What would Americans do with it, if they had as much vacation time as Europeans?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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EAT.
Spend more time in Europe?
Are you inviting all of us? :^)
That would be high on my list, but a long suummer cross-country road trip with the kids is right up there too.
you beat me to it. I would most certainly spend more time travelling.
Personally, I would visit Europe.
Arrest Francois Mitterand.
Blog more?
You could write your book!
I might want to use it to take a break from writing.
My biggest problem is a compulsive reading addiction. I read during almost every waking hour. Even when I use mass transit, or drive in the car, all I do is read signs.
I’ve been known to read the ingredients on the sides of cereal boxes in a pinch. This is the primary component of my blog addiction — words, limitless words and ideas; I can’t consume enough of them to sate my ravanous hunger.
Speaking of… I’ll probably go silent on Sunday while I consume the latest Harry Potter. That is, if I can get my hands on a copy. The children are already lining up outside of the bookstores here. The 24-Kroger grocery store is selling them for 40% off and the cashier told me they were going to have riot squads on stand-by in case they sell out. I don’t think she was joking…
guaranteed to be there tomorrow, but website says its processing…. hmmmm… i hope they just haven’t updated their site yet or something. or else i do believe she will be very mad!!
My kids are in summer school in Norway. I’m going there next week under very strict orders to bring a copy. Apparently, the Norwegian version will not be releasd till November…
When I was a kid … and sometimes yet … I loved to read the dictionary and the encyclopedia. The fun part is opening them up randomly.
used to have the OED that comes with the magnifying glass. I thought that was so cool that I learned a lot of words I’ll never use. My OED doesn’t require the glass, which is a good thing.
Oh my God, I used to do that too. The things one can learn that way.
would you mind terribly if I gave you a “2” for this? (I won’t actually) only because I’m of the opinion that people need to blog less and do more in the physical world.
Become civilized. And less neurotic.
I’m glad you made it over here. Montana is a pretty good vacation spot for those of us that don’t already live there.
Thank you!
I’m fascinated by your governor. Keep us posted. How’s the fire season so far?
No fire season yet to speak of. Some parts of Western Montana just got done with the wettest June since 1892, after a very dry winter. It would be nice to have a break in the five year drought, but we just started to have 100 degree days this week. The summer ain’t over yet.
MEET THE PRESS WITH TIM RUSSERT
WEEKEND LISTINGS 7/17/05
MATT COOPER
White House Correspondent, Time Magazine
JOHN PODESTA
President and CEO, “Center for American Progress”
Former Chief of Staff, President Bill Clinton
KEN MEHLMAN
Chairman, Republican National Committee
BOB WOODWARD
Washington Post
Author, “The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat”
CARL BERNSTEIN
Former Washington Post Watergate Reporter
As the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA officer heats up, we will have an exclusive network interview with one of the men at the center of the investigation — Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper. He avoided going to jail just days ago by testifying to the grand jury after his source released him from his pledge of confidentiality. What did Matt Cooper tell the grand jury? He will discuss his testimony for the first time this Sunday on “Meet the Press with Tim Russert.”
Then, what will be the political fallout of the leak investigation and the new reports that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove did indeed speak to a reporter about CIA Officer Valerie Plame? We will ask Rove’s former Deputy, now the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, and the former Clinton Chief of Staff who now heads the liberal policy research group “The Center for American Progress,” John Podesta.
Then, we turn to another famous case of government leaks and Washington reporting. In an exclusive interview, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reunite on the “…
what the law is about revealing your own testimony before a Grand Jury.
It must be tricky to tell your story without revealing the questions you were asked.
Woodward and Bernstein…good to see Punkinhead’s show drawing an appropriate parallel with Rove!
Spend more supposed vacation time working, care for sick relatives who have little or no health insurance, work more hours at the other job(s), etc, etc.
The relative paucity of vacation time in the U.S., while worth noting, is just another symptom …
I just can’t take it all because my job’s really stressful and, on top of that, Mr. Xray is a teacher and can only go on vacation in the summers.
This year I plan on taking more, though. Even if I have to go alone…
I would love to say travel more but who can really afford it anymore…lol. I would catch up with all the things I neglet due to work and spending too much time on the blogs. I am planning one of my vacation weeks around the Sept March on DC being sponsored by the impeachbush.org people(if I can use my air miles that is). With “Duke” stepping down I may work to help Busby to be my congress critter. may be fun to get involved more on the local level. We shall see.
Should we organize a meeting of BooTribers? I’ll paint up a frog banner… with Booman’s permission to infringe on his logo, of course.
That sounds like a great idea.
I’m in.
Absolutely!!! Maybe it is time to buy that Booman tshirt huh? Let’s get organised and are there any folks that would want to camp somewhere? I can start looking into that or get hotels together?
The best thing to do is stay outside of DC, like in Alexandria. I did have this great place to stay… until my son moved his family to CA. But, he’s got a friend who will probably let me stay with her. Heck, she’s probably going to the protest herself. (I’ll have to set that up, for sure.) She’s a short walk to the metro station and that’s the best way to get to the Mall without circling forever on one-way streets.
There are a Red Roof Inn and a Days Inn on Hwy 1, just outside the beltway, that are relatively affordable. You could hike from both of them to the Huntington metro station. Did you know that they now rent out MiniCoopers at the metro stations? You could fly into Reagan airpost, hop the metro to Huntington, rent a Mini and drive to one of the motels.
Heck, I’ll have my car because I’ll be driving 4 hours to get there. So we could coordinate this so I could pick you up at the metro station. I’ll know you ’cause you’ll be wearing your Froggy t-shirt. Har.
Seriously, when we get closer to this event — like the first of Sept. — let’s get organized! There are some great eateries in Old Town Alexandria like the Bilbo Baggans Bar and Restaurant. This could be serious fun!!!
I am with you. My sister lives in Sprinfield. She is a quiet dem but hubby(who I love dearly otherwise)is a republican that was a research attorney for the government for thirty years and now retired. I am trying to figure out how to explain my being there for a visit. I had mentioned maybe coming out for the Inaugeral parade protest last Jan. and she seemed fine with it but impeachment may be another thing. I just don’t want to have anymore arguements with family members. I have one sister already that we had to come to an agreement not to talk politics a couple of times already since the election. Let’s coordiante when it gets closer. Appreciate all your knowledge of the area and the ride offer. I feel very strongly that we MUST take to the streets as nothing else is working at this point.
Surf the ‘net.
find another job to supplement the low wages from the first one, and help pay some medical bills that the medical care/insurance used to pay, before they stole that.
We’ll be having none o’ that reality-based thinking here, IP! ;^)
ooops, sowwy, it is frivolous isn’t it….LMAO
okay, I’m going to somewhere in the Caribean, lay in a hammock, drink ice cold beer, smoke a good cuban cigar, and forget about coming back ; )
Travel, read, eat, nap, laugh, volunteer for liberal causes, spend time with friends and family.
Lather, rinse, repeat
I might actually have enough vacation time to spend a month or more in Egypt, working my way from the upper to lower Nile.
but my new husband (gonna take a while to get used to that) gets 2 weeks… and its tough getting him to take any of that! he took four days off 4th of july weekend so we could go get married. but he still took his phone and took calls… and went into work friday morning before we went up to the lake. he’s hopeless!
i don’t know what he would do with himself if he had more vacation time! its a use it or lose it proposition… so he’d probably be stressing over having to use it! oh, he’ll be taking some in september… he’d better be there when i have this baby!!! lol!!
This has nothing to do with vacations but seeing it is an open thread…
Paul krugman wrote a great op-ed today at the NYT but this paragraph grabbed me.
“What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we’re not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we’re living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern”.
You can read the rest of this fabulous peice here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15krugman.html?ex=1279080000&en=d6626b2569012841&e
i=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss
watch mindless tv..
except we wouldn’t need vacation time for that: it’s too easy. I’ve spend a good part of my summer bitching about how it doesn’t matter whether Rove/etc said “Wilson’s Wife” or “Valerie Plame”. Anybody could figure it out without going to spy school.
Here’s how SF Chronicle tech columnist David Lazarus did it:
He then proceeded to find her house on a Google map.
So could we all please quit talking as if it matters in the slightest what name Rove or whoever else in the White House used in outing an undercover agent?
But seriously, it seems that Comcast, the only provider of cable TV in my area, may be involved in censoring emails from http://www.afterdowningstreet.org. (full story on rawstory.com) If this is true, it is very disturbing. I suppose it could possibly be a spam filtering accident, but ….Hmmm.
I like to watch TV. So my question — does anyone know of alternatives to cable TV that pass their litmus test (and I ‘ll leave it to you to define the criteria).
There is idish and Dish network and any others? have you heard good or bad things about them? Are there other more obscure ways to access tv broadcasts?
BTW, a foot note to those who may feel the urge to respond with some remark about how they never watch TV, don’t even own one and I should throw it out the window: please save it for someone else. I don’t buy into the argument that TV itself is to blame for the downfall of civilization.
UUUUUUUUmmmmmmmmm….I was wondering what happened to those Int’l ANSWER e-mails I used to receive.
I can just picture one of Rove’s underlings rushing into his office to receive a congratulatory high-five for sabotaging the e-mail communications of an “anti-American” website by flooding an online service provider’s consumers.
Remember, Paul Cry Wolfowitz’s statement last year about controlling the Internet?
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
One step closer to an overtly fascist state.
now i must inform you that my husband works for directv… so iam biased. dish network has a reciever that gets you two rooms on one reciever… but we had dish before bob started working at directv… and it went out a lot. if you got a good installer, probably wouldn’t have that problem. directv has better standards in that regard. but dish is cheaper. bob said that dish lost all fox programming htough… so you wouldn’t be able to get any fox channels with dish… other than that they are basically the same from a programming standpoint.
btw… as far as associations go… directv is related to gm… they are owned by hughes… i have no idea as to dish network’s associations.
Who told Novak that Plame was CIA?
Bush?
And why does no one care – yet – who told Novak?
Don’t people think it was Cheney or Scooter Libby?
Sail man, sail.
Sail on,
Sail away.
You’ll kill me! I’ve 6 weeks/year.
(Not that I actually used it, I’ve been stupid enough to lose 4-9 days/year most of the last ten years, or so. And brought the laptop w/mobile modem with me on leave.)
Cry tears of joy.