Veep debate
Oct. 6th, 2004 12:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramTwo observations about tonight’s vice-presidential debate:
Factcheck
After Edwards rattled off a list of Halliburton’s various offenses and the special privileges it’s been granted by the administration, Cheney referred viewers to a website at “Factcheck.com” which he said would rebut the claims. He was wrong. Factcheck.com is some sort of educational site, nothing about Halliburton I could see when I looked at it during the debate. Though right now that URL redirects to GeorgeSoros.com, with a big anti-Bush message. I wonder who pulled that off. Legitimate domain purchase or politically-motivated DNS hack? I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.
Hm, now that I think of it, the Factcheck.com site I saw earlier had a bit of the look of a generic placeholder site. A quick whois search tells me the site is (or was) registered to “Name Administration Inc” in the Cayman Islands. The sort of place that holds onto expired domains hoping someone will fork over big bucks for them. Soros (or someone who likes him) must have swooped in and grabbed it up when he heard Cheney give the wrong address.
Anyway, Factcheck.org is the site Cheney meant to point people at, and as of right now, the top article is “Bush Mischaracterizes Kerry's Health Plan”, and four of the six front-page article links reflect badly on the Bush/Cheney campaign. The only front-page article mentioning Halliburton just claims Cheney isn’t getting money from them, and doesn’t refute Edwards’s long list of accusations.
The fake lawsuit crisis
I was annoyed at Edwards’s lackluster response to Cheney’s claim that medical malpractice lawsuits are driving up malpractice insurance costs and causing problems for doctors. Edwards’s reply grants the claim, when actually the claim is insurance industry propaganda. Insurance companies lost stock value as the market cooled off over the past few years, and they’ve been raising rates to pump up their profits; rates also increase as part of the cycle of how insurance companies grow and compete. States that have passed liability caps have seen malpractice insurance rates grow dramatically anyway.
This is a pretty major political issue, and 90% of what you’ll hear about it from politicians is bullshit. When the Florida state senate held hearings on the issue (Florida has the highest malpractice insurance rates in the US, and the number of doctors there is increasing anyway), they heard a whole lot from lobbyists about how the raising rates were due to an “explosion in frivolous lawsuits”, but when they took the unusual step of swearing in the witnesses, so that they were under oath and could face perjury charges for lying, suddenly the testimony changed: “I don't feel I have the information to say whether or not there are frivolous lawsuits....”
Factcheck
After Edwards rattled off a list of Halliburton’s various offenses and the special privileges it’s been granted by the administration, Cheney referred viewers to a website at “Factcheck.com” which he said would rebut the claims. He was wrong. Factcheck.com is some sort of educational site, nothing about Halliburton I could see when I looked at it during the debate. Though right now that URL redirects to GeorgeSoros.com, with a big anti-Bush message. I wonder who pulled that off. Legitimate domain purchase or politically-motivated DNS hack? I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.
Hm, now that I think of it, the Factcheck.com site I saw earlier had a bit of the look of a generic placeholder site. A quick whois search tells me the site is (or was) registered to “Name Administration Inc” in the Cayman Islands. The sort of place that holds onto expired domains hoping someone will fork over big bucks for them. Soros (or someone who likes him) must have swooped in and grabbed it up when he heard Cheney give the wrong address.
Anyway, Factcheck.org is the site Cheney meant to point people at, and as of right now, the top article is “Bush Mischaracterizes Kerry's Health Plan”, and four of the six front-page article links reflect badly on the Bush/Cheney campaign. The only front-page article mentioning Halliburton just claims Cheney isn’t getting money from them, and doesn’t refute Edwards’s long list of accusations.
The fake lawsuit crisis
I was annoyed at Edwards’s lackluster response to Cheney’s claim that medical malpractice lawsuits are driving up malpractice insurance costs and causing problems for doctors. Edwards’s reply grants the claim, when actually the claim is insurance industry propaganda. Insurance companies lost stock value as the market cooled off over the past few years, and they’ve been raising rates to pump up their profits; rates also increase as part of the cycle of how insurance companies grow and compete. States that have passed liability caps have seen malpractice insurance rates grow dramatically anyway.
This is a pretty major political issue, and 90% of what you’ll hear about it from politicians is bullshit. When the Florida state senate held hearings on the issue (Florida has the highest malpractice insurance rates in the US, and the number of doctors there is increasing anyway), they heard a whole lot from lobbyists about how the raising rates were due to an “explosion in frivolous lawsuits”, but when they took the unusual step of swearing in the witnesses, so that they were under oath and could face perjury charges for lying, suddenly the testimony changed: “I don't feel I have the information to say whether or not there are frivolous lawsuits....”