talented man is Clancy Brown.

Then there is Sean Connery as Ramirez, the Spanish-named Egyptian with a Scottish accent via Japan who’s over 2000 years old. It’s definitely a one-of-a-kind role. Connery hams it up a bit but it works because he has so much fun with the character. And Ramirez is an interesting guy, willingly training a fellow Immortal whom he may have to fight someday in the future.

The sword-fights are fun to watch (if basic), as are the vignettes of Connor’s life. My favorite is the duel where he is repeatedly run through with a sword without effect. And there is the undercurrent of the pain he suffers as an Immortal, watching his wife grow old and die, with no children to their name. And how that has made him a bitter and distant man.

Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

"You probably heard we ain't in the prisoner-takin' business; we in the killin' Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin'." – Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Writers: Quentin Tarantino

Producer: Lawrence Bender

Studio: The Weinstein Company (USA)

Major Stars: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger

In the genre of exploitation films, there are numerous sub-genres. The blaxploitation film, rape-revenge, splatter, sleaze...the different types seem almost endless. But one that hasn't been explored yet is the World War II exploitation film*.

That has changed. In Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds we have been given our first exploitation film covering WW2. And it kicks ass.

The multi-pronged story should be familiar to most of you by now. A unit of Jewish-American soldiers, led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), are air-dropped into Occupied France to terrorize the Germans. They take scalps and bash in heads, the bashing courtesy of "The Bear Jew", Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) and his bat. They even have a German soldier who murdered Gestapo officers (Hugo Stiglitz, played by Til Schweiger) in their band. At the same time, a cinema owner in Paris who happens to be a Jew using a false identity is forced to host a German film premiere attended by the Nazi hierarchy, which is targeted by an Allied OSS operation. And tying all these different stories together is SS Colonel Hans Landa, "The Jew Hunter", played by Christoph Waltz.

The title may say "Inglourious Basterds", but the story is Landa's. He ties it all together. Nothing in the story would happen (except for one scene) without his involvement. And Waltz plays him to perfection. He is smooth, polite, intelligent and deadly. The opening scene where a Jewish family hiding under the floorboards in a French farmhouse are discovered and killed by Landa's unit is some of the best film-making you will ever see. Landa is exceedingly polite to the French farmer, but you know from the first how dangerous Landa is. From beginning to end, no other character grabs your attention like Landa. Waltz won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for the role, and he deserved it. In a perfect world Waltz would have won the Best Actor award. That is how good Waltz is in Inglourious Basterds.

The sole survivor of the Jewish family massacred in the opening scene is Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), who becomes the aforementioned cinema owner. She is the second most important character to this film. Dreyfus puts the climactic scene into action, an act of Jewish revenge upon the Nazi elite that is stunning and beautifully shot. But it begins to make you wonder why Tarantino named this film Inglourious Basterds when they are, in many ways, tangential at best to the unfolding story.

This isn't to degrade their performances. Pitt chews a bit of scenery as Raine but is a very enjoyable character, one that reminded me more than a little of Lee Marvin's Major Reisman in The Dirty Dozen. Roth is obviously enjoying his role as Donowitz, even as he mangles a Boston accent**. And Schweiger's Stiglitz is memorable in the short time we get to know him. But by and large, the Basterds are mostly ciphers who appear only a few times before the film's conclusion.

Poor Have Plenty of "Skin In the Game"

He's the real victim, here.

In the 2012 Presidential election, one of the common lines of attack from the Republicans and Mitt Romney was that 47% of Americans were, in essence, moochers. That they took from the government and gave nothing back. The solution? Make them pay more in taxes so that they, too (according to Romney and Pals), had "skin in the game".

So while the petulant whining and butthurt from all these millionaires and billionaires amounted to another defeat, the idea that the poor have it easy and need to pay more in taxes persists. Which makes the news that the poor actually do pay plenty in taxes all the more interesting.

When it comes to the taxes closest to home, the less you earn, the harder you’re hit.

That is the conclusion of an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that evaluates the local tax burden in every state, from Washington, labeled the most regressive, to Delaware, ranked as the fairest of them all.

According to the study, in 2015 the poorest fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent and the top 1 percent will average 5.4 percent.

Now, of course, these are not federal taxes so you'll have plenty of Republicans say this doesn't matter. But remember, the complaint was that the poor paid nothing into the system, they were "moochers". When, in fact, they pay plenty into the system.

The reason is simple. Sales taxes, excise taxes, even property taxes, are regressive taxes that take up a larger percentage of low-income wages than the incomes of the one percent. Paying a 6% sales tax on milk, or a television, hits someone making $30,000 a lot more than someone making $300,000. And when a state relies on that kind of income, the result is an unequal system where people who need money the most are the ones without it.

The result is a self-perpetuating system where low-income families are always behind and trying to catch up while the wealthiest pay relatively little. Which, to a rational person, is insane since you cannot build a healthy economy by catering to the economic concerns of a tiny minority of people.