Saturday, December 24, 2011

Ron Paul Lynching—Will GOP Insiders Attempt To Dissolve Iowa And Elect A New One?

Via Matthew

The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney wrote a piece saying GOP will take off the gloves if Ron Paul wins Iowa, (“Just like they did to Pat Buchanan in 1996” as buchanan.org points out.) And the New York Times and The Weekly Standard opened the ball with a revival of attacks based on the Ron Paul Letters of the 1980s, an attack that was made in 2008 by the New Republic.

We covered the Kirchick attacks when they happened during the last election. The Ron Paul letters would not be a big deal in a society that actually believed in political debate. What's going on now is simply rampant Politically Correct hysteria.

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The Christmas Shoes

Re-post Christmas 2009. There was a student who sang this beautifully at TEA (Tarboro Edgecombe Academy) where Dixie went to school until they went out of business after 40 years



Safeties

Safeties:DaybyDayCartoon

Lower than a Snake's Belly in a Wagon Rut

Roundabout via Rich

DOJ to America: we won't reveal the circumstances under which you can be assassinated by us

Via Knuckledraggin my life away

boingboing
Verbatim Post

The DOJ has rejected a Freedom of Information Act request from the New York Times that asked the agency to reveal the legal basis for the newly unveiled American program of strategic drone-attack assassinations of American citizens off the field of battle.

Summary:

* The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen,

* who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda,

* which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment;

* it did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of),

* based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won't show anyone,

* and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won't show anyone,

* and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny;

* although don't worry, because the C.I.A. would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first;

* and this is the "most transparent administration ever";

* currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

AP Poll: Santa Claus Still Important to Americans

He still fills our stockings!

Why do kids believe a chubby guy in a flying sleigh can deliver joy across America? Because their parents do. A whopping 84 percent of grown-ups were once children who trusted in Santa's magic, and lots cling to it still.

Things are changing fast these days, with toddlers wishing for iPads, grade schoolers emailing their Christmas lists and moms wrestling over bargain toys at midnight sales. Despite all the pressures on the rituals of the season, an AP-GfK poll confirms that families are sticking by old St. Nick.

"It's important for kids to have something to believe in," says great-grandmother Wanda Smith of Norman, Okla.

And so they do. Year after year, Santa Claus survives the scoffers and the Scrooges and the 6-year-old playground skeptics. He endures belittling commercials that portray him shopping at Target or taking directions from an iPhone. He shrugs off scolds who say his bagful of toys overshadows the reason for the season.

Two-thirds of parents with kids under 18 say Santa's an important part of their celebrations this year. Moms, especially, have a soft spot for the man in red — 71 percent of them say he's important, and that's a big jump from 58 percent just five years ago.

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Anti-Christian Violence in the Middle East?

Via Looking in the Mirror

The UK Daily Telegraph recently posted an article entitled, "How can we remain silent while Christians are being persecuted?" Anybody reading the Daily Bell this past year will not be surprised by this headline, nor the article itself. Turns out that the writer is reporting on "a new evil [that] is sweeping the Middle East" – and that evil is violence against Christians.

"How can we remain silent while Christians are being persecuted?" the article asks. "The Americans have gone now, and Iraq's Christian communities – some of the world's oldest – are undergoing an exodus on a biblical scale."

The article does not only mention Iraq and makes it clear that the anti-Christian sentiment is broad-based: "The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists ...

"In Tunisia, priests are being murdered. Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest."

Early in January 2011, we predicted this. In an article entitled, "Western Elites Still Secretly Building Islam," we wrote about the West's strategic undermining of non-religious or Christian regimes in the Ivory Coast, Tunisia and Egypt. Here's an excerpt:

Is the war on terror a success? The Anglo-American elite needs an enemy if the authoritarianism that is rising in the West is to continue – because despotism (and globalism) is more easily created when there is an outside enemy. But fighting against 100 Al Qaeda soldiers in Afghanistan is not anybody's idea of a substantive threat. And the Taliban are evidently and obviously fighting an occupying force.

What if the powers-that-be had decided to do what they could to expand the Muslim threat – and thus expand (in the Western mind anyway) the specter of resurgent, militant Islam? A cynical idea isn't it, dear reader. It is merely speculation, but there are reasons to explore it further ...

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Sugar Plum Fairy by P.Tchaikovsky - Glass Harp LIVE (HD)

Via Chuck

Impressive.


Merry Christmas from our BB&T

She does a great job each year.

Charles Krauthammer wishes “Merry Christmas” to “incompetent” and “cowardly” Eric Holder


He ain't got no respect from me.



The War on Christmas is real, and the atheist barbarians are winning it

There are two wars on Christmas: one public and baloney, one conceptual and terrifying. The first usually involves a group of “Bah! Humbug!” atheists trying to ruin everybody’s fun. Take this story from Santa Monica, California. For decades Palisades Park has displayed traditional religious tableaux at Christmas – the Virgin and Child, the three wise men, shepherds etc. But this year a lottery system was introduced to allow other religious groups to compete for spaces. Incredibly, a bunch of atheists won and were permitted to put up images of Satan, Jesus and Father Christmas, with the tagline: “37 million Americans know a myth when they see one… What myths do you see?” All good family fun.

Anti-social displays of bad taste are becoming common in the United States of America. The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue reports the following outrages: “In a South Carolina cancer center, a 67-year-old volunteer Santa was evicted because of the “different cultures and beliefs of the patients we care for” … In an elementary school in Stockton, California, poinsettias were banned but somehow snowmen were permitted; they justified their censorship by saying there was a Sikh temple in the city … A skeleton St. Nick was found hanging from a cross on the grounds of the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg, Virginia.”

Getting over-excited about this sort of thing is, of course, exactly what the perpetrators want. The kind of tragic busybody who takes the time to write a letter protesting a display of poinsettias as an affront to multicultural tolerance probably spends Christmas horribly alone and is just desperate for attention. The best thing to do is to ignore them (as so many public officials have done). Or else, you could wait until they fall asleep after a marathon Battlestar Galatica session and then cover their entire front lawn in a pattern of poinsettias that reads, “Merry Christmas.”

More worrying is the insidious conversion of the religious festival of Christmas into a purely cultural phenomenon. Christians on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed with dismay that the commercial aspects of the season have been elevated (I saw crackers on sale in September) while its spiritual dimension has been squeezed out of the public sphere. I’ve said it before and I’ll write it again: the Founding Fathers never intended for faith to be excluded from public or political life. America might lack England’s established church or continental Europe’s pervasive Catholicism, but it was founded by Christians along Christian principles with the express intention of building a more Christian commonwealth. It is, at risk of sounding pedantic, a Christian nation in all but its absence of national church.

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The late Roman Empire was not the twilight of popular myth

The ever excellent Ed West has this to say over at Telegraph blogs, while speaking about our current decline:

There are, of course, many other similarities between our age and the late Roman Empire: a declining birth rate, especially marked among upper-class women; a collapse in religious belief and the growth of a more vital and passionate monotheistic faith from the Middle East; a shrunken attachment to the ideal of the country – patriotism – and increased attachment to the state, a state which virtually all ambitious, educated people wished to work for.

It is perhaps something of a truism to compare our own age with the period of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Funnily enough, when researching my thesis, which had a chapter about Saint Augustine, I read quite a lot about what historians call Late Antiquity.

Late Antiquity is a fascinating period, and for two reasons. Firstly, it is full of surprises, and secondly it is full of excellent sources, chief of which to my mind is Augustine himself. We know more about Augustine than any other ancient person (with the possible exception of the Emperor Julian) and through him we find a point of entry into the world of Late Antiquity; it is only hundreds of years later that we have a similar insight into what people were thinking and feeling, when we reach the confessional writings of the seventeenth century.

So, what can we learn from the twilight of the Roman Empire?

For a start, it is a mistake to think of it as a twilight. The Empire was substantially intact at the death of Theodosius the Great in 395, and even after 410, when Rome had been sacked by Alaric the Goth, Augustine makes clear in The City of God that he thinks that Rome, though suffering a reverse, is by no means defeated. Indeed, contemporary historians now think that while the fall of the North African provinces was a huge blow, which occurred in the year of Augustine’s death, 430 AD, it was only the two subsequent failures to win them back, in 461 and 468, that doomed the West. So, even into the second half of the fifth century, people in the Roman Empire may well have been confident that the Empire was going to survive, just as it had survived the very difficult period in the third century before the accession of Diocletian.

What is very clear from reading Augustine, and even Jerome, is a strong sense of belief that these men had in the Roman idea, which was for them summed up in Virgil’s immortal line put into the mouth of Jupiter: Imperium sine fine dedi. “I grant them imperial rule without end.” Augustine and Jerome were Christians, but this idea made perfect sense to them. Rome was immortal, granted immorality not by Jupiter but by Divine Providence. Moreover, the other Virgilian tag about Rome’s role in the world, Parcere victis et debellare superbos – “to spare the vanquished and to conquer the proud” – would have made perfect sense to Christians as well.

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Arabic Textbooks Show Children How to Chop off Hands and Feet under Sharia Law

Nice.

Godfather Politics
Verbatim Post

15 of the 19 homicide bombers on September 11 were from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a net exporter of aid to terrorist nations and groups. Even so, Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) argued earlier this year that Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the U.S. and that they had helped stop a package bomb sent to the U.S. last year. Wow! A package bomb!

Saudi Arabia has a public and private face. Publicly, we hear how the Saudis are helping to curtail terror threats, but privately Saudi schools promote Wahhabism, the branch of Islam followed by Saudi Muslims.

A few years ago, the Saudi government claimed that it was working “diligently . . . to overhaul its education system.” One of the easiest ways to reshape an education system is to change the textbooks. The latest information about textbooks being used in Saudi Arabian schools shows that no such overhaul has taken place. Consider this report from the UK’s The Daily Mail:

Barbaric textbooks handed out in Saudi Arabian schools teach children how to cut off a thief’s hands and feet under Sharia law, it has emerged.

The shocking books, paid for and printed by the Saudi government, also tell teenagers that Jews need to be exterminated and homosexuals should be ‘put to death’.

***********

The books were published and handed out to 9th and 10th-graders despite Saudi Arabia’s promises to clean up textbooks in the kingdom.

Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, told Fox News: ‘This is where terrorism starts, in the education system.

‘They show students how to cut (the) hand and the feet of a thief,’ he said.

In one, for ninth-graders, students are taught the annihilation of the Jewish people is imperative.

One text reads in part: ‘The hour (of judgment) will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. There is a Jew behind me come and kill him.’

Another report shows that in 2010 President Obama went “ahead with plans to sell Saudi Arabia advanced aircraft and other weapons worth up to $60bn (£39bn), the biggest arms deal in US history, in a strategy of shoring up Gulf Arab allies to face any military threat from Iran. According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is also in talks with the Saudis about possible naval and missile-defence upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more over five to 10 years.”

Since 2005 the United States has given Saudi Arabia $3.9 million dollars in foreign aid.

A quotation attributed to V. I. Lenin got it right: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Quotes

Quotes
"Without a rifle you are nothing, worthless, you are waiting for death, any minute, any second."
-- Aron Bielski


Quotes Catch Up
"Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from."
-– Thomas Sowell




Quotes Catch Up
"Plan A is to live a long, prosperous life while enjoying my Freedom, and Liberty. My Guns are Plan B."
-- From a .sig block at The Highroad Forums

"Am fear nach gheidh na h-airm 'nam na sith, Cha bhi iad aige 'n am a chogaidli."
-- Gaelic Proverb ("Who keeps not his arms in times of peace, Will have no arms in times of war.")


"It has been said the greatest volume of sheer brainpower in one place occurred when Jefferson dined alone..."
--John Kennedy


"I had no faith in the sabre as a weapon. I only made the men draw their sabres to prevent them from wasting their fire before they got to closer quarters."
No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
--Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
--Thomas Jefferson


4. "Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand."
General Lee to Governor Stockdale at the *Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, Summer 1870
(*Where my military school, Greenbrier had its Final Ball each year. BT)



Three Of My Favorite Quotes
3. At the battle of Franklin, General John Bell Hood told Cleburne to make a frontal attack on an entrenched position. Cleburne tried to persuade Hood but Hood disagreed.

Just before the attack General Daniel Govan told Cleburne, "General there will not be many of us going back to Arkansas after this battle."

Cleburne said, "Well, Govan, if we must die, let us die like men."

Cleburne's horse was shot from under him as he led the charge. As he put his foot in the stirrup to mount a second horse it was killed too. He charged on foot. He was killed by a bullet through the heart


Quotes
1. Confederate General D.H. Hill's letter to Yankee General French in 1863: (Excerpt)
"In regard to your first communication touching the burning of Plymouth you seem to have forgotten two things. You forget, sir, that you are a Yankee and that Plymouth is a Southern town. It is no business of yours if we choose to burn our own towns. A meddling Yankee troubles himself with everybody's matters but his own and repents of everybody's sins except his own. We are a different people. Should the Yankees burn a Union village in Connecticut or a codfish town in Massachusetts we would not meddle with them but rather bid them God-speed in their work of purifying the atmosphere."

7. "To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 B.C.-43 B.C.

10. "I will never be taken alive."
Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State, CSA
to Dr. Moses Hoge

19. "There was no surrender at Appomattox, and no withdrawal from the field which committed our people and their children to a heritage of shame and dishonor. No cowardice on any battlefield could be as base and shameful as the silent acquiescence in the scheme which was teaching the children in their homes and schools that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war, that prisoners of war held in the South were starved and treated with a barbarous inhumanity, that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country and false to their oaths, that the young men who left everything to resist invasion, and climbed the slopes of Gettysburg and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government."
The Rev. James Power Smith, last surviving member of Jackson's staff, 1907

23. " Tarif"
When the Saracens and Moors, in the 8th century invaded and devastated the rich and beautiful provinces of Spain, they were commanded by a general whose name was Tarif, who had but one eye (See Anquetil's Universal History) - Our Tariff must be a descendant of this infamous destroyer, and inherits his defect of having but one eye, as it can see but one interest, and in one direction."
(I found the above quote on microfilm at the Tarboro Library, but I either failed to write down the source, or there was none. Also, I failed to write down the date, but remember that it was well before the War, 1823/1833 sticks in my mind. BT)

24. A Federal surgeon at the battle of Sharpsburg:
" It is beyond all wonder how such men as the rebel (sic) troops can fight on as they do; that, filthy, sick, hungry, and miserable, they should prove such heroes in fight, is past explanation - one regiment stood up before the fire of two or three of our long- range batteries and of two regiments of infantry, and though the air around them was vocal with the whistle of bullets and scream of shells, there they stood, and delivered their fire in perfect order; and there they continued to stand......"

33. "Twenty eight years have passed since the close of our civil war. Time, I trust has healed the wounds of war, but with the revolving years the causes and events of that terrible struggle seem to be forgotten, or if not forgotten, considered as unimportant events of history. And even the history of those events, and the causes that led to that struggle, are not set forth fairly and truthfully. It is stated in books and papers that Southern children read and study that all the blood-shedding and destruction of property of that conflict was because the South rebelled without cause against the best government the world ever saw; that although Southern soldiers were heroes in the field, skillfully massed and led, they and their leaders were rebels and traitors who fought to overthrow the Union, and to preserve human slavery, and that their defeat was necessary for free government and the welfare of the human family.

As a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of Virginia, I deny the charge, and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels; we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."
Colonel Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, at the dedication of the Confederate monument at Old Chapel in Clarke County, Virginia.

35. "If we were wrong in our contest, then the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a grave mistake and the revolution to which it led was a crime. If Washington was a patriot; Lee cannot have been a rebel."
-- General Wade Hampton CSA

39. “Damn ’em, they were foolish enough to think by laying down their arms they would enjoy all the rights they once had…......I am not one of those to ask forgiveness for that which I believe today is right.”
--General J. O. Shelby in a letter 1 Nov. 1865

C96 Broomhandle Mauser

We took all three configurations of the C96 Broomhandle Mauser - a pistol, a carbine, and a machine pistol - out to the range for some comparisons.



LINK

Obama says he's not bound by Guantanamo, gun-control provisions

Via Don

President Obama said Friday he will not be bound by at least 20 policy riders in the 2012 omnibus funding the government, including provisions pertaining to Guantanamo Bay and gun control.

After he signed the omnibus into law Friday, the White House released a concurrent signing statement saying Obama will object to portions of the legislation on constitutional grounds.

Signing statements are highly controversial, and their legality is disputed. (Then sue his ass.)

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Dyslexington

Via SHNV

December 14, 2011
The News-Gazette of Lexington, Virginia
Editor, The News-Gazette:

Dyslexington – [L. ne equus sensus] affliction peculiar to northern
emigrants to small southern towns that prevents them from reading
American history with any comprehension. When presented with objective
facts, patient sees only a jumble of disconnected prejudices; suffers
from inflamed, irrational phobias; visually confuses tokens and symbols
of southern heritage with stereotypical racism as concocted in Hollywood
fiction. Acute victims suffer from distorted vision, an inability to
distinguish St. Andrew’s cross from the Nazi swastika and have publicly
mistaken the former for the Japanese Rising Sun.

Symptoms may include delirium, rage, in-articulation of coherent thought
patterns, non sequitur, ad hoc argumentation, sympathetic identification
with or as Mimi Elrod, psychological denial, knee-jerk paranoia,
cultural amnesia, loss of civic identity and a heightened tendency
toward obsessive brooding over early 19th century social structure.
Unresponsive to reason in the final stages, sufferers of Dyslexington
actually see “slavery” wherever “states’ rights” is spelled out before
their eyes and have even been known to self-destructively support
carpetbaggers for re-election.

Dyslexington is communicable via close contact with professors at
apostate universities ashamed of their namesakes, prolonged armchair
exposure to revisionist cable programming or habitual lassitude toward
widely available reading matter. Unchecked, an entire southern community
may become culturally indistinguishable from any given Boston suburb.
Inoculation is imperative.

Dyslexington, though stubbornly resistant to treatment, is not
incurable. Victims must recognize symptoms and willingly seek self-help.
Opening books published before 1970 alone has often reduced both
arrogance and ignorance by up to 41.3 percent. Sufferers from
Dyslexington should initiate a regimen of applying cold facts to the
thickest part of the skull and schedule a historically themed family
vacation upon first indication of infection.

SHERWIN W. DILLARD JR.
Buena Vista

A British Rebel in the Heart of the Brussels Empire

Godfather Politics
Verbatim Post

Nigel Farage is a name that will remain in the history of Europe. Or, rather, in the history of the failed European Union and the failed European financial union.

He became known to many Europeans just a year ago when enthusiasts published on YouTube a video of one of his short speeches to the European Parliament. The speech is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gm9q8uabTs. In a daring and politically incorrect tone, Farage asked the European Parliament who had just voted for tighter control by the Federal Government . . . oops, I meant the European Commission, over the process of national elections in the members states of the European Union. “Who the hell do you think you are” was the bottom line of the speech. Who the hell do you think you are to unilaterally destroy the freedom of the people to vote and decide for themselves? Farage pointed to the fact that the encroachment on the rights of the peoples in Europe by the centralized government in Brussels uses as an excuse the Euro project; the euro is failing because it has never been a healthy project to start with. But instead of accepting the reality that the project is failing, the eurocrats are going to preserve the project at any cost – even at the cost of destroying the little liberties left to the European nations in the union. Sacrificing the rights in the name of a failed project, that’s what the European Empire is doing.

And Farage asked: “Who the hell do you think you are?” And this phrase made him a celebrity overnight, and his popularity in Europe keeps rising.

Farage, a long-time member of the Conservative Party, left the party in 1992. His reason was that the Conservative Party is just another Social-Democratic Party (the nick name for a socialist party in Europe). He had embraced the Libertarian principles that Margaret Thatcher promoted in Britain during her terms as a Prime Minister. After leaving the party, Farage affirmed those principles even more faithfully, founding the UK Independence Party and becoming one of the most vocal critics of socialism at home and the foreign policy of joining the European Union. In 2006 he was elected leader of the UKIP, and in his maiden speech as a leader made a statement that echoed throughout Britain: “We’ve got three social democratic parties in Britain — Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative are virtually indistinguishable from each other on nearly all the main issues” and “you can’t put a cigarette paper between them and that is why there are nine million people who don’t vote now in general elections that did back in 1992.”

Largely ignored at the beginning, Farage received an increasing barrage of criticism from the official media for his libertarian positions after 1999 when he was elected to the European Parliament as the leader of a significant group of 13 members of the UKIP. The main arguments against Farage are known to the American public from own experience here: “unelectable,” “fringe candidate,” “crazy,” “wacko.” His views on foreign policy have been declared “dangerous” by the official establishment propaganda because he calls for the withdrawal of Britain from any entangling alliances, and for “minding our own business.” Even the “racist” accusations have appeared once or twice. His views on the European Central Bank and the Euro have been called “idealistic,” even in the midst of a collapsing financial structure throughout the whole European Union.

But no matter what the establishment in Britain and in Europe is trying to do, Farage’s popularity steadily rises, both in Britain and in Europe, especially among the young people. The end of false conservatism and the socialist consensus between all parties may not be so close for Britain, but it certainly is coming. When the European Union finally collapses, only Farage’s name will remain in history, as the lonely British rebel against the Brussels Empire.

Harry Andrews and the Legend of Chateau La Roche

Via Jeanie, Belle Grove



Harry Andrews improbable but true World War I service began in an army hospital. The young man was one of the 7,000 soldiers at Camp Dix, New Jersey, who were cut down by an outbreak of deadly cerebrospinal meningitis. Andrews motionless body was moved to a morgue, and his records were marked "deceased" and sent to Washington.

Harry Andrews was on the slab for some time. The body was then taken back to the hospital for dissection. Doctors opened the mouth, cutting away tissue from the upper palate for bacterial cultures. One of the doctors said, "Let's see if we can start his heart with this new stuff." The "new stuff" was adrenaline. A needle pierced his heart and the doctors punched his chest. Then his heart began to beat again.

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Silent Night



This is my favorite version of this song. It's the most beautiful version. The "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" intro is from Floyd Cramer's medley. First released August, 1980, on the Temps. Alb. "Give Love At Christmas." The single was released in 82. The lineup for this version was: Otis Williams, Dennis Edwards, Melvin Franklin (born David Melvin English), Richard Street, Glenn Carl Leonard. Yes, Yes, Yes, there was an earlier version on the album "Christmas Card". Released in 1970. The lineup for that version was Dennis Edwards, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, Melvin Franklin, Otis Williams. Completely different rendition though.