We continue with Dionne Warwick week..
I Say a Little Prayer For You
In 1958, Warwick, Myrna Utley, Carol Slade, and Warwick’s sister Delia, who by this time had begun to be known professionally as Dee Dee Warwick, formed their own group, which they called “The Gospelaires.”[4] Their first performance together was at the Apollo Theater, where they won the weekly amateur contest.[5] Various other singers joined The Gospelaires from time to time, including Judy Clay, Cissy Houston, and Doris Troy, whose chart selection “Just One Look,” when she recorded it in 1963, featured backing vocals from the Gospelaires.
After various personnel changes (Dionne and Doris left the group after achieving solo success), The Gospelaires eventually became the recording group, the Sweet Inspirations, which had some chart success, but were much sought-after as studio background singers. The Gospelaires and later the Sweet Inspirations performed on many records cut in New York City for artists such as Garnet Mimms, The Drifters, Jerry Butler, Solomon Burke and later Dionne’s recordings, Aretha Franklin, and Elvis Presley.
Warwick recalled, in her 2002 A&E Biography, that “a man came running frantically backstage at The Apollo and said he needed background singers for a session for Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor and old big-mouth here spoke up and said ‘We’ll do it!’ and we left and did the session. I wish I remembered the gentleman’s name because he was responsible for the beginning of my professional career.”
The backstage encounter led to the group being asked to sing background sessions at recording studios in New York. Soon, the group was in demand in New York music circles for their background work for such artists as The Drifters, Ben E. King, Chuck Jackson, Dinah Washington, Ronnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, and Solomon Burke among many others. Warwick remembered, in her A&E Biography, that after school, they would catch a bus from East Orange to the Port Authority Terminal, and then subway to recording studios in Manhattan, perform their background gigs and be back at home in East Orange in time to do their school homework. The background vocal work would continue while Warwick pursued her studies at Hartt.
While she was performing background on The Drifters’s recording of “Mexican Divorce,” Warwick’s voice and star presence were noticed by the song’s composer, Burt Bacharach, a Brill Building songwriter who was writing songs with many other songwriters, including lyricist Hal David.[6] According to a July 14, 1967, article on Warwick from Time, Bacharach stated, “She has a tremendous strong side and a delicacy when singing softly — like miniature ships in bottles.” Musically, she was “no play-safe girl. What emotion I could get away with!” And what complexity, compared with the usual run of pop songs.
During the session, Bacharach asked Warwick, if she would be interested in recording demonstration recordings of his compositions to be used to pitch the tunes to record labels. One such demo, “It’s Love That Really Counts”—destined to be recorded by Scepter-signed act The Shirelles—caught the attention of Scepter Records President Florence Greenberg. Greenberg, according to Current Biography 1969 Yearbook, told Bacharach, “Forget the song, get the girl!”
“I’ll Never Love This Way Again”
Eddie Barnes @RepubsRScum
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#BeforeBlackPresidents Things like unemployment benefits & the debt ceiling were extended WITHOUT any cuts or concessions to pay for it!
11:36 AM – 7 Jan 2014
Today at 11:59 AM
How Democrats Can Force Republicans to Help the Unemployed
By Jonathan Chait
It appeared for weeks, and even up until a day ago, that Senate Republicans might filibuster to death an extension of unemployment benefits. But six Republicans from purple states defected, allowing the debate to proceed, and suggesting the path will eventually be cleared for the Senate to pass an extension.
Should it pass, it will head to the House, the pit of despair where even the most uncontroversial and sane legislation goes to die, and where John Boehner endures perpetual torment and damnation. The prospects for House passage, as always, appear dire:
……………..
That’s why, while a handful of free-market absolutists (like Rand Paul and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) are advocating outright for an end to emergency unemployment benefits, most Republicans in Congress are approaching the issue more delicately. Instead, they are professing to favor an extension of emergency benefits, but only if the measure is paid for with offsetting spending cuts. To simply extend unemployment benefits would “add to the deficit in an irresponsible way,” complains Republican Senator Mark Kirk. Boehner has made similarly noncommittal noises.
This isn’t a genuine expression of concern for the size of the deficit. When Republicans actually care about a policy that adds to the deficit, they just pass it and put it on the credit card. That’s how they passed the immensely costly extension of the expiring Bush tax cuts. For that matter, that’s how they passed every deficit-increasing measure during the entire time they controlled the government under Bush – wars, tax cuts, drug benefits, energy subsidies, surges — they put them all on the tab. Demanding an offset is how you stop a policy you don’t care about without having to admit you don’t care about it.
So this might seem to offer a path for Republicans to stalemate anymore benefit extensions. After all, finding deficit savings is really hard. A few weeks ago, both parties scrounged for all the loose change they could find just to lift budget sequestration to a barely tolerable level. There are no easy cuts laying around, and Republicans won’t agree to higher taxes for any reason.
But as it happens, the Democrats have leverage because Republicans are about to pull out the credit card and pass one of the policies they care about: the farm bill. Agriculture subsidies are a huge, bloated entitlement that shouldn’t exist at all on the merits, but Republicans like them because they benefit rich white people (or, to put it more charitably, their constituents). Many of us have thought Congress has to pass a farm bill because, otherwise, milk prices will go through the roof, and all sorts of goofy things will happen. Martha White suggests that this isn’t true: “Even under a worst-case scenario in which the government paid twice as much to dairy farmers as they do now, we’d be talking about $5.25 milk, not $8.” There’s no need to pass a farm bill at all.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/01/how-democrats-can-pass-unemployment-benefits.html
Lachlan Markay @lachlan
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How cold is it in Chicago? The Lincoln Park Zoo had to bring its polar bear(!) inside. http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/eek-squad/40-below-bring-your-polar-bear-dont-worry-about-bats?src=SOC&dom=tw …
3:29 PM – 7 Jan 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nJ0wIPvJG8&feature=player_embedded
WHAT THE HELL
Sad
Downton Abbey: Season 4 Premiere Recap — Lady Mary Finds Her Strength
My favorite scene from Downton Abbey’s season opener:
Thomas Barrow – Out With An Old Foe, In With A New One: There has always been someone around who rubbed Thomas the wrong way (O’Brien, Mr. Bates, Mr. Carson, etc.) and in Sunday night’s premiere, he found a new enemy in the woman taking care of Sybbie (daughter to Tom and the late Sybil) and George (Mary and the late Matthew’s son). Nanny West scolded him for making a sweet little remark to Sybbie after a walk, and she really crossed the line by ordering Thomas about like a (gasp!) servant.
Another run in with the nanny prompted Thomas to stir the pot. Casually, he told Lady Cora that the nanny was “leaving the children to their own devices.” It was a lie, but Cora took heed and walked in on the nanny as she committed a different egregious act – calling Sybbie a “wicked little cross breed.” The nanny dismissed immediately, it was a win for Thomas, and prompted Cora to believe another of his suggestions – that Anna ruined one of Cora’s favorite clothing items and wasn’t fond of her new lady’s maid, Edna.
Lady Cora’s takedown of the nanny GAVE ME LIFE. LOL
http://celebrity.yahoo.com/news/downton-abbey-season-4-premiere-recap-lady-mary-042313329.html
Downton Abbey Returns to Record U.S. Ratings
Golly! Downton Abbey drew a stunning 10.2 million viewers for its season-four premiere on PBS last night, making it the most-watched drama series premiere in PBS history. It’s also a big 22-percent leap from last January’s season-three return, which attracted a then-record 7.9 million same-day viewers. And according to preliminary Nielsen data from PBS, it seems likely the strong Downton debut will allow PBS to tie CBS as Sunday’s most-watched TV network from 9 to 11 p.m. It’s logical that the same-day numbers would spike, given the cliff-hanger-y nature of last year’s finale, which saw — spoiler alert if you haven’t yet caught up — Matthew die a bloody death just moments after the birth of his new son. But if British viewers are any indication, Downton may have also just hit its high mark.
http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/downton-abbey-season-four-record-ratings.html
You can’t trust them. You. just. can’t. Some republicans have no soul whatsoever.
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Robert Gates, former defense secretary, offers harsh critique of Obama’s leadership in ‘Duty’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html
In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”
Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.
As a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion while embracing the Afghanistan war as a necessary response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, requiring even more military resources to succeed. In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair.
It is rare for a former Cabinet member, let alone a defense secretary occupying a central position in the chain of command, to publish such an antagonistic portrait of a sitting president.
Fresh Off of Best Man Holiday, Nia Long Gets a New Gig
by Liku Zelleke
Nia Long has at times been called the uncrowned Queen of the Silver screen. Anyone that has been following her career since the days of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” on TV all the way up to her latest big screen hit “Best Man Holiday” would simply have to agree.
This year, Nia Long has decided that she will go back to TV. WE TV has offered Long a co-starring role in the company’s first scripted series “The Divide.”
Long will be joining the series as the wife of the lead character, Adam Page, played by actor Damon Gunton of “Prime Suspect” and “Deadline” fame.
“The Divide” is a legal drama. Billie Page, the character Long will be playing, is described as a hard-charging wife of district attorney Adam Page. It follows the story of Christine Rosa (Marin Ireland of “Side Effects”) an attorney who looks into the case of an inmate on d***h row whom she believes was wrongly convicted in the case of young family’s murder 11 years earlier.
This makes her the rival of district attorney Adam Page.
http://www.yourblackworld.net/2014/01/black-celebrities/fresh-off-of-best-man-holiday-nia-long-gets-a-new-gig/?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Your%20Black%20World%20-%20News%20Updates&utm_content=
Lemme guess, he’s exercising his 2nd amendment rights? Sounds like a lunatic of one of those white supremacist MILITIAS.
Yep!
x2
I see I am not alone. I am enjoying my space heater so much. It brings such comfort. TY, God!
60 Minutes Hit Job On Clean Energy Ignores The Facts
By Joe Romm on January 5, 2014 at 8:54 pm
Clean technology is booming by every key indicator — but you would never know that from Sunday’s absurd 60 Minutes piece touting an imaginary “Cleantech Crash.”
As documented in the recent Department of Energy (DOE) report, “Revolution Now: The Future Arrives for Four Clean Energy Technologies,” the only thing in cleantech that is crashing is the cost of key components. This price crash has enabled explosive growth in wind power, solar power, LED lights and electric vehicles, as shown in the four charts from the report reposted here.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/05/3120311/60-minutes-cleantech-hit-job/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79mzIKicPwE
This surely would happen to me if I lived in Chicago or Minnesota….I can’t take the cold.
Stay warm guys.
BWA HA HA HA Yes, and it surely would give a whole new meaning to the phrases.”Junk in da trunk” and “baby got back.”
It Is So Cold, Water’s Turning to Ice in Mere Seconds and Mars is Warmer Than Minnesota
It is so cold out, the antifreeze in your car could actually freeze over. It is so cold that in Missouri, they’re saying rock salt will do you no good.
And it is so cold, that northern Minnesota is currently colder than the SURFACE OF MARS. Yes. Let that sink in for a second. Oh, and it’s so cold in Chicago, they’re nicknaming it “Chiberia” and it is colder than the South Pole.
Which means that when one Chicagoan decided to test out the -13 degree weather with a bottle of water, she could literally see it turning to ice before her very eyes.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/it-is-so-cold-waters-turning-to-ice-in-mere-seconds-and-mars-is-warmer-than-minnesota/
LOL It’s freaking-FREEZING cold in Minne-SNOWTA.
This morning I began re-reading John Lewis’ autobiography entitled “Walking with the Wind.”
I just came to the part when he tells of the killing of his uncle’s uncle Dr. Thomas Brewer.
Here is a short biography of Dr. Thomas Brewer:
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/thomas-brewer-1894-1956
ALEC’s New Obamacare Obstruction Plan Won’t Work
Dylan Scott – January 6, 2014, 6:00 AM EST
Obamacare’s opponents are running out of options to stop the law.
The Supreme Court upheld it in the summer of 2012. President Obama was re-elected a few months later. The congressional GOP’s strategy of shutting down the federal government to de-fund the law proved a disaster.
That might help explain why the conservative movement’s latest tactics seem a little more desperate — and, according to experts, equally unlikely to succeed.
Heading into the 2014 legislative session, the American Legislative Exchange Council is pushing new model legislation that aims to undermine the federal health care reform law. The only problem is: It’s probably illegal.
Here’s what the bill says: If an insurance company accepts tax subsidies that trigger Obamacare’s employer mandate — in other words, if an employee at a company with more than 50 employees goes onto an Obamacare exchange to purchase insurance and gets financial help through the law — then that insurer would be prohibited from continuing to do business in that state.
The effect is that if an insurer is doing business with the Obamacare exchange, it’s putting itself at risk of being banned from operating in a state with this law in place. That would either force insurers to pull out of the exchanges or to decline to accept subsidies, which would unravel the foundation of the exchanges — or actually take their business out of the state.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/alec-obamacare-bill
Video interview:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11294
https://twitter.com/ACASuccessStory/status/420018725094690817/photo/1
Thanks for this!
When you guys have time, please read this wicked letter if you haven’t done so. It’s beyond evil.
The Full Willie Lynch Letter.
http://www.theafrolounge.com/2014/01/01/must-read-the-full-willie-lynch-letter/ …
WICKED EVIL And don’t think for one minute that fragments of this kind of VILE thinking don’t still exists.
AMEN!
This is what you call a real savage. He is in his own place…in hell.
Photos: A day in the depths of winter in frigid Embarrass, Minn.
January 6, 2014
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2014/01/06/news/embarrass-photos
Hot chocolate for everyone!
Get in my belly!!!!!
OOOPS!
Welcome Back, Florida State football
Top-ranked FSU captured the program’s third national title on Monday night – in DRAMATIC fashion. t’s worth repeating.
D.R.A.M.A.T.I.C.
The Seminoles scored 14 points in the final 4:31, including the game-winner on Jameis Winston’s 2-yard touchdown pass to Kelvin Benjamin with 13 seconds remaining, to upend No. 2 Auburn 34-31.
http://www.tallahassee.com/article/20140107/FSU03/301070019/Welcome-Back-Florida-State-football?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1
Ladies, your thoughts, please?
The Next Civil Rights Issue: Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/#.UsspfONFzG1.wordpress
Insured, finally: Families put Obamacare to the real test
JoNel Aleccia NBC News
Jan. 1, 2014 at 8:17 AM ET
For the 2.1 million people who’ve signed up for health insurance under the new federal and state exchanges, Jan. 1 is when the rubber meets the road.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called it “an exciting new day in health care” as latest enrollment figures were released Tuesday. But for people like the Schulz family of Phoenix, Ariz., Rita Rizzo and Lou Vincent of Akron, Ohio, and Joyce Moore of Zionsville, Pa., it’s the first test of whether Obamacare will really work.
They all say they’re relieved and excited to finally have new access to health care, and they hope that the rocky rollout of the exchanges under the Affordable Care Act will actually give way to the smooth delivery of vital medical services.
“I’ve been afraid for the last three years to get preventive care, because if they found something, I couldn’t afford to treat it,” said Rizzo, 59, who runs a management training business with her husband. “I haven’t had any blood work in three years and my right hip is starting to give out.”
Rita Rizzo and Lou Vincent of Akron, Ohio, say they’re making appointments with new doctors now that they have affordable coverage on a federal health exchange.
But now that she and Vincent, 64, are covered by a new CareSource silver-level plan under the federal exchange, he’s insured for the first time in years after being denied by dozens of private plans because he has high blood pressure and diabetes. And Rizzo said they’ll pay $184 a month, with a $2,000 deductible and a maximum of $3,400 out of pocket, far less than the $400 a month and $6,000 deductible they were paying for her alone with a private plan.
“The coverage is wonderful,” said Rizzo. “We’ll get prescription coverage. Right now, his prescriptions alone are $170 a month.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/insured-finally-families-put-obamacare-real-test-2D11820757
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Good Morning, Rikyrah & Everyone! Are you working today, Rikyrah?
No Ametia. I called off. I take the commuter train and they had too many problems yesterday. So, I’m at home taking care of Peanut, whose school is closed today.
Keep Peanut warm up there!
@ Rikyrah. Can’t think of a better way to spend time off work with your niece Peanut. How lovely!
Good morning, everyone! It’s COLD down here! Got dang!
I’ve set out some hot chocolate for you all.
Yummy!
Good Morning Everyone!
I hope you 3Chics are staying warm! I know you have WARM caring hearts!
Hi Yahtc. It’s called LAYERING. And I’ve mastered that skill very well. LOL