Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Second rate reporter says what?

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Early Morning Open Thread: Happy Diwali!

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80Comments

  2. 2.

    chowkster

    Yes! Diwali is the festival that celebrates the triumph of good over evil; the victory of light over the forces of darkness.

    How appropriate that this year we are celebrating it after the Democratic sweep of the Senate and the Presidency.

    Happy Diwali everyone!

  3. 3.

    rajH

    Thanks, Anne! And, um, Laxmi is the Goddess of Wealth. She’s not a “warrior goddess”, not unless she has a badass side that I never heard about so far! :)

  4. 4.

    TheMightyTrowel

    ot and highly unlikely but if any of you happen to be phd archaeological scientists, my uni would like to hear from you. we have a job going. drop me a line at mightyTrowel AT gmail

  5. 5.

    JPL

    After reading the overnight news, I now know why the President won because of his values and trustworthiness. Repubs think values means foursomes or something. How long before one of the pastors mentions gay marriage caused the Petraeus/Broadwell Allen/ Kelley affair with a little FBI agent thrown in for good measure.

    pseudonymous in nc said in an early blog………
    It’s like C-SPAN2 meets Jerry Springer. You even have Mrs Broadwell, the broad, well…
    I can’t wait for that show.

  6. 6.

    Linda Featheringill

    Yes! Happy Dilawi!

    We could use some victories: Light over darkness, truth over lies, compassion over harsh judgment, and good over evil.

    Yes, please. I’ll take some of that.

  13. 13.

    Amir Khalid

    Deepavali greetings to all. Yes, there is a victory over darkness for my American friends to celebrate, and I share in their relief and rejoicing. (Although, given the ignorance, stupidity, and denial shown by the Romney/Ryan 2012 campaign, I feel rather tempted to call it a victory over Insufficient Light.)

  16. 16.

    Raven

    @JPL: Joe is killin the Jar Head General that’s in it now!

    eta 41 emails a day from the commander of US Forces in Afghanistan. Gee, anything else he might have been doing?

    Meanwhile, Mike the scold is just horrified.

  17. 17.

    Schlemizel

    @Mustang Bobby:

    Maybe I got a bad batch but I found the sweets to be pretty bad. I bought a bunch from a local Indian market to give as gifts & a few to try. Didn’t much care for them.

  19. 19.

    Raven

    @JPL: Joe is pretty pissed and I’m really enjoying his questioning of what the fuck the FBI was doing investigating this in the first place.

  20. 20.

    Schlemizel

    @Amir Khalid:

    Sort of like Dilberts “Phil, Prince of insufficient light”. He runs around darning people to heck. Have not thought of him in years.

    Its still an uphill battle but at least the tide held at bay for the moment.

  21. 21.

    JPL

    Phew! I thought the gays would be blamed but it appears the Morning Joe crew has decided the FBI is to blame.

  22. 22.

    amk

    ‘is about time.

    Fewer incoming members of the House and Senate have signed the pledge against tax increases run by Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, in a reflection not only of the seats that Democrats gained but of the success they’ve enjoyed in vilifying Norquist.

    About a dozen newly elected House Republicans refused to sign the anti-tax pledge during their campaigns, and another handful of returning Republicans have disavowed their allegiance to the written commitment.

    With Democrats picking up seven or eight seats, that means the pledge guides fewer than the 218 members needed for a majority. In the Senate, where Republicans lost two seats, just 39 members of the chamber are pledge-signers, according to the group’s records. That is a drop from 238 members of the House and 41 senators who committed to the pledge at the start of the 112th Congress.

  24. 24.

    Schlemizel

    @Raven:

    WHA? A General not focused like a laser on his mission?!? THATS UNPOSSIBLE!

    So whats the odds of even the wingnuts throwing this cake topper overboard? Will they defend him all the way down or do they turn & rip at him like a pack of dogs?

    If they do go after him it might be time to remind them that Ike had company during those lonely days in London & Patton was closeted.

  26. 26.

    JPL

    @Raven: So the shirtless FBI agent went to Cantor because he thought the FBI was covering up the affair. Why aren’t they talking about Cantor’s involvement? Maybe they wanted to close the case and the shirtless guy wouldn’t let them.

  27. 27.

    Schlemizel

    @JPL:

    Thank goodness he went to someone important and didn’t just leak it to just some average guy, say like the POTUS, who had no business knowing his CIA chief was tainted & classified info was dribbling out.

  28. 28.

    aimai

    Thanks for posting this, Annie. I love diwali. The eldest miss Aimai danced Parvati in a Parvati and Siva duo this weekend in a big diwali festival here.

    aimai

  29. 29.

    gene108

    And may Lakshmi, the Warrior Goddess

    Small nitpick. Lakshmi – Goddess of Wealth. No killing demons.

    Durga = Warrior Goddess, who killed a demon, which this holiday celebrates.

    @amk:

    How did you get Tamil characters to show up?

  31. 31.

    WereBear

    Plenty of light to all!

    We are finally replacing our ratty old lamps with a discovery on a discount site: sunlight lamps for this winter!

    We are at 44.2794° N, 73.9803° W. It’s not the Land of the Midnight Sun, but it’s already getting DARK at five pm.

  32. 32.

    gene108

    @amk: Glad it worked.

    Quick question. The first word’s Deepavali, what is the second word? I can sound it out to be something close to “vazhittuickal”, but My Tamil’s awful and I’m not sure what it means.

  35. 35.

    gene108

    Reading some of the postmortems on the 2012 elections.

    The Republicans are now openly talking about doing something about their xenophobic, misogynist, anti-intellectual characteristics and somehow change to embrace Latinos, single women and however intellectual rigor can justify Jesus riding a Dinosaur, I guess is what they mean by denouncing anti-intellectual.

    It’ll be interesting to see how Republican voters react to this.

    Will they take their marching orders or will they boot out the uppity folks, who use big words and call them dumb for knowing in their guts Jesus rode a dinosaur, without needing fancy science to prove it to them.

  36. 36.

    Ash Can

    @JPL: Cantor’s involvement is finally starting to (possibly) make sense to me. Cantor was likely, in this FBI agent’s estimation, the most odiously partisan of the actors prominent enough to take this story and inflict sufficient damage on the administration with it. Cantor, however, probably just feared that it would take down Petraeus without harming Obama and sat on it.

  37. 37.

    Maheshwari

    Diwali symbolifies the

    triumph of good over evil

    , brightness over darkness and usually it is celebrated in the last weeks of Oct or early Nov. This year it is a rare occasion-celebrating Diwali in almost mid-Nov but how fitting and meaningful it is after last week’s

    triumph of the people over pacs

    !

  41. 41.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Good God, another general? All I do is go to bed and wake up and this thing has morphed and expanded again, it’s like some science fiction movie creature in a sealed lab.

    When the history is written about this period, it will sound like H.G. Wells:

    “After all man’s devices had failed, the Generals of the mighty US military were defeated by the smallest entities that God in his wisdom had put upon this Earth: their penises.”

  42. 42.

    kay

    @Ash Can:

    It’s funny to watch how media’s love affair with the general skewed their coverage. It couldn’t be that this was just an affair, because the general is too important and honorable for that, although that’s the most obvious answer. They jumped right to vast Obama conspiracy. Someone is trying to silence him! They’re so hopelessley compromised as investigators. They see what they want to see. There may well BE more to this, but they can’t start with “the general is blameless”.

  45. 45.

    Comrade Jake

    There was an epic slugfest between Cole and some chick named Karoli (apparently of Crooks and Liars) over twitter during the middle of the night. Anyone know what that’s all about??

  47. 47.

    giltay

    @JPL: From the NY Times:

    Later, the agent became convinced — incorrectly, the official said — that the case had stalled. Because of his “worldview,” as the official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to protect President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.

    I.e., they were continuing to investigate, not stopping the investigation, but not allowing shirtless guy (whom this official seems to be calling a teabagger) to have anything to do with it.

  48. 48.

    Schlemizel

    @gene108:

    I fully expect the politicians to pander like hell. The trolls and orcs will wink and nod knowing full well that they don’t really mean it and that the few captive examples of the species they are trying to impress are fully tamed and will act the same as the real Americans(C).

    The big issue will be if enough people fall for the act. If the GOP can turn a couple of Spanish phrases, not say out loud what they actually think about rape & birth control and find a couple of candidates that are not old white men the faithful will understand they don’t really mean it. The question will be how large a percentage of the targets will fall for the act.

  49. 49.

    scav

    Divali!!!

    get some celebratory coffees in me and I might manage something more profound than lights! sparkly things! Laxmi! Masala dosa! Devon!
    oh and Ganesh, because there always has to be Ganesh.

    coffeecoffecoffeesparklycoffee. . .

  50. 50.

    MattF

    I know, we’ve had the World Series, and the Schadenfreude Season is officially over… but the truly awful comic strip “Prickly City”, which is a ‘conservative’ strip that balances the rest of the otherwise unacceptably reality-based comics page in the WaPo, has run strips for the past week that obviously assume that Romney won the election. It’s funny, for the first time.

  54. 54.

    Ash Can

    I feel sorry for all the poor slobs in the military who genuinely have a sense of honor, seeing these idiotic schmucks in high places acting like overprivileged teenagers.

  56. 56.

    Schlemizel

    @Ash Can:

    I was amused by the side by side images of a couple of generals.

    One lead the effort to eradicate fascism from Europe & the other probably fibbed a bit to get a bronze star. But take a look at the two & see if you can guess which is which:
    http://img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/39300003.png
    Here is even a better example:
    http://pavlovianobeisance.com/images/generals_medals.jpg

    Honest to pasta there are veterans of the Great Patriotic War reunion in Moscow that would blush at the one display.

  57. 57.

    mai naem

    Happy Diwali! Light over Evil indeed definitely applies today.

    @Schlemizel: Indian sweets don’t last that long and you really have to go to a specialty indian place that makes sweets only. Most of the other places carry stuff that they’ve bought premade from some place else and god knows how old it is. Indian sweets are for the most past very rich and very sweet.

  59. 59.

    Ash Can

    @Schlemizel: I’m just glad Petraeus scuttled himself before he got any higher in government. I know there’s still the possibility that he may have allowed some classified informatIon to be compromised at some point in this shitshow fail parade, but I’m optimistic that he’s not smart enough to have done any real damage.

  61. 61.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    More on Orca:

    “For whatever reasons, the conservative bloggers have latched onto Orca as the reason it all fell apart,” [Romney Campaign Digital Director] Moffatt added. Those bloggers have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted as a fifth column within the Romney camp. Targeted Victory was singled out by some bloggers because a few of its developers worked for Al Gore in the past.
    __
    “Why do they have Al Gore’s dev working on Romney’s social media development?!” blogger Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick asked. “Truly, how can they expect dedication?” She also singled out another developer who is African-American and “who has a 96 percent chance of being an Obama voter… I will be accused of ‘racism’ for even flagging. But it’s the truth.”
    __
    Moffatt said that this kind of thinking puts too much faith in a single piece of software. “Anyone who knows campaigns knows this was all baked in before that day—there was no magic, Orca wasn’t a silver bullet,” he said. “But on the flip side, when you’re on a campaign that has only six months of infrastructure time, sometimes you have to throw a Hail Mary. It’s really hard to go up against someone who has four years of lead time.”

    It’s a good article.

  62. 62.

    schrodinger's cat

    @scav: Diwali, doesn’t have much to do with Ganesh. He is so special that he gets his own ten days in September.

  63. 63.

    Schlemizel

    @mai naem:

    Mine were tasteless & very very very sweet. Really unpleasant. But it was an Indian grocery, their bakery though so I assumed freshness but probably not. Its tough to make a call when your sample size is one and not near the location of origin.

    I hope to win the lotto so that I could have sushi in Tokyo & Korma in New Delhi

  64. 64.

    schrodinger's cat

    @chowkster: So Romney = Narakasur and Obama = Krishna?

    BTW Lakshmi is the Goddess of wealth, it is the various avatars of Parvati that are badass (Durga and Kali, come to mind)

  65. 65.

    Elizabelle

    @MattF:

    RE Prickly City. Ah.

    Epistemic closure hits the comic pages.

    Cartoonist, with weeks to prepare, cannot submit an alternative set of drawings? That’s funny.

  66. 66.

    Steeplejack

    @Comrade Jake:

    As near as I could tell–and it’s very, very murky–there was some Internet falling-out over a possible James O’Keefe-type incident and the woman (or her partisans) had been criticizing ABL and Heather. I looked at a couple of pages that Cole linked to, and it was very inside-baseball-y.

  67. 67.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Schlemizel: Indian sweets are too sweet, since traditional Hindu sweets don’t use eggs,
    they rely on the sugar to hold everything together.

    For Diwali, I make karanjis (look like empanandas) which are not too sweet. The filling is coconut with maple syrup, golden raisins and slivered almonds. I use pie dough and bake them at 450.

  68. 68.

    gene108

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    rely on the sugar to hold everything together.

    I always thought it was ghee that was the thickening agent to hold everything together.

    Indian sweets are all basically flour, ghee and sugar, with a few other spices mixed in.

  69. 69.

    schrodinger's cat

    @gene108: Sugar holds everything together, butter/ghee makes it delicious. I can think of a lot of flourless Indian sweets pedhas, srikhand, chikki, etc.

  70. 70.

    aimai

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Hmmmmmm, srikhand. I now make a quickie version of that by taking greek yogurt (full fat) and mixing it with a small amount of saffron and ground cardamom and sugar. Let it sit and then serve it as dessert.

    aimai

  71. 71.

    KXB

    Diwali has become the Hindu equivalent of Christmas – mostly in a good way. Diwali used to be the big holiday for Hindus in northern & western India. For Bengali families like mine, it was a non-event, since it usually fell between Durga Puja and Kali Puja. But, just as Christmas is celebrated by Catholic and Protestant denominations at the same time, so Diwali is increasingly being celebrated by Hindus that in the past did not.

    If anything, the fact that such holidays cluster around the same time in the fall suggests the tendency of cultures to have a harvest festival in the fall. Then, when spring approaches, you’ll have your assorted holidays heralding the end of winter – Easter, Nowruz for the Persians, etc.

  72. 72.

    schrodinger's cat

    @aimai: You should drain the Greek yogurt for a few hours. I use a sieve lined with cheesecloth, and put a few cans on it. Also add saffron and nutmeg to the really rich, resulting yogurt.

  74. 74.

    Cain

    @gene108:
    Maybe for those north Indian rabble:-) but us Southerners make most of our sweets with milk! Also I don’t think e much use flour as much as besan (chickpea flour)

    Not that I do much prep of Indian sweets. Too much sugar and ghee.

    Salted caramel though..mmmmm

  79. 79.

    schrodinger's cat

    @scav: Yes he is for any religious ceremony. If you can, you should go to Bombay (Mumbai) or Pune during the Ganesh festival, it is a lot of fun. The Sarvajaneek Ganesh Utsav began as political protest, the British had prohibited large gatherings (no freedom of assembly) to circumvent that Bal Gangadhar Tilak, started the Sarvajanik (Public) Ganesh celebrations, because the British in general gave religious festivities a wide berth.

    Diwali is more a social gathering than religious, you wear new clothes, eat special foods that you only make once a year, light fire crackers, exchange gifts (usually the special Diwali snacks that you make). People who own businesses usually do a Lakshmi pooja.

  80. 80.

    Corner Stone

    @Comrade Jake:

    Anyone know what that’s all about??

    Just classic Cole. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and then stubbornly doubling down on stupid.

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