Andrew Sullivan flags a dispatch from Obama's ground game here. Post-Citzens United, one of the things I'm really curious to see play out in the 2012 election if Obama can repeat the effectiveness of his ground game in the last election, and subsequently how that plays out against Super PAC money that will likely dominate the airwaves.

My sense of it is that Obama will be trying to reach voters by knocking on doors while the GOP and its allies will be going through the teevee, and it's not at all clear which approach will better motivate each side.

Ezra Klein does a nice job of breaking down exactly why all the GOP budget plans involve painful cuts for the poor and the social safety net. Simply put, every other piece of the budget is sacrosanct, so there's no choice.

I'm curious, though, if there's any chance of a rational discussion of why help for the poor is not held in higher esteem by the party that purports to be on the same side as Jesus. If you saw Real Time with Bill Maher over the weekend, you may get a big clue -- the narrative of "the welfare state" is a big part of the Republican brand, particularly for people who don't look like you do. The actual debate, though, is why simply cutting funding is preferable to trying to fix something they see as broken.

Of course, that may go back to the founding GOP principle that government simply can't do that, or any, job properly in any formulation, but man, I'd love to see a serious debate over that. With regard to welfare, what are the alternatives? And not "oh, the market will decide," because that's shorthand for "fuck if I know," and is another one of those areas where a for-profit model risks sacrificing service for cost savings.

Yeah, I know, I'm being all idealistic about politics again. It'll pass.

In the past week, I've read about Mike Daisey and Apple's factories in China, and about Kony 2012. There's also Rick Santorum making outrageous statements about euthanasia in the Netherlands, and pretty much the entire GOP presidential field inventing quotes and stances from the Obama administration on a daily basis.

All of these cases take liberties with the actual truth, sometimes embellishing to make a point, and sometimes just completely making things up to fit their worldview. Stephen Colbert effectively skewered Santorum on what the underlying issue is here -- Santorum's people said he was "speaking from the heart," which is appropriate, since Colbert launched his show on the exact concept, even if the anatomical origins were a little lower.

We live in an era of truthiness. If it feels true in your gut, or in your heart, it may be repeated as fact.

Particularly with the Mike Daisey case, I've seen it said that there's a growing trend of "punching up" your nonfiction elements or reporting to tell a better story. It's James Frey's fake memoir applied to journalism, which goes back to that old chestnut that the Tribune here in Chicago always falls back on -- the news is not newsworthy in its own right. Some of it is the confirmation bias of living in media bubbles. Some of it is just flat-out lying to get ahead.

But what's interesting is how it plays out in the current media landscape. As the atomic elements of newsgathering explode across blogs and "citizen journalists" and the major news organizations become aggregators, quality control goes out the window. Every blogger wants their story picked up, so they become salesmen of their content. With a lot of these folks being complete amateurs -- and this is where the Kony case may come in -- there might be plenty of cut corners and other behaviors that professionals know enough to avoid that can taint an otherwise compelling piece of work.

Couple that with the speed of viral video, and you literally have lies going halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. This is why I'm still dubious of Twitter as an actual source of news. It's more like a source of raw material for news, and to drive that into a metaphor, consuming raw meat will make you sick unless you know how to prepare it. To date, the mainstream media still occasionally undercooks the meal and makes us sick.