Links and Minifeatures 2008 10 06 Monday

Carnival of Real Estate

Joe Biden:10 factually incorrect claims in the debate

Ace says 14. Here's his list

I stopped counting after six egregious, known and verified.

Palin may have shaded the truth and had some instances of tunnel vision, but nothing where the numbers and facts were flat out incorrect. For instance: Pre-surge troop strength we were at 138,000 troops in Iraq. The surge boosted that to about 160,000. We're now at 142,000 and falling. The claim is closer to true than not. On a grayscale from 0 (black) to 10 (white) give it an 8 for simple mathematical proportionality. But on the same scale, Biden's factual errors were dead wrong zeroes. I do not know if he was intentionally misstating ("lying") or simply mistaken. Neither one is precisely laudable, and they both have their plusses and minuses relative to each other, but neither is as good as having the facts correct. For that matter, neither one is good, period.

Palin solidly outpointed Biden. She told the truth, or close enough to be within the bounds of legitimate differences of opinon. Biden did not. She didn't school Biden like John McCain did to Barack Obama, but if this was a boxing match, there's no doubt which candidate would win the decision from honest judges.

Michael Totten weighs in

Sarah Palin was closer than Joe Biden to the Vice-President's constitutional role.

(The president has the ability to delegate executive powers to other people. I don't read anywhere in the Constitution a prohibition on him delegating such power to the Vice-President, especially as the Vice-President is the only other official with a claim to national direct election. It's just that with a party (the Democrats) who have first filibustered opponents and then denied them point blank when they got voting control of the Senate for no other reason than George Bush wanted them, denoting the Vice-President as being the president's delegate removes the ability to obstruct the confirmation process.)

Was Obama telling the truth about al Qaeda? Not when you look at actual evidence.

The pressure is on al Qaeda every which way it turns and it is losing, not winning.

Using the slack monitoring of smaller contributions to break campaign finance rules: Obama's 'Good Will' Hunting

Consider the cases of Obama donors "Doodad Pro" of Nunda, N.Y., who gave $17,130, and "Good Will" of Austin, Texas, who gave more than $11,000--both in excess of the $2,300-per-person federal limit. In two recent letters to the Obama campaign, Federal Election Commission auditors flagged those (and other) donors and informed the campaign that the sums had to be returned.

Tackling the fibs on McCain's proposed health-care plan

The figure Obama provided, $12,680, comes from a study published last month in the journal Health Affairs. That study found that "average annual premiums in 2008 are $4,704 for single coverage and $12,680 for family coverage." But that same study reported the average cost people pay for employer-provided health care coverage is $721 for singles and $3,354 for family coverage. The rest is covered by the employer.

Those figures back up a conclusion from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center: that McCain's health plan, offering a tax credit of $2,500 per individual and $5,000 per family, would be a net tax cut initially for many. As the CNN Truth Squad has previously reported, the center calls McCain's health care plan a tax cut for virtually all Americans through 2013 and for the middle-class through 2018, which is as far as the center has projected. But the center says long-term, some of those benefits might erode if the tax credit did not keep up with costs of health care.

We have got to get away from the idea that employers are responsible for our health care, and linking health care inextricably to employers. It has all sorts of implications that vary from undesirable to outright bad. The only "advantage" is that many people who are employees start thinking of health care as essentially free, which it is not.

Three and a half minutes. Worth every second, no matter who you support.

Thomas Sowell: Do Facts Matter?