Here is a site that keeps track of all of the rumors being spread about Sarah Palin, just about all of which are vicious lies. The list has 71 entries, and I suspect it will keep growing.

Here is a possibly more authoritative site, the non-partisan FactCheck.org, which also vindicates Palin. Yes, Republicans also twist the truth and unfairly accuse their opponents sometimes, and FactCheck calls them on it, though none of those entries go as far as the anti-Palin entries do. But this is a good site to bookmark and to check throughout the campaign.

Here is a more detailed refutation of the biggest one some people are currently trying.

Bearing false witness like this is just evil.

Certain questions, of course, are valid paths of inquiry. Consider the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Democrats are saying she supported it before she opposed it. I don’t doubt that. Local and state officials are always trying to get federal money. At the end of the day, though, she did kill the project, so as to use the federal highway funds for more worthy projects. But here is the kicker: As Glenn Beck reported last night, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden VOTED FOR the Bridge to Nowhere. They even voted against a counter-proposal to take that money and give it to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in order to build that bridge! John McCain, of course, consistent foe of wasteful spending, fought it tooth and nail.

Do the Democrats really want to get in a war of campaign ads about earmarks?

The Democrats seem to be in a panic, which leads to ineptitude. Turning Sarah Palin’s pit-bull with lipstick joke into that other joke about how a pig with lipstick is still a pig? Do they not realize how this is going to go over among ordinary women who are deserting the Democrats to the Sarah Palin banner in droves?

Today, a super-particle accelerator will get turned on just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. Some people, though, are afraid it will generate black holes that will suck in all the matter of the earth. They are also afraid of “strangelets,” whatever those are, and no telling what they might do. The project is part of the search for a unified theory that accounts for both electro-magnetic forces and gravity. The hope is to find the “God particle.” (Which does not mean what it sounds like! Someone else had better explain it.) From Excitement and Fear Abound Over Super Collider:

The concerns are nothing less than a total doomsday scenario. The anti-LHC hysteria was started by Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho, who filed suit in U.S. and European courts to stop the LHC. Their theory is that the LHC will produce micro black holes and “stranglets” that may not decay as rapidly as mainstream physics predicts.

“Any miniature black hole created at rest in a collider would essentially be trapped in Earth’s gravitational field, and over seconds to hours, slowly interact and acquire more mass,” Wagner says on his LHCDefense.org Web site.

A number of safety studies conducted by CERN and independent physicists have concluded that the doomsday scenarios posited by Wagner and a few other researchers are fundamentally flawed, and there is virtually no chance the machine will produce matter-sucking phenomena.

Some are calling these fears “faith based science”–or F-BS–but I would venture to say that NO Christians believe the earth will be destroyed in this way. I suspect that the opponents are instead radical environmentalists, who currently oppose scientific research more than Christians ever do.

Another issue is whether such research, which has no practical application, is worth the expense. The liberal arts answer, which values knowing truth for its own sake, would be “yes.” The Christian liberal arts answer adds to that the great impetus for science in the West, the desire to know what God chose to create as a way of glorifying Him.

See you tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow.

Carlos Pascual and Strobe Talbott of the Brookings Institute declare in the Washington Post that the End is near, that we only have 7 more years to stop global warming and world devastation. From 7 Years to Climate Midnight;

The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades. That means that between Inauguration Day in January 2009 and 2015, either John McCain or Barack Obama will face the most momentous political challenge of all time.

Reflecting a consensus of hundreds of scientists around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has affirmed that greenhouse gas emissions are raising the Earth’s temperature. The Earth is on a trajectory to warm more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit by around mid-century. Exceeding that threshold could trigger a series of phenomena: Arable land will turn into desert, higher sea levels will flood coastal areas, and changes in the convection of the oceans will alter currents, such as the Gulf Stream, that determine regional weather patterns. Manhattan and Florida would be under water, while Nevada would have no water at all.

A suggestion: Don’t set dates. When you do and the date passes with the prediction not happening–as Christian end-of-time millennialists have learned–you look really foolish.

But I don’t think the world is going to do very much about this problem in 7 years. Maybe the world should, but it won’t. So perhaps we should all make plans to face our doom. Move out of Manhattan, Florida, and Nevada. Stockpiling supplies will only buy you a short time. Accept death with dignity. Above all, make peace with your Maker.