At Wednesday's Republican presidential debate in California, John McCain asserted that Iraq was not the major factor in the GOP's 2006 election losses:

Spending got out of control. Republicans lost the 2006 election not over the war in Iraq, over spending. Our base became disenchanted.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveyed voters in the 2006 election.

GOP voters were found to be unhappy about spending:

At Thursday's Republican debate in Florida, Rudy Giuliani said Bill Clinton had slashed the military by 30 percent as part of a post-Cold War "peace dividend:

A Los Angeles judge last week ordered Actress Lindsay Lohan to spend time at the county morgue and a hospital emergency room as part of her sentence on a misdemeanor drunken driving charge. Lohan last year was sentenced to one day and served 84 minutes as part of a plea deal. But to the casual observer, spending less than two hours in jail followed by two four-hour days at the morgue seem like light punishment for Lohan's crime.

As with Paris Hilton before her, there's a sense that Lohan is getting a better deal than the average citizen. But consider:

During Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, John Edwards suggested that immigrants should be required to learn and speak English as a requirement of citizenship:

EDWARDS: Second, I think if you want to become an American citizen and earn American citizenship, you should learn to speak English.

During Tuesday's Democratic debate, Sen. Hillary Clinton decried the 2005 energy bill passed by Congress:

CLINTON: Well, Tim, I think it’s well accepted that the 2005 energy bill was the Dick Cheney lobbyist energy bill. It was written by lobbyists. It was championed by Dick Cheney. It wasn’t just the green light that it gave to more nuclear power. It had enormous giveaways to the oil and gas industries.

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Hillary Clinton became the subject of debate this week when she appeared to choke up at a town meeting in New Hampshire. Many observers compared her to Edmund Muskie, whose 1972 presidential campaign was reputedly undone by a display of tears on the campaign trail. Are tears really that fatal to a candidate's chances?

David Broder of the Washington Post wrote the initial story to depict a weeping Muskie.

At Saturday night's presidential debate, Sen. Hillary Clinton touted her experience. "I've been making positive changes in people's lives for 35 years," Clinton said.

But Clinton has been an elected official for seven years, and has been in the national spotlight since 1992. How does she arrive at that figure?

In October, The Hill investigated:

At a caucus, party activists go to a meeting where they start the process of nominating presidential candidates by expressing an initial preference for a candidate. Any registered Democrat or Republican can be a party activist and attend a caucus. In Iowa, caucus-goers elect delegates to county conventions, who, in turn, elect delegates to district and state conventions where national convention delegates are selected. That makes these meetings of local party leaders and activists an important first step in picking presidents.