DISTORTIONS

One of the most painful frustrations for me today is to have to tolerate the many distortions one hears and can do nothing to correct. For months we have been hearing that we are not in a recession when everything points to the fact that we are. Numbers are presented by the media as fact which frequently are not accurate and give a very biased or skewed picture which is then seen as some sort of standard.

Today I heard that a local town was fighting over the fact that a firefighter had been called to active duty and had been given full pay for as long as the town could afford it beyond the period required by law, what ever that time is. I believe it was an official of the firefighter's Union who gave a speech calling council members the worst politicians possible because they had stopped paying him full salary due to budgetary problems. This man described the fireman in Iraq as serving in our International Guard. I struggle to understand when our National Guard became the International Guard. The United States National Guard is authorized by the Constitution of the United States. As originally drafted,''the Constitution limited the mustering of state militias: without the consent of Congress, states could not "keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace,...or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." (Article I, Section 10; Clause 3) Congress, however, had a duty to protect states from invasion and domestic violence (Article IV, Section 4)." National or International? Is there a majority in the US who really believe that we were in imminent danger of attack from Iraq other than the Administration who lied so many times to us that people believed them? How do families subsist? Was this an unconscious (or Freudian ) slip? I'll probably never know. It was just a brief spot in the news when I did not know the time or station.