Regardless of our choice of candidates for office or choice of news sources, we all are bombarded by election-year rhetoric and opinion. Is what we hear and read fact or fiction, truth or spin?

I came across a list of fact-checking websites in a recent college publication that could be very useful in making these distinctions.

Here is a partial summary of these sites:

media matters.org (monitors conservative media).

mrc.org (monitors liberal media).

PolitiFact.com (Pulitzer Prize-winning site with Truth-O-Meter and pants-on-fire ratings).

FactCheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center).

RealClearPolitics.com (aggregation site presents a variety of perspectives of daily news).

I hope these will be helpful to some in the quest to make good election-year decisions based on truth and facts rather than diatribe and insinuation.

Dee Dee Carlson

Durango