The Voice of Reason

VP Debates

Funny thing w/the VP debates.

During the debate, Cheney made a statement that an independent group sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania that checks the validity of candidate claims, has verified that he has done nothing wrong. He then went on to say that anyone could call in to http://www.factcheck.com.

Factcheck.com was inundated with literally millions of people attempting to view their site. However, factcheck.com was the wrong web site!!! Factcheck.com, owned by an offshore company, forwards web sites requests to sponsored services. These services pay factcheck.com a fee for click through to their sites. Because of the Cheney gaff, factcheck.com was billing these sponsored services a fortune for click throughs. To avoid making their customers angry, factcheck.com started to forward all requests to another web site: http://www.georgesoros.com. George Soros is a multi-billionaire that hates Bush! Imagine people's surprise when they ended up at that site (by the way, I was going to send you the Soros site before this even happened).

The proper site that Cheney should have mentioned was http://www.factcheck.org.

However, if you go to that site, you will find that Cheney is only partially exonerated for his influence to help Halliburton. And, of course, the site includes Cheney's gaff in it's list of inaccuracies that the candidate made. Much of the site seems to call attention to Bush / Cheney misrepresentation of facts! I have no idea why Cheney would have referenced this type of site as they certainly do not present the Bush / Cheney campaign in a positive light. If I have time, when access to that site is down, I'll copy some text that is interesting. Right now, trying to even get near that site only produces timeouts - they do not have the capacity to handle all of this web traffic.

All in all, the news post analysis of the vice president debate was fascinating. I read a bunch of articles. Amazing how vicious Cheney was in some and Edwards was in others. There were even those that called the debate a draw.
http://news.google.com/?hl=en&ncl=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12901-2004Oct6.html

Other news of interest:

The commission that looked into whether Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction presented a thousand page paper to their congressional oversight committee. Their conclusion: there was not any indication that there were weapons of mass destruction.
http://news.google.com/?hl=en&ncl=http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml%3Ftype%3DtopNews%26storyID%3D6433959

Again, with the news, there are many who say 'so what' - that we should have been in this war anyhow. Boy, is that gung-ho, given that was the main reason why our president got us into this war.

For you volcano watchers .. geologists are lowering expectations that Mt. St. Helens will erupt. Everyone is disappointed. It is always fun to watch nature do it's thing when no one would get hurt.

posted by The Voice of Reason @ 8:00 AM