Getting ready for the elections - Part 1

Yes, I guess I'm a little late. The Presidential Election campaigns have been going for quite some time. It feels like they've been going on forever - or at least since the last election in 2012. I'm going to try to stay neutral but I will pick someone to vote for in the end.

Until November, we are going to hear a lot things said by the candidates and their supporters and you need a way to help figure out where the truth is. More than ever, I find candidates are just saying things that they know are not true but they are willing to be found out later as long as it stops their opponents at that moment. They figure that by the time they are found out, they will have figured a way to twist what they said into something else. But what we need is a way to quickly find out where the truth is and to not be fooled into thinking they know what they are saying.

I'm going to present a few links in two categories in two posts. The category for this post is Fact Checking. I've mentioned the Snopes site before and it is very good at helping to expose things that are just plain wrong or may just be mistakes. But if you get an email from someone who says the President just abolished the Supreme Court, Snopes is a good place to check. The only thing is that Snopes covers everything from people finding fingers in their fast food to web pages that rewrite the history of the railroads. So, to find information about the political campaigns, you have to dig through a lot of other things. But just in case you can't click on the link above, here is the link spelled out: http://m.snopes.com/

A politics-only site is PolitiFact (here's the link spelled out: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/). I find their format much easier to look over quickly. If you want to look into the item in more depth, you can click on that item and see a more in-depth discussion. But they have a nice meter (a Mostly True reading  is shown to the left) for each item that shows how much of the candidates statement is true or false. Yes, very few things are completely true or false. There are subtleties to any statement and the folks at PolitiFact look into that for us. It saves a lot of time but is very thorough. All of the sources for their article are available so you can make your own determination, too.

The other site I want to highlight is FactCheck.org (that link spelled out is simply http://www.factcheck.org/). It is run by the highly regarded Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. It is not a politics-only site like PolitiFact but neither is it as broad as Snopes. But since politicians are usually the ones making questionable statements, the majority of the items at FactCheck are about the people running for President. You can usually get the idea of whether the statement made is true or false by the headline given to that article. But this site makes you do a bit more reading to get the answer. Again, there is a link to click to get a more in-depth discussion and you will find links to all the sources for the articles along with charts and tags for similar articles.

There is so much information flying around out there and this is such an important decision to be making that I think it is everyone's duty to check up on the claims being made by the people who want to run our country. If you don't check up on them, you have only yourself to blame if the wrong person gets elected.

My next post will be a discussion on Logical Fallacies. These are the misleading ways people can make a statement and make it sound true when it is really false. They usually show up in a debate but they can show up anywhere.

[Update: The second part of "Getting read for the elections" can be found in this post.]