An Ode To America

We rarely get a chance to see another country's editorial about the USA
Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper. The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title 'C'ntarea Americii, meaning 'Ode ToAmerica ') in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei 'The Daily Event' or 'News of the Day'.
~An Ode to America ~

Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.
On 9/ll, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the Army, or the Secret Service that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about.
Instead the Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand.
After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing: 'God Bless America !'
I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people.
How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put into collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth unites the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace, I thought things over, I reached but only one conclusion... Only freedom can work such miracles.
Cornel Nistorescu
(This deserves to be passed around the Internet forever.) It took a person on the outside - looking in - to see what we take for granted !
GOD BLESS AMERICA !!!

Sheriff Joe is at it again!

SHERIFF JOE IS AT IT AGAIN !

You may
remember Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, who
painted the jail cells pink and made the inmates
wear pink prison garb.
Well.........

SHERIFF JOE IS AT IT AGAIN !

 

Oh, there's MUCH
more to know about Sheriff Joe !

Maricopa County was spending approx. $18
million dollars a year on stray animals, like
cats and dogs. Sheriff Joe offered to take the
department over, and the County Supervisors said
okay.

 

The animal shelters are now all
staffed and operated by prisoners. They feed and
care for the strays. Every animal in his care is
taken out and walked twice daily. He now has
prisoners who are experts in animal nutrition
and behavior. They give great classes for anyone
who'd like to adopt an animal. He has literally
taken stray dogs off the street, given them to
the care of prisoners, and had them place in dog
shows.

The best part? His budget for the entire department
is now under $3 million.    

The prisoners get the benefit of about
$0.28 an hour for working, but most would work
for free, just to be out of their cells for the
day. Most of his budget is for utilities,
building maintenance, etc. He pays the prisoners
out of the fees collected for adopted animals.

I have long wondered when the rest of
the country would take a look at the way he runs
the jail system and copy some of his ideas. He
has a huge farm, donated to the county years
ago, where inmates can work, and they grow most
of their own fresh vegetables and food, doing
all the work and harvesting by hand.

 

He has a pretty good sized hog farm, which provides
meat and fertilizer. It fertilizes the Chris-
tmas tree nursery, where prisoners work, and you
can buy a living Christmas tree for $6 - $8 for
the holidays and plant it later.   
 

Yup,he was re-elected last year with 83% of the
vote. 
Now he's in trouble with the ACLU
again. He painted all his buses and vehicles
with a mural that has a special hotline phonenumber    
painted on it, where you can call and report
suspected illegal aliens. Immigrations and 
Customs Enforcement wasn't doing enough in his
eyes, so he had 40 deputies trained specifically
for enforcing immigration laws, started up his
hotline, and bought 4 new buses just for hauling
folks back to the border. He's kind of a
'Git-R-Dun' kind of Sheriff.

 

TO THOSE OF
YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO..

   HE IS
THE MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF   AND
HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND
OVER.   THIS
IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY:

   Sheriff Joe Arpaio (in Arizona) who created the 'TentCity
Jail': 
** He has jail meals down to 40 cents
a serving and charges the inmates for them.

 

** He stopped smoking and porno magazines in
the jail.

 

** Took away their weights.

** Cut off all but 'G' movies. 
** He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on 
county and city projects. 
** Then he started chain gangs for women so he wouldn't get sued
for discrimination.

** He took away cable TV until he found out there was a federal
court order that required cable TV for jails, so he hooked up the cable TV
again.....BUT          only let
in the Disney channel and the Weather channel.  
** When asked why the weather channel,
he replied, "So they will know how hot it's
gonna be while they are working on my chain
gangs."

   ** He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value.

   ** When the inmates complained, he told them, "This isn't
The Ritz/Carlton...... If you don't like it,
don't come back."   

More On The Arizona Sheriff:

 

With temperatures being even hotter than usual in
Phoenix (116 degrees just set a new record), the
Associated Press reports: 
About 2,000 inmates living in a barbed-wire-surrounded tent
encampment at the Maricopa County jail have been
given permission to strip down to theirgovernment-issued 
pink boxer shorts.

On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing
boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds
or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 
degrees inside the week before.

 

Many were also swathed in wet, pink towels as sweat
collected on their chests and dripped down to
their PINK SOCKS.

 

"It feels like we are in a furnace," said James Zanzot, an inmate who
has lived in the TENTS for 1 year. "It's inhumane."

 

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago
started making his prisoners wear pink and eat
bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic.
He said Wednesday that he told all of the
inmates, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and our 
soldiers are living in tents too, and they have
to wear full battle gear, but they didn't commit
any crimes, so shut your mouths!"

 

Way to go, Sheriff !

 

Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be a lot less crime
and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be
punished for their crimes - not live in luxury
until it's time for their parole, only to go out
and commit another crime so they can get back in
to live on taxpayers' money and enjoy things
taxpayers can't afford to have for themselves.

The Doolittle Raiders, American Heroes

T HE F INAL T OAST ! They bombed Tokyo 73 years ago.

They once were among the most universally admired and revered men in the United States .. There were 80 of the Raiders in April 1942, when they carried out one of the most courageous and heart-stirring military operations in this nation's history. The mere mention of their unit's name, in those years, would bring tears to the eyes of grateful Americans. Now only four survive. After Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, with the United States reeling and wounded, something dramatic was needed to turn the war effort around. Even though there were no friendly airfields close enough to Japan for the United States to launch a retaliation, a daring plan was devised. Sixteen B-25s were modified so that they could take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. This had never before been tried -- sending such bi g, heavy bombers from a carrier. The 16 five-man crews, under the command of Lt. Col. James Doolittle, who himself flew the lead plane off the USS Hornet, knew that they would not be able to return to the carrier. They would have to hit Japan and then hope to make it to China for a safe landing. But on the day of the raid, the Japanese military caught wind of the plan. The Raiders were told that they would have to take off from much farther out in the Pacific Ocean than they had counted on. They were told that because of this they would not have enough fuel to make it to safety. And those men went anyway. They bombed Tokyo and then flew as far as they could. Four planes crash-landed; 11 more crews bailed out, and three of the Raiders died. Eight more were captured; three were executed. Another died of starvation in a Japanese prison camp. One crew made it to Russia. The Doolittle Raiders sent a message from the United States to its enemies, and to the rest of the world: We will fight. And, no matter what it takes, we will win. Of the 80 Raiders, 62 survived the war. They were celebrated as national heroes, models of bravery. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a motion picture based on the raid; "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, was a patriotic and emotional box-office hit, and the phrase became part of the national lexicon. In the movie-theater previews for the film, MGM proclaimed that it was presenting the story "with supreme pride." Beginning in 1946, the surviving Raiders have held a reunion each April, to commemorate the mission. The reunion is in a different city each year. In 1959, the city of Tucson, Arizona, as a gesture of respect and gratitude, presented the Doolittle Raiders with a set of 80 silver goblets. Each goblet was engraved with the name of a Raider. Every year, a wooden display case bearing all 80 goblets is transported to the reunion city. Each time a Raider passes away, his goblet is turned upside down in the case at the next reunion, as his old friends bear solemn witness. Al so in the wooden case is a bottle of 1896 Hennessy Very Special cognac. The year is not happenstance: 1896 was when Jimmy Doolittle was born. There has always been a plan: When there are only two surviving Raiders, they would open the bottle, at last drink from it, and toast their comrades who preceded them in death. As 2013 began, there were five living Raiders; then, in February, Tom Griffin passed away at age 96. What a man he was. After bailing out of his plane over a mountainous Chinese forest after the Tokyo raid, he became ill with malaria, and almost died. When he recovered, he was sent to Europe to fly more combat missions. He was shot down, captured, and spent 22 months in a German prisoner of war camp. The selflessness of these men, the sheer guts ... there was a passage in the Cincinnati Enquirer obituary for Mr. Griffin that, on the surface, had nothing to do with the war, but that was emblematic of the depth of his sense of duty and devotion: "When his wife became ill and needed to go into a nursing home, he visited her every day. He walked from his house to the nursing home, fed his wife and at the end of the day brought home her clothes. At night, he washed and ironed her clothes. Then he walked them up to her room the next morning. He did that for three years until her death in 2005." So now, out of the original 80, only four Raiders remain: Dick Cole (Doolittle's co-pilot on the Tokyo raid), Robert Hite, Edward Saylor and David Thatcher. All are in their 90s. They have decided that there are too few of them for the public reunions to continue. The events in Fort Walton Beach marked the end. It has come full circle; Florida's nearby Eglin Field was where the Raiders trained in secrecy for the Tokyo mission. The town planned to do all it can to honor the men: a six-day celebration of their valor, including luncheons, a dinner and a parade. Do the men ever wonder if those of us for whom they helped save the country have tended to it in a way that is worthy of their sacrifice? They don't talk about that, at least not around other people. But if you find yourself near Fort Walton Beach this week, and if you should encounter any of the Raiders, you might want to offer them a word of thanks. I can tell you from first hand observation that they appreciate hearing that they are remembered. The men have decided that after this final public reunion they will wait until a later date -- some time this year -- to get together once more, informally and in absolute privacy. That is when they will open the bottle of brandy. The years are flowing by too swiftly now; they are not going to wait until there are only two of them. They will fill the four remaining upturned goblets. And raise them in a toast to those who are gone.

Their 70th Anniversary Photo