In last night's debate, Dick Cheney did not directly rebut John Edwards' allegations about Halliburton. Instead, he directed people to go read the non-partisan website, www.factcheck.com where, he said, they'd investigated the charge and debunked it. Cheney was wrong on a number of accounts…

• He got the URL wrong. The site he had in mind was actually www.factcheck.org, a page maintained by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
• The actual www.factcheck.com is a name owned by a "placeholder" company, meaning that they haven't put a site at that address. When they started to be overloaded with hits at that address, its proprietors decided to forward everyone to someone else's site. They picked www.georgesoros.com, an anti-Bush site maintained by the Liberal billionaire.
• So if you went to the site Cheney gave out, you found yourself on a page where the headline was, "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values." This is probably not the message Cheney wanted all of America to study.
• And then if you somehow found your way to www.factcheck.org, you found that their Hallburton article debunked different accusations against Cheney and that company. The article there in no way refuted the charges that Edwards had made.
• Today, that website — which I guess now has Cheney's endorsement as a place to go for facts — has this page up that corrects a lot of things said by both Cheney and Edwards. It starts by saying, "Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co." So his only defense against Edwards' charges has collapsed on him.

A number of other things that were said by both men are not standing up to the test of time, even 18 hours later. I really like the fact-checking of public officials' statements, even when it says my candidate got something wrong. I don't think these lapses were all lies. Some of them were just innocent errors about unimportant matters.

On the other hand, I think some of what Cheney said, like the line about not linking Iraq to 9/11, were lies about important matters. And now that I think of it, the bottom line on who "lost" (still dislike that term) may have to do with who gave the opposition some great footage to use in a campaign commercial. Does anyone think the Democrats or some 527 aren't at this very moment editing an ad spot with two clearly-contradictory Cheney sound bites?

I've probably mentioned this before but among my many complaints about political discourse these days is the devaluation of the word, "lie." A lie is now anything your opponent ever said which can possibly be interpreted as inaccurate.

To be completely non-partisan about it, here are two examples. In the 2000 Presidential Debate, Al Gore mentioned going to inspect fire damage in Parker County in Texas with FEMA head James Lee Witt. It turned out that while Gore had accompanied Witt to other disaster sites in Texas, the Parker County trip had been with someone else. I thought that was an innocent mistake but Republicans sold it hard as some sort of deliberate falsehood. Over on the National Review site, it's still cited on a page called "Gore Lies."

Last night, Dick Cheney said that the first time he'd ever met John Edwards was when they walked out on stage and shook hands. Democrats quickly produced photos and records that showed the two men had been together on at least two occasions, and quoted Tim Russert as saying he saw them shake hands backstage before the debate. This is being sold in many venues as a lie.

I don't think these things are lies. And even if they are, I don't think they reflect that badly on their speakers. I'd settle for any elected official if the worst lie his opponents could pin on him was something so trivial. The Democrats oughta be hammering Cheney on those aluminum tubes that were allegedly for nuclear weapons but actually weren't, or for statements about Weapons of Mass Destruction or even Halliburton. And we shouldn't be letting anyone get away with defining "lie" so loosely that it loses its meaning.

Gotta admit: I was never a huge fan of Rodney Dangerfield. Well, I kinda liked that you had a guy who flopped as a comedian and didn't let that stop him. He got out of show business for a while, then gave it another go and clicked. (That was why he got stuck with the joke name. When he went back to performing, he didn't want friends from his "other" job to know, so Jacob "Jack Roy" Cohen became Rodney Dangerfield, just for a while. Then the second career took off before he got a chance to change it to something else.) He worked hard and managed to develop a truly funny comic persona…though one that seemed to me to be paper-thin and sometimes very nasty. He was a performer who often made me nervous, and not in a good way.

He was always so "programmed." When Carson had him on, he didn't dare ask a real question. He just let Rodney sit there and do the jokes he'd picked in the order he'd planned. I remember one Tonight Show appearance in the Leno era when a guest on the couch interrupted Rodney with a comment, and you've never seen a professional comedian get so lost in the middle of his act. Dangerfield suddenly had no idea where he was, what he'd just said, what he was going to say next.

Audiences generally loved him, though the word along the comedy circuit was that he often disappointed them with high ticket prices, short sets and too-familiar material. People who worked with him were wildly divided, and I suspect that now that he's gone, there will be a suitable period of deference and then we'll start hearing anecdotes to the contrary. First, though, we have to get through an awful lot of obits that will say, "He finally got some respect."

Well, it's over. I don't know how the public will react to it. I don't think any knockout punches were landed. My suspicion in these things is always that the folks who were already going to vote for the Democrat will say the Democrat kicked butt and the folks who were already going to vote for the Republican will say the Republican took no prisoners…and those who have no great emotional commitment will say, "We don't really want either of these guys." But then, I was surprised that so many Bush supporters were willing to concede that he did poorly last week.

I thought Edwards did make a few strong points on issues like Health Care (and especially the Administration siding with drug companies over people) that are probably not going to budge a lot of voters. I also thought Cheney did a good job of throwing a lot of semi-personal accusations at Edwards — too many for him to address.

I guess I was disappointed in both men. It was a pretty bland debate, especially after they hit the speed bump of Domestic Affairs. Maybe it is true that no one votes for Vice-President and that we all just wasted 90 minutes of our lives.

They're discussing malpractice insurance and frivolous lawsuits. This is an important topic but no one's going to shift their vote over it.

I'm getting really sick of Edwards saying, "We have a plan…" and Cheney snarling and looking down.

Just heard.

Cheney has said a couple of times that he doesn't have enough time to respond to things Edwards is saying. Wonder what would happen if Edwards turned to him and said, "Well then, how about if we schedule another debate next week with no silly time limits?"

The moderator's doing a good, by-the-books job. But what I'd love to see are a couple of questions that the debaters' prep crews couldn't have anticipated.

We're halfway through and my sense is that nothing that's been said has changed anyone's mind about anything.

About fifteen minutes ago, I thought I saw Edwards give Cheney one of those looks that Chevy Chase used to deliver behind the back of someone who was delivering a serious editorial on Weekend Update.

Oops. There's another one.

Well, so much for the rule where they're not supposed to address each other directly.

I wish Edwards sounded a little less like Kerry's agent.

Too many planned talking points. Both of them.

Being limited to 90-120 seconds per answer may have helped Kerry. It may even have helped Bush. But at the moment, Cheney and Edwards are tackling too many areas in each question and the topics cry out for longer discussion.

I just thought of something I'd say tonight if I were John Edwards. At some point, Dick Cheney is bound to make some sort of outrageous, over-the-top attack on Edwards or his running mate or both. If I were Edwards, I'd smile and begin my reply with…

Well, Mr. Vice-President, that brings to mind a suggestion that you recently gave Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor…

…and then, I'd throw in a "however" and give a proper, dignified response.

For those of you in or around Orange County: A gaggle of top cartoonists — including Sergio Aragonés, Scott Shaw! and Stan Sakai will be appearing this Saturday at the Orange County High School of the Arts. Details here.

In a Broadway musical, the musicians are usually playing from a pit in front of and under the stage. Occasionally, they're on stage. But lately, they're sometimes elsewhere.

You have lots of choices on the Internet today…websites that will tell you Kerry is slightly ahead, even or slightly behind. Obviously, what it means is that a lot can still happen with a month to go and more debates ahead. For some reason, I'm looking especially forward to the Vice-Presidential one tomorrow night. Cheney is so unpopular, even with folks who intend to vote for the Republican ticket, that Edwards may have to decide whether to go in for the kill, or just sit there and look statesmanlike by comparison. One assumes he will not make the error Joe Lieberman made of letting Cheney get away with claiming he has never made money off the government.

More interesting to me is this evaluation of the polls that suggests Democrats have a real chance of taking control of the Senate. I'm not sure, given the choice, I wouldn't rather have President Bush and a Democratic Senate than President Kerry and a Republican Senate.

I am also amused by the fact that Alan Keyes, who was selected from another state to run against Barack Obama, is running around fifty (50!) percentage points down. This is one of those situations where, like John Ashcroft and his track record of convicting domestic terrorist suspects, I think, "Hey, I could have done that!" At one point, the premise was that Keyes probably wouldn't beat Obama but they thought he'd keep the guy busy so he couldn't campaign for other Democrats, and maybe he'd get bloodied in ways that would hamper his future prospects. But Obama's sailing to the easiest win in the whole Senate race, so you have to wonder: Maybe the real motive of the Republican leadership was to rid their party of Alan Keyes.

I don't think Bush is going to get far with his claim that Kerry's use of the term "global test" means that a President Kerry would give foreign nations a veto power over U.S. actions. William Saletan has a pretty good column up today explaining how Bush is misinterpreting the term. Clearly, Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations, filled with solid evidence that has proven faulty, failed some sort of test that we ought to regret.

The question I would most like to see in Friday's debate — of those that might actually be asked: "Mr. President…if, as you say, we're 'making progress' in the war on terror, why do we keep seeing all these orange alerts that say, 'High risk of terrorist attacks'?"

P.S. I just Googled to get the exact wording of an orange alert and I found that if you search for "terror alerts," the highest-ranked page is this one that translates the alerts into Sesame Street characters. Make of that what you will.