factcheck the urls
From the Vice-Presidenial debate last night (transcript):
"VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Well, the reason they keep mentioning Halliburton is because they're trying to throw up a smoke screen. They know the charges are false. They know if you go, for example, to factcheck.com, an independent website sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details, with respect to Halliburton."
There is a cool site factcheck.org which does have a factcheck about the debate.
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Comments (20)
Your blog cites "factcheck.com" which in reality is www.georgesoros.com, not a non-partisan site. I think you may have intended factcheck.org. Freudian slip or....?
He's just quoting the VP! Cheney mentioned the wrong URL which is one that George Soros snapped up quickly to redirect to his own URL. Quite funny when you think about it ;-)
Details on the georgesoros thing:
http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/001086.php
I have a feeling the redirect might have been very hurriedly arranged last night.
Either way the .org appears slashdotted right now, so you're only choice is the try .com and visit Soros' page
I think the site does a good job of presenting the true data. They correct both parties for rights, wrongs and partial rights. From reading some of the other fact check stuff, I have to wonder. Why is a vote to not cut taxes considered one of raising taxes? Is this an addition by non-subtraction? I don't know where these people went to school but if you want to subtract and I don't, doesn't mean my pile increases.
See, in RepublicanThink, if you vote against a tax cut it means you voted to have the tax rates be at a higher level. Another approach, you voted to raise taxes from the level they would have been at if the cut passed. Either way fits their prescription. It's just like saying if you were against the Iraq invasion then you were for Saddam Hussein. Which they also say. There are no shades of gray in their world; you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists. We're right, and you're wrong. God's on our side, and not on your side. Anything that increases your pile reduces our pile. And so on.
The redirect was indeed set up sometime after Cheney mentioned the URL. I checked the factcheck.com immediately after he said it. Once I was able to get through, it had one of those generic pages giving you a dmoz-like top-level subject hierarchy -- the kind people often put up when holding a domain name.
George Soros did not set up the redirect. This was done by the Cayman Islands based advertising group that owns factcheck.com. They were trying to relieve stress on their servers and express a political viewpoint.
Yes, this story [see also here] is funny: How can one rely on the web and pretend to say the truth?
I am more worried about that kind of thing: "Bush's aides acknowledged that Mehlman's note on Tuesday was almost identical to one written by the Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, last Thursday" [CNET News].
What do you think of this practice?
So who owns Fatcheck.com? The Republicans or the Democrats?
Neither of them own the page. Its owned by and independant URL holding company with partisan anti-Bush leanings. One of the links says that the reason for picking Soro's site specifically (as opposed to any of the great number of other anti-Bush sites) is that they knew it could handle a big rush of hits without going down
Lost in all the hoopla about Cheney's error on the URL are two facts. First, he never responded to questions about Halliburton, either then or throughout the debate. Second, the site he meant to refer people to (factcheck.org) said Cheney was wrong and Edwards was right.
For anyone who's interested, I've been scraping an RSS 2.0 feed of FactCheck.org for a while.
Mojo, the site did say that Edwards hadn't explicitly lied, but it does lay out some details Edwards overlooked.
From the document covering the debate (I've modified some paragraphing):
No, this document wasn't up when the debate took place. Another document, covering deferred compensation that Kerry and Michael Moore have picked up on, was. However, this document (the one referring to the debate) points out:
The tendency (particularly by Cheney) to answer an unasked question while ignoring the asked one is always hilarious.
The most interesting part of the whole performance was Cheney speaking of "the war" as if it were over which doesn't seem to be the case. He said some guy was in Baghdad before the war and is still there after the war.
That's taking "mission accomplished" to some rather great lengths.
Love.
Aren't they ALL throwing up smoke screens? Anyways, good for the Univ. of Penn.
AJ
And something else FactCheck.org said about Cheney:
"In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."
Poor Bush team. Even they experts they point to are noticing that the accusations are "mostly right."
You must have missed my previous post, Nate. It covers where Edwards was mostly right about his three accusations. The parts he was wrong were, in my opinion, the most important parts.
To comment on Rob's commnet concerning "RepublicanThink".
Rob, it seems you think there is a Yes or No or Maybe voting possibility. Sounds alot like John Kerry (waffler PhD) who has quite a bit of trouble with morality questions like partial-birth abortion. Today's Democratic Party think's highly of socalism and could care less about morality. The Dem's think morality can be found in a vending machine - that you can shake too if you ran out of coins. Don't want to hurt someone's esteem!
As Europe has gone into the sewer, the Democrats are eager to follow with shallow or hollow justifications.
A good book name for the lowering of the U.S. culture which began in the 1960's and accelerated in the 1990's would be "The Sewer Enlightenment", or "How the Death of Right and Wrong began".
If you say you a regular voter, then you must decide to vote either Yes or No. Its really not that hard. Although if you keep flipping a coin, maybe it will land on its side....