‘We’re Not Going to Let Our Campaign Be Dictated by Fact-Checkers’ – James Bennet – The Atlantic.
Truly bizarre: “”The press is all full of itself about how they’re going to declare that it’s false [the Romney welfare ad[, but it’s really a lot less false than you think it is.”
Recently Gov. Ronmey pollster, Neil Newhouse, asserted that fact checking groups (FactCheck.org, the Washington Post “Fact Checker”, Tampa Bay Times “PoliticFact”, etc) have “jumped the shark.” The specific context was the Romney campaign’s advertisement that the Obama Administration had gutted welfare reform. The various fact checker groups have basically rated this as “mostly false”, “four Pinocchios” or – so it seems to me – intentionally misleading. Gov. Romney has also been subjected to this kind of “spinning” when his remarks about “liking to fire people” were taken out of context. Seems to be the state of political advertisement.
Have political fact checking groups “jumped the shark.” As my friend Angie Holan (disclaimer: works for PolitiFact) says: cue the Jaws music. These groups are invaluable to today’s landscape (or seascape?).
Here is the state of things: I mostly hold judgment on any political ad until it has been fact checked. Seems to me political ads have jumped the shark
Especially germaine given the increasingly harsh rhetoric of this campaign season.
My Franciscan Province has a very nice two-part article on St Clare of Assisi. You can read them here:
The sun is extraordinarily generous, giving huge parts of itself away every second. How much? Well if you remember that energy and matter are interchangeable, then every second the equivalent of 4 million elephants are being transformed into light. The sun is giving itself away. If this generosity should halt, all energy would eventually lose its source and everything would die and become inert. We, and everything on our planet, live because of the generosity of the sun.
“Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” (Mark 6:31)
We hurry too much, pure and simple. Our days are filled with things to do, people to meet, calls to make, emails to return, kids to drop off/pick up. Doesn’t it feel like sometimes we just live our lives behind schedule? So much unfinished “stuff.” We are behind, getting “behinder” and are always hurrying. What’s wrong with hurrying?
Big news from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN – yesterday’s experiments seem to collaborate and point to strong evidence to the boson particle operative in the Higgs field. Of course…. what is all this about? Take a look at this video from Fermilab and you will be an expert on the topic…
– and avoid having to use overly technical language while you are at it.
“This Land Is Your Land” is one of the United States’ most famous folk songs. Its lyrics were written by Woody Guthrie in 1940. Recently I heard a radio show that mentioned the genesis of the song and that most often we do not hear all the original lyrics. For some reason, rising early on our nation’s Independence Day, I looked up the original lyrics. The song was a musical response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”, which Guthrie considered unrealistic and complacent. Tired of hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio, he wrote a response originally called “God Blessed America for Me”.
The latest Franciscan Mission Service “World Care” newsletter. Take a read and take time to consider supporting this great organization http://ow.ly/bZNQJ
July 4, 1776 – a new nation being forged in a revolutionary war, establishing an initial and fairly unsuccessful government under the Articles of Confederation, and finally via a difficult process establishing a constitutional government – 1788. With this the American experiment was truly born and a Constitution written – in a way the mission and vision statement for us as individuals, a family, and a society of people among a larger family of other nations. It shapes our identity as a people. Continue reading
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