My obsession with facts strikes again.

I know this is a bore.  I know few people read this.  I am assuming that those who do care, although maybe not as obsessively as I do.

Some more false statements out there:

First one that is very close to my heart, an email is circulating including the claim that Barack Obama was the first president who terminated America's ability to put in space.  Politifact rates that as "Pants on Fire."  This is hardly surprising -- ask any NASA employee, or space buff, and they will tell you that Richard Nixon killed manned exploration after Apollo.

From the other side of the political spectrum, Rachel Maddow (whom I usually love) claimed that "A recent Department of Labor study guessed Wall Street fees cost a worker 28 percent of the value of your plan over the span of your career." While granting Maddows' larger point, that fees eat up a lot of money, Politifact reported that her numbers were way higher than reality, and rated the claim "mostly false."

And from Snopes, the truth behind the email/Facebook post supposedly from Warren Buffet.  The upshot?  The quote by Buffet about fixing the deficit in 5 minutes by making all members of Congress ineligible for re-election anytime there was a deficit more than 3% of the GNP was real. Most of the  rest of the email is a repackaged version of the "28th Amendment" crap that I reported on earlier.

There are so many, many others, such as Newt Gingrich's repeating of Sarah Palin's lie about "death panels," to a claim that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's bill freezing state employees' salaries included a 5.4 raise for himself.  Politifact labeled those "Pants on Fire" and "False," respectively.

I have to remember that I am not responsible for correcting everybody's misstatements and outright lies.  Or I am going to burn out on this, quickly.

It's just that this sort of thing bugs me.  If "We the people" are going to influence policy and political decisions, if we are to be an informed citizenry capable of fixing what is wrong in this country, we need to deal in reality. And sooner, rather than later.

For myself, I want truth.  I want accuracy.  I have an idea where facts will lead me in the end, but I need my decisions to be grounded in the way the world really is, not the way other people would wish it to be.