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James, this is why it helps to actually read the articles. They try to cut past the picking and choosing that politicians normally do:

"Yet other ratings don't show Obama as the Senate's top lefty.

He wasn't the top liberal in his two other years in the U.S. Senate according to National Journal. He was 10th-most liberal in 2006 and 16th in 2005.

The McCain campaign has previously cited a 2006 rating by the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action that gave Obama 95 percent, which the campaign noted was the same as Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer.

But there's a little sleight of hand in that one. Although the McCain campaign is correct that Obama earned a 95 percent rating that year for voting the way ADA wanted, there were 10 senators who got more liberal scores than Obama, including Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Richard Durbin of Illinois. (In the latest ADA rating, for 2007, Obama missed five of the 20 votes the group scored, so he received a 75 percent rating. But he voted the way ADA wanted on each of the 15 votes he attended.)

Voteview.com, a site created by political scientists that plots lawmakers on a liberal-conservative scale based on their voting patterns, calculated there were nine senators more liberal than Obama in the current Congress, including Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

If McCain had made a more general statement about Obama's ideology, he could have been more accurate. But McCain's statement that Obama "has the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate," suggests it is a cumulative rating for all of Obama's time in the Senate. But in fact, it is true for only one rating for one year. Measurements for other years and by other groups show Obama is not the No. 1 liberal — in some cases, far from No. 1. So we find McCain's statement to be Barely True"

So yes, One study for One year. Not what McCain said.

Look, the point is that McCain's intent was to state that Obama is extremely liberal. People can say that Michael Moore is the most liberal person in Hollywood, and reasonable people may disagree about the use of the superlative -- maybe you'd come up with a better candidate for the title if you think a while -- but I don't think anybody would contend the point that he's really, really liberal.

Likewise, saying that Obama has the "most liberal" voting record should not prompt to us to try and find somebody who's slightly more liberal; the point is that as Senators go, he leans quite far to the left. If you take the quote too literally, it's not "true", but if you take the commonly-understood intention, it's 100% spot-on.

I don't see any quotes on the site that are interpreted literally like that to the detriment of the Democrat candidates, which is why I question their bi-partisanship.

"Look, the point is that McCain's intent was to state that Obama is extremely liberal. "

But it's not what he said.


"Likewise, saying that Obama has the "most liberal" voting record should not prompt to us to try and find somebody who's slightly more liberal; the point is that as Senators go, he leans quite far to the left."

Do you not understand the meaning of the word "most"? That would mean that nobody else has a more liberal record than he does. That's not true.

"If you take the quote too literally, it's not "true", but if you take the commonly-understood intention, it's 100% spot-on."

So, if you pretend that McCain didn't say what he did say, and make qualifications that were not in the statement, it was true? That's not the way the world normally works.

"I don't see any quotes on the site that are interpreted literally like that to the detriment of the Democrat candidates"

Well, then you didn't look hard enough. Read their statement on Ron Paul as to how they pick what they dissect.

Don't believe the hype Russell. They are actually quite fair, but the true believers (tm) on either side of the fence don't like it when their saviors get called out on what they said.