It's well understood that when politicians are in campaign mode, they spin just about everything they say. And since Washington, D.C., is pretty much in perpetual campaign mode, with congressional elections every two years, the spin is nearly constant.

The Associated Press released an article last week titled "Fact Check — Stimulus," which looked at the rosy claims made by the Obama administration about the impact of federal stimulus spending, particularly on innovative technologies.

The article takes a look, claim by claim, at the glowing statements made in a 50-page report on the impact of technology-targeted stimulus spending. It turns out that the facts are often at odds with administration claims.

It's natural for the administration to defend its stimulus spending, but the fact-check article brings to mind the story of Diogenes, who wandered ancient Greece "in search of an honest man."

Conducting that same search in Washington, D.C., would be fruitless, given today's partisanship and the 24/7, 365-days-a-year nature of politics in America.

The report, unveiled by Vice President Joe Biden, claims that the U.S. is "doubling U.S. renewable energy generation and renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012." The fact-check response from a renewable energy expert is that the minuscule level of current U.S. capacity makes the Biden statement meaningless or misleading. The expert said, "When you're looking at where the U.S. is starting from, doubling that isn't all that meaningful a statistic."

The report also claims "with $8 billion in funding, the Recovery Act is beginning to make high-speed rail a reality across the country."

Reality check says most projects getting stimulus money would simply upgrade existing tracks, allowing for speeds of 110 mph on a few lines, well short of what other countries have already achieved. The facts are that the United States is already years behind high-speed rail systems in Europe, China and Japan. The stimulus money did not change that.

Each claim in the report makes optimistic assumptions or neglects to include inconvenient truths. That's to be expected because stimulus spending is a hot political issue, not one based on realistic analysis.

Democrats are guilty of spinning the stimulus analysis. But Republicans are just as guilty of spinning things their own way too. The result is that the public is left not knowing who to believe — or believing things they should not believe.

The constant spin from politicians has spread to the public, where too many people will believe only things that confirm their own biases. And in some cases the media, especially on cable television, feed this with some programs slanting heavily to the left or the right.

Endless spin and political gamesmanship is now the norm, making the country ever more divided and harder to govern or move forward on the many serious challenges it now faces.

Americans deserve some honest men and women — and less political spin. But a politician who didn't spin would not survive or thrive in politics today, and that's bad for all of us.