Debates

Slightly echoing my earlier comments on Fahrenheit911, it's a surreal world when the Democratic VP candidate is the one compellingly arguing for tax cuts,
defecit reduction and fiscal responsibility. Andrew Sullivan has an interesting article from several months
ago which expresses some similar sentiments. Now, we have a Republican administration and legislature leading the largest expansion of the federal government in decades. It's rather
odd.

Given that the debates aren't really debates (eg, the debaters are actually prohibited from directing questions at one another), I've been pleased and impressed at the
level of discourse. There's been some real substance there, and I think it managed to highlight some of the key issues that have concerned me. One of Kerry's quotes
that I thought well summarized the issue: "It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong. Certainty sometimes can get you in trouble." A
friend who grew up in Germany wondered aloud why Bush's attributes of being "resolute", "steadfast", and "determined" are considered a good thing. He observed Germany had leadership
with all of those qualities in the 1940s. Being resolute and certain isn't inherently good.

I'd support Kerry over Bush on social policy grounds anyway, but I find the unflinching confidence of an administration who has been in power through torture,
secret tribunals, an unprovoked war, institution of secret laws,
censorship
and increased limits on civil liberties to be extremely distressing.
Their certainty has gotten us into big
trouble in Iraq, and I'm afraid of where more might lead. 9/11 changed
a lot of things, but it shouldn't be a carte blanche for the disaster we've been lead through since then.

FackCheck, FactCheck, Oops

To tie together two previous entries: I wrote about
factcheck.org a while ago, long before
Dick Cheney's near mention of it in the debates made it
famous. I also recently wrote about knowing my audience. On FactCheck, however, while I got the URL right, I mistyped the text of
the link as "FackCheck.org". No big deal, the link leads to the right
place, and I just feel a little silly for such an odd spelling error.

But, it turns out other people have heard about factcheck.org, but
misheard as "fackcheck". Fackcheck.org doesn't exist, so what
do they do? Search Google for href=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=fackcheck&btnG=Google+Search>fackcheck.
Link #3, my site. So, this week I've gotten a moderate number of
visitors who came to my site by searching for "fackcheck". Welcome,
whether you're here looking for fackcheck.org, fackcheck.com,
fact-check, fack-check, fack check or whatever.

The real site is factcheck.org
and I highly recommend it. Cheney mentioned factcheck.com, which
someone (not Soros) set up to point to George Soros' web site. The
funny twist beyond the URL error is of course that Cheney was claiming
that factcheck.org defended his record at Halliburton which it does
not do. While Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, they did a great deal of
business (through subsidiaries) with enemies of the United States.
What factcheck.org does say is that the Democratic accusations of
improprieties regarding granting Halliburton military contracts are
overblown. Inappropriate granting of contracts to Halliburton:
overblown. Doing business with enemies of the USA: well, yes.
Spelling errors: in the age of google, they sometimes help people find
what they're looking for.