Free Republic

A rare bottle of whisky signed by US president elect Donald Trump has sold for £6,000 at auction in Glasgow. The 26-year-old GlenDronach single malt whisky was bottled in 2012 to mark the opening of Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire. A Canadian bidder paid more than twice the estimated price to secure the bottle at the auction of rare whiskies.

After generations of his family spent their lives as outlaws for making the infamous Irish poitín, Pádraic Ó Griallais has finally been able to carry out the family business in the open just under a decade after the spirit was outlawed. Taking a career break from his job as a high school teacher to establish a new business based on his old family recipe, Ó Griallais is free to produce and sell the highly alcoholic spirit as he pleases without the interference of the Gardaí [Irish police], who hounded the previous poitín distillers in his family with raids to put...

If a tough new proposal in Utah becomes law, just a few drinks — or even a few swigs — could put you over the limit for drunk driving. An effort is underway in the state to lower the legal blood-alcohol concentration for driving to .05 — a first in the nation. Currently, all 50 states have a .08 cap, eschewing suggestions from the National Transportation Safety Board to redefine what constitutes drunk driving.

Beer is without question, like Pizza, Madonna, and fast cars, an icon of modern American culture. That the white working class American male is stereotypically referred to as "Joe Six-pack" is but one example of the dominance of beer as lower and middle- class America's preferred alcoholic beverage. But this was not always the case. 150 years ago, in the 1840s, hard cider held the position now held by beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage of the working class. But somehow, by the end of the 19th century and well before Prohibition, Cider all but disappeared in the United States....

San Francisco, this probably isn’t a ranking to be proud of. The city apparently is the most hungover city in the country, according to a recent ranking by Trulia. The Trulia ranking took into account the cities’ number of bars, the number of young people and amount of party suppliers. It also surveyed how many of a city’s residents reported having at least one binge drinking incident in the past month. “The city with the most party suppliers, young people and binge drinkers scored higher as a place to party,” a Trulia news release said. Behind San Francisco came San...

GREENFIELD, Ind. (AP) -- Authorities say a central Indiana woman faces charges for allegedly beating her young sons after they found their hidden Christmas presents and unwrapped them. The 36-year-old Greenfield woman was freed on bond Thursday, two days after she pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of battery.

REDONDO BEACH, CA -- Former President Bill Clinton's half-brother pleaded no contest Monday to a misdemeanor DUI charge stemming from his June 6 arrest in Redondo Beach. Roger Clinton -- who entered the plea through his attorney -- also admitted an allegation that he refused or willfully failed to complete a chemical test. He was ordered to serve 48 hours in jail and three years on probation, according to the Los Angeles Superior Court's Public Information Office.

Do a few evening beers make your mornings un-beer-able? Does a vodka martini make your brain feel shaken, or stirred? Has a Dark ‘N’ Stormy been clouding your thoughts? For most people, the occasional night out is not a big deal — but when a hangover becomes a regular part of your weekend routine it’s a sign something might not be right. It’s an alarming statistic that one in five Australian adults regularly drink harmful amounts of alcohol. This chronic alcohol use can cause liver failure, stomach ulcers, bleeding problems, damaged nerves, injured brain cells and an increased risk of...

A 41-year-old man has ended his life by fatal injection rather than carry on living as an alcoholic, in a radical new extension of Holland’s euthanasia regime. Mark Langedijk decided that death was the only way to escape from his addiction to drink, according to an account published by his brother. Mr Langedijk set the date for his own death and was joking, drinking beer and eating ham and cheese sandwiches in the hours before his GP arrived at his parents’ home to administer fatal injections, it said.

Three Christians in Iran have been sentenced to 80 lashes by a Sharia court after they were found guilty of blasphemy for drinking holy communion wine. Yaser Mosibzadeh, Saheb Fadayee and Mohammed Reza Omidi, also known as Youhan, are due to be flogged in public after they were arrested at a house church gathering in Rasht in May.

A week removed from the election of Donald J. Trump, wild stories about that fateful night are just now beginning to surface. One of the wilder stories comes from radio host Todd Kincannon, whose sources inside the Washington political elite have relayed to him an insane new story from inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign bunker. According to Kincannon, Hillary was not only inebriated on election night, but physically violent toward several members of her staff. CNN reporter tells me Hillary became physically violent towards Robby Mook and John Podesta around midnight; had to be briefly restrained. — The Kincannon Show (@kincannon_show)...

Radio host Todd Kincannon from The Kincannon Show tweeted today that a CNN reporter told him Hillary Clinton became physically violent towards Robby Mook and John Podesta around midnight last Tuesday as the presidency was slipping away. CNN reporter tells me Hillary became physically violent towards Robby Mook and John Podesta around midnight; had to be briefly restrained. Hillary Clinton did not make it on stage that night. She sent John Podesta out instead. Hillary was drunk. She was. I posted about that too. She was in a "psychotic drunken rage" according to my reporter friend. Doctor added sedatives to...

Sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco have cost the Treasury more than £31 billion, an analysis has disclosed amid calls for a reduction in the Autumn Statement. Around £31.6 billion of tax revenue has been lost because of the illicit market in spirits, beer, wine, cigarettes, rolling tobacco and diesel, according to the analysis of HMRC figures by the Taxpayers’ Alliance. The high taxes on alcohol and tobacco simply fuel a black market in the goods which means that HMRC loses money, the campaign group said. …

Alcohol consumption caused more than 700,000 new cancer cases and around 366,000 cancer deaths in 2012, mainly in rich countries, according to data reported Wednesday to the World Cancer Congress in Paris. Comparing the cancer risk of people who drink, to that of people who do not, researchers calculated that alcohol was responsible for an estimated five percent of all new cancer cases, and 4.5 percent of deaths per year. “A large part of the population is unaware that cancer can be caused by alcohol,” study co-author Kevin Shield of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), told AFP...

Imagine you lived in a world in which no one except one senior citizen ever drank alcoholic beverages. Would you think it is a good idea to choose this one person – the only drinker in the world – to be in charge of the nuclear arsenal? No, that would be crazy. We know alcohol impairs judgment. And a president is on-call for emergencies 24-hours a day. Alcohol plus life-and-death decisions is a dangerous combination. The only reason social drinking (or worse) is not automatically disqualifying for the Commander-in-Chief job is because … wait for it … many of us...

The American Medical Association defines an “alcoholic” as someone who 1.Has a prolonged period of frequent, heavy alcohol use. 2.Is unable to control drinking once it has begun. 3.Has withdrawal symptoms when the individual stops using alcohol. 4.Needs to use more and more alcohol to achieve the same effects. 5.Has a variety of social and/or legal problems arising from alcohol use. By that definition, Hillary Clinton is an alcoholic. Exhibit A In an email to Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta on August 8, 2015, Director of Communications for Hillary’s campaign Jennifer Palmieri wrote, referring to Hillary: “I think you should...

From:jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-08-08 16:31 Subject: Re: Have you sent her the docs? I just sent. Was getting my hair cut and trying to write all this on an iPhone. I think you should call her and sober her up some. Sent from my iPhone > On Aug 8, 2015, at 1:55 PM, John Podesta wrote: > > Should I call her and talk this through or better to leave with you? I'm worried she'll get on with Cheryl and we'll end up in a bad place. I'm in a session that lasts till 3:30 your time. Is that...

ANCIENT BEVERAGE BREWED IN MILWAUKEE MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN — NPR reports that archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her research team worked with Lakefront Brewery to try to re-create an alcoholic beverage that had been placed in a bronze cauldron and buried in a grave sometime between 400 and 450 B.C. in what is now Germany. The recipe was based upon the research of paleobotanist Manfred Rösch, who analyzed the residues in the Iron Age cauldron. He found evidence of honey, meadowsweet, barley, and mint—ingredients in a type of beverage known as a braggot.

National American Beer Day is observed annually by beer drinkers across the nation on October 27. There are more than 2,100 breweries that manufacture beer in the United States. They range in size from industry giants to brew pubs and microbreweries. •The U.S. produced 196 million barrels of beer in 2009. •The U.S. consumes roughly 20 US gallons of beer per capita annually. •In 2008, the United States was ranked sixteenth in the world in per capita consumption, while total consumption was second only to China. •Prohibition in the early twentieth century caused nearly all American breweries to close. •After...

What is Drudge hinting with this pic?