QUOTES of the DAY

NBC Washington’s Jim Long takes this morning photograph. He calls it “Sunrise over Washington.”

A new avenue for the Biden gaffe: Twitter

“Welcome to twitter Joe Biden, @VP, or at least Joe Biden’s press staff.” — TIME‘s Jay Newton-Small in a Tuesday tweet.

Journo Mysteries

“Just got third email today (4th since last week) saying someone is trying to reset my Twitter password. Freaking out a little.” — Reason Magazine’s Mike Riggs in a Tuesday tweet.

The Fashion Consultants

NJ’s Amy Harder: “Casual Tuesday? Sen. David Vitter, R-La., walks onto Senate floor in khakis and plaid shirt, no suit jacket.” She added, “And Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., is in jeans. Maybe the casual attire is a bipartisan protest of being in session this week.”

WaPo‘s new Deputy National Editor Terence Samuel: No suit jacket or no jacket? And did he have a tie?

Reporter starstruck by Politifact founder

“Saw@politifact’s Bill Adair on CNN while picking up a rental car in Chicago. I was starstruck!” –D.C. Digital Journalist Chris Montgomery in a Tuesday tweet.

Tread carefully around this journo today

“Late night headache. Kill. me. now.” — WaPo Social Media Producer Katie Rogers in an extremely early morning tweet.

Reporter flees scorching heat of her apartment

“Nothing motivates a girl to be up, out of the house and ready to work by 6:40 like having no A/C in her apt in DC in July.” — Roll Call‘s Meredith Shiner in a Wednesday morning tweet.

Breaking up with your BlackBerry is hard to do

“I need to figure out how to tell my BlackBerry at the end of this month that I want a divorce, and that I’m leaving it for a Droid or iPhone.” — The Hill‘s Michael O’Brien in a Tuesday tweet.

DC-based PolitiFact has launched PolitiFact Oregon with The Oregonian.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact Editor and Washington Bureau Chief for the St. Petersburg Times, remarked to FishbowlDC: “We now have PolitiFact state sites from coast to coast. It’s like we’re fulfilling a fact-checking manifest destiny!” Below is what has been described as the “magical and enchanting” Crater Lake in south central Oregon. It is an easy road trip for readers of The Oregonian.

This cheese allegedly hails from Madison, Wisc.

PolitiFact’s “Truth-o-Meter” has expanded to Wisconsin, announces St. Petersburg Time‘s Washington Bureau Chief Bill Adair over the long weekend.

“Wisconsin has a long tradition of great political characters,” Adair told FishbowlDC, ignoring our question on whether he’d be eating more cheese as this gets underway. “It’s a great state for the Truth-O-Meter.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will launch PolitiFact Wisconsin – the sixth state to utilize the fact-checking service. The others, so far, are Texas, Florida, Rhode Island, Georgia and Ohio.

The Truth-O-Meter has kept a watchful eye on ABC’s “This Week” since White House correspondent Jake Tapper was interim host and continues to watch over the facts (or lack thereof) of the show and its guests with host Christiane Amanpour.

PolitiFact, the fact-checking service run by Bill Adair, Washington Bureau Chief of the St. Petersburg Times, has announced that it will continue the feature with Christiane Amanpour, who debuts as the new host of ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

The fact-checking feature began at the direction of interim host Jake Tapper.

“We’ll keep checking the guests – and the pundits – every Sunday,” Adair told FishbowlDC.

An ABC News spokesperson said the decision to continue to fact-check the show came easily: “Our viewers have responded well to what we are doing with PolitiFact. Everyone here is very supportive and there wasn’t a question as to whether we will keep doing it.”

Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact and Washington Bureau Chief of the St. Petersburg Times, on Tuesday morning rejected HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington‘s weekend claim that PolitiFact was playing lukewarm with the facts. In other words, that PolitiFact was trying to have its cake and eat it too.

“I respect Arianna’s right to disagree with us, but I think we got it right,” Adair told FishbowlDC in an e-mail. “We spent several days researching her statement and found that while there was the overbilling she cites, there wasn’t clear-cut proof it was fraud. So Half True was the right call.”

Huffington took issue with PolitiFact’s conclusion to a fact-checking of her recent appearance on ABC’s “This Week” in which she said “Halliburton had defrauded American taxpayers.” She called the fact-checking “an object lesson in equivocation, and a prime exhibit of the kind of muddled thinking that dominates Washington and allows the powerful to escape accountability — and our corrupt no-accountability status quo to continue wreaking havoc on our country. It’s a favorite trick of those in power: using ambiguity and complexity as a sort of chemical dispersant on the truth. Dilute it enough and it becomes unrecognizable.”

Adair fires back: “I strongly disagree with her suggestion that PolitiFact seeks “the comfort of the middle ground.” Indeed, our 1,400 Truth-O-Meter rulings over the past three years show we are a unique organization in American journalism that is not afraid to make a call. People may not always agree with our rulings, but most will recognize that we fill an important role in holding officials — and pundits — accountable for what they say.”

(Readers: As you’ll note in the above photograph, Pinocchio’s nose is not at full extension of a lie. Instead, it’s relatively normal-sized with possibly another odd shaped nose growing adjacent to it. I’m no Pinocchio nose expert, but I think you get the half truth gist of it.)

WaPo’s Howard Kurtz, who hosts CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, is getting in on the fact-checking business. Most recently ABC’s Jake Tapper, the interim host of “This Week”, began having fact-checking on the show by Politifact’s Bill Adair.

On CNN on Sunday, Kurtz followed suit and launched a segment in which he fact checked statements made by various politicians on the Sunday morning talk shows in recent weeks.

“Reliable Sources fact-checking popular on Twitter. Should ideally be done during the wk;” Kurtz tweeted Sunday. “I’d be happy to help. Viewers seem hungry for it.”

Watch the segment here.

But, it seems, everyone’s a critic. Media Matters has decided to fact check Kurtz’s fact checking. Read it here.

Not like that. Get your minds out of the gutter! ABC News’ Jake Tapper and Politifact’s Bill Adair appeared on Colbert last night to talk fact-checking for “This Week.”

(Photo Credit)

Where will you be watching tonight’s election results? We’ve asked all sorts of journos for their evening plans and they include an Atlanta hotel room, the Phoenix Biltmore, and Champs Sports Bar in Cincinnati.

Join us after the jump…

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Good morning Washington. Is the writer’s strike really over?

Quickly navigate Morning Reading List:

REVOLVING DOOR | NEWSPAPERS | TV | ONLINE MEDIA | MAGAZINES | RADIO | WEST WING REPORTAGE | JOBS

Say hello to Washington Times White House reporter (and new daddy) Jonathan Ward.

What word do you routinely misspell? Excercise

What’s the name of your cell phone ring? Vibrate.

What time did you get up this morning? 7, when my 2-month old son was done eating but wanted to stay up for a bit

When did you last cry and why? Holding my son a few days after he was born, cuz i was happy and grateful

How many emails do you receive a day, roughly? Too many

Read the rest when you click below…(and see previous FishbowlDC interviews: Julie Mason, David Shuster, Joe Curl, Alex Pareene, Peter Beinart, Jonah Goldberg, Megyn Kendall, Ana Marie Cox, Jim Brady, Howard Mortman, Amy Argetsinger, Jose Antonio Vargas, Chuck Todd, Tom Gottlieb, Kelly Ann Collins, David von Drehle, David Lat, Mark Leibovich, Zain Verjee, David Plotz, Paul Kane, Karen Travers, Mark Halperin, Hugo Gurdon, Greg Kelly,Ken Rudin, John Dickerson, Anne Schroeder, Spencer Ackerman, Bret Baier, Bob Sellers, Greta van Susteren, Danielle Jones, Jonathan Salant, John McCalla, Pam Hess, Ryan Grim, Marc Ambinder, Marty Kady, Jack Shafer, Annie Lou Bayly, Jerry Zremski, Charlie Cook, Dave Hughes, Howard Fineman, Katie Tarbox, Mark Segraves, Chris Cillizza, Tom Sietsema, Bill Triplett, Robin Givhan, David Brody, Norah O’Donnell, Carl Cannon, Jordan Lieberman, David Folkenflik, Molly Henneberg, Ernesto Londono, Brody Mullins, Aaron Blake, Martha Raddatz, Andrew Sullivan, Christina Bellantoni, Shane Harris, Nora McAlvanah, Adam Nagourney, Erin McPike, Mike Memoli, Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, Arthur Delaney, Chris Mincher, Rachel Sklar, Laura Sullivan, Jeff Kosseff, Matthew Cooper, Scott McCrary, Dan Reilly, Jennifer Griffin, Ari Shapiro, Jonathan Kaplan, Rick Klein, Mike Allen, Olivier Knox, Erik Wemple, Nathan Burchfiel, Andrea Mitchell, Mike DeBonis, Anne Kornblut, April Ryan, Amy Morris, Keith Koffler, <strongMark Silva, Ann Compton, Mark Knoller, Betsy Fischer, Katherine O’Hearn, Pamela Brown, Beverly Kirk, Wendell Goler, Glenn Kessler, Susan Page, Michael Crowley, Claudia Milne, Kelly Dinardo, Bruce Becker, Michael Rogers, Paul Schur, Diana West, Eric Nuzum, Bill Adair)

Also, drop us a line to let us know who else you’d like FishbowlDC to interview. They must work in the Washington area and you must include their email address.

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