Chupacabra Report

News That Gets My Goat..

-One of the funnier moments of the GOP debate last night happened when Michele Bachmann suggested that Rick Perry ordered that Texas schoolgirls get the HPV vaccine because Merck Pharmaceutical gave thousands of dollars to his campaign. Perry answered that Merck donated only $5,000 of the $30 million he raised, and that “if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000 I’m offended.” Susan Bankston at Juanita Jean’s The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon asks “Well then, what is your price, Governor? Because most estimates put it at $200,000.”

-Mitt Romney laid out his plan for middle-class tax relief: eliminate taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for people making under $200,000. This is rich coming from a silver-spoon vulture capitalist. Most sources consider households making from $35,000 to $100,000 to be middle class. As one in the middle of that demographic, my interest income most years is in the tens of dollars, and taxes on dividends and capital gains is not a problem either. I wonder if Romney remembers how many houses he owns.

-Libertarian Ron Paul was soundly booed by the audience when he made a rare foray into the realm of good sense during the foreign policy segment of the debate. After all the recent noise about “the lessons of nine-eleven,” I see little evidence that we’ve learned anything. See what you think..

“There's a lot of room to cut on the military, but not on the defense. You can slash the military spending,” Paul explained, “We don't need to be building airplanes that were used in World War II -- we're always fighting the last war.”

“Most of the danger comes by our lack of wisdom on how we run our foreign policy,”

“We're under great threat, because we occupy so many countries. We're in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world. We're going broke. The purpose of al Qaeda was to attack us, invite us over there, where they can target us. And they have been doing it.”

“Al Qaeda has committed “more attacks against us and the American interests per month than occurred in all the years before 9/11” -- because the U.S. is “occupying their land.”

“This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this, and they're attacking us because we're free and prosperous, that is just not true. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been explicit... They wrote and said that we attacked America because you had bases on our holy land in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians fair treatment, and you have been bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for 10 years. Would you be annoyed? If you're not annoyed, then there's some problem.”