Oooopppssss...make that "org" :-)

It is definitely NOT what Dick Cheney had in mind when he sent listeners to a web site Factchecks.com during the Cheney-Edwards debate.

On arrival, surfers found themselves faced by George Soros who has worked tirelessly to get rid of the Deceptive Gang presently in power:


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/campaign/07fbox.html

New York Times - October 7, 2004

Just the Facts, Yes, but Where Are They? by the New York Times

If Vice President Dick Cheney told viewers once on Tuesday night, he told them at least a dozen times: Senator John Edwards had his facts wrong. Check out the truth, Mr. Cheney said, on www.factcheck.com.

But anyone clicking on that Internet site on Wednesday instead found a message Mr. Cheney had not intended, or expected: "Why we must not re-elect President Bush."

The vice president had wanted to send people to www.factcheck.org., a nonpartisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. There, he said, they would find information refuting Mr. Edwards's contention that there was an improper relationship between the Bush administration and Halliburton, the company with large contracts in Iraq that Mr. Cheney led before he ran for vice president.

But in urging viewers to check out www.factcheck.com, Mr. Cheney had instead sent them to a small Web site that simply could not handle the heavy traffic - 48,000 people in one hour. So the site, which sells educational material, found what it considered a "creative and amusing quick fix." According to a lawyer for the site's owner, John B. Berryhill, the company - Name Administration Inc. of the Cayman Islands - decided to bounce the crowd to another site. But which one? How about one for George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has given $18 million to Democratic advocacy groups to defeat President Bush? Click. In an instant, viewers were redirected to www.georgesoros.com.

Mr. Berryhill said his clients did not want to appear to support Mr. Cheney and did not want to send people to a site that could make money from the Web traffic. Instead, they made Mr. Soros an unwitting participant.

When it came to Mr. Soros and his page, www.georgesoros.com, his staff was simply perplexed. His chief of staff, Michael Vachon, issued a statement on Wednesday: "Neither George Soros nor any organization or company with which he is affiliated owns the FactCheck.com domain name, and we are not responsible for it redirecting visitors to our site. We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events."

Then there was the Annenberg Public Policy Center's site, www.factcheck.org. Its director, Brooks Jackson, and his staff just wanted to get the facts right - as Mr. Cheney had tried to do. So for those viewers lucky enough to hit .org instead of .com, the center posted a statement on its site that read:

"In fact we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."<<