• by October 7, 2004

Something interesting happened during Tuesday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates. The fluke had the unintended consequence of sending people to a Web site run by billionaire financier George Soros who's known for his dislike of the Bush administration.

Here's what happened: Vice President Cheney, attempting to answer questions regarding his interests in Halliburton Corp., inadvertently directed television viewers to FactCheck.com, instead of FactCheck.org, a non-partisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, for fact-checking with regard to his ties to the company. The Bush administration's ties to Halliburton, and in particular, Cheney's ties, have come under increasing scrutiny in recent months; Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

In citing FactCheck.com, Cheney's gaffe had the unintended consequence of sending people to an advertising site based in the Cayman Islands. Oops.

In response to what must have been a deluge of traffic to its site, FactCheck.com redirected traffic to the Soros site. Nearly 100 viewers per second were redirected there after the debate, John Berryhill, an attorney for FactCheck.com said, according to an AP report.

Ironically, the Soros site was chosen because FactCheck.com decided Soros could afford to field the traffic surge, and site administrators decided not to direct surfers to fundraising sites, Berryhill told the AP.

The flood of visitors to FactCheck.org caused the site to crash several times yesterday, and through this morning, The Minute was unable to access various sections of the site.

For its part, GeorgeSoros.com, posted a notice saying that it doesn't own FactCheck.com and wasn't responsible for re-directing readers from that site to the Soros message.

Oh boy!

It all goes to show what dropping the names of a few Web sites can do. Cheney meant well. But where are millions of undecided voters going on the Web for answers to their questions? Does anyone out there have the names of some good non-partisan sites that seek to tell the truth? Let us know.

In the meantime, I wish all four of the candidates would address the issues more directly instead of speaking in glib generalizations designed for sound-bite replay. Let's tone down the histrionics and get some real answers on how the candidates are planning to address the issues at hand.