“Any voter who assumes a political TV ad is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is making a very risky assumption, and they might well cast a vote that is based on completely wrong information. Because there is a lot of completely wrong information out there.” –Brooks Jackson, FactCheck.com

Our friends at the Kansas City Star do an Ad Watch today on a Roy Blunt campaign commercial and a commercial and a campaign commercial for the “Let Voters Decide” group that is pushing proposition A. The Blunt ad criticizing Robin Carnahan’s position on federal health care gets seven out of ten stars for accuracy and fairness. The newspaper gives the Proposition A commercial only six out of ten in those categories and criticizes it as “slightly inaccurate” on one count, and “more misleading” on another.

We encourage our readers to watch their newspapers for similar ratings of campaign statements and advertising and encourage folks to let us know if we have missed similar fact checking done in other papers.

We also encourage our readers to go to three sources to help them evaluate candidates or the commercials run by and on behalf of candidates. Go to FactCheck.com and to Politifact.com. If you want to check the voting records and statements of candidates, visit Project Vote Smart.

We also have come across a piece about the use of misleading campaign advertising on the “Political Hotsheet” blog of CBS News that might provoke some general thinking

We submit these notes to you from time to time because we believe it is best that voters not make decisions on what they are told; that they are better served by making decisions on what THEY think. And we believe voters owe it to themselves, their state, and their nation, to care enough to become educated, not manipulated.