McCain said Obama "will increase taxes on 50% of small-business revenue."

Factchecking, otherwise known as due-diligence, is very important in evaluating the credibility of the candidates. Are one or both of the candidates willing to state straight-out falsehoods in order to win some cheap votes?

For example, McCain has consistently misrepresented Obama as someone who wants to raise taxes across the board, esp. on the middle class. The fantasitic site FactCheck.org has this to say about such a claim:

It's a pretty standard Republican theme: "Democrat X favors higher taxes and wasteful spending." But the McCain-Palin campaign has repeatedly pushed this line far beyond what the facts will support. Among the whoppers: that Sen. Barack Obama has voted to raise taxes on families earning as little as $32,000 per year, that Obama wants to tax your electricity and your heating oil, that he has voted for "higher" taxes 94 times, and that he will raise taxes for 23 million small-business owners. Each of these claims is false. ... As for Obama's actual plan: The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that 81.3 percent of all American workers and families would see a tax cut.

Last night he said that Obama's plan, "will increase taxes on 50% of small-business revenue." This is flat out blatently false (and not even close to the actual truth):

...according to the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a joint effort by two Washington think tanks, less than 3% of small businesses pay taxes in the top two brackets and could therefore see higher taxes. And for most of those small businesses, business revenue represents less than half of their income.

Other whoppers of 2008 can be found here.