The bill Senator Obama voted for read, "Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV." There is no way around it. The ad is factual and accurate.

Keep trying to talk around the facts of the matter, it is OTM's position after all.

Sorry, Matt. Bold faced Lie

Here's where to find the complete text of the law:

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=3&GA=93&DocTypeId=SB&DocNum=0099&GAID=3&LegID=734

What you'll see if you read the whole thing is that the law does not mandate sex ed classes at all. Instead it sets guidelines for any sex education classes a school might decide to set up, including some guidelines that most cultural conservatives should be happy to sign on for, eg abstainence education, and the provision that no student should be required to take a sex education course against the wishes of his or her parents.

this is a stupid idea

I am surprised at the picture accompanying this segment. Vice President Dick Cheney. Since OTM asserts that the Vice President is a purely Executive Branch Office then the picture implies that Senator Obama was sworn into the Executive Branch and not the Senate.

Very troubling. OTM should clarify the meaning of this picture. Either Obama has been attacking himself for the last year as part of the Bush Administration or OTM has been wrong in its hard line on the location of the Office of the Vice President of the United States in the Constitutional order!

So, Harry Nillson in his album The Point was correct, "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear." Maybe dialogue with the audience isn't really any more possible than candidates holding to their pledges.

Thanks to some solid reporting by Byron York of National Review, the ham handed and incomplete reporting of The St. Petersburg Times Politifact and The Annenburg Fact Check, has been exposed. York's article, On Sex Ed, McCain is Right was published at National Review Online on September 16th. Byron York points out that the fact checks miss a fundamental fact, that when legislators pursuing progressive policy objectives, like Senator Obama, the use of words such as objective, factual, and medically accurate is a reference to the type of comprehensive sex-education McCain and his supporters objected to in the ad.

Unfortunately the same ham-handed and incomplete mistake was made again by Bob Garfield. Mr. Garfield, you need to do some reporting before you mistakenly call things a bald lie. This failure borders on professional malpractice and incompetence. The bill Senator Obama voted for read, "Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV." There is no way around it. The ad is factual and accurate.

Well Bob, you and I have hardly ever agreed, but I would love it if your idea for a "truth-based" campaign was somehow doable and enforceable. I will ignore the fact that you are trying to ruin 220 years of American politics as we have come to know and love it. Seriously, given the tools available today, it would be great if people could have an easy means to get past all the smoke and mirrors and outright lies and have a simpler means of making rational judgments. Unfortunately, that assumes a lot too. In a country where most people cannot place the Civil War in the correct century, much less decade, cannot name 2 Supreme Court Justices or their own Congressperson, and in general are woefully misinformed, I am not sure that the truth squad issues are the real problem.

Anne is woefully misinformed. President Bush (W) was the first to open up research using public funds on embryonic stem cell lines, but only on a couple dozen or so that were already out there, not any new ones. There are separate issues as to how much that helps, but that is another discussion. President Clinton had the opportunity to open this up a few times, but never pulled the trigger.

She also is quoting the mischaracterization of McCain's position as put forth by the Dems, as was pointed out correctly by OTM. OTM and I often disagree, but this is one time I think they got it pretty much right regarding the entire fact checking issue. However, see next comment.

I was disappointed that the commentator missed the actual distinction between political positions on "stem cell research". My understanding is that scientists consider research with embryonic stem cells essential to increasing knowledge. Currently, research in the United States is limited to adult stem cells.

John McCain is running on the Republican ticket, and HIS platform calls for a ban on all embryonic stem-cell research, public or private.