At exactly 8am this morning UNO embarked on a new school year, and so did the UNO Democrats & UNO Democrats/Blog…

Prepare for the best year UNO Dems have ever seen! To quote Obama (D-IL) in 2004:

If you feel the same energy I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you steal the same hope that I do… then I have no doubt… a brighter day will come

That’s how we feel over here at the UNO Dems Blog. We’ve come a long way since Ryan Renner pioneered the use of political blogging in Nebraska; we’ve come a long way since Chad Brakhahn dared to lead a Democrats club at UNO, but the best is still to come!

I hope you’ll join us tonight at our first meeting of the year:

And in the comments section I hope everyone will post their hopes, their passions, their dreams, anything they want about this new year, so we can all feel the energy a new semester brings us…
…and one last thing: A new year means more posts, more content, more blogs. This is your one-stop shop to keep up to date on everything College Democrats. So bookmark us, or set this blog as your homepage! Do it now!

We’ll see you tonight!

FactCheck.org did an in-depth analysis of the commercials being run in the U.S. Senate race between Pete Ricketts and Ben Nelson.

Fake News, Nebraska Style - Senate candidates from both parties stretch credibility in their latest ads. - FactCheck.org

I encourage everyone to read the article. It’s well-written and researched, and if you read the article, you’ll see most of the worst offenses are made by the Ricketts campaign.

Here is a summary from the website:

In his most recent ad, we find that Republican challenger Pete Ricketts inaccurately uses citations from news reports to draw his own, more incendiary conclusions. The words displayed are not in the articles, are not representative of the articles as a whole, and are more inflammatory than any words in the actual articles.

In an earlier ad, the campaign used images of newspaper clippings to splice its own conclusions among ten-year-old news reports for “creative reasons,” according to a spokesperson.

Democratic incumbent Ben Nelson’s campaign responds with a somewhat more accurate ad, but it is also stuck in the past, using a decade-old media report about long vanquished opponents.

The state’s Democratic Party joins the fray with an ad attacking Ricketts for trying to lower the property value of his home for tax purposes. Ricketts did try to lower his house valuation, but so have many Nebraskans — including Ben Nelson.