Watering Hole: Monday, October 31, 2011 – Happy Halloween

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Two years ago, the most popular Halloween costume for adult women that I witnessed was the Sarah Palin look.  This year, I’m thinking that Guy Fawkes will be popular.  We were going to attend a few parties on Saturday dressed in our Guy Fawkes costumes, but the heavy, wet snowfall kept us home instead.

I don’t have much more to say at this moment so I will leave you with a song and vintage clips from the 1921 film, “Haxan Witchcraft Through the Ages”.

Boo!

This is our Open Thread for today.  Speak Up on any topic.

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169 thoughts on “Watering Hole: Monday, October 31, 2011 – Happy Halloween”

  1. Having lived in close proximity to San Francisco most of my life, Halloween was kind of “ho hum” compared to every other day of living near there.
    I loved it and I miss it..

    • Really? Halloween is like the National Gay Holiday, and no place does it up like San Francisco. Except maybe New Orleans, or Rio or . . .

      • No dissing the Bay Area. Mark Fuckerberg has told the world he’s truly sorry for having chosen us for the FB launch. He preferred Boston…
        well get you fanny east in the deep snow!

        Back to Halloween – there are, no longer, any sanctioned parties in te City. That doesn’t stop gatherings, though.

        ——
        Vinyl – the Bay Area misses you!

        • I suspect I’ll eventually get a small plot of land near Pescadero as I get older and wander beaches surffishing and going over the hill once in a while to visit friends and go to shows.
          Presently it’s different to be in a place that is so disconnected from what I grew accustomed to growing up with.
          My idea of the coast is not an endless row of condominiums.

  2. There’s a rich history of witches in Germany.
    When I visited Koln Germany, the witches in that region there were very enchanting.

  3. Obama To Order FDA To Help Reduce Drug Shortages

    President Barack Obama is directing the Food and Drug Administration to take steps to reduce drug shortages, an escalating problem that has endangered patients and raised the possibility of price gouging.

    Patient deaths have been blamed on the shortages, which tend to affect cancer drugs, anesthetics, drugs used in emergency medicine, and electrolytes needed for intravenous feeding. Hospitals have been forced to buy from secondary suppliers at huge markups. Surgeries and cancer treatments have been delayed.

    So, the teabaggers were worried about Government Death Panels? Looks like they forgot about the free market Big Pharma Death Panels that care only about their profits. This is why ‘socialism creeps into our society’, as the Bachmanns and Palins like to claim, because Libertarianism KILLS!

    • The baggers reason thus:
      Big Pharma means big stock dividends, they can reap a profit so they have lots of money after they retire to pay the high insurance premiums to cover the exorbitant health care costs. Nothing like doing things the hard way.

      • Baggers can be relied upon to vote against their own self interest and look for straw creatures to stand up when caught being stupid.

    • But, but, but, but the market will take care of this by punishing those bad companies who kill people.

      Or so the mantra on the right goes.

      • Republicans are also for “tort reform.” Which is frank Luntz speak for limiting the legal remedy for the common folk to sue the bad companies.

        How are you going to punish the bad companies if you have regulations against punishing them?

  4. I’m playing hooky from my teaching job tonight to take my 8 year old daughter and 2 year old boy out trick-or-treating. It’ll be a perfectly cool, foggy night, with lots of kids from our neigborhood and the surrounding hoods coming by in their costumes.
    We carved two pumpkins, one about 3 weeks ago to get Amber something to do, and it’s now a ghostly slumping, weird looking thing. Perfect!
    Have fun out there, and …be careful!

  7. My three are all set for the evening – we go over to friends’ house and sit in the drive with a firepit while the kids tour the neighbourhood and the wives follow with hot chocolates spiced with various ‘performance enhancing’ additives. I have one candy corn, a Captain Jack Sparrow and a Michael jackson (an interpretation of how he looks now I think).

  9. OK, show of hands. Who is surprised by this?

    Citing multiple sources, Politico reported overnight that Herman Cain, during his tenure as head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, was accused by “at least two female employees” of “inappropriate behavior.” The women, who left the trade group, complained to colleagues and senior association officials that Cain engaged in “sexually suggestive behavior,” which made them “angry and uncomfortable.”

    The association ultimately gave them financial payouts “in the five-figure range” to leave the group, but the agreement “included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.”

  10. 10-30-2011 10:29 PM ∞ twitter

    Coulter Defends Cain

    Conservative pundit Ann Coulter weighed in on the Politico story regarding Herman Cain’s alleged “sexually suggestive” harassment of two women while at the National Restaurant Association, according to a tweet from Politico reporter Alex Burns.

    “It’s outrageous the way liberals treat a black conservative,” she said

    As opposed to conservative teapottiers/rebups who treat a progressive black man who just happens to be the President.

    • oh that last paragraph was me and should not have been included in the quotes attributable to Coulter.

    • Gotta wonder if Mann Coulter is going out trick or treating tonight as herself>?? Very scary!

    • It was outrageous that Conservative sought to impeach a sitting President over a BJ, too. But Ann C. never cried about that, did she?

  11. Again, the coverup is worse than the crime…

    So we have two new data points: Cain denies any serious impropriety and denies knowledge of the payments to the women, the critical evidence of serious impropriety:

    Cain said that he was not aware of the details of any financial settlement paid by the National Restaurant Association. He declared, “I hope it wasn’t for much because nothing happened.”

    He really had no idea that his own organization had arranged compensation in the five figures to two women claiming harassment? So who did authorize this? And how did it get by Cain himself? Was he that off-hand a manager?

    Then this rather amazing fact: he has been aware of this story for ten days, and yet seemed completely incapable of responding. AEI kept questions at bay, and then he goes on Fox for a friendly chat. The legacy of Palin endures. But even Palin knew in the end that this kind of national spotlight is a brutal personal vetting.

    • Cain, being the rookie dufus he is, could have responded to this, but by stonewalling it, he justs makes it worse.
      His 15 minutes will be up by the end of the week.
      Next up?
      The next fumbling, dumbass Republican wannabe.

      • Saif Al Islam Gaddafi is angling for a fresh start somewhere….

        Dennis Miller?

        Courtney Stodden?

  13. TV That Deserves the Name “Journalism”
    By David Sirota

    Chris Hayes’ new show on MSNBC provides a rare space for the expansive, non-partisan debates we need.

    David Sirota is on Colorado Progressive Talk AM 760 weekdays from 9am to noon eastern. He has subbed for Thom Hartmann recently and Thom borrowed his studio for a day while visiting Denver. I split time between listening to David’s show and Carl Wolfson on KPOJ in the mornings after the Bill Press Show.

    • Sirota is spot on about Chris Hayes’ weekend shows. I watch them every Monday morning online, all four hours. Extremely well done, highly recommended. All with only four thirty-second commercials.

    • [Cain said that if more allegations surface, it will be because people "simply make them up." He said "the only other allegations will be trumped up allegations."]

      He’s starting to sound like ol’ what’s her name…

  16. From TPM:

    Limbaugh: Cain Allegations A ‘Hit Job’

    Speaking on his radio show on Monday morning, conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh came to Herman Cain’s defense, calling sexual harassment charges against Cain a “hit job.” Limbaugh attacked the “main-stream media,” presumably referring to Politico’s scoop, as using the “ugliest racial stereotypes” to attack a black conservative.

    Sexual harassment is racial?

      • Thanks, House ~ just a little over a foot of the white stuff; melted down to about 4 inches today. Woodstove served me well, as the pilots on the furnace weren’t relit after last weeks visit from the gas co. (Driver just left a few minutes ago, so my backup heater is now working) And I have power … And I am off to work again ~ Be Well!

    • I was “Vitamin C” in a school play, once upon a fourth grade, in Colchester, Vermont.
      Other than that, all I remember was having my Mom buy a white shirt and dye it orange.
      Gawd, I miss the stage…

  19. I’m still without electricity which means no home internet. So here I am at the local coffee shop which is staying open two hours later today so that locals that don’t have electricity can stop by and use the business’s WiFi. This is very thoughtful of the business owner.

    The word on the street is that we won’t have electricity until sometime on Thursday. Good thing we have a generator which we run periodically, mostly to keep the freezer from getting warm and to run the well for water. It got really cold last night so we also put the heater on for a bit. Today’s weather is in the 50′s so most of the snow is gone except on my property.

    Happy Halloween. The teabaggers must love this holiday because it’s a holiday for being scared and these baggers are always scared of something.

    • My take is that the teabaggers hate it, it scares them and reminds them that despite their religious fanatacism, they too are going to die someday. So they’ve already begun haunting us!

  20. One of the most pitiful and pitiable interviews I’ve ever seen is this one between Chris Matthews and Ken Blackwell in re “personhood”, for lack of a better word.

    I have insurmountable difficulty comprehending the wingnut “romance” with the concept of defining the fertilized egg as a human. I have enough difficulty accepting the apparent premise that humans are more important, in whichever odd way, than are pine trees, or earthworms, or cockroaches, or, for that matter, even amoebas when there is absolutely NO evidence that supports such nonsense.

    On a separate note, it’s been reported that the seven billionth currently living human will be born either today or within the next few days (I suppose depending on how many die naturally — or are murdered, executed, etc. — during that same span). Of special note is that the concept of the seven billionth “living” human ignores fertilized eggs.

  23. What do you do when your campaign is rocked by a scandal? If you’re Herman Cain at today’s press conference, you make like Mr. Bo Jangles….

  25. Cain: You’ll Meet My Wife Soon

    Asked on Fox why his wife had been absent from the campaign trail and whether voters would ever meet her, Cain replied: “You will meet my wife publicly in an exclusive interview that we are currently planning and anticipating.”

    Cain continued: “It’s not her style to be with me on every campaign stop…and I want her to continue to be the nucleus of that calm and tranquility you get from your family”

    • Translation: “She is bound and gagged in chains and leather, in a room behind a secret basement wall of my house”

  26. Heinlein was off by a decade or so. He wrote of the 90′s as the Crazy Years and predicted a Holy Roller named Nehemiah Scudder who would ring in just the sort of society the Right is working on. The only good news is the none of the Republican clowns has the charisma of an oyster.

      • Yes, you’d think it would be a sign “Shut up you idiot, you’re making me look like a twat.” But then said delusional f***wit would say – “Ah the devil is trying to stifle my holy truthiness by making me slur my words and have trouble getting to the bathroom on time.”

      • I liked the pileof clothes left in the park – should’ve had a dog leash on the ground too (you know that Jesus likes dogs, dude)

  31. Breaking News Alert
    The New York Times
    Monday, October 31, 2011 — 7:29 PM EDT
    —–

    MF Global Under Investigation for Missing Money

    Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money have gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the company’s operations as it filed for bankruptcy on Monday, according to several people briefed on the matter.

    The revelation of the missing money scuttled an 11th hour deal for MF Global to sell a major part of itself to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global, the powerhouse commodities brokerage run by Jon S. Corzine, had staked its survival on completing the deal.

    Now, the investigation threatens to tarnish the reputation of Mr. Corzine, the former New Jersey Governor and Goldman Sachs chief who oversaw MF Global’s demise, making it the first American victim of Europe’s debt crisis.
    Read More:

    http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

  32. Hi gang. I just have a few moments and haven’t had time to read through the thread but it sounds like the KochCain campaign is facing instant death. It makes one wonder if someone in Crazy Shelly’s campaign briefed her on it. She made a rambling statement to a radio show, it was last week and I’ll see if I can dig out the clip, that made a odd reference to “someone dropping out and it’s not me”.

    • COnsidering their ignorance, I wonder if the Fundibaggers aren’t proof that there’s something to this supernatural stuff. I’m begging to wonder if God sends an angel to magically poof any copy of the Bible or Constitution out of existence the moment a Fundibagger touches said copy? Obviously, I have no evidence for this but it would explain their ignorance of the actual contents of said tomes. They have surely not read or understood either of them.

    • I almost forgot.

      The author of that story told a whopper. In what fantasy world could any sane observer claim that the Republicans are keeping their focus on jobs? Unless she meant they are devoted to killing as many jobs as it takes to beat Obama? She might have a point.

  35. THE ONE WHO INVENTED TRICK OR TREAT By:Shel Silverstein

    Yes,I invented “trick or treat”
    So you could fill your mouth with sweets-
    Candy bars,and lemon drops,
    Marshmallows and Tootsie Pops,
    Butterscotch and bubble gum.
    Hold out your hand-they’ll give you some
    Chocolate kisses,Jujubes,
    Sourballs and jelly beans.
    Have a cake-some cookies too.
    Take a couple-grab a few.
    Peppermint sticks and Mary Janes,
    Licorice whips and candy canes.
    Slurp some soda,munch a pie,
    Don’t let those M&M’s go by,
    Chew that toffee,munch those treats,
    Get that caramel in your teeth.
    Then come see me,I’ll be here-
    I’m your friendly dentist,dear.

    • “Did you getting..” oh for pity sake **get (those damn big, long words are so difficult)/

    • No, I never have any here. Years ago the future-ex would sit out on the front porch for awhile if the weather was nice. I don’t have any way to light the front now. That got left out of the remodel we did on the exterior. I still haven’t run the wiring for that, yet.

  41. Not normally considered particularly Halloweenish by fans of the later, Phil Collins dominated, Genesis started off a a fusion of prog rock and theater. The entire album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, by Genesis, is fairly appropriate for the holiday. Plus Pater Gabriel liked costumes. Unfortunately, there’s no high quality video of them at their best so I used the studio version of The Carpet Crawlers.

  44. So many great posts tonight, wish I could watch and listen to the tunes,but I’m running the ragged edge of megabytes this close to the end of the month.
    Took a drive through town tonight, fun being in a place where people, lots of people, dress up in costume just for the fun of it, walking down the street, business as usual…

  47. Herman Cain went door to door tonight, but all he got was little slips of paper that said:
    “IOU a Snicker”

  48. Getting a coffee at Starbucks, I was asked by a witch if I wanted room for cream.
    I said no, just a toad.

    • It’s easy to be brave on the top of a hill at the end of a long dark street where no one dares go.. hoo hoo haa haa haaaaa…..

  52. [Ding Dong]

    “Trick or Treat!”
    “Oh my, a Zombie!”
    “Yep, you got it!”
    “Are you a Republican?”
    “How did you guess?”

  54. [Ding Dong]

    “Trick or Treat!”
    “Who are you supposed to be?”
    “A terrorist!”
    “But in that suit and tie, you look like a Wall Street broker!”
    “Yeah, well?”
    “OK, here’s a Pay Day…”

  55. The Obama’s must be doing something correctly – or the imbeciles wouldn’t be so petty…

    Trick Or Treat! Obama Derangement Syndrome Is At The Door

    In the latest round of Obama Derangement Syndrome, right-wing media attacked the Obamas for handing out fruit along with candy to trick-or-treaters at the White House.

  56. (Bank of America headquarters)
    [Ding Dong]
    “Trick or Treat!”
    “If you wish to speak to a customer service representative, please remain on the porch”
    “Yeesh”
    “For training purposes, quality control, and to cover our asses, this visit may be monitored.”
    “C’mon lady, get on with it…”
    “For security purposes, please state your mothers maiden name, how many hairs you have on your head, and the last four digits of your cell phone number.”
    “Oh forget it dude, this ain’t worth it…”
    “I’m sorry, but we are not able to comply with your request at this time. Please try back next Halloween. Thank you. Goodbye.”

    • All the racist r/wing haters are circling the wagons around ‘Herb”…
      it’s humorous considering the names and descriptions they lay on Obama!

      • Lumpy is all concerned and horrified that some Dem will depict “Herb” with big lips and watermelon, but I guess it’s okay to giggle through endless rounds of “Barack the magic negro.”
        :roll:

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