October 7, 2004
I'm sure everyone knows this by now, but what the heck: During the vice-presidential debate Dick Cheney urged viewers to go to www.factcheck.com, thinking he was talking about www.factcheck.org, a non-partisan group at the University of Pennsylvania that takes the time to research all the claims made in the debates and campaign ads.
Going by what's on the front page right now, it seems they're finding more BS in Bush/Cheney's releases than they are Kerry/Edwards's, so it probably wasn't a great idea to send people there in the first place.
Anyway, most organizations tend to register the three main US domain types -- .com, .net and .org -- all at once, so it's usually not a big deal if you flub the top-level domain. Except, FactCheck isn't one of those organizations. Factcheck.com is run by (probably) a cybersquatter. And when his useless site started getting hammered with hits immediately after Cheney's remark, he did what any self-respecting leech would do -- route the site to a place that pays for more bandwidth.
Enter George Soros's site. Soros is a billionaire, and he doesn't like Bush very much. So I'm sure a lot of people were surprised when they went were Cheney told them to, and found a page that basically says "we've got to get rid of these guys." To his credit, Soros put up an explanation of what was going on as soon as he found out. Which would make him the most honest man involved in the debate.
