Another Day, Another Debate

The most recent debate was held in Hanover, New Hampshire at Dartmouth. Fancy. I don’t know what it was about this particular debate, but I was not a huge fan of the first 50 minutes. Maybe it was because they were sitting at a round table with coffee mugs. Maybe it was because the younger female monitor had a sassy attitude. Or maybe it was because everyone kept talking over each other.
Not that I’m a huge Santorum fan, but from what I saw, he was asked only asked one question in the first of hour, of the entire debate. When Charlie Rose went to cut him off Santorum responded with, “I am not done yet. I’ve only been able to answer one question, unlike everybody else here, so let me just finish what I’m saying.” You tell ‘em Rick. Poor guy seems to be fighting a losing battle. He deserves a 9.9(.9) on my I.B.I. scale for that.

The second half of the debate I found to be more compelling. The GOP candidates were able to ask each other questions. That’s always a recipe for something of interest.
So what were some of the questions? Well, Ms. Bachmann, decked out in all white, asked Perry what he will do differently than Obama. The answer? Nothing you haven’t heard before. Next, the always entertaining, Herman Cain questions Romney’s ability to name all 59 points in his 160 page plan. And that is just the start of many questions addressed to Romney. But that doesn’t seem to intimidate him one bit. Every answer seems to be handled with much ease and eloquence, really.

Something I really found interesting was a quote from Cain that he was addressed about. The quote is, “… don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself.” According to Cain that quote does not refer to the 14 million people “who are out of work for no reason…” but it is directed towards the protestors. Either way, I’m not sure those are words that are easy to just accept. Food for thought, I suppose.

Truthfully, this was the most lack luster debate for me. So what did I do? Fact checking. I actually found a webpage that came up with 13 facts for this particular debate. So I wanted to share a couple.

Jon Huntsman was quoted saying, “The IRS is already planning on 19,500 new employees to administer that mandate. That will stay, and that’s the ruinous part of ‘Obamacare.’”
Who knows where he got this figure from, but according to the IRS budge request for 2012 the new number of employees is 1,300.

During the debate Cain was approached by Ron Paul about calling the Federal Reserve ignorant. Of course, Cain denied such a thing. But read the quote that Paul was referring to:
“I don’t know why people think we’re gonna learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. I think a lot of people are calling for this audit of the Federal Reserve because they don’t know enough about it.” Hmmm. So he didn’t actually say “ignorant”, but he might as well have.


Quote of the Day: “I'm a mother of 28 kids, 22 foster kids, 5 biological kids.” –Michele Bachmann (Wait, how many kids have you mothered?)