Best Christmas songs ever

 Merry Christmas.

Most of the Christmas songs playing now have been written very recently, say in the last 25 years.  The really good ones, though, are old.  And the best one is REALLY old.  These are my favorites at this time of year:

5.  Jingle Bell Rock.  This little ditty was pumped out around the infancy of rock and roll by a guy named Bobby Helm in 1957.  It's a catchy tune, and was very popular in its day, and you can't go very long at this time of year without hearing it played. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itcMLwMEeMQ)

4.  Rockin Around The Christmas Tree.  Brenda Lee was only 14 when she recorded this favorite in 1958.  Again, this tune has legs and has been one of the more popular Christmas songs for over 50 years and running. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6xNuUEnh2g)

3.    Breath of Heaven (Mary's Song). Amy Grant has a number of outstanding Christmas songs under her belt, but this one is a jem of jems in the jewelry box of outstanding tunes.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPbV_HTpyx0)

2.  It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year. Andy Williams really hit it out of the park with this one in 1963, although Amy Grant's rendition years later is also a real toe tapper.( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2urlriwjcg)

1.  Messiah by George Frideric Handel, composed over 250 years ago, in 1741.  This one is my favorites owing to a performance I witnessed many years ago on a Christmas Eve, in a little Lutheran church in Manassas, Virginia.  The congregation at the time was perhaps 150, and the choir consisted of a gifted music director with perhaps 15 singers.  When they were done with their performance of Messiah, those perhaps 80 worshippers burst into applause, and there simply wasn't a dry eye in the church, it was done so beautifully.  I've never heard it done as well before or since, not even by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the link below.  It was the closest thing to a miracle I've ever witnessed in my life. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_VARtvgGBY&feature=related)

Obama's Ministry of Truth puts out 'The Big Lie'

We've seen it before.  Historically, the manipulation of information by the government for political purposes was wildly successful for several years just last century in keeping a corrupt and evil regime in power for a decade plus.  All of this misinformation and distortion of statistics and economic reports issued by the Obama administration for the purposes of his re-election, this has been done before to fool the public.  This administration didn't invent this tactic.

The National Socialists, or more popularly referred to back in the day as the 'Nazis,' under the leadership of Adolph Hitler, were able to fool much of the German public through brazen lies and fabrications provided by Reich Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels.  It was ol' Josef Goebbels who orchestrated the huge parades and spectacular settings for the soaring speeches of Hitler, and of convincing the German population that white was black, that up was down, that wrong was right.  And most infamously, Goebbels was able to convince the German public that Jews were responsible for everything bad in their lives.  Goebbels was the mastermind behind the 'Krystal Nacht' in 1938. Goebbels was the master of 'The Big Lie:' tell the people something so outrageously incredible, tell them the same thing over and over and over, and in time the lie becomes true, because how could it not be?  Who would have the brazen audacity to concoct something so universally broadcast to be true out of a falsehood?  Nobody would ever do this, so the 'Big Lie' (whatever it is) simply must be true.  At least, it becomes true in the minds of the masses, but the reality never changes. Obama must have read Hitler's tome 'Mein Kampf' and underscored the 'Big Lie' and its constructs. 

They say that once you mention Hitler's name in any issue, you lose the argument.  Well, maybe so.  The similarities between these two governments are just too eerily close not to bring this up.  The unemployment statistics issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are one such "Big Lie."  According to most economists (those who participate in the 'dismal science'), the concept of 'full employment' in an economy is one that for everyone who is willing and able to work, employment is available to them.  The statistic for 'full employment' is roughly 4.5%, give or take, and those 4.5% 'unemployed' folks are simply in between jobs, and that they fully expect to find employment within a month or so.  This was the rate of unemployment or close to it during much of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations.

Owing to the current 'Frank/Dodd/Obama Recession', this number has crept over 10% at one point, and has hovered in the 9's for most of President Obama's first (and hopefully only) term.  Now the administration puts out the newest unemployment rate: 8.6%.   Oh great!  Things are getting better, way to go, President Obama!  Woo hoo!

Not so fast, there, Joe Sixpack (Joe is the average run of the mill American, who doesn't pay much attention to what's going on the in country).  This rate doesn't include those Americans who have been unemployed for so long, that they just gave up looking for work.  And who are now no longer counted as unemployed.  They just disappeared from the books.  And this number of Americans last month who disappeared from the unemployment rolls was around 315,000 people.  The rate can be reported to shrink, but that is because the total labor force has declined (a very bad thing).  That's why we call these bad times a 'recession.' Things recede in a recession.  Am I being redundant here? Good.  And when things recede economically, that's really bad news.  We are living and breathing in a real, live recession that continues to eat at all of us.

The Ministry of Truth would have us all believe that things are getting better, 8.6%, we should all be dancing in the streets with that kind of prosperity going on out there.  Just like Josef Goebbels, the Obama administration is blowing the horns heralding our great recovery, and assuming we believe them when they tell is that up is down, that night is day, and that wrong is right.  All we have to do is look around.

That's right.  Get up and go to the mall of your choice.  Count the number of empty stores in that mall.  Subtract that number from the total stores in the mall, and then look at the ratio of the existing leased businesses vs the total available.  This is what they call the occupancy rate.  When we have full employment, most established malls have occupancy rates that are the inverse of the full employment rate: 100%-4.5%, or 95.5% occupancy.  That's in good times.

Occupancy rates these days are 70% in way too many malls across the country right now.  Or worse.  And you can see this with your own eyes.  Things are really, really bad out there right now.

Get up and take a walk around your block.  How many houses are for sale?  Quite a few, I would bet. Way more than you remember at any one point in time in the good ol' days.  And how long have they been on the market?  Quite a while, I would bet.  And how many of those houses for sale are for sale because of a foreclosure?  Quite a few, I would bet.  And that's really bad.

And how many of your neighbors have lost their jobs?  Well, those still able to pay mortgage or rent payments and are still your neighbors, probably more than anyone would care to admit.   And that's really bad.

Things are really, really bad out here.  Just open your eyes and take a look around. 

And then go back and look at what the Ministry of Truth is putting out: we're on the road to recovery!  Things are rocking and rolling, 8.6% unemployment!  Let's not change horses in the middle of the stream, re-elect President Barack Obama!

Don't fall for 'The Big Lie.'

No sympathy for 'street people'

I can hardly stand to read the Chicago Tribune anymore.  What they call 'news' is simply nothing more than article after article with some liberal spin on the passing scene.  This morning, I picked up the paper from my driveway, thinking that I should really cancel this damn liberal rag, but started to read it anyway.

And in the editorial section called 'Perspective,' the headline is When you recognize the homeless .  The author and his wife were out Christmas shopping and were approached on the street by a homeless girl whom they knew from their New Jersey neighborhood.  And the author gushed on as to his discomfort and sympathy towards her and gave her all the money in his wallet to alleviate his guilt about her situation, and promised her that he would say 'hi' to her mom.

Give me a break.  In the piece, the details are very clear as to how this woman ended up on the street: she was irresponsible, had children out of wedlock as a teenager, and had hysterical outbursts that required police intervention, and the courts took her children away from her, and slapped a restraining order on her seeing them.  I suspect left out of the author's piece were drugs, alcohol, and varied and sordid other details that land people in the gutter.

While the author had enormous sympathy for this loser, I couldn't help but think that her newly found identity as a 'street person' was a choice she actively made.  People don't wind up on the mean streets of this country because they had a string of bad luck, or that everyone was out to get them (in other words, the fault of everybody else except themselves).

This is the reality of life in America: homelessness is a choice.  Nobody has to live on the streets if they don't want to. There are too many alternatives that can divert this eventuality, most involving family solutions, some run by the state, and many run by charities and churches.  Homelessness has many causes to include but not limited to: drug additions, alcohol abuse, criminal behavior, profound irresponsibility, inability to plan, inability to respect authority, and often a conscious choice to shun polite society and a deliberate choice to live life on the streets.

When approached by a homeless person, I avoid eye contact, never give them any money, but do not feel sorry for them; that is one of their tools of their trade - sympathy.  People live life on the streets because they choose this way of life, not because 'the man' is out to get them.  They are on the streets because they like it.  And don't let them tell you they don't because they lie like shamelss dogs: to you, to me and to themselves.  If they didn't like it, they could easily do something about it.

Like take responsibility for their lives, recognize and respect authority and ask for forgiveness from your estranged family.  In other words, choose not to be homeless.

What's fair, and what isn't fair

Last time around, Barack Obama ran his successful presidential campaign on the mantra of 'hope and change.'  It worked very well, as we all know.  Now, three years into Obama's abysmal administration, those two words are no longer uttered by anyone associated with the White House.  And for good reason: things in this country have gone downhill since he took office.  I could go into the metrics of exactly what parts of our country, to include social, political, and economic components are worse off today than in January, 2009, but I think most of us know all about it.

But this is all in the past, and our failed president is mustering his forces for a second term.  This time around, hope and change are not on the menu.  No, this time it's 'what's fair.'  Obama throws this word around like rice at a wedding.  Everyone should do 'their fair share,' 'millionaires and billionaires should pay their fair share,' and on and on.  Things should be 'fair.'

To the dumbest among us, this sounds right.  Things shouldn't be unfair.  That's just not right.  And here's a guy saying he will stand up and make things fair, if re-elected. 

To those of us who are of at least average intelligence, we all know through living life that things just are not fair, in general, and that John F. Kennedy said it best: 'Loif.  Loif's not fayuh.'  And for those of us outside of Massachusetts, this better translates to 'Life.  Life's not fair.'  And we all know this to be true.

It isn't fair that a graduate of Columbia school of journalism, with honors, interviews for a news reporting position with Fox News, and is told that while their resume is outstanding, they went with another candidate who was a better fit to the position.  The Columbia summa cum laude candidate was average looking, and the successful candidate graduated in the middle of her class at Boise State, but was also 2009 Miss Idaho.  How fair does that sound? 

But this happens all the time.  All the time, and everybody knows this to be true.  While this example is a stark one, Obama will resort more toward a class warfare point of view, and point out that the working people in this country seem to have all the money, and are greedy because they won't give any of their hard earned money to those less fortunate, and work less. Or don't work at all.  Is that fair that these greedy working people keep all of the money to themselves, Obama asks? All people need money in this great country, Obama states.  And it isn't fair that only the most industrious among us have all the money.  Not fair at all.

Obama wants to end all of this unfairness using the hamfisted power of the government.  If re-elected, he will re-double his efforts to legally transfer the wealth of those who work in this country to those who don't work in the name of fairness. 

And those dumb non-working morons will certainly vote for that, as it really sounds fair.  Why should these working people have all the money?  We non-working parasites need money, too!

Vote Obama, 2012.  It's the fair thing to do.

What happened to American Airlines will happen to America

It took a while, but it finally happened.  American Airlines, with its crushing cost structure, finally declared bankruptcy.  Driving this decision was the inflexibility of its greedy unions and their crazy wages and benefits that have saddled American Airlines with unsustainable debt.

Pensions take the lion's share of the blame, and then comes out of control union wages and benefits.  Pensions are in the red to the tune of about $8 Billion dollars in unfunded checks to geezers who no longer load a single bag, check a single ticket or replace a single rivet on a single plane.  In the long run, the pensions that were coerced out of American Airlines have run the ship into the reef.  In reality now, American Airlines is paying three baggage handlers for every one that actually handles baggage.  The other two are retired and collecting pensions.  No business can run like this indefinitely, and American Airlines finally has hit bottom.

They can thank their greedy, selfish unions for wrecking their company.  When you pay a baggage handler, who flunked out of high school, a wage that is wildly beyond the actual value of his service (such is the nature of unions), in time the costs of doing business will disadvantage that company in the market place to such an extent that in the long run, the chickens will come home to roost.  The company simply cannot compete against leaner, meaner competitors.  And in the long run they go broke, just like American Airlines.  And United Airlines before them.  And TWA before them, and Pan AM before them, and on and on. 

The United States of America is heading down this exact same path: paying three teachers for every one teacher that stands in front of students: one teaches, and two more are retired, but the school district is on the hook for all of the teachers salary, and the pensioners pensions.  Ditto policemen: for every one cop on the beat, there are two more drawing pensions.  And ditto for firemen: for every firefighter fighting fires, there are two more watching the Bears game in their Lay-Z-Boy, sucking down Molsons and collecting pensions. 

All on the county, state and federal dime.  We are not so unlike American Airlines, the U.S. as a whole.  When only 47% of Americans pay federal taxes, where are we headed in the long run?  Into bankruptcy, just like American Airlines.

We better wake up and smell the coffee before it's too late. 

We'll miss Barney Frank.....or maybe not.

If you recall, prior to his scandalous sexually deviant behavior a few months ago that forced his ouster from congress, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was the voice of the vicious far left, to whom all of the cameras and mainstream news reporters went for juicy soundbites that put Republicans in as bad a light as was possible.  And Rep. Weiner was also great to have as a guest on the Sunday shows and could always be counted on to shout down any opposition to the views and policies of his radical Left buddies on Capitol Hill.

Barney Frank (D-NY) was also one of the go-to guys on the left, and the venomous bile and invective Rep. Frank spewed to any microphone he saw was always greedily gobbled up by the mainstream media and put out as valid political expression.  Of course, Barney was a favorite on the Sunday political shows as well, shouting down and railing against any opposition to anything liberal he and his Marxist pals foisted on us.

Now Barney is hitting the road, no longer interested in re-election to his House seat, presumably to spend time with his children and grandchildren in his Golden Years.  Oh, that's right.  Barney's gay, and has not produced any progeny.  Thank God.

Much like his scandalous partner in New York congressional crime, Anthony Weiner, Rep. Barney Frank has also had his share of scandalous sexual deviancy associated with his lifestyle, if we all recall.  Remember way back when , Barney's 'partner' was running a homosexual house of prostitution out of Barney's residence.  New York voters didn't seem to mind all that much, and re-elected Barney about 12 times since then, so it can't be any big deal.

And of course who could forget Barney's blockage of any reform attempts by the Bush administration to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, categorically stating on the floor of the House of Representatives that both of these institutions were fundamentally sound, and that there was no need to make any changes to these solid mortgage lending programs.

That was before the 2008 financial meltdown, caused by mandated federal requirements against 'red lining' and forcing banks to give home loans to bums and scalawags who never intended to pay the loans back.  Barney made sure that Fannie and Freddie would make the banks whole by insuring that those two crooked institutions bought up the paper on those loans, and he personally nearly brought down the global economy when the sheer weight of these criminal loans crashed and burned in front of Barney's eyes.  As he looked the other way, of course, and blamed Republicans.  And fat cat bankers.  And everybody except himself.

We'll miss Barney's sound bites, and blatant lies and distortions.  And with any luck, his seat will be filled by a Republican, just like the deviant Anthony Weiner's seat was.

American 'culture' today, such as it is....

When I was looking at a recent article about the 'Most Admired American Women' list, I couldn't help but gape in disbelief as Lady Gaga made the list.  The article did not say where she was on the list, but she did not appear in the Top Ten. 

However, the fact that Lady Gaga made the list AT ALL was stunning to me. 

Most of my flabbergasted disbelief stemmed from the fact that Lady Gaga's entire professional persona is that of a pornographic slut.  And she is admired for this by more than a few idiots among the 1019 Americans chosen by Gallup to partake in this foolish telephone poll in March of 2011.  Some might say that Lady Gaga's persona is just that, an onstage act that has no bearing or resemblance to her personal life, and that she is actually chaste and pure, much like her button-down, 'church lady' mother who appears from time to time with her trollop, hussy looking daughter.

Lady Gaga can certainly claim that this is true, but in the real world perception is reality.  And her onstage presence is one of a shameless, scantily dressed strumpet.  Who gets mention on the Most Admired U.S. Women List.  What has become of us, and Western culture in general, when we adore pornographic personas such as this brazen harlot?

Now Oprah and Laura Bush have legitimate standing on this list, as both are accomplished Americans, Oprah in the entertainment business, and Laura Bush as the wife of an ex-president and a supporter of many charities and foundations too numerous to mention.  Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie also made the Top Ten, although I might note that Angelina Jolie is closer in public persona to Lady Gaga than to Laura Bush, although not to Lady Gaga's extremes.

At times, I know why Osama bin Laden hated the West. And, sad but true, these are the times that I agree with Osama.

Our culture is at times one that lauds decadence and debauchery.