The Obama campaign has launched a “Fight the Smears” web page to address all of the nasty rumors that are being spread about him and his wife. It’s got good evidence to counter the charges, and urges people to respond to nasty e-mails by sending them the correct information.
It might be useful in fighting the ignorance of some of the friends and relatives I’ve heard described on the Dope. It also seems like a particularly Dope-like thing to do – cite!
I heartily approve- the best way to face smears and lies is to get them out into the light and expose them as such.
The sad thing is that on some other sites, like Digg, some of the more rabid anti-Obama crowd are saying that what he’s doing is basically stifling free speech. :rolleyes:
I love this! Proactive, to the point, no punch-pulling. It’s a thing of beauty. And the graphics are cool, too. 
What are they talking about on that page! Of COURSE there’s a video of Obama’s wife saying whitey! All you have to do is find a normal number, expand it into binary representation and parse the right bit-string and…
Does the web page say that he really, really, truly doesn’t want to increase the capital gains tax rate from 15% to 28%? Does the site claim that the tax increase position attributed to Obama is just another smear?
Exactly. Glad you got the point.
It’s a slight saying that in a number where every possible string of switch combinations occurs, every possible medium expressible by a computer exists, this means there is a porno somewhere of you having sex with every person you’ve ever met, a picture of a written confession with your signature admitting to every major crime committed since you were born, and a video of Michelle Obama saying “whitey” (or for that matter a video of John McCain saying whitey, but whatever).
Of course the chances of finding said string, especially one that would be “perfect” (i.e. shows no signs of video editing flaws, since there’s every possible state of the video out there, including ones with photoshopped kittens in it and ones that are obviously fake) are insanely tiny.
(It was actually inspired by this webpage that was posted in one of my threads asking how to do rational numbers and such in binary, hexadecimal etc:
It’s been really bothering me lately the way that both sides are refering to this “Obama is a Muslim!” as a smear. While the truth is that he isn’t and never has been, both sides have been treating it like it’s “Obama is a child molester!” Look, I get that the majority of this country is Christian, and I also get that most of them don’t want to elect somebody who isn’t the same religion as him, but if I was a Muslim, I would be much more offended by Obama calling these Muslim accusations a smear (as if being mistaken for a Muslim is a horrible thing) than him just saying that it’s false information which is going around and he is trying to inform us of the truth.