One interesting site you may want to look at is the Fundrace 2004 Neighbor Search, which allows you to type in a name or a ZIP code and then get a list of people who donated money to political campaigns, with their address (though many use their business address). It is a bit discouraging that you have to make that information so public (you undoubtedly will get blasted with requests for donations once the fundraisers, and not just political ones, get your name and address), but I suppose that’s the price you pay for protecting the system against massive anonymous, illegal donations.

The site also features great maps showing the geography of the donations, sortable by amount, candidate and so on, with the maps detailed by county, area, and state.

Another site to look at is Iraq on the Record, a database on the House of Representatives site, which allows you to search through a comprehensive listing of 237 different false or misleading statements made by Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, or Rumsfeld, sortable by subject, keyword, and date. For example, Bush claims he never said Iraq was an “imminent threat,” right? Well–

Today the world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq. A dictator who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people must not be allowed to produce or possess those weapons. We will not permit Saddam Hussein to blackmail and/or terrorize nations which love freedom.”

Source: President Bush Speaks to Atlantic Youth Council, CNN (11/20/2002).

“On its present course, the Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency. . . . it has developed weapons of mass death.”

Source: President, House Leadership Agree on Iraq Resolution, White House (10/2/2002).

Unless you want to make the losing argument that “urgent” is not synonymous with “imminent,” it looks like Bush was lying. What a fun database!

You might also want to use Wikipedia for an information source in the future. Wikipedia is a free, open-source encyclopedia, and is very helpful on a wide range of topics, with 230,000 entries so far. “Wiki-wiki” is a Hawaiian word meaning “super fast,” and when used to refer to a web site, means a collaborative project like Wikipedia, where anyone can contribute to the content of the site. Disinfopedia is the “propaganda” version of Wikipedia.

If you want to keep track of Bush’s job ratings, you can visit RealClear Politics or Polling Report.com. RealClear has a much nicer format and is easier to distill information from, whereas Polling Report has more raw data. Pollkatz has a great compilation of polling over time, with good charts–but their data has not been updated for two months or so.

And finally, for those of you who enjoy conspiracy theories, this page will keep you pretty busy. It gives a very highly detailed, heavily sourced account of Flight 93 on 9/11, the plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The administration’s answers about this (“we didn’t shoot it down”) just don’t match up with the facts, which demonstrate, for example, that the cockpit tape recording played for the families cut off three minutes before the recorded time of the crash. A lot of good material there, very well put together. I have to say that I do not believe that Flight 93 crashed because of the struggle in the cockpit–the engine landed intact a mile away, indicating that it was shot down; paper debris was found miles from the crash site, too far to have been blown there from the crash. One passenger called 911 claiming to have heard an explosion and seen white smoke coming from the wing; after the call was mentioned to the press, the 911 operator was immediately shut up and not allowed to speak about the matter, the records labeled confidential and never shown publicly, and the government now denies it ever happened.

It is also interesting to note that Bush admits giving Cheney authorization to shoot down the plane. It is my guess that they did exactly that, and then lost the nerve to admit it to the public. Call me a conspiracy nut, but it fits the facts, as well as this administration’s willingness to hide actions they don’t want people to see (can you tell me what happened at Cheney’s energy policy meetings? No? There you go).