I gave up on PolitiFact a couple of years ago—long before the recent ridiculousness about the claim that House Republicans voted to end Medicare was named their Lie of the Year. The truth is that if you go to PolitiFact (I don’t recommend it, so I won’t provide a link), you will see that in general, the Republicans do worse than the Democrats. But even still, this greatly understates how much more lying goes on amongst conservatives than liberals. The biggest problem has to do with what PolitiFact chooses to fact check. For example, George Will’s constant stream of lies and misinformation about climate change never seem to interest PolitiFact.

Today, PolitiFact checked a number of things in the President’s State of the Union speech. In particular, they found his claim that businesses had created three million jobs in the last 22 months “half true.” Why? What was wrong with that claim? Nothing. So why did they say it was half true? Because PolitiFact had divined that Obama implied that government policy had something to do with it. Hence: half true. Apparently, the people at PolitiFact have never seen Dragnet; Just the facts, Ma’am.

This morning, Paul Krugman wrote about when facts aren’t facts about the half true designation. He was one of many. So PolitiFact, showed, in addition to being useless, they have no backbone; they changed the “half true” into “mostly true.” This did not help matters, because what the President said was in fact true. Krugman wrote again on finding the truth. He wrote

Rachel Maddow provides an excellent summary. And she ends it properly: “You’re fired!” Better late than never, everyone. Welcome to my world!

I present the following video (a catch from Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook) as an illustration of what it is like to be a freelance writer: lots of work for little pay. This young man made a $100 bet with his father than he could do a backflip every day in 2011. Watch it. It is really interesting. Shockingly, it only has a couple hundred views.

This is a lot of work for very little money. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

I would be worried what people would have to say about this article, but no one reads my political writing. So I will go ahead and pretend to be brave.

I don’t understand all the uproar about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program. First, of course, there is the issue that the evidence is pretty poor that they even have one. Second, and more important, is the issue that the uproar just seems racist. Why are European countries allowed nukes, but not Iran? Why are Asian countries allowed nukes, but not Iran? Why is Israel allowed nukes, but not Iran?

I know the standard answer: the Iranians are crazy and they’ll actually use it. But this exact argument was used against the Soviets. Remember what a big deal détente was? The idea that the Nixon administration would treat the communist countries as if they were rational like we were? Shocking! And that’s how I feel about Iran. Would they actually use a nuclear weapon? I just don’t see it. Would they give it to a terrorist group? Give me a break! A millionaire won’t even give a bum a dollar; you think Iran would go to all that trouble just to create a bomb to give it away to some terrorist group that just as well might use it against Iran itself? Preposterous.

The bad side of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon is that it would likely set off an arms race in the Middle East. But could it really be worse than anything that brought the US to have almost 10,000 warheads and Russia, a similar amount?

We need to stop pretending that countries we don’t like are irrational. They never were and they aren’t now. So can we all just lower the rhetoric before we start another war? Is it so much to ask that we all stay calm and peaceful?