I wish I can find the time to waste and answer Dave B. list because what many of his points can said of the Republicans! But I leave in seven hours for a two week vacation to Spain. I pissed that I cannot take a month vacation like GB.

Bill

Bill from NYC: Someday when you are a straight thinking hard working Republican like GWB, you too can take a month long vacation. Enjoy your two weeks in Espana.

Bill, you capitalist, you!

You are suffering from relative deprivation, you are "pissed" because you can only take two weeks in Spain instead of 4 like GB!

Imagine how the rest of us feel, the proletatirat teachers and librarians who can't afford to visit Spain for even one day!!!

We proletariat masses have no sympathy for the likes of you!

Pashaw!!! :p

Have a nice holiday and eat lots of ham for me!
Carmen

Booklady

I should not mention I get four weeks vacation, but my boss will not let me take more than two weeks after I took a three week vacation to Tuscany Italy and thought about not COMING BACK!

I will not mention a word. My lips closed with zipper on this one.

Ham in Spain? Not for me it is the safe bet to eat in Spain. I more of the try something new!

Bill (In Barcelona)

Fulano,

THE TRUTH WILL ALWAYS COME OUT IN TIME



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A MUST READ

Subject: Fw: Canadian Press On Bush -

This is from a Canadian.

George Bush, the man
By David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I'm tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right. But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.
And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S.
Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russell Honore, it was once again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on
a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail. From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and government support through many other programs. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses that could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.

Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming
disproportionately from people who vote Republican. For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets." The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.

Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero. Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days in advance of the storm fall. In the little time since, he has managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.

One thinks of Kipling's poem If, which I learned to recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern lefties and liberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise .

Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.
__________________________________________________

'Nough said

To all
Since I opened this topic maybe after all that has been written I hope that I may close this topic with a few words from my dear friend that live in Galicia.
It is like a science fiction film but unfortunately it is real. But all of us that have been to the States for a while know that you are great people, you support each other firmly and courageously. As I told my American students when they asked me what I admired most of the USA I always said that it is amazing how so large a country, with people just from every possible corner in the world, people so diverse and different have made a country that is so proud of itself, that works together with the precision of a Swiss wrist watch.And that is what I always tell to my students here too. I have no doubt that this bad dream will be forgotten pretty soon and life will go back to normal again.

and then there is this cute little joke.
I am a staunch supporter of the USA, all the more when we here have to deal with the traditional secessionists and their whims, having a government now that is a real shame. I will tell you a joke that I have been told recently and that portrays the American people and the Spanish pretty good. It goes like this: A father and a son are carrying two buckets full of crabs (you know, those sea animals with shells, I think that is the name of these animals). The father tells the son: Be careful and mind that this bucket here has the lid well tightened. Why dad this bucket needs to have the lid tightened and this one does not, when all of them are just crabs?- the boy asks. The father replies: This here bucket is full of American crabs, they are going to manage to come out all together and pull all together the lid to escape right away, while this other bucket is full of Spanish crabs and they do not need any lid as they will start fighting with each other as soon as they have a chance and they themselves will take good care that no one escapes from the bucket.

And now enough has been said. Another emergency is waiting somewhere.

"cute little joke"

Mecky,

Did you ever hear the joke that explains the difference between American hell and Spanish hell?

Mecky, good post and I got a kick out of the joke but it actually is a very old analogous joke that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans use to try and explain thier predicament as to why they supposedly are not progressing economically and politically as rapidly as these strong and talented people should. "A Mexican crab fisherman brings his catch of crabs in a bucket onto the pier, sets down his bucket and is going for a beer, someone asks "Don Oloroso, aren't you afraid your crabs will escape while your gone?" and Oloroso replies "Hell no! these are Mexican crabs and if one tries to leave the bucket to escape the other Mexican crabs will do there best to pull him back down!
It's a great joke describing peoples frustration as they try and lift themselves out of lower economic situations.
Salud,Pesetas,y Tiempo para gozar

You know you people with the bucket joke do not see the bad side of the U.S. If you are black in American you are in a Spanish/Mexican bucket. Only the ones on top are white crabs and I am a white crab too!

I got off the plane yesterday from Spain, turn on the news to find out what going on in my country. See the beating of the 62 year old black man in New Orleans by the police. Welcome back home Bill, I thought to myself because this racist **** has not changed!

Bill