Of course in these political days, people with nothing better to do with their time find ways to smear candidates running for office. Many times rumors are made up in the hopes that there will be no, or little fact-checking. And even when there is fact-checking, well the damage is done. And that is the point for these hateful people that live on both sides of the isle. They want to damage upstanding individual’s reputations in the hopes there will be enough unresearched backlash to ruin them.

Here you will see some examples of some very careless people posting whatever they feel like about Sarah Palin. There will also be positive and constructive criticism of Governor Palin. This is a direct feed from Twitter with the various renditions of the search term “Sarah Palin”. If you watch the updates closely, you will notice those with the hateful attitudes, hateful messages, hateful rumors; many that are outright lies! This feed updates every thirty minutes with only 5 new posts. If all you see is “Palin Twitter Updates”, without 5 bullet-point posts (apparently Twitter can be finicky), or if you’d just like to read more, visit www.twitter.com/twitting4palin [Editor’s Note: this account is now closed].

[Editor’s Note: Had to remove the feed as it was no longer functioning]

After getting frustrated reading many of the lies about Governor Palin, I saw a post that directed me to a Fact Checker website that actually verified that many statements about Sarah Palin were untrue. I also found This Website run by Charlie Martin, who has researched and set the record straight on over 70 Sarah Palin rumors. Here are a couple rumors he put to rest:

  • #40 yes, she did ask the librarian if some books could be withdrawn because of being offensive; no, they couldn’t; yes, it was “rhetorical”, at least as was reported contemporaneously in 1996[1] ; yes she did threaten to fire the librarian a month later; no, that wasn’t over the books thing but instead over administrative issues; no, the librarian wasn’t fired either; yes, the librarian was a big supporter of one of her political opponents; yes, the librarian was also the girlfriend of the Chief of police mentioned above; no, this is not the first time in the history of civilization that someone has been threatened with being fired over a political dispute
  • #41 No the list of books she wanted to ban that’s being passed around isn’t real; among other things, it includes a number of books published after her time in office there.

And

  • #50 No, she doesn’t believe in “abstinence only” education. Yes, she thinks abstinence is an effective way of preventing pregnancy. Duh. Yes, she believes kids should learn about condom use in schools.
  • #51 Yes, she did smoke marijuana, when it was legal in Alaska. Yes, she apparently did inhale.

It is great to have these resources to double check silly comments that you read on websites and blogs. And both websites are debunking Obama rumors too, so they are not partisan. You just have to know where to look to find that information.

I hope this helps you to not over react when you read something about someone on the Internet without fact-checking to verify the authenticity. But sometimes you can even go to a site you trust and find that it seems the information is authentic, when in fact, that site also did not verify the information before posting it. One classic example is a site called Daily KOS, a liberal blog site. Unfortunately someone there started a potentially damaging rumor about Sarah Palin covering for her daughter’s pregnancy. Many sites ran with the story, only to look foolish because they didn’t bother to check the facts. Now Daily KOS is regarded in my opinion as rumor mill for trash talking liberals.

So, whether you are for McCain/Palin or Obama/Biden, before you start spreading rumors with the hopes of damaging one’s character, you better make sure you have your facts right.