the tinyblog

During the vice-presidential debates yesterday, he recommended that people visit factcheck.com. I'm sure he was kicking himself since factcheck.com was in fact an Anti-Bush site.

A small anti-bush site. So when the owner of factcheck.com got about 40,000 hits that night, he redirected the domain to georgesoros.com (I personally would have redirected to the latest installment of Get Your War On.

But that's not why I'm thanking him. I'm actually thanking him for where he MEANT to direct people, which is factcheck.ORG, a site I had never heard of before, but which is quite excellent. It's a political fact checking site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and they appear comitted to the highest level of journalistic integrity.

It's interesting to see that there's quite a few distortions on both sides of the partisan fence, but I'm quite glad that a site like this exists. It seems to be credible enough to be a non-partisan coda of truth. I think my man Bill in particular will find this a good resource. It seems it's pretty popular these days as well, so you may have to try several times to get the pages to load. I'd like to take this opportunity to point to a few articles I thought were important:

• (Most recently:) Getting it wrong about combat pay, Halliburton, and FactCheck.org
• Swift Boat Veterans Anti-Kerry Ad: "He Betrayed Us" With 1971 Anti-War Testimony
• Bush and Kerry both pepper their standard political speeches with misleading claims.

I think it should be the duty of every American voter to keep abreast of this site. It's that worthwhile. These articles should be picked up by dailies all over the world...this is fascinating stuff...sort of like the snopes.com of the political world!