Carol of the Bells” is a popular Americanized version of a Ukrainian Christmas carol. It is a choral work by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych as “Shchedryk“ and translated, or rather, adapted to English by Peter J Wilhousky who wrote and Americanized the lyrics. Leontovych’s composition was in turn, set to the words of an ancient Ukrainian carol performed during the celebration of the New Year.
The song is recognized by a four-note ostinato motif (see image to the right). It is a holiday favorite throughout the English-speaking world, having been arranged hundreds of times for different genres, styles of singing and settings. For example, it was been covered by artists and groups of many genres: classical, jazz, rock, and pop. It has also been featured in films, television shows, and parodies.
That’s right, young Sorors.
https://twitter.com/BEautifully_C/status/543588564823711744/photo/1
Media Alert:
Sunday, December 14, 8 pm EST
HGTV DOES CHRISTMAS AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Link to a gallery of 97 pics:
http://www.hgtv.com/shows/white-house-christmas-2014/christmas-at-the-white-house–2014-pictures
http://youtu.be/5hksKXZQ3us
https://twitter.com/petesouza/status/543581907632807936/photo/1
Mr. NFTG @Kennymack1971
Yeah I’m done. People who don’t have a direction, plan or blueprint but talking the most shit. And talking it to Black folks.
Mr. NFTG @Kennymack1971
Sorry but this ain’t about Black Lives Matter for these ppl. This is about “Hey look at me and how deep and provacative I am!”
Mr. NFTG @Kennymack1971
“I should’ve voted for Romney” dawg…..DAWG. At what point do we finally tell these “activists” STFD and STFU?
Mr. NFTG @Kennymack1971
So now we got buyers remorse and “I should’ve voted for Romney” okay..
“activist” rapper dude…okay. pic.twitter.com/EjWkPceQmw
itgurl @itgurl_29
@MonieTalks_1 I cannot get over how stunningly IGNORANT the leaders of this “movement” are. #BlackLivesMatterButIShouldaVotedforRomney
Monie @MonieTalks_1
Reading an article about Tef Po from Sept. He waxes on about long history of police misconduct in Ferguson. So what did he pre-Mike Brown?
PragmaticObotsUnite @PragObots
PBO invited Tef Poe to WH to discuss #Ferguson & police brutality. Tef Poe then goes on #EdShow and says he should’ve voted 4 Romney? #WTF
Is Philly charter wait list make believe?
By Daniel Denvir
Published: 12/11/2014
Philadelphia’s most influential charter-school advocates are making a big push to open more schools and keep insisting that the demand is enormous: 40,000 city students, they say, are on waiting lists for seats.
But it’s not clear that this number has any basis at all.
“We are not aware what comprises this 40,000,” says School District spokesperson Fernando Gallard. “It would be important to get more detail about this number. It would be important for us, and I think it would be important for the general public, to drill down.”
That has, so far, proven impossible. The Philadelphia School Partnership, PennCAN and Educational Opportunities for Families have all touted the same 40,000 number. The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools says there is a statewide wait list of 44,000. None of the groups responded to requests by City Paper to explain where those numbers came from.
But the 40,000 figure of unknown provenance has nonetheless become a key talking point in a coordinated effort to pressure the School Reform Commission to back costly new charter schools that, due to the financial crises, the District is loathe to approve.
On Monday, the SRC began a series of hearings on applications for 40 new charter schools — totaling, apparently by coincidence, 40,000 new seats. The District has not accepted new charter school applications since 2007 because of repeated budget shortfalls that have prompted mass layoffs and school closings. It has been estimated that each new student who enrolls in a charter school costs the District as much as $7,000 in addition to regular spending — money it simply doesn’t have.
http://citypaper.net/news/is-philly-charter-wait-list-make-believe/?commentsMsg=added&num=23561
what are the gas prices where you live?
on my way to Peanut’s Christmas Pageant, the station with the lowest prices in the neighborhood was at $2.68. On my way home, I saw that it had changed to $2.61.
I’ll say it again…
I’m paying more for a gallon of milk than I am a gallon of gas.
This is CRAZY!!
https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/543251990415818752
CNN is reporting on Bill Cosby nonstop.
get DA PHUQ outta here with this bullshyt
…………….
The Opinion Pages| Contributing Op-Ed Writer
Is Obamacare Destroying the Democratic Party?
DEC. 2, 2014
Charles Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, has forced a debate over fundamental party priorities out into the open. Should Democrats focus primarily on the problems of the poor or should they first address the economic struggles of the working and middle classes?
It’s not often that a politician provokes conflict within the ranks of his party’s core supporters. Schumer did just that in a National Press Club speech on Nov. 25, three weeks after devastating Democratic losses in Senate, House, gubernatorial and state legislative elections.
According to Schumer, President Obama and his party suffered defeat last month in large part because of the strategic decision to press for enactment of the Affordable Care Act soon after Obama won the presidency. In 2009, with Democrats in full control of Congress and the White House, Schumer said,
Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – health care reform. The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed. But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make; Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs; not for changes in their health care. This makes sense considering that 85 percent of all Americans got their health care from either the government – Medicare or Medicaid – or their employer. And if health care costs were going up, it didn’t really affect them.
Schumer analyzed Obamacare in terms of pure political calculation:
Only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote. In 2010 only about 40 percent of those registered voted. So even if the uninsured kept with the rate, which they likely did not, we would still only be talking about only 5 percent of the electorate. To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense. So when Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought, the Democrats are not paying enough attention to “me.”
There were also adverse political and policy consequences to the emphasis on enactment of Obamacare:
Had we started more broadly, the middle class would have been more receptive to the idea that President Obama wanted to help them. The initial faith they placed in him would have been rewarded. They would have held a more pro-government view and would have given him the permission structure to build a more pro-government coalition. Then Democrats would have been in a better position to tackle our nation’s health care crisis.
Schumer’s remarks set off an explosion.
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House leader, responded in a written statement: “We come here to do a job, not keep a job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/opinion/is-obamacare-destroying-the-democratic-party.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthomas-b-edsall&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Collection®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article
It’s Friday!!
I have a half-day today because I promised a certain someone that I would attend her Christmas Pageant…LOL
Blair Underwood Will Play A Key Figure From Melinda May’s Shadowy Past in ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
Photo of Tambay A. Obenson
By Tambay A. Obenson | Shadow and Act
December 11, 2014 at 11:09AM
Blair Underwood has booked a role on ABC’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” to play a character described as “a key figure from Melinda May’s shadowy past.”
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Underwood will recur during Season 2 as May’s estranged ex-husband, Dr. Andrew Garner, whom we first will meet in a March episode.
“S.H.I.E.L.D.” aired its winter finale on Tuesday this week, and will return on March 3.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/blair-underwood-will-play-a-key-figure-from-melinda-mays-shadowy-past-in-agents-of-shield-20141211
No. The White Working Class continues to vote against their economic self-interest.
How is it that the Black working class, Latino working class, Asian working class can vote their economic self-interest, but the White working class just can’t seem to get around to it?
Could it be, because they vote their WHITENESS?
That they cling to the WHITENESS?
Tired of these articles.
Stop coddling them.
…………….
Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class?
DEC. 9, 2014
Why don’t white working-class voters recognize where their economic interests lie? Somewhat self-righteously, Democrats keep asking themselves that question.
A better question would be: What has the Democratic Party done for these voters lately?
At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago. Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.
This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.
Liberal victories in the sexual and women’s rights revolutions – victories that have made the lives of many upscale Democrats more productive and satisfying — appear, from the vantage point of the white working class, to have left many women to struggle as single parents, forced to cope with both male defection from paternal responsibility and the fragmentation of a family structure that was crucial to upward mobility in the postwar period.
This bleak view emerges from two recently published works, “Labor’s Love Lost,” by Andrew Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins, and “Was Moynihan Right? What Happens to the Children of Unmarried Mothers,” a research report by Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, respectively.
Both works address broader subjects than the partisan allegiance of working-class whites, but each illuminates the interaction of economic and cultural forces driving these voters away from their New Deal home.
“The young adults without bachelor’s degrees who are the heirs of the industrial working class today are not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern family lifestyle,” Cherlin writes. “Rather, they are a group making constrained choices.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/have-democrats-failed-the-white-working-class.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
https://twitter.com/wendmyoung/status/530163193310494720/photo/1
http://youtu.be/x6t7vVTxaic
https://twitter.com/CandaceTX/status/543063706683199488/photo/1
https://twitter.com/THRAwards/status/543076803951075328/photo/1
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/543203049838501889/photo/1
https://twitter.com/ElaheIzadi/status/543240748586369026/photo/1
https://twitter.com/wizzyjr/status/543220484121174017/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Bipartisanism/status/543234432031682561/photo/1
https://twitter.com/WestWingReport/status/543202072200769537/photo/1
https://twitter.com/WestWingReport/status/543192469215932417/photo/1
https://twitter.com/WestWingReport/status/543196358392709120/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Lib_Librarian/status/543259626695708672/photo/1
Ava DuVernay Earns Her Way Into the History Books – First Black Woman Director to Be Nominated for a Golden Globe Award
Photo of Tambay A. Obenson
By Tambay A. Obenson | Shadow and Act
December 11, 2014 at 9:14AM
Of note, with regards to this blog’s interests, “Selma” picked up a healthy 4 nominations – Best Picture, Drama; Best Actor, Drama (David Oyelowo); Best Director (Ava DuVernay); and Best Original Song, Motion Picture (“Glory”). It’s worth noting that Golden Globe motion picture nominees historically foretell what the Oscar nominees will be; not that they are always 100% accurate, but there’s a very good chance that most of the names you see here will carry over to the announcements scheduled to be made on January 15, 2015. So, despite the SAG Awards absence (the film wasn’t completed in time to meet the submission deadline), it’s set up here nicely for some recognition at the granddaddy of all ceremonies.
I should note that, with her nomination, Ava DuVernay makes history, becoming the first black woman director to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director in the Motion Picture category. She’s on her way to doing the same, when the Oscar nominees are announced next month. Previous Golden Globe nominees of African descent in this category include Steve McQueen for “12 Years a Slave,” and Spike Lee for “Do the Right Thing.” It’s painfully incredible that between the years of 1990 to 2014 (24 looooong years), there wasn’t a single black director (male or female) nominated for Best Director in the Motion Picture category!
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/ava-duvernay-earns-her-way-into-the-history-books-first-black-woman-director-to-be-nominated-for-a-golden-globe-award-20141211
https://twitter.com/AVAETC/status/543110422866309122/photo/1
https://twitter.com/metaquest/status/543392093507305472/photo/1
It’s ugly isn’t it?
Good Morning, Everyone :)