Prying open Snopes.com

Courtesy of my friend Doug, Rico says it seems it's a case of "please ignore the man behind the curtain" again:

For the past few years Snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it, as the ' final word' on any comment, claim, and email.
For several years people tried to find out who exactly was behind Snopes.com. Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it. Kinda makes you wonder what they were hiding. Well, finally we know. It is run by a husband and wife team . That's right, no big office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby.
David and Barbara Mikkelson started the website about thirteen years ago in the San Fernando Valley of California. They have no formal background or experience in investigative research. After a few years it gained popularity, with everyone believing it to be unbiased and neutral, but over the past couple of years people started asking questions: who was behind it and did they have a selfish motivation? The reason for the questions (or skepticism) is a result of Snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issue when, in fact, they have been proven wrong. Also, there were criticisms that the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.
I can personally vouch for that complaint. A few months ago, my State Farm agent, Bud Gregg in Mandeville, posted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the internet. Supposedly the Mikkelsons' claimed to have researched the issue before posting their findings. In their statement, they claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact nothing of the sort took place.
I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me), thinking he would want to get to the bottom of this, and gave him Bud Gregg's contact phone numbers. Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big execs at State Farm in Illinois who would have been willing to speak with him about it. He never called Bud. In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg that no one from Snopes.com ever contacted anyone with State Farm. Yet Snopes.com issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they had done all their homework and got to the bottom of things; not!
It has been learned the Mikkelsons are very Democrat and extremely liberal. As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative. There has been much criticism lately over the internet with people pointing out the Mikkelsons' liberalism revealing itself in their website findings.
I say this to everyone who goes to Snopes.com to get what they think to be the bottom line: proceed with caution. Take what it says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself. Plus, you can always Google a subject and do the research yourself. It now seems apparent that's all the Mikkelsons do. I can personally vouch, from my own experience, for their not fully looking into things.

Rico says damn, here he'd hoped it was the source...