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If you are still making up your mind about the candidate you'll be supporting in your state's presidential primary, Factcheck.org and Politifact.org are invaluable resources. Here's a sampling of what you can learn from them, and what bloggers have to say about them.
Politifact is a joint project of the St. Petersbug Times and Congressional Quarterly. It's sexiest feature is the Truth-o-Meter, which offers concise assessments of claims made by and about the candidates. Ratings range from "True" (as in Mike Huckabee's observation that Ronald Reagan "raised taxes a billion dollars in his first year as Governor of California." to "Pants on Fire!" (as in Mitt Romney's claim that he didn't call John Mc Cain's immigration plan 'amnesty.')
Kay B. Day at Covering Florida says Politifact is "a lot of fun." She adds:
The “Truth-O-Meter” recalls an age when newspapers provided unbiased information on their news pages, backed up by research and documentation. My take: Sublime.
Factcheck.org has been around for awhile. It was invaluable in the 2004 election, along with the dearly departed Spinsanity.. The American Journalism Review credits them with "fact checking when no one else was." (Not quite -- see Spinsanity, above.) Today days, FactCheck is taking John McCain to task for a campaign mailing that incorrectly implies that Mitt Romney supported state funding for abortions as Governor of Massachussetts.
Factcheck.org is one of the sites figuring in the effort to debunk e-mails asserting that Barack Obama is a covert Muslim. Bloggers for Obama quotes Factcheck:
"There is little excuse for those who continue to circulate this one. The most audacious falsehood it contains (of several) is a claim near the top: "We checked this out on 'snopes.com'. It is factual. Check for yourself." Anyone who actually does that would quickly find that Snopes.com, the respected debunker of urban myths, judges the message to be "false." And yet we continue to receive examples sent to our readers by others who either don't take the time to check, or who don't care that they are repeating false and damaging statements."
But ConspiracySquirrel complains that Factcheck.org should emphasize that a right-wing magazine's report making the Obama-is-a-Muslim-extremist claim was relying on sources in Hillary Clinton's campaign. All I'll say to that is first, the magazine is accountable for what it published, regardless of the source. Second, if your claim is that the Clinton campaign is spreading false rumors about Obama, you still have the responsibility of backing it up.
Finally, I can't post a blog entry on Jan. 15 without noting that this is Dr. Martin Luther King's real birthday. In that vein, here is a collage of clips of Dr. King on the topic of war:
