California Gov. Newsom defends ‘wine caves’ after debate debacle
Supporters of the presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders took advantage of a fundraising opportunity with the sudden interest in wine caves.
My talented colleague Fuzzy Slippers covered the heated exchange between Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren over fundraising, which occurred during the Thursday Democratic Party presidential debate.
The exchange included a reference to wine caves, which are swank, temperature-controlled areas that are now popular in high end restaurants.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, an owner of several wineries, came to Buttigieg’s defense.
.@GavinNewsom quite comfortable chatting with the press for a long time in the spin room, defends Buttigieg #winecave fundraiser and says the Pete bashing over it and purity tests aren’t really helping the party #DemDebate + in California you gotta support the wine industry pic.twitter.com/Y1Ce9N4jxr
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) December 20, 2019
It’s my business, it’s how I started,” he told HuffPost after the debate. “It’s a point of pride. It’s one of America’s great exports. I don’t know that it’s helpful to have those kinds of debates.”
Newsom also bemoaned the “purity tests” imposed by progressives that Buttigieg referenced.
“That cave’s been used by Democrats all across the country for fundraising … Probably a hundred congressional representatives have benefited from the use of that,” he later told reporters. “I don’t know that this is healthy. Democrats are good at begrudging people … I don’t know why someone that’s had success should apologize for it, or be embarrassed by it, or now no longer be allowed to participate in the democratic process.”
And while the exchange did not include Sen. Bernie Sanders, supporters of the presidential hopeful sensed there might be a fundraising opportunity with the sudden interest in wine caves.
A website called peteswinecave.com surfaced shortly after the debate but it leads to to the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue and options for donating to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
To be honest, all the profits I get from blogging have allowed me to install my own wine cave.
My wine cave. pic.twitter.com/e8b3q7qkVv
— Leslie Eastman (@Mutnodjmet) December 21, 2019
In summary, the discussion was nothing more than elites arguing about how elite their elite activities are. I hope all the Democrats are filling the wine caves to the ceiling. They will need much liquid comfort next November.
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Comments
From sanders, to newsom, to butthead, to fauxcahontas, to biden, to obama, to fat obama, to pelosi, to flake, to romney, to mccain: you can put a fancy label on them, but they’re poison.
It’s stuff like this makes me a cynic … the Dem elites rolling in the dough and clinking glasses in their wine cave(s), while rolling out laws and regulations to keep the rest of us in austere/spartan lifestyle.
The next time Dems descend into their wine cave(s), could someone please fill in the shaft behind them?
i’m not cynical.
i’m experienced. 😉
What Even is a Wine Cave?
It’s where the Walmartian nouveau riche go to eat expensive rubbery chicken.
Of course Gavin Newsome has a wine cave; his extended family, including Nancy Pelosi, Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and the Gettys, have done very well for themselves in politics.
Unlike Sanders, whose main residence I understand is a pillar in the desert, and whose second home is humble barrel, overturned, on a Washington DC street.
He’s distantly related to Pelosi, but as far as I know the Gettys are merely family friends, and he has no relation to the Browns.
Nancy is not a blood relative. His aunt was married for a time to Paul Pelosi, Nancy’s brother in law.
Maybe Trump can bottle a wine commemorating the Dems loss in 2020.
“Chateau Defeat” … a very good vintage.
A bunch of winos …
Thanks to “ballot harvesting” and illegal aliens voting (aided by a healthy dose of good ol’ voter stupidity) crooks like Newsom and Pelosi are safe from the reach of the proles. Like any run-of-the-mill communist dictatorship the rich in the People’s Democratic Republic of California will continue to get richer. Meanwhile, you unfortunate inmates of the PDRC can laugh at their expense (before it becomes illegal):
Pelosi prays daily for Donald Trump but is withholding sending them to God.
Q: What is the difference between North Korea and the PDRC?
A: In a few years massive green energy projects will come online and the PDRC will have as much electricity as North Korea.
Other states use speed bumps and speed limit signs to get motorists to reduce speed; the PDRC uses potholes, traffic jams, ROAD CLOSED signs and a punishing gas tax.
Who says the PDRC isn’t a land of golden opportunity? An engineer graduated at the top of her class from UCLA, got a Silicon Valley tech job with a six-figure starting salary and a swanky cardboard box under a bridge to live in. In a year with stock options and a double-digit raise she will be able to afford food and gas.
There’s nothing wrong with ballot harvesting, if done honestly, and I’m not aware of any evidence that the Dems did it dishonestly. I suspect them of it, but only because it’s the sort of thing they would do given a chance, so it stands to reason they did. But regardless of any dishonest harvesting they may have done, the Dems got big gains from honest harvesting, simply because the Reps neglected to do it themselves. That’s hardly the Dems’ fault.
See this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s-9Q_N09H0
Video description links to a companion article at Red State.
You just made my point. That’s a video of ballot harvesting done honestly, and the worker (who has no reason to lie) says that’s how the Dem Party trained her to do it. If that’s how they trained all their workers then they did nothing wrong.
I suspect that the team of honest and earnest volunteers this woman was with was fielded as cover for a second team of hard-core ward heelers, who did their harvesting dishonestly. But I know of no evidence for this; my only reason for believing it is that it would be so easy to do that I can’t imagine the Dems not jumping at the chance.
I disagree with you about “honestly”.
The change to the law allowed voters to designate any person to hand deliver their ballots to the precinct by close of polling. The law was put in place ostensibly to help persons unable (seniors and disabled, etc.) to get to the polls or a mail box. “Designation” originates with the voter who chooses someone they trust to deliver their ballot.
One thing that struck me about that video, was ballot security. In other articles with photos of non-partisan ballot harvesters / collectors, they had portable secure ballot boxes. Not so the person on the RING video linked above. She was hand-carrying ballots unsecured. Did you notice the video was time-stamped (uploaded to YT) on October 16th? The election was November 6th. Where were those ballots kept for 3 weeks?
Is it honest to exploit the law other than it was intended / sold to the people? To tell the people it was designed to help “I’ll collect your ballot if you voted for the candidate I represent, otherwise grandma, you’re on your own?” At the very least, it’s an abuse of the law and provides NO ballot security. Privacy is also lost – because they made voters disclose the candidate they voted for by saying they’d only pick up for the Democrats. So much for voter privacy and secret ballots!
I’d call that not only dishonest, but unethical.
Your entire premise is wrong. This is how the law was intended to work. If you didn’t understand that at the time, that’s your fault, not anyone else’s. And why wouldn’t you understand it? What was obscure about it?
Yes, designation is made by the voter, and whom better to trust than a representative of the party she supports? And ballot security? What exactly are you worried about? Why on earth would a D worker want to tamper with D votes? I assume that for 3 weeks the ballots were in a box at D campaign headquarters. What’s the worst that can happen? They’ll lose them? If the Ds don’t have a problem with that why do you?
Your concern about privacy is also nonsense. There has never been privacy in the sense you want it. Ballot privacy exists only in the sense that the actual ballot paper is sealed in an envelope, and can’t be seen without steaming it open and then resealing it invisibly, which is difficult to do. So it is possible for a R voter to pretend to vote D in order to use D services, just as it always was; but most people don’t do that, because the same services are provided (or should be) by the R party, and also because both parties have a pretty good idea who’s likely to vote how and only target their own likely voters.
Think of how transporting voters to the polls has traditionally been a function of political campaigns, who of course only transport people they think will vote for them. Imagine a campaign where only the D campaign offers rides to the polls, and the R campaign doesn’t bother; would it be any wonder if this gave the Ds the margin of victory? Whose fault would that be?
I am afraid I am not in sympathy with your argument. The whole point of having ballots and voting located only in secure places is to allow monitoring to prevent fraud. Any political party or candidate can send poll monitors if they choose. Ballot harvesting makes monitoring very close to impossible, unless the cheaters either confess for some reason or get caught in the act (good luck with that).
Don’t you see that with ballot harvesting cheating is (relatively) easy and enforcement of ballot security is nearly impossible? If a tinpot dictator in a banana republic had his campaign workers dump a bunch of ballots in ballot boxes all over the country and say they came from voters unable to actually show up, we in the West would laugh our heads off at such obvious subterfuge. Ballot harvesting is legal in the PDRC, but it is absolutely insane and absurd.
It is true that Republicans could play the ballot harvesting game to try to level the playing field, but how long do you think it would be before the Democrat Party officials started harassing them? Some years ago I witnessed a blatant act of intimidation of a poll watcher by the city’s mayor and two of his toadys from the city’s legal department, who successfully browbeat the poll watcher into leaving despite the protestations of the election judge that she did nothing wrong. The poll watcher – the wife of a city council candidate – was legally allowed to be there. All she had to do was sign an affidavit requiring her to not handle the ballots that had been cast, not do anything to disrupt the voting process, and not campaign within a certain distance of the entrance to the polls (happily, her candidate husband won and became a much-needed thorn in the side of the mayor). Now just imagine ballot harvesters from the GOP – a minority party in the PDRC – facing the wrath of a well funded Democrat machine. How many would agree to participate after a few well-advertised cases of harassment, even if no charges get filed?
First of all, if you’d bothered reading what I wrote instead of mindlessly attacking it, you’d have seen that I wrote that allowing ballot harvesting makes cheating easy, and that I’m concerned the Ds did in fact cheat, even though I know of no evidence for it. The video that circulated at the time, and that was linked above, shows how harvesting is supposed to work. That is not cheating at all. If every D harvester worked like that then we should congratulate them on their surprising and admirable honesty. But I suspect that they didn’t.
Second, what on earth are you talking about, with “campaign workers dump a bunch of ballots in ballot boxes all over the country and say they came from voters unable to actually show up”? Do you really not understand what the topic is? These are ordinary postal votes, such as have always been available, and are available in most democracies. Each ballot is in a secure envelope, signed by the voter who cast it, and it’s not opened until it is verified that the voter is eligible and has not already voted.
There are only really two methods of cheating with postal votes. One is to apply for votes in the names of people who you estimate will probably not bother to vote themselves, intercept the ballots before they get to the voter and fill them in yourself, and then send them in. For this you don’t need harvesting; you can easily take them to the nearest letter box yourself. This is a time-honored method of cheating, used historically by both parties.
Harvesting opens the door to a second method of cheating: You collect genuine votes from everyone willing to entrust you with them, try to ascertain which ones are for your side and which for the opposition, and destroy those ones instead of delivering or mailing them. For this to work you don’t tell people you’re only collecting Dem votes. On the contrary, you want to collect as many Rep votes as you can, so you can destroy them. The worker in the video, who was trained only to collect Dem votes, is doing the exact opposite of that. If all the votes she collects are Dem, and she’s a Dem, then there’s no way she can cheat.
Plenty of room and spirits for the homeless.
Lead a bunch of homeless to one hosting newsome, that would be a hoot.
Gov. Gavin Nutcase – the man who has his hair styled at Jiffy Lube.
Gavin Newsom said he stopped drinking when he was Mayor, after he arrived at the hospital dead drunk, to see an officer who had been shot, and after he had a drunken in office affair with the wife of his best friend and campaign manager . But a few years ago he said he started drinking wine again. He looks more red eyed and disheveled these days.
Funny – the unfortunate proles of the People’s Democratic Republic of California have the same disheveled haunted look. I wonder why….
Wow, some basic common sense evinced by greasy-coiffed Newsom, here, bemoaning the fact that his Dhimmi-crat peers love to vilify Americans based on their professional success and wealth.
The guys sounds like a rational Republican, in this moment.