In an election year, with the presidential debates mere days away, it's a bit alarming that these sorts of mistakes aren't as well known as they might be. So as a public service, I'm posting a list of common logical fallacies used in debates. Credit goes to Michael Wong, who wrote this list for his website debunking creationism. His list has been abridged for length and to trim the less relevant references to religion but can be found in its original form and context on this page.
The "Strawman" Fallacy: this is where you build up a distorted "strawman" version of your opponent's argument in order to knock it down more easily. Virtually all creationist representations of evolutionary mechanisms distort the principle somehow, thus falling into this category.
The "Ad-Hominem" Fallacy: this is also known as "attacking the messenger, not the message". One of the most common forms of the ad-hominem fallacy in online debates is to poke fun at someone's spelling errors and then conclude that the person's points are wrong. In religious debates, the most common form of ad-hominem fallacy by far is to attack the morality of an irreligious opponent.
The "Appeal to Motive" Fallacy: this is where you attack the authors of an idea on a personal level by questioning the "hidden motives" behind their arguments, rather than addressing their arguments directly. For example, "you're just saying that vegetables are good for you because you're a vegetarian."
The "Red-Herring" Fallacy: this is where you introduce an irrelevant tangent to the debate. Most people aren't clumsy enough to completely change the subject, so they will pick something which is somewhat related to the general subject but not to the actual arguments being made. For example, "the capitalist theory of supply and demand is misleading because capitalism has been responsible for the systematic degradation of the working class, which produces all of the demand" (notice how it looks like it's related in some way, but despite its appearance it does not actually address or refute the theory of supply and demand at all).
The "False Dilemma" Fallacy: this is where you try to force your opponent to choose between two options when in fact three or more options are possible. For example, "you should invest that inheritance money in stocks, because the bond market is not healthy right now" (notice how it assumes that there are only two possible choices).
The "False Cause" Fallacy: this is where you assume that A caused B even though this is not necessarily the case. There are many specific forms of the false cause fallacy such as the "post hoc" fallacy where people assume that if A comes before B then A must have caused B, or the "complex cause" fallacy where people assume that something has just one cause when it may have several. For example, "it's too bad Lucy caught Bob watching pornography, because that led to their divorce" (marital failures are often much too complex to pin on a single cause like that) or ""the Nazis reintroduced school prayer when they gained power in pre-war Germany, and the Holocaust followed shortly afterwards, so school prayer caused the Holocaust" (as absurd as that sounds, remember that the removal of school prayer is routinely blamed for everything wrong with society, which is no less absurd).
The "Circular Logic" Fallacy: this is also known as "begging the question", and while few debaters will be clumsy enough to blatantly say something as obvious as "Marxism works because Marxism works", they will generally do so by rewording the same idea in two different ways. For example, "property rights are just as important as human rights because when you examine the human condition and the history of ethical philosophy, you will see that the right to property is one of the fundamentals, which means that it is a self-evident and inalienable right, just as much as the right to life" (notice how it's somewhat pompous but is nevertheless basically circular because its premise is just a reworded version of its conclusion).
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