newsminer.com

The St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly have a useful site in which they contrast the candidates' statements and the facts.

They added the comments of Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP nominee for vice president, to the mix this week. PolitiFact.com is the product of independent journalists from the St. Petersburg paper in Florida and Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C.

"Journalists and researchers from the Times and CQ will fact-check the accuracy of speeches, TV ads, interviews and other campaign communications. We’ll publish new findings every day on PolitiFact.com, and list our sources for all to see," the organizations note on their Web site.

"PolitiFact (pronounced puh-lit’-eh-fact) is bolder than previous journalistic fact-checking efforts because we’ll make a call, declaring whether a claim is True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True or False. We even have a special category for the most ridiculous claims that we call 'Pants on Fire.'"

For Palin, the fact-checkers say that her comment that Sen. Barack Obama wants to raise income taxes and payroll taxes is "half true" in that he wants to raise taxes on higher incomes.

They said Sen. John Kerry's comment that Palin "doesn't believe that climate change is man-made is "mostly true" and that MoveOn.org's claim was "false" that she backed Pat Buchanan in 2000.

For more on all the candidates, check out the Truth-O-Meter at www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/.