As of December 17th, 2024, Fingers has migrated to Beehiiv, and is no longer operating on the Substack platform. For more on this decision, click here.

If you found this post, and want to read my independent journalism about drinking in America, please subscribe here:

Subscribe

If you’ve got questions, reach out anytime: dave@dinfontay.com.

• City Brewery is on the verge of bankruptcy;

• Full Glass acquired two more DtC wine platforms;

• Suntory Global Spirits did a round of layoffs;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

The Kroger Company, the country’s fifth-largest grocer and one of its most influential buyers of beverage alcohol, had a very bad day in courts yesterday. That’s right: “courts,” plural. At issue was the firm’s troubled $24.6-billion mega-merger with rival Albertsons, and after a pair of unfavorable rulings out of the Pacific Northwest on Tuesday afternoon, that deal—the largest ever proposed in the $1.5-trillion American grocery industry—suddenly has a whole lot more issues.

Because of its massive implications for future of American booze retail, Fingers has closely covered the Kroger-Albertsons merger from the week it was proposed in October 2022. There have been dozens of twists and turns in the two grinding years since, and I’m not going to get into them all here out of respect for your attention span and/or sanity, but the upshot is that the attorneys general of Washington and Colorado and the Federal Trade Commission all filed suits to kibosh Kroger’s would-be tie-up with Albertsons, arguing that it’d be bad for shoppers and workers.

The firms in question, of course disagree with that evaluation, claiming the deal will help them actually lower prices through economies of scale/synergies/etc., but independent industry experts have mostly pegged it as a stinker from the jump. There’s a reason Kroger’s stock price jumped after the 2024 presidential election last month, and it’s not because Wall Street believes Donald Trump is good at saying the word “groceries.”1

Anyway: two of the three lawsuits against the Kroger-Albertsons merger hit milestones yesterday within hours of each other. First, a federal judge in US District Court in Portland, Oregon, ruled in the FTC’s favor, agreeing that the deal was unduly anticompetitive and Kroger’s proposed spinoffs were bullshit. (“There is ample evidence that the divestiture is not sufficient in scale to adequately compete” is how the Honorable Adrienne Nelson put it.) Less than two hours later, a King County Superior Court judge dealt the deal another blow, ruling that a “colossus of a merged Kroger and Albertsons” would violate Washington State’s antitrust laws and couldn’t be permitted.

This is good news for grocery customers and workers (to the extent that these cohorts are distinct from one another, at least), who stood to be gouged by the proposed entity’s consolidated pricing power on products and labor, respectively. “FTC Chair Lina Khan is showing what it looks like for the government to work for working people,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren posted on Bluesky following the first ruling.2 In a press release issued last night, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 called the rulings “a huge win for tens of thousands of grocery workers and millions of customers across the nation.”

It’s also almost certainly good news for smaller beverage-alcohol brands.

Read more

• Molson Coors bought another craft brewery, lol;

• Duckhorn and Duck Pond are in a legal flap;

• Stoli’s US subsidiaries went bust after a geopolitical cyberattack;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

There’s a chill in the air and Mariah Carey’s soprano on the breeze. Thanksgiving is in the rearview mirror, and the Days of Nog approacheth. It’s time once again for Fingers’ Bad Holiday Gift Guide for Heavy-Drinking Frenemies™.

Now in its fifth (!!!) running,1 the boozeletter’s annual shortlist of sipping-related schlock has distinguished itself in the halls of drinks-industry public relations firms as the least-desirable press placement of the holiday season. Maybe? I don’t know. Anyway, previous installments of Fingers’ Bad Holiday Gift Guide for Heavy-Drinking Frenemies™ (BHGGfH-DF™) have featured such embarrassing and/or obscene items as:

• “Let’s Go Brandon” .50-caliber bullet bottle-openers for your Facebook aunt who abruptly stopped talking about January 6th, 2021 for… reasons;

• Tesla tequila tumblers for the coworker who recently bought a Twitter Blue subscription;

• A shot-dispensing Shotfun™️ shotgun for aspiring boogaloo bois;

And so much more. This year, I hope to once again assemble a roster of the best bad gifts to give the various familiar (but, for legal reasons, totally fictional) shitheads in your life. For example: what do you get a flatbrim Barstool dad who already has all the Blanton’s stoppers?

To answer such questions, I need your help, Fingers Fam. Comments are open to both free and paid subscribers, so drop links to the worst fucking drinks-related giftables you’ve seen this year:

Leave a comment

I encourage you to check out BHGGfH-DF™ 2023, 2022 and 2021 for inspiration. Editorial guidelines here are loose: I’m looking for absurd, self-important, corny, and otherwise irritating drinking ephemera; I am not looking for actual alcohol, or whiskey stones, which are so foundational to this exercise by now that they’re basically just the “free” square in Bingo.2 You can do better (worse), Fingers Fam, I just know it.

As ever, strong preference will be given to Blue Lives Matter flotsam, “let them drink Veuve”-esque baubles, and products that shamelessly pander to The Troops™️. Once I’ve got a good working list of bad gifts, I’ll winnow it down to only the most dismal junk, and invent terrible people that you should give them to. Get thee to the comments:

Leave a comment

To any flacks reading this who take umbrage with the premise of the BHGGfH-DF™, please remember that this is all for fun and nothing is personal. Unless your client makes the list, in which case, it’s very personal, and maybe even your fault, too. Don’t email me about it!

📬 Good post alert

Thank you to Friend of Fingers Rob F. for sending me this good post. If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email, or a DM on Bluesky or Instagram.

🎧 How Four Corners crafted a Big Beer buyback

George Esquivel is the co-founder of Four Corners Brewing Company in Dallas, Texas. He joined Taplines this week to talk about selling his brewery to Constellation Brands, spending five years within the belly of Big Beer's Golden Beast, then retaking control of his brewery to go independent again in 2023. It's a rare perspective that only a few brewers across the country have, and Esquivel graced us with rare candor when telling his tale.

Check out the video above if you like to watch your podcasts, or find it on your preferred platform here. Don’t forget to subscribe so new episodes show up directly in your feed!

📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.)

The biggest travel week of the year is upon us once again. Your fearless Fingers editor is thankful to be staying put for the Thanksgiving holiday, but if you’re on the move, you’re going to need something to distract you from our nation’s decaying transit infrastructure and/or the sights, sounds, and smells of your fellow traveling wretches. May I suggest some podcasts?

For the listening pleasure of paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve added some additional episodes to the already-substantial Fingers Holiday Podcast Playlist, pushing it well north of 24 hours’ worth of archival interviews from Taplines and The Fingers Podcast. Tune in for thoughtful, in-depth, off-the-wall conversations about the Light Beer Wars, the labor movement, and so much more. Hope they make your travels a little less painful this holiday week!

Read more

• New Belgium’s “total beverage” transformation is inevitable;

• Former owners of a Napa custom crush got stiffed by its PE buyer;

• Constellation Brands execs sold off a bunch of shares after the election;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

One of the less glamorous aspects of Prohibition was that a lot of people got poisoned by bunk booze. As historian Dan Okrent wrote in his 2010 history Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (emphasis mine throughout):

Derelicts were poisoning themselves before Prohibition with alcohol of less than vintage quality […] But Prohibition stimulated the avarice of low-grade bootleggers, who extended their inventory of repurposed industrial alcohol with the addition of wood alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, and other toxic compounds, turning reports of paralysis and death into a newspaper staple.

Naturally, these consequences disproportionately befell the poor wretches who couldn’t afford Al Capone’s mark-ups on Sammy Bronfman’s fine Canadian liquors. In fact, to some of the more zealous Drys on the national scene, this was a feature, not a bug.1 Pretty fucked up?

Toxic drink hasn’t really been much of “a thing” in the US in the intervening century since Repeal. Despite its many well-documented ills, the country’s patchwork of state and federal alcohol regulations are actually fairly good at keeping actual poison out of the marketplace.2 You can see why beverage-alcohol firms would embrace this type of regulation, too. For one thing, it kneecaps (ahem) organized crime, and turns millions of home-cooking “competitors” into customers, clearing the board for commodification and consolidation. At a more basic level, it also ensures the American drinking public remains confident enough that their drinks won’t blind them to keep drinking.

This month, right after voters chose the presidential candidate that has promised to destroy the federal regulatory state, we got a a vision of what the American drinking public will lose if Trump 2.0 succeeds where Trump 1.0 failed.

Read more

• Molson Coors ate $41.1 million just to get out of craft beer;

• Deutsch Family learned the wrong lesson from Josh Cellars’ virality;

• Is anybody getting whupped by destocking harder than Rémy Cointreau?;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

Around 2:45am last Wednesday, once it became clear that Donald Trump had the 2024 presidential election in the bag, Dana White took the stage at Mar-a-Lago to get the party started. The Ultimate Fighting Championship’s head honcho delivered half a minute of praise for Trump’s resilience, work ethic and other character traits that he very obviously doesn’t possess. Then White moved on to some shoutouts to “manosphere” entertainers in his inner circle that he considered integral to the former president’s reelection.

That list ended with “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” because of course it did. But the very first people White thanked from the Mar-a-Lago stage last week, with newly minted president-elect looking approvingly over his shoulder and the cameras beaming him around the world, were the Nelk Boys. The YouTube edgelords-turned-GOP darlings had made it to the inner sanctum. And they brought their shockingly successful hard seltzer brand, Happy Dad, with them.

I’ve been tracking the Nelk Boys’ ascent descent to MAGA royalty since March 2022, when Trump appeared on their podcast, Full Send. The episode would quickly become notorious when YouTube pulled it down for violating its guidelines about misinformation about the 2020 election, but what caught my eye was the 12-pack of Happy Dad hard seltzer placed conspicuously in frame. It’s not uncommon for influencers to try to leverage their online popularity by launching beverage-alcohol brands, but it’s a rare influencer that’s able to place their own flavored malt beverage on the elbow of the former president of the United States. I began looking into the relationship, filing an initial report that spring, and additional items ever since.

Now, two years removed from that first podcast episode, and one week removed from the 2024 election, I think it’s important to put it all together. At the nexus of the Nelk Boys, White, and Trump are millions of Zyn-popping frat bros, heavily armed Punisher-misunderstanders, and other too-online jamokes slamming Happy Dad and getting angry about “the border.” They’re mostly anonymous chuds, but some of them are very famous and powerful chuds, like conservative reactionary Caitlyn Jenner, former Fox News demagogue Tucker Carlson, and Nazi-humping welfare queen Elon Musk. Here’s how together, they helped reelect Trump.

For those lucky enough to still be unfamiliar: the Nelk Boys are a collective of dudes who do pranks and objectify women for tens of millions of views each month on their main channel, which boasts 8.25 million subscribers. In 2021, the Nelk Boys launched Happy Dad, a hard seltzer in a standard 12-ounce beer can meant to differentiate it from the “skinny can bullshit” of segment leaders White Claw and Truly.

That’s a very thin reed upon which to hang an upstart brand in a crowded segment that was then beginning to plateau, but with Nelk’s media machine behind it, and legions of opted-in young drinkers clamoring for Nelk, Happy Dad has done very, very well. It’s a top-five hard seltzer brand nationwide, and has recently begun showing up in Circana scan-data snapshots of the top 25 brands across all beer in some channels. Sophisticated, experienced firms like Boston Beer Company don’t know whether to shit or go blind in the now-struggling hard-seltzer market, but Happy Dad and its interloping founders are thriving.

It’s impossible to say how much of that success is due to Nelk Boys’ Trump-ward lurch (which began in 2020 with a ride on the recently ousted president’s plane), but I think it’s helped. In 2022, I argued that embracing the former president’s conspiracy-addled worldview gave Happy Dad a lane to a customer that mainstream brands simply couldn’t reach:

This is a longstanding tradition on the American right wing, and hard seltzer, as an ahistorical, premium-priced beverage that’s relatively inexpensive to make and carries no cultural baggage, is an ideal product for aspiring 20-something hucksters like the Nelk Boys to hawk to an impressionable young audience already thirsty for line-stepping, anti-PC troll theater. In other words, if Happy Dad succeeds long-term, it won’t be in spite of the group’s decision to cozy up with Donald Trump and tweet endorsements from Alex Jones—it’ll be, at least in part, because of it.

Two years later, the opposite has also proven true. Whether the UFC’s White, a conservative star in his own right who would go on to sign a $100-million deal to be Anheuser-Busch InBev’s anti-woke henchman in 2023, then introduce Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2024, orchestrated the 2022 interview to help the fuckboys, the felon, or both isn’t clear. But whatever prominence with MAGA drinkers the Nelk Boys gained for Happy Dad by simping for a lifelong teetotaler in Trump, they would also repay in spades once the 2024 presidential campaign began in earnest.

They rose together, in a sense: the brand, up the hard-seltzer sales charts; the election-denier, in popularity with the the young male mouth-breathers he’d need to return to the White House. In March 2023, Happy Dad muscled its way into the top 10 bestselling hard seltzers in the country. The following month, a freshly indicted Trump ran into the Nelk Boys at—what else—a UFC fight in Miami, where the group posted videos of the former president receiving a standing ovation interspersed with clips of a Happy Dad-sponsored fighter doing a shoe-y with the hard seltzer. “The chance [2023] meeting led to a second appearance” on Full Send, reported TIME last week. “His closest confidantes didn’t realize it at the time, but interviews on male-focused podcasts would become a throughline of his extraordinary political resurrection.”

@jdLaunching my TikTok with @NELKBOYS

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

By early 2024, Trump was once again consolidating power on the campaign trail, and the Nelk Boys were very much along for the ride, helping to repackage the shambling candidate’s cognitive decline and vile racism as epic own-the-libs machismo to hordes of credulous Happy Dad customers.

In Nevada this past February, the then-presumptive GOP candidate shouted out the conservative #creators from the campaign stump, marveling at the reach of their 2022 interview before YouTube spiked it. At a golf tournament later that year, Nelk members kitted out in Happy Dad swag glad-handed with Trump wearing Happy Dad apparel. Trump’s conviction in May in New York presented an opportunity for the Nelk Boys to deploy their damn-the-torpedoes schtick in service of their beloved bully-in-chief. They did just that, posting “Free Trump” to their 4.2 million Instagram followers.

In August, when Trump’s oafish running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, joined TikTok, his first post was a video of him accepting a 12-pack of Happy Dad from Nelk ringleader Kyle Forgeard after recording a podcast episode with the group. At a Las Vegas rally in late August, the group appeared with Trump on-stage while Happy Dad promo girls handed out hard seltzers to the crowd outside; a month later in the same city, Forgeard endorsed Trump to a stadium crowd, then did some fan-service about taxes on Zyn, the preferred nicotine source of the American right’s angry young flat-brims. Of course White shouted them out at Trump’s election victory party last week—they were basically running his Gen Z surrogacy operation, and delivering millions and millions of free media impressions in the process.

Don’t think they don’t know it. Two weeks before the Nelk Boys moment of MAGA glory at Mar-a-Lago, Forgeard appeared on Fox News for an interview with host Jesse Watters to talk about Trump’s late-game pivot to “manosphere” entertainers like Rogan, Theo Vonn, and the Nelk Boys themselves.

“So you’re taking full credit for him blowing up in the podcast world?” Watters asked.

“Oh, we’re taking full credit,” Forgeard responded. On his head perched a Happy Dad hat.

If Grunt Style and Black Rifle Coffee Co. opened a distillery, what would it make? Unfortunately, we don’t have to speculate, because this Veterans Day, the militarization of brown liquor is fully upon us.

This edition of Fingers is a collaboration with , a longtime military-technology journalist and publisher of the independent newsletter . Kelsey and I have both been amused and/or appalled by the proliferation in recent years of liquor brands—typical whiskey—that pander to military-affiliated and/or -obsessed drinkers with overwrought names, corny slogans, and deeply cliché designs.

A society’s relationship to the horrors of war is a complex thing, and all the more so for active-duty service members and veterans. You don’t have to make a moral judgment on the commercialization of that dynamic to recognize that it’s much different and more complicated than simply “supporting the troops.” Especially given that nearly three quarters of veterans report struggling with alcohol use, according to a 2020 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services. But hey, camo bottles! 

Together, Kelsey and I weeded through a thicket of pitches to select a half dozen liquor brands targeting troops with cheap gimmicks, bellicose branding, and unctuous rhetoric for Veterans Day 2023. You’ll find those below, along with our notes. In no particular order, and without further ado, it’s the Fingers x Wars of Future Past Whiskey for Troops™️ Veterans Day guide to militarized brown liquor!

Read more

• Monster’s brewing division was down again in Q3;

• Can American drinkers save sake?;

• SipSource sees another tough year ahead for US liquor sales;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

Politicians use alcoholic beverages as props all the time, with varying degrees of success. In nearly 15 years on this beat, I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody do it with less success than Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. Look at this fucking guy:

About once a week I get an email from a reader griping about Fingers’ political coverage. I’m reluctant to dunk on them, unless they’re being assholes, in which case I’m not reluctant at all. To those complaining in good faith, I usually respond with something along the lines of:

It’s my editorial experience that the heavily regulated, multi-billion-dollar American beverage-alcohol industry is inherently political, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice to my readers.

Could I build a more successful business pretending otherwise? Oh, almost certainly. (Speaking of which, if you’re reading this for free, please buy a subscription, thank you.) There’s seemingly endless thirst for view-from-nowhere business analysis for CPGuys, and for soft-focus #content for brands. I have no interest in publishing either. I do have an interest in examining what a stone-cold freak JD Vance is around a case of beer, though.

What is he up to with that sixer of Old Style? What does he mean when he pats that mix-pack of Happy Dad hard seltzer and tells NELK Boys ringleader Kyle Forgeard that he’ll “use it on the airplane” with a nervous laugh? I’d almost expect this bizarrely wooden behavior from GOP ticket-topper Donald Trump, a known teetotaler whose brain is porridge. But Vance is 39 years old, and there’s an odd-on chance he’s tasted original-formula Four Loko. Why is it so hard for him to not be an oleaginous oaf when somebody hands him a beer?

I’m not covering Vance’s limp-dick beer-brand pandering because it’s funny, though it is, and you should laugh at him. These videos demonstrate yet again there’s no exempting drinks from politics, and never has been. Vance’s Old Style spot is pure faux-populism, a bid to coopt a proud Rust Belt symbol to make a hackneyed point about inflation and grocery prices. Old Style deserves better, man. The Happy Dad video is easier to parse: the NELK Boys built a hard seltzer brand for the Let’s Go Brandon set, and the Trump campaign desperately needs to reach the shitheaded jamokes that venerate them. This all exists in the same ecosystem as the Proud Boys’ White Claw obsession, the transphobic tantrum over Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch InBev’s subsequent repositioning of the brand to the right, and Ted Cruz inviting Joe Biden to kiss his ass over as-yet-unpublished USDA drinking guidance.

I could go on, but I won’t. The point is you can’t understand drinking in America unless you understand the political landscape that shapes it. It was ever thus.

It’s Election Day 2024. Perhaps you’ve heard. I think the case for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is obvious, in the sense that Trump is obviously a fascist. It’s Fingers’ considered editorial opinion that you should vote against him, and for her. If the fact that Vance has less charisma than a Blanton’s-humping tater helps you look past your objections to her candidacy, hey, great. Regardless of how you vote, and how this election goes down, I’ll continue covering the business, culture, and, yes, the politics of drinking in America as I have for the past four years. Including any drinks-abetted on-camera grotesques of the historically juiceless JD Vance, if I have to. I hope I don’t.

📬 Good post alert

If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email or Instagram DM.

🎧 Meet the middle tier's master matchmaker

Read more

• Anheuser-Busch InBev will be fine, ‘twas ever thus;

• Oregon utility to smoke-tainted Willamette vineyards: tough shit;

• Uncle Nearest’s co-founder made some weird videos about tequila;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

Money in politics: it’s a thing, and it’s suffocating democracy beneath an avalanche of billionaire cranks’ cash. Not ideal. One small silver lining is that federal campaign finance laws haven’t been gutted beyond utility (yet), so we can get still some sense for how corporations and trade groups are spending money to influence elections. To that end, I’ve compiled the 2024 federal campaign donations of the political action committees (PAC) associated with each of the biggest players in the American beer, wine, and spirits markets using data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research platform.

Some of these corporate PACs have very dumb names; others, like SAZERACPAC, are basically perfect. Regardless, they all plowed a bunch of your hard-earned drinking dollars into this year’s federal races via contributions to Congressional candidates, other PACs, and so on. Here’s how much Big Booze spent on the 2024 election—or, more precisely, how much its heaviest hitters’ PACs were required to disclosed. Oh, and please enjoy the charts, I worked really hard on them.

Read more

• Truly still hasn’t hit rock bottom;

• Is Southern Glazers Wine & Spirits still… doing the “wine” part?;

• Ultra-premium liquor sales are starting to slide;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

Much has been made in recent years about how “artificial intelligence” is going to change society. Here’s one way that it will not: robot bartenders.

In our lifetime, you will not see the widespread adoption of “autonomous” machines with articulated limbs that use “deep learning” and “neural nets” to serve you drinks. Anybody who says otherwise is dumb, lying, or both. This should be obvious to anybody who lived through the “Web 3.0” boom and bust just a few years go, or even just anybody who has ever worked behind a bar. Less obvious but more important is why so many of these techno-maximalist AI boosters are so thrilled by this fiction. I have a theory.

Earlier this month, Tesla, a federal welfare scheme with a failing car company attached, announced a slate of new “products.” I’m using smart quotes there because none of them are real, and given the longstanding record of right-wing chief executive Elon Musk pumping his firm’s stock with outlandish lies, it’s doubtful they ever will be.

Even the business press and investment bank analysts—two of the most stunningly credulous accomplices in Tesla’s absurd ascent to the global pinnacle of electric vehicle manufacturing—were unimpressed by the latest vaporware on display at the event, “We, Robot.” (Irony is dead.) Musk’s loyal legions of Silicon Valley “libertarians,” Trump supporters, and divorced condo dads are fully bought in, though. Predictably, they loved it. In particular, they loved Optimus, a laughably lazy I, Robot ripoff that was pouring draft beers for attendees while wearing a cowboy hat.

Read more

• Havana Club’s countersuit against Bacardi got spiked;

• Napa’s got a brand new domain;

• States can’t figure out how they feel about hemp-derived THC products;

And much more. If someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.—Dave.

Read more

On the night of the 2020 election, with the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump still too close to call, longtime Democratic operative & pundit James Carville got on MSNBC with an expensive bottle of booze and told the network’s audience of #Resistance liberals to calm down.

“First thing is every Democrat—just put the razor blades and the Ambien back in the medicine cabinet,” the Ragin’ Cajun told anchor Brian Williams with a chuckle. “We’re gonna be fine, we’re gonna be fine.”

Making suicide jokes on national TV at a time when ordinary Americans were stressed the fuck out at the very-plausible prospect that the Democrats might’ve blown it again was one hint that the long-time Clinton acolyte was not actually very attuned to the concerns of working-class voters. The bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve bourbon peeked out over Carville’s shoulder on the video feed was another.

“That stuff is about $200 an ounce,” he told Williams, who had asked if the bottle started the night full. “I parsed it out pretty good… Uncle Pappy, he’s not coming out until I’m sure, but right now I feel good.”

Of course Carville felt good. None of this would affect him very much, regardless of how it went. After all, he was drinking whiskey that costs more per pour than a month’s worth of insulin.

That a Clintonian Democrat who once wrote a book purporting to understand the political importance of the American middle class would nevertheless get on TV in 2020 to condescend to rank-and-file voters while brandishing this particular pricey bourbon wasn’t surprising. Four years later, unfortunately, it still isn’t.

Read more

LL Cool J has long advised against calling it a comeback, but with respect to James Todd Smith III, there’s simply no other word for it. Jack Owoc, the colorful, chaotic, cringeworthy founder and former poster-in-chief of Bang Energy, is launching another energy-drink venture.

[To to my secretary, who does not exist] Clear my schedule and hold my calls.

[To myself, in the Lloyd Bridges from Airplane voice] Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

[To you, the Fingers Fam who may or may not grasp why this is such a big deal around here] Here’s what we know.

Read more