Well, this is it. My final plea for sanity. I know that most of you don't care about the facts in this election and would rather listen to the television ads, but the facts are availiable and I'm going to give you the most useful sites to use when you are voting.

One is http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/index.html, which is a pretty fair account of the issues at hand, though not as good as last time since the issues are still being clouded by the side issues of abortions, gay rights, and terrorism. The fact of the matter is that no president is going to make a difference on abortion, gay rights, or terrorism. It is an appeal to those who don't want facts.

http://factcheck.org/article298.html gives a run down of the biggest lies of the campaign so far. It doesn't seem balanced, but it is certainly fair.

Some points to look at would be:

"Bush continued to misrepresent Kerry's health-care proposal in a series of ads and mailings, telling voters that Kerry would take health-care decisions out of the hands of doctors and have "bureaucrats in Washington" making them instead."

"Kerry has stated unambiguously that he would not increase taxes on anyone making less than $200,000 and is promising additional, targeted tax breaks for some who fall into that category. Bush has systematically distorted, exaggerated and misstated Kerry's record on taxes since the start of the campaign. Initially, his spokesmen accused Kerry of casting 350 votes to raise taxes, which was flatly false."

"Bush has portrayed a Kerry deficit-cutting bill from a decade ago as a proposal to "slash" spending on intelligence in the face of a rising threat of terrorism. The fact is that what Kerry proposed and voted for in 1994 amounted to less than 4 percent of all intelligence spending at the time. Back then, the focus of intelligence spending was still the former Soviet Union, which was disintegrating, and Republicans were proposing cuts in intelligence spending, too"

"Kerry did oppose the list of weapons cited by Bush as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Senate in 1984, as then-President Reagan was pushing an enormous build-up in military spending.  But the fact is that once elected, Kerry didn't actually vote against many of the weapons on that list (except to oppose the entire Pentagon budget in 3 years). Kerry cast specific votes mostly against expensive nuclear and strategic systems such as the Trident missile, B-2 bomber and "star wars" missile-defense systems. After the collapse of the Soviet Union even Republicans were for cutting spending on weapons: Bush's father and his secretary of defense Dick Cheney proposed a 30 percent reduction in Pentagon spending. Kerry has supported Pentagon budgets in 16 of his 19 years in office, including every annual budget from1997 on."

There is so much depth in the article that I can hardly go into it here, but go and read for yourself if you really care about your vote and your country.