Before I sign off for a while …

Just a few links, starting with another on the topic of press failure in fact-checking: Pundit Ezra Klein says he didn’t want to write a fact-check piece on Paul Ryan lying without “bending over backwards” to find some truthful things to say about it. As Daily Howler points out at the link, the purpose of fact-checking is specifically to point out lies, not to present a “balanced” view. And isn’t telling the truth supposed to be the default ethical position? Unless it’s something truly startling, why praise a candidate for not lying?
For a good fact-check, this looks into flaws in Romney’s claims about his insurance plan, for example, that it will cover pre-existing conditions (not so). And ThinkProgress looks at Romney’s tax plan and his claim that even though it cuts taxes on people like himself, it won’t actually cut taxes on people like himself.
•Here’s a fact-check by a blogger on Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek article on Obama (the same one that prompted Newsweek to say it doesn’t fact-check its authors)
•A Harvard professor looks at the recent cheating scandal and finds many students who think cheating is just a necessary part of life, a way to get ahead. And once they’ve succeeded, of course they’ll stop cheating, make a serious contribution to society and set a good example.
It reminds me of an article I read a few years ago in Christian Science Monitor. A college professor said he deals with lots of students who have stellar grades, terrific extracurriculars and none of it means anything to them except a hoop to jump through. And now that they’re in college, their courses are just more hoops. If that’s really a common attitude, I imagine it would make cheating on the hoops pretty easy.
As for the belief of the cheaters that they’ll turn it around—like they say, life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.
•Here’s a horror story: Little kids whose schools locked them up in mop closets or stuffed them into dufflebags in order to keep them from disturbing anyone.
•President Obama’s war on whistleblowers spreads through government.
•The dubious qualifications of terrorism experts. A side point: One writer quoted in the piece says that to be cost-effective (as conservatives demand non-security related regulations are), spending on Homeland Security would have to have thwarted 333 attacks a year.
•Echnide looks back at former NYT columnist John Tierney’s woman issues.
•A young woman in the Dominican Republic dies because of leukemia. Doctors delayed starting treatment three weeks because the 16-year-old patient was nine-weeks pregnant and they worried it would harm the fetus.
•In response to those “I’m glad my mother didn’t abort me” activists, here’s a woman who wishes mom had.
•Flashback: George Washington assures American Jews that freedom of religion isn’t just for Christians: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Compare this to the lies of David Barton.
•My friend Katherine Taylor discusses why a series jumps the shark. I tackled the same topic a while back.
•Right-wing bloggers freak out over Joe Biden referencing (gasp) chains!
•A Politico writer claims that criticism of Todd Akin‘s claim raped women don’t get pregnant was an attempt to “shut down debate.” He later “apologized” by saying he was only trying to have a “nuanced discussion” The nuances being, as near as I can figure it out, that some women lie about rape, so that proves … well nothing much. His argument is incoherent, not nuanced.