First, get educated by watching last night’s presidential debate (the last of them for this go around). Nothing can substitute for hearing them speak for themselves. All in all, I found most of the debate helpful toward this end:

Second, get educated by fact checking all the stuff the candidates said (and that their ads, surrogates, partisan pundits say). My favorite resource for this is factcheck.org, which I’ve found to be partial to one thing: calling the candidates, regardless of their affiliation, on their misuse of the facts. Use the radio and its talk show hosts for entertainment… but don’t make decisions based upon what you hear until you made sure the claims are actually backed up by hard facts. FactCheck can help you in that (and if you’ve already watched the debate, here’s their initial analysis of the candidates inaccuracies). Also available is InQuotes, a new Google service that compares actual quotes from the two major candidates on a variety of issues.

Third, get educated by comparing your views on your most important issues by using a tool like glassbooth.org. What I like about this one is that you can weight some issues more than others, or others not at all. After selecting your issue weightings, you’ll take a short quiz. Together, the weightings and your answers provide a correlation report with all the candidates and their stands on your issues. It’s not perfect of course, but it can help you consider the candidates in a little different light.

Okay, enough for now… back to the message prep for my second message from the ‘Neglected Series’ on politics. If you missed my first message on politics, here it is: Neglected, part 5: “Political Intrusion” Audio : Discussion