Intellectual Property Law

Wonkette's Ken Layne in 2001 famously declared that bloggers "can fact-check your ass."

One wonders whether he ever realized just how frenetic that real-time fact-checking would get.

Bloggers and micro-bloggers on Twitter spent the evening sifting through the fibs and exaggerations that the presidential candidates put forth during their televised town hall meeting with voters Tuesday evening in Nashville, Tennessee.

Both the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Factcheck.org and National Public Radio's Vox Politics blog provided updates at a furious rate Tuesday night. NPR solicited the help of the public by asking them to do a little bit of real-time research and tweet their findings using #factcheck. (They also tried doing a Twitter dial-test by getting the public to tweet #dialtest and assigning a number between 1 to 10 to each candidate on a particular debate point. The results were then graphed and mapped on Plodt. By that account, Obama won and McCain lost in the minds of Twitterers.)

Both the candidates were caught on items that ranged from slight misquotes to outright mischaracterizations of the other's position.

NPR's librarian Barbara Van Woerkom noted Tuesday evening, for example, thay John McCain misquoted Teddy Roosevelt during the town hall when he said: "You know, my hero is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt used to say walk softly -- talk softly, but carry a big stick. Sen. Obama likes to talk loudly. In fact he said he wants to announce that he's going to attack Pakistan. Remarkable."

Van Woerkom notes that Roosevelt actually said: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

Even the second part of that quote was misleading, FactCheck.org found.

The FactCheck Wire's Lori Robertson noted that the comment to which McCain was referring was one that Barack Obama made August 1. 2007. Obama had said that "It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Robertson then goes on to note that Obama himself in 2005 wasn't exactly forthright when he made the remark. She noted that the CIA had been reported to take out one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan with an remote-controlled air-strike.   

Both Factcheck.org and NPR have dozens and dozens of points that clarify and put in context what both the candidates said on everything from their healthcare plans, to who's the blame for the financial crisis to each others' accusations about how they would change the tax code.

They're all worth a read since many of the candidates' statements aren't particularly candid. In fact a lot of them are, shockingly, outright lies, a misstatement of the facts, or even a mischaracterizations of their own policies.

Taken together, the blog posts as a whole really do make for interesting reading and for good cocktail party conversation fodder in their own weird, idiosyncratic way.

If you took the time to read through the two fact-checking sites, take our poll: Who told the biggest whoppers, in your opinion? Tell us why you think so in the comments section.