Picking Day: Pinot Noir

The Pinot Noir grapes got ripe when they got ripe. 

There is wisdom in patience, but I don't have it. The longer the grapes are on the vine, the more that can go wrong. Birds. Rain. Frost. Hail. Mildew.

I am thrilled to be picking today.

The parts of the vines that were still putting up new growth when we had the frosts a week ago turned brown and curled, which is why the top of the canopy looks different from the middle. The top is brown, the middle is green. The wind machines worked for three days last week trying to keep the temperature above 31 so that the leaves would stay alive and could keep sending carbohydrates to the grapes. It partially worked. The goal wasn’t just sweetness; it was ripeness.

A crew will start at 7 a.m. today.

The netting protected the grapes from starlings. I have seen swooping murmurations this year, but so far little damage. A neighbor used up a box of shotgun shells blasting away at the starlings this past weekend. They have discovered our side-by-side vineyards. He frightens them, and they fly away, but return. He said he fired one shot into the tall tree next to the vineyard and eight birds fell. In another context I would be sympathetic to the birds, but not now, not here. They want my crop and I want to protect it. We are in a competition. I would have an animal-lover’s live-and-let-live attitude if they were eating blackberries or anything else besides my crop. I don’t hate the starlings; it isn’t personal. I am in the most ancient and fundamental of struggle: a fight with another species over a resource. I have hardened my heart. The grapes are mine.

Today, amid the back-to-back-to-back commercials for candidates, I will likely see a heart-wrenching ad seeking donations for starving animals. I will feel sorry for them, which is the point of the ad. Meanwhile I am happy my nets are up and that my neighbor scares starlings with a credible threat of death. Some animals I want to feed; others I want not to feed. Irony is not dead.

We are in an era where my mixed-emotion sympathy for the birds may come across as lacking the testosterone-infused warrior spirit that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says is the proper way to approach battle. If I encounter a bird trapped in the net later this morning, and it is frantic, trying to escape, should I let it go? Should I wring its neck? Should I kill it and hang it on a T-post as a trophy and warning to its fellows in the flock? Hegseth would have the public display: It would be deterrence and a display of triumph. Achilles dragged the body of Hector behind his chariot. Achilles did not need a testosterone boost. But even the gods who favored the Greek side were offended by his disrespect to the vanquished Hector, and Achilles came to grief.

(I will let the bird escape. The nets did their work. I am trying to protect a crop, not get vengeance.)

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Give Republicans back their spines

In their hearts, Republican officeholders know Trump is corrupt, foolish, autocratic, and dangerous. 

They know it. They just can't admit it.

Yet.

Republican candidates and officeholders tolerate his behavior because Trump has the power to engineer their defeat in a primary election. This November's midterm election is an opportunity to send a message to those officeholders that it is time to rediscover their sense of right and wrong. 

The way to do that is to lose their elections.

I wrote on Saturday that Christine Drazan, the Republican candidate for governor of Oregon, made a powerful argument for her election. She advertised that she wouldn’t have the power to enact MAGA/Trump policies, so Democrats and Independents can vote for her without fear. Some readers thought that meant I considered it was harmless to vote for her. I do not.

It is best for our country if she loses her election amid a nationwide Trump purge. The more thorough Trump’s rejection, the more courage Republican officeholders would have to begin asserting their own values. I start with the premise that most Republican officeholders are not as corrupt as Trump, so surely some of them are disgusted by his open grift and corruption. Surely some of them oppose our choice to support Russia in its war with Ukraine. Surely some oppose his abuse of democratic process. They would not tolerate a Democrat acting as Trump does. Maybe they would find courage to put brakes on Trump these final two years.

Oregon’s gubernatorial contest is the outlier in the nation’s Democratic shift, with polls suggesting that this may be the one major race in the country where there is no blueward shift. A Drazan win could be interpreted in a way that confounds the lesson the country needs to learn. It could be thought to mean that Trump’s problem was that the Trump era lasted too long. Trump has been at the center of national politics for 11 years. Oregon Democrats have controlled the governorship for almost four decades. Oregon governor Tina Kotek’s loss could be interpreted as voter fatigue with a party in control for too long.

That is an inadequate lesson, but Republicans might jump to it. It shifts blame away from the people who need to learn a harder lesson. Political parties look for easy excuses to avoid confronting a fundamental policy and moral failure. Democratic Party leaders said the real problem in 2024 was that Kamala Harris did not have time to sell herself, and besides, her loss was due to a worldwide inflation problem; no need to rethink anything. In fact, the 2024 election revealed a profound misjudgment in allowing Biden to hide his health status -- the Democratic Big Lie -- and the party’s inability to confront its own interest groups sufficiently to deal with a broken immigration system.

I don’t want Republicans to decide that the real problem was one of Trump being on stage too long. The problem is that Trump is obscenely corrupt, that he has damaged our democracy, and that he has made disastrous foreign policy mistakes in his treatment of trade, alliances, and decisions to go to war. Trump’s policies directly hurt Oregon, especially our nationally recognized Oregon Health Plan. The Portland Metro Chamber admitted that Trump’s H.R. 1 would remove 200,000 Oregonians from the Oregon Health Plan. Trump’s errors and crimes became his party’s shared responsibility because, top to bottom, Republican officeholders and candidates don’t dare speak up to oppose this. Oregon’s one Republican U.S. Rep., Cliff Bentz, was a critical vote in favor of it.

A big election loss is a learning opportunity. Is it fair that candidates like Drazan and Republican state Senate candidate Brad Hicks lose elections because of the undertow brought about by President Trump? I think it is fair and necessary. Their silence enables Trump. They are part of the problem.

If Drazan and Hicks win election, Trump wins. Trump is validated. Silence is validated. It is better for the country if Trump loses. That means Drazan and Hicks need to lose, too.

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Easy Sunday: Save the country..

"Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colours
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away."
        Paul Simon, Kodachrome, 1973

It was another No Kings rally.

But the memories go back 60 years. I have done this before. So have many of my fellow demonstrators.

I have been scolded by readers for observing and describing something that is both true and obvious: The participants at No Kings rallies skew old. There are people of all ages, of course, including some young people, but there are a lot of people more or less my age. I had a mission now, to express my discontent with our national leadership. I had a second mission, to circle back to memories of my youth.





Why not? My hair is gray now, and this time I am carrying a sign.




There were thousands of us on the sidewalks and in Hawthorne Park:

And then there is this one. Possibly these young people are simply doing the explorations of youth, trying out being outrageous, trying to get a rise out of the crowd of old fogies. Perhaps they are provocateurs placed by the local GOP. Perhaps they are the leading edge of a new era in the U.S., but I think not. I think it is more likely that in 60 years, if they are alive and well, that they will remember this moment with nostalgic fondness, imagining their daring as a kind of heroism, as described in that Robert Frost poem:

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."








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Drazan tells Oregonians not to worry

Drazan: I can’t hurt you. I’m outvoted. So elect me.

It is the strangest darned thing: The Republican candidate for governor’s strongest case consists of saying she cannot fulfill the aspirations of her party or her own past votes, so it is safe for Democrats to vote for her.

This argument might succeed.

Republican candidate Christine Drazan's branding is summarized in this ad. Republicans are spending a lot of money to run an ad that says she won’t, and can’t, carry out Republican policies.

Click: 30 seconds

Here is the text:

You’ve probably seen a lot of me lately, grainy pictures, creepy music. So here’s the thing: I’m not going to ban abortions, I’m not going to get rid of the Oregon Health Plan, I will never let D.C. run us over. But we are going to make life here more affordable, freeze utility rates, and bring standards back to our schools. I’m running for governor because I love this place. I want to fix what’s broken. I want to feel proud of our home. Let’s get our Oregon back.

Drazan is telling Oregonians not to worry that she could implement Republican policies. The Oregon legislature will still have a Democratic majority, so she won’t be able to enact the abortion bans we read about in Idaho and other red states. The GOP has repeatedly tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and Republicans passed the Big Beautiful Bill, which would push tens of thousands of Oregonians off the Oregon Health Plan. But she won’t fight the legislature’s effort to keep nearly all Oregonians insured.

Moreover, she has said elsewhere that she cannot overturn Oregon’s sanctuary law on her own. That law is another Republican point of attack on Oregon. She has said publicly the thing a Republican cannot admit and still be appointed to a judgeship or a cabinet post: Biden won the 2020 election. She accepts that vote-by-mail is the law in Oregon.

Democrats fear that any Republican governor will get a version of the call Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state, insisting that she, through some pretext, “find 11,780 votes,” or whatever number is necessary in Oregon to reverse an election outcome. But rest easy: Oregon governors don’t have the power to change a vote count. That call would need to go to Oregon’s secretary of state, Democrat Tobias Read, who would surely refuse.

Her argument embeds a premise: Oregon has Democrats in too many key places for it to become a MAGA state. That holds even though she and other Republicans have a track record of supporting issue after issue that would, were they in the majority, produce MAGA policies. She isn’t defending her own positions, nor MAGA’s. She is arguing for moderating a state that is too blue. The theme is bringing back balance, not power.

The ad has two powerful things going for it. First, unlike the Republican ads we see locally, both for Drazan’s campaign and for state Senate candidate Brad Hicks, it doesn’t use the ugly-photo, creepy-music technique. It mocks the technique, a welcome relief. Second, simple truth is powerful and persuasive in a political ad because the genre runs to crude exaggeration. It is true that Drazan will not have the power to turn Oregon red, gerrymander Oregon, cancel elections, dismantle the Oregon Health Plan, outlaw drugs like misoprostol, eliminate environmental laws, ban unions, fast-track data centers on farmland, or act on whatever other back-of-the-mind worries Oregonians have about Republican power in the era of Trump.

Democrats have held the governor’s office for nearly four decades. There is restlessness in the political air. Drazan is trying to look like change with a safety net. All she can really do is moderate the Democrats a little. Nothing to worry about.

I don’t welcome her winning, but I think her message will find traction with frustrated voters, likely a majority of them. Voters may decide it is safe to experiment with a vote for a Republican, Trump notwithstanding. As long as the legislature stays blue, she can’t do too much damage.

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Brad Hicks or Denise Krause: Who started the negative campaigning?

So the campaign turned into a slugfest. 

Does it matter who started it?

Hicks went on TV and lied about negative ads, so I will set the record straight.

KOBI5: Click here

KOBI5 Interviewer: "How has this campaign been between the two of you?"

HICKS: "Well, I'd like to apologize to Southern Oregon on behalf of my opponent, who went negative very early. Uh, I don't like negative campaigning, we've tried to stay above that fray. If you will, uh, um, but I guess that's a sign of desperation, but I, I don't know what you call it. I wish it were cleaner. Um, but, uh, I guess it speaks to our individual personalities. Uh, I like living here and I want people to still say hello to me at the grocery store, so we're trying to keep it clean as much as we can and, uh, uh, we'll leave the dirty stuff to our opponent."

Perhaps Hicks thinks we are blind, deaf, and stupid. "Stay above the fray?" Who are you kidding, Brad? We see your ads!

I don't mind negative ads when they are completely truthful. Criticism of a candidate can expose foolish and unpopular policies. It is part of the self-correcting process of democracy. If a policy or belief is easy to ridicule and makes the candidate look bad, maybe the candidate should change positions. I see negative ads from both Hicks and Krause about every 15 minutes during news shows. Hicks's line, "We'll leave the dirty stuff to our opponent," is laughable in its dishonesty. So Trump-like in its projection.

This campaign is built around a simple truth: Brad Hicks is a Republican. Denise Krause is a Democrat.

 Hicks's problem is that some Republican positions are unpopular. Krause's campaign hammers on those positions. Her ads seem negative because she presses her case: 

-- Most Oregonians support women's right to abortion. 

 -- Most Oregonians like our vote-by-mail system, which Trump has bullied Republicans into trying to change. 

 -- Most Oregonians support the Oregon Health Plan and don't want the Medicaid cuts congressional Republicans enacted, cuts that will cause tens of thousands of Oregonians to lose their insurance. That will leave them at risk of medical bankruptcy and push local hospitals into financial crisis when uninsured patients cannot pay their bills. 

-- Most Oregonians don't like what tariffs have done to gasoline and grocery prices. (As a grower of wine grapes, I most certainly don't like how tariffs have damaged our export markets.) 

Trump is a drag on Republican candidates, but Hicks says nothing to defend Oregon. Krause points that out.

As a Democrat, Krause carries the baggage of long-time Democratic governance in Salem. She is not an incumbent herself, but she has not openly criticized Gov. Tina Kotek, the Oregon Legislature, or her union supporters. Hicks has openings to challenge Krause on issues, but he isn't using them. We aren't learning what he would do differently, and the public is worse off for that. 

Hicks said Krause started the negative ads. No. That is a lie. There is a record. 

No negative TV ads by either candidate ran before September 13. Until then, the ads had been introductory and feel-good: Krause fighting the insurance company and cancer, Hicks assuring us he was a work-across-the-aisle kind of guy. 

On the afternoon of September 13, I saw an advance copy of the first negative TV spot. But on September 8, five days earlier, I received a copy of this door hanger. It had been left on a voter's screen door. It was the first negative ad: "Paid for by Hicks for Senate." 

 

A comparison piece is not necessarily unfair or dishonest, but this one is. It starts with a manipulated, dark-toned photo of Krause with her mouth agape. It calls her an "extremist"; she is, in fact, a perfectly normal Democrat, in no way extreme. It calls her a "rubber stamp," with no basis; she hasn't rubber-stamped anything. It says she will answer to "politicians and special interests." Who says? She hasn't cast a single vote. And the piece practices guilt by association, citing not what Hicks has any reason to think Krause believes, but what third parties in an organization that endorsed her believe.

The door hanger is no better or worse than the ads we see on TV now. It uses the same smear techniques. 

Hicks has filled mailboxes and airwaves doing exactly what he looked right into the camera and claimed he is too good to do.

Spare me the self-righteous, hypocritical dishonesty. "Above the fray." What a crock.

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A tiny piece of good news about Trump corruption

     “No, she wasn’t a member of my family. She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago. She went to Greece, she was doing a good job, but we didn't like what we were reading.  I didn't speak with her, no. She will, uh I didn't like what I read."

Trump comments to reporters on Kimberly Guilfoyle

Kimberly Guilfoyle: terminated as U.S. Ambassador to Greece

We should accept this moment with a good and generous spirit.

Trump corruption has limits.

I share the dismay many readers feel that America has reset its standards of corruption so low that open, proud pay-for-play grift, crypto meme-coin bribery, and pardons-for-donations are tolerated by the congressional maority.  How could we sink so low?

And am I now writing that we should see Trump’s preposterous effort to distance himself from Guilfoyle as something good? Yes.

The fact that Guilfoyle lived with Trump’s son, Don Jr., and was engaged to him, in a relationship that lasted six years and ended only in 2024, makes Trump’s distancing an even more heroic lie. Trump is normally a confident, rapid-fire liar. He appears to believe what he says while he is saying it. It is part of his persuasiveness. The idea in circulation to explain this phenomenon is that Trump doesn’t lie; he truly believes obviously untrue things, then speaks his mind.

His claim that Guilfoyle was some remote stranger was so obvious a lie that he couldn’t get the words out cleanly, by his usual standard. He fumbled. It means Trump has a conscience -- yet more good news.

There is a limit to Trump’s corruption. Family members are exempt, of course, but Guilfoyle was near-family, and she remains a fierce loyalist. She was careless in her grift. There were guilty words in texts. She was either running a shakedown, because she had some knowledge of bad behavior by the favor-seeker, or simply peddling influence without a sufficient cover story. 

Trump avoids putting things in writing, and he always has a pretext ready. His pay-to-play dealmaking has the cover of an “investment” in crypto coins. That was plausible enough that thousands of gullible Trump supporters sent money to get in on the bonanza. They were the suckers. They lost money. The big-money players, the smart money, had no illusions. They knew it was a bribe, not an investment. Their reward was a seat at the dinner party, where Trump could acknowledge their deposit in his favor bank.  

Guilfoyle’s firing is not, however, simply a failing grade in grift-craft. Nor, I think, is it simply a failing grade on the look required in the Trump orbit — her garish plastic surgery having given her the “Mar-a-Lago face” that mangled her appearance and casts shade on the Mar-a-Lago brand. Trump did, in fact, set a boundary. He does not want open grift by non-family loyalists. 

It means something that he does not openly embrace the grift brand. That was in dispute. One could argue that he saw getting money from selling influence as a positive, a sign of dominance — proof that Trump is not a trustee of an office owned by the public, but rather the country’s de facto owner, free to take what he wants. Trump personally takes what he wants. That is established. It was uncertain how far Trump could delegate personal enrichment.

We got the beginning of an answer, a boundary: not as far as Guilfoyle.

In the months ahead we will see other boundaries tested to establish how Trump manages enrichment for an umbra that includes White House staff, cabinet members, major donors, friends of donors, and others. We already know that Republican politicians are “protected” IF they are 100 percent loyal. We saw that scandal-plagued George Santos and Ken Paxton are protected. Guilfoyle now joins former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in being cast out. We learn who can enrich themselves by inference. Like Trump himself, close family and in-laws can do anything. Very wealthy friends appear to be in the protected class, if loyal. Presidential appointees are a mixed case, requiring more definition. Kash Patel is in, for now. Males have more latitude than females.

The fact that there is any boundary is a positive. Trump is establishing a standard for acceptable corruption, the standard of old Tammany Hall: “honest graft.” 

At least it isn’t a free-for-all.

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The ghost of Lindsey Graham must be furious

The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 passed with large, bipartisan majorities, and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on September 18, 2026.

This week Trump broke the letter and spirit of the law with a deal for Russia to release 36 million barrels of diesel into the world market.

Russia is supplying Iran with intelligence and weapons that target American soldiers. We are helping finance the war against ourselves.

It sounds crazy. Is Trump is really doing this? He is.

Maybe there is something in it for the Trump family, some deal with Lukoil. Maybe it is wordless signaling, a way to show Ukraine that notwithstanding the Lindsey Graham Act, Trump supports Russia in its war with Ukraine, so Ukraine should give up. Maybe it is political theater to show American buyers of diesel that Trump will do anything to lower the cost of diesel, including financing our enemy.

It is still the oil era. My age cohort left college and graduate school in the early 1970s to experience as adults the disruptions of the first big oil shock. I remember struggling to buy enough gasoline to travel round trip from New Haven to Boston for a weekend. The gasoline stations were out of gas and closed on Sundays. As an aide to U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver (D-OR) in 1977, I staffed a booth at county fairs explaining the congressman's bold proposal that we barter with Middle East oil kingdoms a one-for-one deal: a bushel of wheat for a barrel of oil. The commodities had been at parity, each about three dollars, a price Americans considered fair. But in 1977 oil now cost us $12/barrel. Weaver was a Democrat with a good feel for a populist issue: demand parity. In the 1970s, the nationalist animosity against Middle East countries was not religious or cultural. The fact that they were Muslim was a non-issue. American voters were angry that they had economic leverage and were extorting us. What an outrage! I was young and learning politics.

College classmate Erich Almasy has his own history with oil, and he shares it in this guest post. He attended Harvard Business School, then joined a management consultancy. He was young and learning the oil industry.

Erich Almasy, with Gulf logowear added

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

I spent several years consulting for GORAM (Gulf Oil Refining and Marketing), based in Houston, Texas. It was 1978, five years after the world had gone through the first energy dislocation. Following the Yom Kippur War and the United States’ support for Israel, the leading oil countries of OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) embargoed oil to the United States, and prices quadrupled from $3 to $12 per barrel. OPEC had formed in 1960 as a cartel of oil-producing nations: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, but OAPEC was specific to Arabian producers. Most of these were allies of the United States, but they joined to cut production and embargo oil, resulting in long lines at American gas pumps. At that time, the United States imported roughly 30 percent of its oil, most of it from the Middle East. 

Gulf Oil had been created in 1901 to market output from the Spindletop oilfield in Beaumont, Texas, and was headquartered in Pittsburg because the Mellon family controlled it. Throughout the 1930s, Gulf invested in oil fields in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Venezuela. By the 1940s, Gulf was recognized as one of the Seven Sisters, the world’s leading oil companies, which included British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, three former Standard Oil companies, Texaco, and Gulf. The cost of oil from Gulf’s holdings was estimated at 20 to 50 cents per barrel. The company’s strategy was to “monetize” oil in whatever way possible by refining the liquid gold into anything that would sell: asphalt, heating oil, kerosene (jet fuel), diesel, and gasoline. Gulf Oil had gas stations in all 50 states until 1973.

My consulting role was to evaluate GORAM’s strategy since it was now harder just to make money by maximizing production. Value-added was now the key. To start, I received a primer on how oil is turned into derivative products, a process somewhat misleadingly called distillation. Crude oil pumped out of the ground derives from fossilized organic remains that were subjected to pressure over millions of years. There is no single chemical formula, but generally it is represented as a complex hydrocarbon of C85H15. Heat and/or a catalyst can break the carbon-hydrogen bonds into several component parts. At the refinery, crude oil is heated to temperatures ranging from 950°F to 1400°F. The heated oil can be partially broken up by a catalyst, usually a form of zeolite, a naturally occurring aluminum compound that breaks ionic chains. Catalysts don’t change what happens, but they reduce the heat needed and thus the cost of refining.

The heated oil ascends up a “cracking” or “fractionating” steel tower with outlets at prescribed intervals. At the bottom are the heaviest compounds (technical term: “sludge”), used for asphalt and road paving. At the top of the column are the lightest compounds, such as butane. In between are heating oil, kerosene (jet fuel), diesel, and gasoline. These are called derivatives, or distillates, and because they all come from the same crude oil input, their costs are inextricably linked through a concept called byproduct costing. Thus, their price depends on market value rather than direct cost. Also, because you cannot make one without the other, the relative amounts produced during cracking determine supply. If the market demands only so much diesel fuel but wants more gasoline, then diesel must be in surplus. For Texas oil refiners, this diesel was sold in foreign export markets. By banning diesel exports, Trump is trying to defy the laws of both oil production and supply and demand. It doesn’t work that way.

My work with Gulf extended over six years and focused on finding alternative markets within the constraints of the crude type and production process. During the 1940s and 50s, Gulf Oil ranked in the middle of the world's oil companies. By 1973, it produced and refined roughly 3 million barrels of oil per day, about 5 percent of world output. In 1975, Kuwait nationalized its oil business, and Gulf Oil’s reserves dropped dramatically. By 1984, Gulf was an easy target, and lax antitrust oversight by the Reagan administration allowed Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California) to purchase the company.






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