In a short piece, the Manteca Bulletin (McNerney honors Flags Over Manetca effort, 27 Sep 08) tells us how the congressman made a speech "on the floor of the House of Representatives." It begins "Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the dedication of ..."It's a heartwarming tale of the flag raisers in Manteca and volunteer Les Thomas who organizes the effort. The congressmen called it a "stunning display of patriotism" that continues to "memorialize the sacrifices of all our nation's heroes."
Fantastic stuff! Except for one small detail: Such a speech never actually occurred.
(I hope I'm not bursting anyone's bubble here, and no disrespect to the actual flag volunteers. Maybe the kids should leave the room while you read the rest of this.)
As the Bulletin should know, such tributes are entered into the Congressional Record as part of the "revise and extend" comments. These are written comments simply added to the record by the congressman and then printed. ABC news guy John Stossel wrote about this in his book Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity. In other words there was no speech "on the floor of the House of Representatives" as reported by the Bulletin.
Although as Stossel points out this wastes a few million dollars a year, I'm not that concerned about it at this point. I figure so long as they are busy printing tributes they aren't messing up the lives of the rest of us with things like "Give us $700 billion or else terrible bad things might happen!"
The careful reader may be wondering what "Manetca" is. I presume they are having some computer or keyboard problems over there. Or it's the work of The Eductaors.
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