Political Truth-O-Meter

"A place to fact-check political facts/speeches in terms of truth and accuracy." I do not believe there are facts, in politics. Isn't political thought the result of an opinion based belief system? It's like religion. The facts may come into play with the historical record of what has been said and done, but what has been said and done is very rarely based on fact. But, that's only my opinion.

The scary idea to me, is that we allow anyone to determine anything on our behalf--ideally, shouldn't people be motivated to seek out information on candidates as part of their civic responsibility? Or at least to hold organizations accountable for the information they provide?

nice blog. who's Rolin?

Good points S & R. (& M) I agree that the openness would present problems. I just don't believe that a closed solution is the ideal goal. Not sure how to get to the proper open solution though.

>Have we gotten to the point in our disillusionment with news that we do
>not trust ANY reporter (or team of reporters) to determine
>truth/untruth on our behalf?

Not that I necessarily don't trust, but I don't want to entrust such an important resource to a private group. (And, yes, I probably don't trust.) I mostly trust Google, but dont necessarily think its a good thing they own the book scanning DB they've put together.

Democrat Joe Biden: "The president is brain-dead."

gets a rating of "Pants on fire! Irresponsible claim (and wrong medical diagnosis)"

That's retarded. It's an idiom, and a statement of opinion, not fact. To assume that it IS a statement of fact and meant to be taken literally is disingenuous and, in this case, ironic (since it in itself is "brain dead").

Idiots.

While I agree that more elements of transparency about the research process would be great, I'm not actually sure that an open source element would be the best thing.
Maybe I'm just cynical but it seems that if this were open source, it would be too easily subjected to manipulation by campaigns and candidates. I think a lot of people would be skeptical about the validity of the information and feel like they would have to put in extra effort to fact-check the truth of the claims.

Yeah, I generally agree that it would be terrific if this could take on elements of openness & open source.

But, there's an interesting question there, right?

This thing is predicated on evaluating the factual truth of political claims. How is factual truth related to openness? Have we gotten to the point in our disillusionment with news that we do not trust ANY reporter (or team of reporters) to determine truth/untruth on our behalf?