Are you kidding? You think “false equivalency” is an Obama talking point? I’d say you need to get out and breathe some fresh air. Also, characterizing it as the “I don’t beat my wife as much as he beats his wife,” defense is misguided. Objecting to “false equivalency” in the media (or any other reporting of facts) isn’t a defense of one’s own actions, it’s a critique of the media. It’s probably one of the most insidious ways that the so-called “unbiased” mainstream media promulgates rank falsehood, seeming to value ‘fairness’ or ‘balance’ over truth.

The JFK-Nixon debate where Nixon looked pale and sickly is usually given as the example of debates mattering a lot.

I don’t think FactCheck.org has been credited with changing an election, but many people on the left (Lessig?) credit some ads for Kerry’s loss.

FactCheck.org may or may not play a larger role in keeping candidates less dishonest, and FactCheck’s reports are often quoted in papers and even by VPs.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sadly_mostly_true.html

“We won’t attempt to assess which side is more deceitful, a task that would require subjective judgments about the degree of untruthfulness and the relative importance of each misleading statement. But, sadly, each side is correct to say the other has used false attacks.”

Others, including Crazy, have compared sins, but it’s usually seeing the splinter in the other guy’s eye while being blind to the log in your own eye.

It’s easy to catch Obama continuously giving false information about McCain’s socials security program (you seniors in FL would have lost all your money). It’s much more difficult to present complex issues such, as is social security privatization benifical; a position I agree with Obama and the democrats http://www.socialsecuritybullshit.com

It’s a much more difficult journalist problem of how to report on complex issues. Get a quote from both sides?

The failure comes when criticism and reporting degenerates to “Some say the sun sets in the east, some say it sets in the west — the truth must be somewhere in between.” That is a corruption and distortion of truth, and not virtuous sin.

1. That the position of the VP was executive rather than legislative, as demonstrated by Article I. Article I is about the legislative branch and describes (among other things) the VP’s role therein. One can argue that the VP has become primarily executive, but that isn’t how the office is set up in the Constitution, which is what Biden was citing.

2. That the only legislative role of the VP was to cast a tiebreaking vote. The VP is stated in Article I to be president of the Senate. As I understand it, that means both that he presides, if present, and that he gets to make decisions on the rules which require a supermajority to overrule. I gather the latter was something of an issue back when the Republicans were discussing the “nuclear option” to dealing with judicial filibusters.