And this is the clean-up...

I don’t know if this happens to everyone, but it seems that cleaning up the holiday decorations is more chaotic than anthing else during the season. I really dread this clean-up and the fact that I will probably forget to pack up something that will end up living on top of my fridge all year.

The kids are wishing you a fine 2009

We had a great new years day. Dad was home we zoned out with our new Wii, there were walks to the park and most of all we all enjoyed each others company. Here’s to a great 2009!

These are the times that are the most challenging as a parent. Living on very little sleep, wondering who is going to go down next, and trying to keep up my own strength so that I might be spared from the puke-fest.

All this comes among the good news that my husband will be returning from Iraq sometime during the week of the 15th. Things should be turning around to the light shortly, good karma don’t fail me now.

I will focus on national politics here, but I believe that it is equally important to be informed about local ballot issues and I hope to do another post regarding that before the current election cycle is over.

The first links here are resources that are generally considered unbiased fact checking organizations. I think knowing facts is especially important now that our news sources include a lot more citizen journalism (blogs), a 24 hour news cycle that rewards the first to break the story rather than accuracy, opinions that are not labeled in a traditional op-ed way, and pure politics on the parts of the campaigns. Hopefully you will use these sites to check the news stories from your favorite source whether that is CNN, Fox News, NPR or some other print, tv, radio, or internet site. I personally use the top three listed here most often, but you can look a little further at the others to find one that might work for you.

http://www.factcheck.org/
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/

http://factchecked.org/ (oriented towards students)
http://www.ontheissues.org/
http://www.opensecrets.org/
http://vote-smart.org/
http://snopes.com/politics/

I have also included the presidential candidate’s websites so you can look at each of their policy proposals for yourself. Cutting out the middle man and thinking critically about what each candidate has written is a good place to start…

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/
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Last but not least – http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ is a good political news aggregator that gathers most current polls and information and serves it up in a format that is easy to look through and decipher.

I hope these are useful to you – thanks for checking it out.
Please feel free to pass this along to anyone you think might be interested.

I plan to write about my chaotic life and the technology I try to employ to help me control it. Most of the time it probably controls me.

So here goes – I am probably blog number 20,001 started today, can I cut through the clutter?