These are some of my & Mrs. Thinking Bulldog’s favorites.  These are all small wineries with friendly folks and great wine:

Goosecross Cellars—in Yountville, kind of hard to find but worth the search!  Be ready to taste 8-10 great selections.

Summers— in Calistoga; my wife’s favorite of all that we visited.

Whitehall Lane—In St. Helena.  You can get this in GA.

Sequoia Grove—across hwy 29 from Whitehall.  Very nice tasting room.  One of the few in Napa that actually charges for tasting, but worth it.

Dutch Henry—do not miss, Silverado Trail near Calistoga.  Small batches.  Very friendly folks; tasting right in the cellar.

Ballentine—another small winery.  No frills in the tasting room, just in the wine.

Folie a Deux—very cool tasting room.

Steltzner—beautiful place, on Silverado Trail near Napa.

I’d recommend you stay away from big wineries and especially the champagne places (e.g., Mumm)–there you sit at tables and have a waiter—not fun.

If you’re spending a day in Sonoma/Russian River area.  I’d recommend a day trip to Healdsburg and tasting in Dry Creek & Alexander Valley.  Pack your liver.

Conservatives who complain that “the Media” are “in the tank” for Obama.  Where the hell have these people been the last 20, 30, 40 years?  Like this is news?  Is this your first presidential campaign?  Seriously, this is the ninth presidential campaign that I can remember, and in every single one the media were 100% behind the Democrat nominee.  Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, etc.  And the Republicans have won 5 of the past 7 elections.  Media bias in favor of liberal candidates is a given, so shut up about it.  I don’t need any more examples.

Liberals trying to personally ruin anybody who disagrees with them.  First Sarah Palin, now Joe the Plumber.  Do these people really think they are persuading other people to their point of view by trying to destroy a private citizen who asked Obama a question that he bungled?  Yesterday morning I wrote someone that before the sun went down the liberal smear machine would be fully engaged against Joe.  If Obama were smart he would personally and publicly apologize to Joe the Plumber and demand that his supporters leave him alone.  Palin too.  As I wrote somewhere earlier, the Obama campaign and the media should ignore, ignore, ignore Palin, and Joe too.  Attacking Joe and running flimsy expose’ pieces on Palin only raises their profile and attracts sympathy to them, and by extension their views.

Articles by Republicans about “what McCain should be doing.”  First of all, McCain is McCain.  You know what he can, and cannot, do.  So it’s idiotic to say something like “McCain needs to come out in the debate and attack, attack attack on Ayers/Wright/Rezko et al” and then whine and complain that he didn’t and lost the debate.  That’s just not McCain’s style and you know it; so knock it off.  Secondly, one must realize that out here we are not privy to near the information that the campaign itself has; they have massive research operations that poll and focus group every issue.  When things don’t make sense, it’s because you don’t have all the information.  Plus, why do I care what some clown like Bill Kristol thinks about how a political campaign should be run?  A far more interesting article would be to examine why the campaign might not be focusing their campaign on your pet issue.

Hospitals.  Have you ever noticed how filthy hospitals are?  And how there are always so many people in those gross little medical unis doing nothing?  Grab a damn mop and make yourself useful.

Talking about the stock market.  Yes, I have a pulse.  Yes, I am aware that the market is crazy these days.

Talking about the price of gas.

Obama supporters.  Look, I’m really glad to see folks enthusiastic about a political campaign.  But for God’s sake give it a rest!  Many, many of the Obama supporters I know literally have tied their own self-worth to the Obama presidency, and I think some folks are going to seriously blow a circuit if he loses.  And he most certainly can lose.  Please get some sort of hobby, just in case.

So, we are supposed to believe that if Congress doesn’t use $700 Billion in taxpayer money to bail out the financial system, we will have some sort of financial armageddon.  The people saying this in Washington and Wall Street are the same ones who:

1.  Passed the Community Reinvestment Act, which led directly to the entire subprime mortgage concept.

2.  Permitted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to not only be their own political slush fund and destination job for ex political hacks, but also permitted the entities to remain dangerously undercapitalized.  In fact FM & FM’s capitalization requirements were slashed as the subprime crisis gained steam.

3.  Passed Sarbanes-Oxley with the “mark to market” concept that has destroyed some of Wall Street’s oldest investment banks and financial institutions.

4.  Exercised exactly zero oversight over the market in credit default swaps, leading to the collapse of AIG.

Sorry, I’m simply not buying it.  The clowns in Washington are the ones primarily responsible for this; the last thing this problem needs is another Federal Command Bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, that’s what we’re going to get.

 (I’m unsure who is supposed to be offended by this photoshop)

The bounce McCain received out of the Republican convention is going to be wider than most expected, and the Obama campaign is in deep trouble and needs to change its strategy quickly. I’m sure the polls will bear this out over the next week or two. Obama will do better than either Gore or Kerry in the South, but not well enough to win anywhere except maybe Virginia. I think Palin’s biggest impact in the electoral college will be in the northernmost states; Montana is out of play for sure, and I think it puts Obama/Biden in serious jeapardy in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, and possibly a couple of Maine electoral votes. Let’s face it, those northern types are a very different bunch of folks, and Palin speaks their language. Also the dual westerners on the Republican ticket and the personality of Palin will make Colorado and New Mexico uphill climbs. I think Nevada is Obama’s best shot at a pickup out west.

The first thing I’d do if I were in charge of the Obama campaign is shut the hell up about Sarah Palin. Tell the media to leave her alone and do their best to not cover anything at all about her. Not only are the attacks not working to knock her down, it is turning off swing voters, energizing the conservatives, reminding voters about Obama’s utter lack of experience, and worst of all giving Palin the opportunity to show that she can take a punch just as good as Hillary, if not better. Now, if McCain/Palin were whining about how unfair it was that Mean ol’ Barack was attacking a woman, it might be worth pursuing further. But Palin hits back harder and more effectively than Obama can dish it out, and it’s definitely hurting Obama’s messiah credentials to not seem “above politics.”

Meanwhile, McCain becomes the guy above politics. The media can ask him about it and he can just shrug his shoulders and say “what the heck do I care, that woman can obviously take good care of her own self.” Trying to destroy Palin has backfired on so many levels that the Obama campaign simply has to make the media stop. What Obama needs is a Palin media blackout.

Remember, there was virtually no difference between Hillary and Obama on the issues in the primary, and both of them were completely lacking in any political experience with “actual responsibilities.” So the early on the Democrat primary was nothing more than a personality contest, until Hillary tapped into the segment of Democrat primary voters who were deeply suspicious of Obama and the Angry Left. Also remember that when Obama clinched the nomination, he quite unsuccessfully tried to do the ol’ move to the center like Bill Clinton did in 1992. Back then, Democrats were so desperate for a win that they gave Bill a pass; in 2008, however, the Democrats are so positive they’re going to win that Obama’s far left backers think moving to the center is unnecessary. On the issues, where can Obama go? Taxes? He probably doesn’t want to run around talking about how he wants to raise taxes (See Mondale, 1984, a 49 state loss). Environment? The oil crisis has turned the tables on this issue and is Palin’s area of most thorough experience. Iraq? No. Terrorism? No. Health Care? Maybe. Also the Democrats will need to do their traditional “Republicans want to take away your social security” bit to try to stay close in Florida and Nevada.

My solution: Obama needs to get this race back to a personality contest between him and McCain. He needs to be more self-deprecating, humerous, down-to-earth. Mr. Average Guy vs. the Old Senator. That’s where Obama needs to get this race. Put another way: he needs to become how Hillary was in the second half of the Democrat primary. Realize this now about the angry left: they are looking into the abyss of losing a sure thing, so the angry left will relent now, as Obama moves to the center (i.e., pretends to move to the center) to try to save the campaign. It can work.

Meanwhile, the media needs to do two things to help Obama: blackout of coverage on Sarah Palin, and focus on McCain’s age. The biggest concern about McCain is his age, and if it becomes an issue, Palin’s inexperience is the top concern among voters about her, i.e., if McCain’s age becomes an issue, Palin’s experience will also.

UPDATE:  it looks like Obama is already taking my advice.  Or at least trying to.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  I stand corrected.

(Alaska:  hottest governor, coolest state)

Without question the electrifying Sarah Palin has changed the 2008 presidential campaign, and even more certainly she has changed the landscape of the Republican Party. Absent a John-Edwards-style self immolation, Sarah Palin will be the front runner to be the next Republican nominee for President, win or lose in November.

The Palin selection helps John McCain on multiple levels with very little downside. First she will help with one of the most crucial demographics in this race, married women. The Obama campaign is having trouble with married women, partially because of the Obama-Clinton primary battle, and Sarah Palin exacerbates this problem. The Obama campaign has been trapped by it’s zeal to stay on offense by attacking Palin’s inexperience, which only drew comparisons between his own inexperience and hers, and for Obama on this issue the best one can say is that there are spirited arguments to be made that either Palin or he is more qualified. But she is not the nominee. The experience attacks only highlight Obama’s own unpreparedness, best stated by Palin in her comparison between “community organizing” and being the mayor of a small town (“like being a community organizer except with actual responsibilities”).

Further the merciless and blatant attacks by the media doing Obama’s bidding by attacking Palin and more importantly her family backfired thoroughly, not only among married women but by religious conservatives. The media do not understand religious conservatives and thought that by exposing her daughter’s pregnancy and the smear attack on her young child with Downs Syndrome, religious conservatives would be turned off. But religious conservatives rallied to her defense not only because her daughter is keeping her baby and marrying the father, but also because she carried her youngest to term knowing full well it would be a special needs child. The family did the right thing in both instances, and the media caricature of religious conservatives is quite wrong; they are typically the most forgiving of people, particularly those who admit their failings and take responsibility for their actions, not the intolerant moralists they are made to be.

Which brings us to the second reason Palin changes the race. She energizes conservatives not only because she’s the best speaker since Reagan, but her substance on the issues, her record of conservative reform, and her genuineness and personal story is genuinely American. And she is a fighter; she completely gutted all of her attackers in one speech, her first speech on a national stage. Support among conservatives for McCain was tepid before Palin became the running mate; now conservatives are energized because they see the future of the Republican Party in Sarah Palin as a conservative future, distant from the Bush years of big government spending and business-as-usual corruption that infected the later years of Republican control of Congress.

The Palin pick was a home run for the McCain campaign and Republicans, but it was only the final piece of what was a well-played August. Dick Morris wrote a piece in late July (I can’t seem to find it on his site now) about how August would be the month to destroy Obama. As they knocked out Kerry with the Swift Boat Veterans in August, and the Willie Horton ad against Dukakis hit the airwaves in August also. I wouldn’t call it destruction, but the ad wars of August definitely played out well for McCain, the Britany Spears ad and the Moses parting the sea ad being particularly effective, and Obama’s lead dwindled from near certain victory to neck-and-neck by the start of the Democrat convention

So where does Obama go from here? McCain is going to get a big bounce from the Palin pick, the convention and his own speech. His speech lacked luster mostly, but was a great speech for McCain by comparison, particularly the gripping story of how his POW experience transformed him from an arrogant flyboy into a humble servant of the country that saved him. Obama will be playing catch up, and from where I sit he has few options. But he might still pull it out with the dynamics now swirling against him. Next we’ll explore how Obama might regain the initiative and what sort of voting coalition he can stitch together to get to 271 electoral votes.

“Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling” to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s in touch with regular Americans?

“The reality is that Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and opposition to producing more energy here at home as gas prices skyrocket show he’s completely out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.” -McCain spokesman Brian Rogers 

This article in Politico is funny on multiple levels, first in that John McCain is not sure how many homes he and his wife own, and second that Democrats have the ability to criticize, with a straight face evidently, someone else for nominating a wealthy candidate.

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, referred in an interview with Adam Nagourney of The New York Times to an imagined meeting of McCain strategists “on the portico of the McCain estate in Sedona — or maybe in one of his six other houses.”

Cindy McCain is of course the heir to a liquor distributorship worth around $100 Million.  (I wonder if she is on the University of Arizona Board of Regents?)  It is a benefit to all politicians regardless of party that the electorate’s long term memory is basically non-existent, thereby permitting a political consultant to slam an opponent’s wealth when his party’s last nominee was married to a woman worth arount $1 Billion.

From the Atlanta Business Chronicle:

AJC spokesperson Jennifer Morrow said 85 jobs in the newsroom will be eliminated, while the ad department will lose 104 jobs. The moves will cost 150 people their jobs, while the remaining cuts are positions that are not filled and that will now be eliminated.

“These changes are difficult but necessary,” said AJC Publisher John Mellott. “They enable us to remain the local news and information leader, and they position us for future growth.” …

“Over time, the costs to produce the community sections have become prohibitive,” said Mellott. “Paper costs have risen 35 percent this year, and, since we drive 80,000 miles a day to deliver the AJC, fuel costs have also hit us hard.”

The job cuts and newspaper changes are the latest wave of bad news for the AJC, which has seen its circulation drop 8.5 percent to 326,907 for a six-month period ending March 31, the most recent data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

 Per this article in The New Georgia Encyclopedia, the AJC had a circulation of 640,000 in 2004.

This story on the Flint Riverkeeper gives away a few insights into the environmentalist mind.    The story focuses primarily on former President Carter’s support of the group, but this gem caught my eye:

President Jimmy Carter, whose Plains home is about 30 miles down the road, rallied a new generation of environmentalists and river rats to fight any effort to build dams on the Flint River.

Environmentalists oppose dams because they disrupt the river’s natural ecosystem, block aquatic migrations and destroy wetlands.

Pardon?  Destroy wetlands?  What the hell is a lake?  The fact is that the state’s lakes have led to enormous benefits for fish and wildlife.  And aren’t we a bit short of water these days?

A bit farther into the article, the truth slips out.

Carter’s unlikely opposition propelled the little-known Georgia governor onto the national scene as an environmental crusader willing to go against Washington’s powerbrokers.

“It was unprecedented back then for anybody to be against a dam,” Carter said. “The opposition was just a bunch of weirdo environmentalists.”

Dams mean construction jobs, high-priced lakefront development and recreational dollars, he said.

Ah, now we are getting somewhere.  What could be worse than construction jobs and lakefront development?

Spice this with a dab of arrogant elitism, and you’ve got yourself some truth:

In recent months, U.S. Reps. Nathan Deal (R-Gainesville) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Grantville) have expressed some interest in building dams along the Flint to create large water-supply reservoirs like Allatoona and West Point.

“There will be tremendous pressure here to go along with these congressmen that somehow think it’ll solve the water supply problems and allow people to sprinkle their lawns seven days a week,” Carter said.

Why does this man see it as a bad thing for people to have the water supply to keep their lawns nice?  Additional reservoirs would be a great boon to Georgia fish, wildlife, and people who love the outdoors, and would help solve the water crisis, but for Carter and the Flint Riverkeepers, it’s more important to be anti-development.

A fan writes:

What percentage of Republicans (especially the NRO-types) would have initially supported, and would still support, the war in Iraq if it had been prosecuted by Clinton/Gore/Albright/etc. instead of Bush/Cheney/Rummy/etc.  Less than 5%?  I am certain that there would be no more outspoken critics than Rush, Hannity, etc.  …There’s a chance, albeit admittedly small, that Obama will be a transformative political figure if he wins.  But even if that doesn’t happen, he’s very unlikely I think to screw things up.  As for McCain, I think he’s just as safe (unlikely to botch anything), but his upside is substantially lower I think.  No chance he’ll be transformative, at best he’ll be a decent guy who more or less keeps the train on the tracks and running on time.

I seriously doubt President Gore would have put American troops on the ground in Iraq, or even Afghanistan for that matter. We’d have gotten the same Clintonista stuff we got in Bosnia (air cover, peacekeepers) and the wag-the-dog airstrikes in Somalia and Iraq. The Right was critical of these operations (and rightly so it can certainly be argued), but the Republicans in Congress were very uncritical in a “partisanship ends at the waters edge” way. I suspect they’d have been the same way if Gore had authorized Afghanistan or Iraq. The Democrats were quite the opposite with W and Iraq. But really, I don’t see any way either operation is done with a Democrat in the White House, even after 9/11.

I still think if the Dems had gotten on board with the Iraq war, they’d have won the presidency in 2004. But the party is controlled by its most liberal wing, so partly out of liberal reactionism, and partly because of bitterness over Bush v. Gore, they were just reflexively against anything W was for, and it cost them. But they did succeed in scaring W, et al, into making sure casualties were as low as possible (recall the daily death notices every time we lost a soldier on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story on the nightly news), thus ensuring the light footprint/low casualty strategy that was sure to fail.

Had Gore gone in, I think it’s certain that whoever Gore had at Defense would’ve used the same “light footprint”/”force protection” strategy after the invasion that Rumsfeld used, with the primary goal to keep American casualties as low as possible. This was the same strategy that didn’t work in ‘Nam prior to Tet. Colin Powell and John McCain were the most vocal critics of this strategy and pointed out, rightly it turned out, that we didn’t have enough troops in there to provide security while the Iraqi security forces were built and trained.

Eventually W came around to their way of thinking (with the help of the 06 election debacle) and put Patreus in charge of a textbook counterinsurgency operation with enough troops to do the job, and got the troops out of their bases and on the streets. Predictably the strategy worked, as it is an ancient strategy (the entire methodology is explained in the US Marine Corps “Small Wars Manual” first published in the 1930s). It’s all very similar to Viet Nam, in which after Tet McNamara was replaced as SecDef by Clifford, and the replacement of Gen. Westmoreland by Abrams, who increased troop levels and ran a counterinsurgency to the point where the Viet Cong was totally eliminated in 1969.

Anyway, the Gore administration would likely have used the same strategy as Rumsfeld/McNamara and gotten the same results after the initial invasion, and I’d think mainstream Republicans would’ve been very critical in the same manner as Powell/McCain. However, the Dems “against anything W’s for” strategy did pay off, eventually, in 2006 (with truckloads of help from the republican idiots in congress). But I think history will be kind to W in that after 2006 he went with the surge/counterinsurgency option when virtually everyone was saying we should get out like we did in Viet Nam post-1970 (and like we apparently will, in Iraq, under Obama).

Speaking of Obama, I continue to be amazed at all the Republican whining about his flip flops and associations with far-out leftists. Why are they so surprised that he’s “moving to the center” and trying to appear like a moderate conservative, or at least a moderate moderate, now that the primaries are over? What did they expect him to do? It seems easy to understand (at least to me) that McCain needs to show the clear distinctions between himself and Obama on the issues (mostly the “experience” issue) in order to win, and all Obama needs to do is obscure those distinctions as much as possible, making it an easy victory for him on personality, good speeches, and feel-good 60 second ads. Then when Obama gets elected, he’ll be as liberal as he thinks he can possibly get away with and still get re-elected in 2012. I also think that the Republicans are wasting their time going after Obama on his associations with Wright/Pfleger/Rezko/Ayres, et al. This country elected Bill Clinton twice….

I seriously doubt either will be a “transformative” President. Maybe I’m not sure what “transformative” means.  As I said before, but for the Supreme Court, I’d hope Obama wins for the entertainment value alone. I disagree very much on the other side of the coin…while I think that the chance McCain’s presidency will be disastrous are next to zero, I’d say the chance that Obama’s will be a total, unredeemable disaster are significant. I don’t think many outside the hard core Obamaniacs would argue that he has the experience or has demonstrated an ability to be President? But the country appears to be willing to take that chance just to get the Republicans out of there. It worked in 1992, after all.