The debate last night wasn't as exciting as the one last week. Cheney and Edwards are both very good speakers, though one of them is a tad deficient on the charm and health side of the ledger (guess which one I'm talking about) and Edwards blinked way too much.
If you couldn't hear anything they were saying, you'd think that Edwards was very nervous and Cheney was very angry, perhaps some kind of fire-breathing preacher of an apocalyptic Church of the Brimstone-Laden Intestines.
My favorite part was when Cheney got all defensive about Halliburton and told his audience to check out Factcheck.com, which would clear things up nicely about his record. The problems with that were that 1) I knew what page he was talking about and it only addresses the issue of his deferred compensation from Halliburton, not their investments in Iran or the investigations for bribery and 2) that page is not at Factcheck.com, it's at Factcheck.ORG.
Interestingly enough, until yesterday, Factcheck.com was nothing but a link farm — set up to entrap careless typers and drum up hits for advertisers. But somebody managed to redirect it to George Soros' web page! How'd they do that so fast? (Update: it seems that the domain owners did the redirect themselves, and the Soros team had nothing to do with it.)
Perhaps Cheney misspoke on purpose (as he did on so many other things), because the REAL FactCheck is pretty harsh on him today.
Another update:
The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits -- about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.
"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.
They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.
Web site operators typically pay fees to the companies that host their sites. The more hits a site receives, the more its operator pays.
Soros was not advised of the switch and did not know it had taken place until Wednesday, said a spokesman, Jeremy Ben-Ami.
"We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events but certainly encourage voters to visit both of these valuable sites," Michael Vachon, a senior aide to Soros, said in a statement.
An unprecedented number of visitors to FactCheck.org caused the site to crash several times Wednesday, said Brooks Jackson, the site's director.
Considering that the site is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, presumably for tax reasons, I'm pleasantly surprised at their politics.
