Talking Politics?: What You Need to Know before Opening Your Mouth

In today's superheated partisan climate, honest, reasoned, and informed political debates are too rare. Political spin and even demonizing opponents with distortions or outright lies are commonplace from Washington to the local city council. The hyper-partisan rhetoric and the public's spotty knowledge about our political system undermine informed responses to these debates. This work by Sheila Suess Kennedy identifies some of the most common areas of confusion and/or misunderstanding about our political system--distortions of accepted history, constitutional law, economics, and/or science--to help readers distinguish between facts that have been documented and agreed to by responsible people of all ideological perspectives, and the different conclusions and interpretations that may be drawn from those facts. This work aims to create a more informed electorate and to better ground debates in fact, from Capitol Hill to the family dinner table.