The Good, The Bad, and the Downright Insane

Here's a short list of blogs and sites I've been reading leading up to this election...I consider these blogs windows into the news sources, not actual news themselves.  Blogs are written by people like you and me, and aren't inherently credible...so it's important to understand that in reading blogs, the reader also has the responsibility to verify the source and not just the presentation of that information, because the real message can become twisted through interpretation.  I do not assign responsibility to either political party for these blogs or for the news sources, and I want to make it clear I understand they are separate and independent from each other in most cases, but they still play an important part in spreading information and opinion to the masses and must be mentioned here.  Whether being praised, scorned, probed, accepted, outrightly denied or tacitly approved, these blogs play an important role in the Political atmosphere we connected individuals live and breathe in.  With that said, here are a few blogs I've found helpful, informative, entertaining (The Good), conspicuous, inconsistent, inconclusive (The Bad), or incredulous, frightening and harmful (The Downright Insane).

The Good:

Talking Points Memo - http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

Daily Kos - http://www.dailykos.com/

The Election Geek Blog - http://www.electiongeek.com/blog

Think Progress - http://thinkprogress.org/

MSNBC Politics - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032553/

Steam Powered Opinions - http://steampoweredopinions.blogspot.com/

Balloon Juice - http://www.balloon-juice.com/

TV Newser - http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/?c=rss

Politico - http://www.politico.com/

The Bad:

Little Green Footballs - http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/

Drudge Report - http://www.drudgereport.com/

The Downright Insane:

World Net Daily - http://www.wnd.com/

Gateway Pundit - http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/

America's Right - http://www.americasright.com/

AND THE WORST IS: African Press International - http://africanpress.wordpress.com/

African Press International (API) is the worst of the worst because it is supposedly from a Kenyan in Norway who "reports" mainly on political unrest in his part of Africa, but suddenly decided to get famous by taking advantage of Obama's Kenya connections and lack of insight by the American people into their world, so when stories about Barack and Michelle Obama started spouting up people would think he had no reason or nothing to gain by lying and have permitted him (him being Chief Editor Korir, publisher of this blog) to "report" obvious lies and falsehoods repeatedly and with no evidence to back his claims.  Being far away and unfamiliar with US Legal operations and Media reputations has been his excuse for delaying fulfilling his promises to make evidence available and he continues to draw out these fabricated stories to the delight and admiration of really delusional and hateful people who post idiotic nonsense in his comments.

To verify news, I check with multiple "liberal mainstream media" sources (sarcasm on the liberal part) such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, and yes even Fox, various papers and fact checking sites like FactCheck.org and Politifact.org, Snopes.com, and above all, I try to look at things through a lens of common sense.  If something is just so complicated, hard to believe, far-fetched and reported by sources with questionable credibility, I generally wait for hard and respected validation before I come to any conclusions.