Best Decorated House?

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A holiday favorite:

Once again, I was disqualified from my neighborhood's "Best Decorated House." They said I had a bad attitude!



What do you think?

Santa Needs a Raise

2015:  "This year, the cost of all of the items in the song comes to a staggering $34,130.99. . .

Here's how the gifts add up:

1 partridge in a pear tree $214.99 (+3.5%)

2 turtle doves $290.00 (+11.5%)

3 French hens $181.50 (0.0%)

4 calling birds $599.96 (0.0%)

5 gold rings $750.00 (0.0%)

6 geese-a-laying $360.00 (0.0%)

7 swans-a-swimming $13,125.00 (0.0%)

8 maids-a-milking $58.00 (0.0%)

9 ladies dancing $7,552.84 (0.0%)

10 lords-a-leaping $5,508.70 (+3.0%)

11 pipers piping $2,635.20 (0.0%)

12 drummers drumming $2,854.80 (0.0%)

= $34,130.99 (+0.6%)

Read the Washington Post, The ridiculous amount you’d need to spend to buy all the stuff in ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’. 

2010:  Those 'piping pipers, leaping lords and assorted birds' are gonna cost you more.

Read The New York Times, 12 Days of Christmas Gifts Cost 9.2% More This Year.

The Christmas Can-Can (Animated Version)

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By Straight No Chaser:

Holiday Trivia

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"While you're busy wrapping gifts and preparing to feast with family and friends, TIME brings you these bizarre Christmas facts to ponder.

Read Time, Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Christmas. 

What If Jesus Was Born Today

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Watch a what if -- the story of the Nativity in the time of the web, social media, and mobile phones:

'Twas the Night Before Christmas by Jeff Dunham

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Season's Greetings from Jeff Dunham's Very Special Christmas Special:

Animals of YouTube Sing "Deck the Halls"

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Why Santa Didn't Answer Your Letter

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Not for the young:

How Does Santa Know?

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Courtesy of Mom & Pop Tammy, from the Facebook page of Young Americans for Liberty:

A Very TSA Christmas

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Suggested by Mom & Pop Tammy, who said "[f]unny but sad because there's some truth to this," Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained:

Humurous Holiday Display?

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From an email:

"Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after 2 days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever. Great stories. But two things made me take it down.

First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by.

Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn't realize he was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn't take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard."

In case you were wondering, here is the display:

 According to Snopes, it is true.

Holiday Lights: Gangum Style

First Halloween:



Now Christmas:

Who You Callin Short

Repost for 2015:

Happy Winter Solstice 2009!

P.S.

It is no coincidence that Christmas is so close to the winter solstice.

Holiday Quiz

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"Test your knowledge about how the Christmas holidays are celebrated from the Philippines to Mexico."

Take this quiz at the Christian Science Monitor, How much do you know about Christmas traditions around the world?

Finally Got the Tree Up!

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What Happens to Unspend Money?

UPDATE II:  On the other hand, maybe gift giving serves a different purpose.

"Though some economists argue otherwise, economics isn't that great at capturing the point of gift giving. Economics is centered on the idea of utility – a measurement of how useful something is to people, in a world of finite resources. But look around the world, and you see that there's good reason to think that gift giving is rarely motivated by practical concerns.

By contrast, there are many anthropological studies that show that gift giving is, and has always been, driven by factors much different than maximizing economic value." 

Read the Washington Post, Why cash is the worst gift.

UPDATE:  Want to ensure the highest satisfaction by your giftee, give cash.

"Many experts agree that money is a better bet than gifts for the holidays, primarily because people are more likely to buy things they’ll actually need and use with their own money. When someone spends $100 on herself, she usually gets $100 worth of satisfaction out of that item, argues University of Minnesota economics professor Joel Waldfogel. When someone else picks out the item for her, it’s almost always going to give her less value in return."

Read Slate, The Obama Girls Want Ca$h for Christmas, and So Should You.  

"Over at the Wall Street Journal, Phil Izzo reports that some $41 billion worth of gift cards have gone unused since 2005. So what, exactly, happens to that money? After all, retailers aren’t allowed to report the cash used to buy gift cards as income until the cards are actually redeemed. So there’s a murky area that arises when a gift card just gathers dust in a drawer for years, lost and forgotten."

Read the Washington Post, How your Best Buy gift card ends up in New York’s bank account.

What is Zullo Hiding?

UPDATE:   How much time has past since the promised 'universe-shattering' revelations:


That sound you hear is the growing laughter at the Birther delusions.

It is also "a tale of incompetence so hilarious that it could be a script for an Elmer Fudd cartoon or a sequel to the Pink Panther movies with the inept Inspector Jaques Clouseau. The tale stars our favorite bumbling “detective” Cold Case Posse Commander Mike Zullo. It costars Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio and the supporting cast", including Pastor You-Know-Who.

"The gullible hard core Birthers still believe one day 'A-Z Day' will come and are willing to send Arapio money."

Read Reality Check Radio, The incredibly inept Cold Case Posseman Mike Zullo goes hunting for Obamabots and finds DARPA (at the wrong web site).

"Someone call Guinness Book of World Records: Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Cold Case Posse commander Mike Zullo may have a claim.

In federal court Tuesday, during what likely is the last week of testimony in Arpaio's civil contempt trial before U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow,  Zullo invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 40 times in 15 minutes, answering question after question from plaintiffs attorney Stanley Young with some version of 'I'm taking the Fifth, sir.' . .

[O]n November 9, Zullo took the Fifth a whopping 347 times (or thereabouts) in nearly four hours of testimony as Young peppered him with inquiries about the MCSO's so-called Seattle investigation and the confidential informant at the heart of it, Dennis Montgomery."

Read the Phoenix New Times, Joe Arpaio's Cold Case Posse Commander Takes the Fifth, Again and Again.

Read also BREAKING NEWS, BREAKING NEWS! Are Gullible-Gallups and Zullo Going to Jail.

And guess who won't be talking about this topic today!!

Your Holiday Favorites Performed by Goats

Better experienced than described:



Read Slate, Finally, You Can Hear All Your Holiday Favorites Performed by Goats.

Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein's (© NoBullU.com) Next Act

UPDATE: So what gave rise to the Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com)?

"The American right has always contained a combative, nativist fringe, where radicals and kooks bend world events to fit their conspiracy theories. There were the John Birch Society newsletters of the 1970s and ’80s; the AM talk-radio shows of the ’90s; the world-government chat rooms and e-mail chain letters around the turn of the millennium; and the vibrant, frenzied blogosphere of amateur muckrakers of the mid-2000s. . .

But in the Obama era, the reach and power of this segment has increased dramatically. The fringe has swelled with new Web sites, radio stations, confabs, causes, pressure groups, celebrities and profit-making businesses noisily pitching themselves to the tea party. An entire right-wing media ecosystem has sprung up, where journalist-warriors flood social media with rumors of sharia law coming to suburbia and hype a fast-approaching 'race war' in America targeting whites. The Republican establishment — a loose coalition of party committees, moderate donors and business interests — once hoped to harness this tremendous new energy to recapture the White House. . .

Some Republicans have made their careers by mastering the new machinery of the movement. When a group of conservative elites quietly huddled with lawmakers one evening in 2013 to lay out their 'defund Obamacare' plan, Sen. Ted Cruz positioned himself as the public face of the campaign. It hardly mattered whether he believed that their government-shutdown would actually gut the health-care law; few, if any, of the architects did. ('I don’t think you could find a single person in that room who really believed the plan would work,' one of the meeting’s attendees confessed to me. Several days into the shutdown, a Cruz aide told me with jarring candor that the senator had stuck to the 'defund' rallying cry because 'a more complicated message' wouldn’t 'make for a good hashtag.') When the dust settled, Obamacare was still fully funded and GOP officials were panicking — but Cruz was a newly minted conservative superstar, and the organizations that backed him had raised millions of dollars. The senator’s staff did not respond to requests to comment for this story.

Skirmishes between the Grand Old Party and far-right populists are as old as lever-operated voting machines, and the old guard usually comes out on top. But in this era of democratized media and deregulated political money, the fringe owns a much greater share of the cash and the clout. Trump was among the first players to realize that. (His staff, too, did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)

The insight appears to have struck him during the run-up to the last presidential election, when his “birther” antics briefly propelled him to the top of pre-campaign polls. Trump, a masterful marketer, has taken care since then to make his right-wing cheering section look huge and wholly organic, habitually retweeting typo-laden messages of support from sycophantic accounts. But this year’s groundswell wasn’t totally spontaneous. Over the past four years, Trump has been laying its foundations with a careful campaign of cultivation. In this, he was far ahead of most of his presidential opponents."

Read the Washington Post, How Donald Trump courted the right-wing fringe to conquer the GOP.

This article is a must read for those who want to understand The Donald fervor.

"I’m telling you, folks, if you think Donald Trump’s demagoguery on immigration has created problems for Republicans, just wait until he unveils his next act. If we get a Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, Trump may well roll out a whole new story about how Republicans and Democrats alike are conspiring with a shadowy cabal of international elites to help China and other foreign countries continue destroying the living standards of American workers."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump is just getting started, Republicans.

Sieg Heil Der Donald!

UPDATE II:  "Donald Trump supporters taunted and called for violence against a number of protesters at a tense rally in Las Vegas Monday night, reports from the scene say. BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins took a short video in which one man can be heard shouting 'light the motherfucker on fire' as a black protester is being removed from the premises :

And about ten minutes into the Trump rally, this happens. pic.twitter.com/65pXHjsJ3x

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) December 15, 2015

NBC's Benjy Sarlin says that one individual shouted the Nazi greeting 'Sieg Heil' in the area of the same protester."

Read Slate, Trump Supporters Shout “Sieg Heil,” “Light Him on Fire” at Black Protester.  

UPDATE:  "If Republicans are responsive to Trump’s vitriol, it’s because he echoes—in less coded terms—the discourse of much of right-wing media."

Read Slate, Donald Trump Is a Conservative Media Creation.

"Trump will protect us from such people. Just as he will protect America from all its enemies.

The price we pay will be tiny. We will give up a civil liberty here, a freedom there.

Certain people will be registered. Their houses of worship will be spied upon. Names will be taken down. But as long as these people are not Christians, do you really care? Trump is betting you do not."

Read Politico, All hail Der Donald.

Read also CNN, Why some conservatives say Trump talk is fascist, which notes that "[s]cholars of fascists like Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany (none of Trump's conservative critics have compared him to either man) say, however, that Trump does display some of the key characteristics of a fascist. His comments about a national registry for Muslim-Americans, together with his propensity to stir up anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiments among his supporters, amount to a perception of hostility toward ethnic and religious minority groups."

And read Slate, Donald Trump Is a Fascist, which asked "[h]ow does he build favor with Republican voters? He shows bravado and 'strength,' disparaging weak opponents. He indulges racist rhetoric and encourages violence against protesters. He speaks directly to the petite bourgeoisie in American life: managers, public employees, small-business owners. People squeezed on all ends and desperate for economic and cultural security against capitalist instability and rapid demographic shifts, as represented by President Obama. Elect him, Trump says, and he’ll restore your security and American greatness. 'You’re going to say to your children, and you’re going to say to anybody else, that we were part of a movement to take back our country. … And we will make America great again.'"