The DOBlog

Good grief. How low and desperate are the Republicans? Newstalk radio in Ireland this morning ran a clip of Sarah Palin putting the stilletto in to Obama by talking about comments made at an event that Obama was at about Israel and US support for Israel back in 2003. Palin’s killer blow was that they didn’t know how Obama had reacted because the LA Times won’t release the video they were given.

So Mr Obama, when did you stop beating your wife and why won’t the LA Times release the video? When did you stop taking psychotropic drugs? When did you stop torturing downed fighter pilots in the Vietnam war?

Why is the LA Times covering for you Mr Obama?

There is no effective response to this other than to say “gahhhh… bahhh”. To engage with a denial prompts the follow up question… “So are you denying it?”, followed by the spin “Candidate denies fornicating with fluffy bunnies”.

It is a cheap and lazy tactic that evidences the disarry of the McCain Palin camp in my view.. Obama has such a lead in the polls now that he doesn’t have to engage with the issue.

Mrs Palin, when did you stop beating your moose?

I noticed that Informatica have launched a new website called www.doyoutrustyourdata.com, to highlight issues with poor quality information from the media.

My personal opinion on the site is that it isn’t very nice looking (but then I’m not a big fan of black on green). However, I’m biased as I moderate the IQTrainwrecks.com blog for the IAIDQ which has been doing this for over 2 years now in an occasionally tongue in cheek manner. IQTrainwrecks.com gets reasonably good search returns on google (and we’re looking at ways to improve that further).

I’m flattered that Informatica have stumbled upon the same idea that the IAIDQ had back in 2006. I hope that we can figure out a way to have both sites working together for the benefit of information consumers everywhere. For example, the IAIDQ would love to reward members for submitting stories to IQTrainwrecks.com but our resources aren’t extensive enough to fund that (yet).

[Update] As Vincent McBurney correctly points out, the IAIDQ wasn’t the first to try to create a resource like this. IQTrainwrecks is a spiritual descendant of www.dataquality.com and also the listing of issues that Tom Redman has been tracking over on www.navesink.com). [/update]