Monday Open Thread | Christmas Jams

Posted on December 5, 2016 by SouthernGirl2

beautiful-christmas-candles-5Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree is a Christmas song written by Johnny Marks and recorded by Brenda Lee in 1958 on Decca9-30776.

Although Decca released it in both 1958 and again in 1959, it did not sell well until Lee became a popular star in 1960; that Christmas season, it hit #14 on the Billboard pop chart and turned into a perennial holiday favorite. It continued to sell well during the holiday season, hitting #5 on the Christmas chart as late as 1984. Brenda Lee’s recording still receives a great deal of airplay. Despite the song’s title, its instrumentation also fits the Country genre which Brenda Lee more fully embraced as her career evolved. Despite her mature-sounding voice, she recorded this song when she was only 14 years old. The recording featured Hank Garland’s ringing guitar.

For decades, Brenda Lee’s recording was the only notable version of the song. Radio stations ranging from Top 40 to Adult Contemporary to Country Music to Oldies to even Adult Standards played this version.

About SouthernGirl2

A Native Texan who adores baby kittens, loves horses, rodeos, pomegranates, & collect Eagles. Enjoys politics, games shows, & dancing to all types of music. Loves discussing and learning about different cultures. A Phi Theta Kappa lifetime member with a passion for Social & Civil Justice.
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36 Responses to Monday Open Thread | Christmas Jams

  6. SouthernGirl2 says:
    December 5, 2016 at 3:27 pm

    Another mistrial because racists are hell bent on denying a black man justice. I feel nothing but hopelessness and despair.

    Reply
    • Liza says:
      December 5, 2016 at 4:03 pm

      That poor kid never had a chance with a father like that. It’s so sad. I hate to think about what a horrible death that was for this child.

      Reply
  11. Ametia says:
    December 5, 2016 at 11:20 am

    Interview

    Fareed Zakaria’s “CNN Special Report: The Legacy of Barack Obama” premieres Wednesday, December 7 on CNN.

    A new CNN special promo highlights just some of the wins, disappointments and controversies that contribute to the first Black president’s complicated legacy.

    Journalist Fareed Zakaria will discuss those defining events with the president in “CNN Special Report: The Legacy of Barack Obama.” The promo above shows Zakaria asking Obama about the Islamic State’s rise, intercut with footage of American- and Gadsen-flag-waving protestors chanting against the Affordable Care Act and images of a Sandy Hook massacre memorial.

    http://www.colorlines.com/articles/watch-president-obama-explores-legacy-new-interview?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28Colorlines.com%29

    Reply
  20. rikyrah says:
    December 5, 2016 at 10:46 am

    Uh huh
    Uh huh

    Job Retraining Won’t Work. We’ll Need Government Jobs, Then a Universal Basic Income
    by David Atkins
    December 4, 2016 8:00 AM

    There is a growing consensus among futurists and visionaries of various backgrounds that the challenges of an automated economy will require implementing a universal basic income. These thinkers range from former SEIU president Andy Stern to Robert Reich to a wide range of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated for it, as did conservative Milton Friedman.

    For all the hoopla over china, trade and immigration, 85% of the manufacturing losses in the United States were due to automation, not trade. And it’s not just manufacturing. Automation imperils huge swaths of employment, from the medical profession to the finance industry. Drivers of all kinds, from truckers to cabbies to worksite drivers, are all on the chopping block. Big data threatens to slash middle level managers and analysts of all kinds. Something will have to be done.

    But most people aren’t ready for a universal basic income. Wherever the public has had a chance to vote on it, it has failed–and usually dramatically. People aren’t comfortable with the idea yet–they worry about creating a class of layabouts, and about removing the dignity that comes with a job, and about losing the leverage workers have had against capital since the dawn of the labor movement. Most of these are cultural fears that will dissipate over time, but they are very real.

    Because of that, reducing structural underemployment and unemployment due to automation is going to require a large push for government sector employment first. There is a great deal of work to be done in repairing and creating new infrastructure, in retrofitting existing equipment to implement renewable energy, water saving and carbon-controlling measures, and in forward-thinking work like space travel. A great deal of this work will be manual and skilled trade labor of the sort that can be done by Americans hardest hit by the global economy.

    But to get even that far will require an acknowledgment that retraining for the “jobs of the future” is not a satisfactory answer. Former factory workers in places like Muncie, IN, either cannot or will not learn to code and develop apps. Job retraining programs have not been very successful in part because of cultural challenges, and in part because there isn’t actually a skills gap between American workers and unfilled jobs. The “jobs of the future” are rapidly changing as well. Ten to fifteen years ago the “cool” job was web design, and everyone was supposed to learn HTML. Now those skills are nearly useless, as automated tools make it easy to create a website without any coding knowledge whatsoever. Today’s hot job is making apps, but that labor market is already saturated and globalized, with ever more democratized tools. Tomorrow’s hot job will be in 3-D printers with their own language and requirements, but then that too will be rapidly simplified on the front end. The back ends of all these technologies will require fewer and fewer back end creators, even as machine learning for back end applications improves.

    Reply
  21. rikyrah says:
    December 5, 2016 at 10:30 am

    The Evil One Speaks:

    Dick Cheney Celebrates a World Where Facts Don’t Matter
    by David Atkins
    December 4, 2016 5:47 PM

    Dick Cheney is thrilled with the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s tweets have made his dream of a world free from the accountability of the press and basic realities come true:

    I think one of the reasons people get so concerned about the tweets is it is sort of a way around the press. He doesn’t have to rely upon, uh, rely upon — this is the modern era, modern technology. He’s at the point where we don’t need you guys anymore.

    Conservatives have long complained about a “media filter” that supposedly doesn’t let them get their messages across. If the media were somehow distorting the words of conservatives that would be one thing. But there’s a reason a media filter exists: to provide some sort of reality-based check on whether a politician is being truthful or not. Without some sort of filter, communications from politicians are nothing more than propaganda.

    So when Cheney celebrates the notion that Trump can bypass the media, he’s not championing the notion of truth over bias. He’s lauding a world in which a politician can falsely claim that, say, there were millions of fraudulent votes cast when nothing of the sort ever happened, and millions of his followers will blindly believe it without verification.

    But then, that sort of fact-free environment isn’t a new creation of Donald Trump. It was the modus operandi of the George W. Bush Administration as well:

    Reply
  26. rikyrah says:
    December 5, 2016 at 8:21 am

    UH HUH

    UH HUH

    From Reuters:

    Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.

    Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.

    The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership – a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.

    The tribes have rights to use the land, but they do not own it. They can drill it and reap the profits, but only under regulations that are far more burdensome than those applied to private property.

    “We should take tribal land away from public treatment,” said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican U.S. Representative from Oklahoma and a Cherokee tribe member who is co-chairing Trump’s Native American Affairs Coalition. “As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country.

    Reply
  27. Ametia says:
    December 5, 2016 at 7:36 am

    Good Morning, Everyone. Love this song.

    Reply
  28. rikyrah says:
    December 5, 2016 at 5:05 am

    Morning , Everyone😐😐😐

    Reply

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