First of all, the bar for reporting income based on a horse business is not very high. In my state, it is illegal not to report income of more than $7,000 if you earn any income at all based on a horse business. In other words, it is illegal if you own a horse who may earn income not to report it. Rafalca has several possible ways to produce income either competition or through breeding. She has excellent blood lines and breeding her at some point would be good. Furthermore, as she develops and continues to excel, her value will increase if all the three owners of whom the Romneys are only one third were to sell her.

No US Equestrian team members medaled at the Olympics. Although US horse/rider teams did well in worlds, the rules are slightly different for the Olympics and discussion is ongoing about how to prove team performance in the future.

I met my first MS patient over 30 years ago. She was very pretty–bright blue eyes and big smile, but her legs were frozen and stiff and her upper body was somewhat spastic. She came to me for swimming therapy. One day this beautiful woman shared that her husband had left her. The next woman with MS that I knew had no visible outward signs of MS either, but she was on some very powerful medicine. In addition, she knew she could become disabled and the potential of the future she faced. Since then, two women I went to school with became wheel chair bound, spastic, unable to speak or eat, and each eventually passed. MS is not a walk in the park, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

As for her horse being drugged, you really should have read the article and then done a little research. Catherine Norris purchased Super Hits who had not been ridden in two years in 2008. She kept the horse at the same place Ann Romney had boarded the horses and used the same trainer and the same veterinarian for a year. She had words with the trainer over the way she perceived Super Hits was moving. She didn’t like the trainer’s response, so she moved him and got a new vet. The second vet performed surgery on the horse in 2009. Then in 2010, Catherine Norris decided to sue Ann Romney, Ann Romney’s vet, his practice, the trainer, the trainer’s wife, her veterinarian, and her veterinarian;s practice. Curiously, the trial was not set until September 2011. Curiously, the expert vet, made this very outlandish statement which was an opinion, not a fact. He is a vet for FEI and USET, and no one in their right minds uses drugs on a horse near competition if they can be detected. In fact, all of the drugs in the horse were administered by the veterinarians except one.

Two of the drugs were anti-anxiety type drugs to sedate the horse during the x-rays, one of the drugs was a NSAID (think Advil); however, the fourth drug was not accounted for by any of the vet records, but to imply that Ann Romney knew anything about the fourth drug is absurd. She doesn’t need the money nor does she need the trouble. Nonetheless, the veterinarian who can be see clearly enjoying the festivities at Gladstone, NJ, when Steven Colbert’s team video’s the sport of the summer made a highly unprofession statement directed at Ann Romney. Had he had a thought that Mrs. Romney might let this suit go to trial where he could be cross-examined, he might have omitted such a slanderous statement. The truth is that modern veterinary medicine allows horses to remain serviceable, i.e. useful for far longer in their careers than what used to be the standard. While someone did something that should not have been done by injecting a second drug into the horse’s, these drugs could be found in perhaps as many as 50 to 605 of horses during their annual exams or hoof trims. Some horses are just to nervous or high strung to have anyone work in their mouths or on their hind feet, so they are sedated both for their safety and for vets. Dr. Soule lives in the most liberal bastion in the US and his comments need to be weighed. Just because he said this doesn’t make it true. If he can’t prove it by showing the medication records of every horse he had ever done a pre-purchase exam in the past 38 years, it is not a fact. The AAEP has no standard, accepted one-size fits all pre-purchase exam despite what he stated in his deposition.

gah…..these people.