The most beautiful of lyrics, the grace of a catchy tune, or the deep meaning of words describing our current condition. Each will wrap up this carol series. And then some. After all, who decides what’s a carol? I’ve included a few not obviously Christmas themed because they add to our spirit and understanding.

You have to surf away for the first, so y’all come back now, mmkay? Here’s Steven Colbert, Elvis Costello, Toby Keith, Willie Nelson and others, setting the mood.

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And it becomes especially important to recognize how many are left out by the festivities, possibly alienated from family and community, possibly suffering from some inner torment.

It is still up to us to reach out, because. It’s the way we continue on the path to civil…

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And how do you reach the lonely, the depressed, the hurting? Kind words rarely do enough. That tactile sense is too often lacking. Are they really untouchable? In this season?

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There’s danger when we let our hearts fall silent.

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Because Christmas, as celebrated in America, is especially about children and our joy at their joy. It’s about gifting each other, which can be both joyous and stressful, but for many, there is no one for that sharing. Perhaps there’s broken ties. Perhaps there’s the charity of strangers. And even in that case, some distance is maintained. For them the greatest gift can be the free one, touching hands, patting backs, giving hugs.

Reminding them that they are a part of us, of the community, of humankind.

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Even the first Christmas reached to the poorest and most distant according to the legends. (In the next video, slide the bar to 1:40, to skip the blather and go to the beauty of that.)

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Trace Bundy carries the beauty forward with his intricate finger works. Touching the strings like we touch each others’ hearts.

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Love, Actually treated us to Olivia Olsen’s version of this song for the romantics. Here, an 8 year old named Syd rivals that stellar performance.

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And how can we escape the spiritual message inherent in the season? Some ignore this, using the holiday itself as a barrier to bludgeon others with, claiming you can’t enjoy the holidays without Christ (and to do so condemns you… how pleasant is that? Is that what your Christ stood for… punishment?)

Dar Williams doesn’t think so and says so in song.

And John Gorka reminds us of the biggest thing we all missed this Christmas.
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And there it is. What kind of Christmas are Iraqis having? You know, those 26 million folks who never attacked us? Or Afghanistanis? Or Pakistanis? Or Yemenis? Places and people we are officially and unofficially at war with. Because a band of a few thousand violent malcontents exist in the world, we fight hundreds of millions who bore us no harm at all.

Because of this, tens of thousands of American troops are also permanently damaged, wounded forever, since we have government leaders who’ve decided this is the best and only way to go.

They have no idea what Christmas is about. Here’s a clue from Brett Dennen.
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And Rustic Overtones asks this President the same Questions they asked the previous one last year.

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Stevie Wonder looks forward to what Christmas should be.

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He first sang that 42 years ago. How sad that makes that beautiful carol today.

So yeah, between the violence, the loneliness and the materialism, it’s understandable why the only carol for some is this Eric Idle ditty. (NOT work-safe)

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It’s also understandable why others turn their thoughts to the heavenly. Eric Idle again, and his compadres provide a version of it that’s just as plausible as any we’ve imagined.

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For me, I try to remember the forgotten, which was part of the initial message.

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And Christmas is about creating and delighting and uniting.

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It’s especially about granting consideration for all others and taking time to demonstrate your concern.

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And indeed, if we are to reach the pinnacles of caroling and celebrating Christmas or Hannukkah or Festivus or Kwanzaa, these are all the things we must remember: reaching and reconciling, touching and loving, creating and considering, forgetting none and celebrating the joys of everyone.

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And I hope your holidays involve all of that including, ultimately, your smile.

Peace, sister & brother.

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Christmas may be over and further celebration may be anticlimactic to some. But I hew to the quaint notion that the spirit that moves us then is worth carrying through to all of our days.

Which isn’t to suggest I plan to regale you with year round carols. It being Christmas weekend still, there’s more to share that I left unsaid in my previous two offerings on December 24th.

Here, I’ll let the focus lean to the humorous and bizarre, before wrapping up the series with the most moving songs I found relevant to these times.

I’ll let Brian Setzer set the mood.

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Riffing on Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’, here’s the Cheezy Keys:

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For those of you who’ve had their fill of Alvin & the Chipmunks wanting a hula hoop for Christmas, perhaps you’ll enjoy ‘Chipmunks Roasting On An Open Fire’.
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And can it get more offensive than Mr. Garrison of South Park?

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Sure, we can go lower than that. And cheesier. Here’s Bob Rivers:
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Ray Stevens gets all Big Brotherish as a jealous boyfriend at Christmas.
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Which brings us to the question: what’s Santa Claus really all about? Frosty the Snowman claims to know.

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And a ninja has a different take on the jolly old sleighrider.

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Finally, for this segment, we have to ask: what’s Christmas without Robert Earl Keen’s classic real-family Christmas carol?

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Next: the beauty of song and the strength in lyric, in Part 4, the carol finale.

And there is a Christmas for the old and sentimental.

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And another kind of Christmas for the young.

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There are those who think Christmas is for the sharing.

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There are those who think it’s for romancing.

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Even romance that goes all in. (Caution: not workplace safe)

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There’s the old-fashioned country Christmas.

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There’s the Christmas real ladies like Michelle Bachmann secretly enjoy.

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There’s a Christmas that transcends boundaries of culture and race.

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There’s even a Christmas that transcends time and space.

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Part 3 is still ahead…

We gather to celebrate the birthday of the guy who said:

‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

And today, for this Christmas, 60 millionaire Senators voted to take care of 30 million more sick Jesuses. Starting in 4 or 5 years. Minus the extra couple hundred thousand who’ll die needlessly by then. While visions of Christmas bonuses danced in the bank accounts of AIG and other insurance company executives. Without the delay.

And so begins the carols of Christmas in 2009. Compliments of an agnostic heathen.

From the White House press room, this was sent as a Christmas gift to soothe the base:

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But all the base did not belong to them.

Of course, the Congress critters from the red states were livid. But Christmas 2009 was not theirs. It belonged to the others.

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Afterwards, they adjourned on the counsel of Jethro Tull.

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Meanwhile, hidden in a cave in Montana, former US warlord Dick Cheney was celebrating Christmas in his family’s traditional way (warning: not workplace-safe)

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Alrighty then. The Christmas carols that follow speak to the beautiful, the creative, the smart and the smartass, because, after all, that’s who you are. And unto you today, these gifts are borne. So listen up.

It all began on a quiet night outside of Bethlehem…

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Which, over 20 centuries, evolved into a slightly different emphasis.

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That oversimplifies, of course, as many still seek ways to unify across the great divide…

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(Part 2, to come in a little bit)

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Back in the 1980s in Upstate New York, one of the UHF TV stations (23?) had a weekly “Bad Cinema” night.I believe it was literally called “Bad Cinema”. They played the cheesiest old SciFi, horror, etc. One night they had a movie, can’t remember the name of it, the plot being an island was haunted, and the townsfolk were heading out to get rid of the demons. An old farmer dude, or maybe he was a fisherman, says “You can’t scare off demons with a shotgun!”

Lagniappe: Baby Snake Oil, He Licks Her

Comix, comics, comixx, comic strips, editorial cartoons, cartoons, comic books, underground comix, satire, parody, Republicans, political cartoons, John Poindexter, Ollie North, G. Gordon Liddy, John Bolton, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Joe Lieberman, Zappadan, Frank Zappa, Richard Nixon, Bible Study

Zencomix

You know the drill. Supporting nationalized health care is socialism, Communism, Naziism! I guess the latter charge comes because Germany has the oldest national health care system at 126 years old. In the Americas, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela have it. All of Europe has it. Numerous countries on other continents have it.

The US stands alone as the ONLY industrialized country in the world without it.

We’re Number Zero !!!!

For a country that used to pride itself on being the best in education, invention, sciences and more, it’s really surprising how little pride remains. We’re not near number one in low infant mortality or any good thing. We are only number one in imprisonment rates and military spending. We do punishment and death very well, but life? Not so much.

Yesterday the very moderate Howard Dean, a lifelong physician, said it’s time to scrap the current bill and resort to parliamentary tricks to pass a new and better bill. He’s absolutely right for several reasons.

1) Liberals wanted a single payer plan because it provided universal coverage and had clear cost controls built in. Our Congress refused to consider it at all. We were told we’d have to settle for a public option that would allow our government to compete with private insurers, to compel them to be more cost-efficient. Then we were told states could opt in or opt out of that. Then the public option was eliminated. Then came the proposal to lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55. Now that’s been killed. So have almost all cost-efficiency regulations and rules requiring insurance companies to clean up their acts.

There is no middle to these compromises. EVERY compromise has been made by liberals. The current bill is a conservative’s dream: wasteful, nothing for the middle class, with extra profits going only to the corporations that turned our medical care system into a permanent snafu.

2) The argument that we pass ’something’ now, then try and improve it later is a hollow one. In almost every instance of social safety net development, Congressional tinkering has leaned towards restrictions that limit services instead of expanding them. When I was a welfare assistance worker in the 1980s, I was sent to a class that described how the agency ferreted out fraud and abuse. The lecturer announced that - nationwide - fraud by clients had recently passed one billion dollars.

Another worker said client fraud drew page one attention in the news, usually when one major defrauder was caught with fake birth certificates, ripping off the system for 50 or 100 grand a year. Meanwhile, he’d see one or two paragraph stories buried on page Z that mentioned some doctor or pharmacist caught ‘overbilling’ the system or ripping it off through some similar scheme. He asked “Does the agency keep statistics on provider fraud?”

The lecturer responded affirmatively: “Yes, provider fraud recently passed 9 billion dollars.”

That was in 1982, when 9 out of 10 dollars stolen from the welfare program was taken by the well-off doctors, pharmacists, clinics, dentists, etc. And how did Congress respond? They didn’t. The page one stories of a major client fraud would send them into paroxysms of moral outrage and fresh rule changes, but provider fraud remained largely ignored. And before that Great Society program was 30 years old, it went through a major overhaul by President Clinton because it had become bogged down by the weight of patch upon patch aimed at limiting clients.

An example: I had to deny one laid off worker from receiving food stamps because he owned a motor boat. And the rules said he couldn’t sell the boat to qualify either. He’d used up his unemployment and his savings and waited till he was destitute before even walking through the door of the agency and I had to turn him down after he’d worked and paid taxes for 26 years.

If a healthcare bill passes, a few minor improvements might come, but the notion that major benefit improvements or major reforms to rein in costs lie ahead is only a selling point that has little basis in reality. That’s not how our two party system works on social programs.

3) The GOP has made it clear - even in leaked memos - that it plans to do all it can to kill health care reform. Because it could make Obama and Democrats look good. I’ve seen their effort in action in Florida. Republican representatives and fake senior organizations send out mailings that indicate Medicare for seniors is being cut in each new Democratic plan. Scaring seniors into opposition is the GOP health care plan. In other states with fewer seniors, no doubt they’re targeting other groups to provoke their opposition too.

The lack of health care for 1 out of 6 Americans doesn’t matter to the GOP. Defeating Democrats is all they’re interested in. We certainly can’t expect that to change if more Congressional seats are Republican.

4) Not just the country will be bankrupted by this bill. It does nothing to protect individuals from going bankrupt under present insurance company practices.

So is any bill better than no bill? No. A bad bill can offer some subsidized health care to the poorest Americans, giving nothing to most of the middle class, while ballooning the deficit with the outlandish cost increases that Big Pharma and Corporate Hospitals have driven to insane levels in recent decades. And it’ll keep those medical bankruptcies coming. In simplest terms, a bill that fails to rein in costs will ultimately force the program to fail under the weight of its expense.

Republicans would love to see such a failure tacked onto the Democrats. And the handful of Pseudo-Democrats that have been key impediments to a good bill’s passage simply don’t care who knows that they’re the puppets of lobbyists trying to defeat reform.

It doesn’t take extremism or liberalism to recognize what’s going on or how to achieve the principal goal, which 2 out of 3 Americans support. A fiscally conservative, socially caring moderate middle class American would have to see the common sense in the plan Howard Dean is advocating.

Abandon the Senate’s Titanic health care bill before it hits the iceberg. The reconciliation method allows for a sensible, successful alternative with 51 - not 60 - votes. And in the Senate, there are more than 51 ready to meet America’s needs.