“He Looked Beyond My Fault”: Herman Cain Can Do No Wrong
By an accident of timing, Herman Cain appeared on Monday morning at the intersection of 17th and M Streets, Northwest – the location of the National Restaurant Association, where he is alleged to have sexually harassed two women when he was the group’s chief executive.
The allegations, first reported by Politico, could not have come at a worse time for the front-running Republican presidential candidate: just ahead of a very public day of speeches in Washington. The first was scheduled at the American Enterprise Institute, which happens to be right across the street from the restaurant association. It was, as one political reporter at the AEI event put it, like going into the lion’s den wearing a Lady Gaga meat suit.
And so Cain did what he always does: He turned a devastating situation to his advantage. “By the way, folks, yes, I am an unconventional candidate,” he told the overflowing crowd. “And, yes, I do have a sense of humor. And some people have a problem with that. But . . . Herman is going to stay Herman.”
So the women who filed the complaints didn’t get his sense of humor? And that’s the end of it?
It just may be. This sort of scandal would end the career of many a politician. But the usual rules don’t apply to Herman Cain. He survives gaffes and scandal the way he beat colon cancer – and whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger.
He says he would negotiate a swap of terrorists at Gitmo – then claims he misunderstood the question. He claims abortion should be an individual choice – then again says he misunderstood. He proposes an electrified border fence that could kill immigrants from Mexico – then says people didn’t get the joke.
Evidence that he has said something dumb, or offensive, only confirms to his supporters that he is not another polished pol like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. And so Cain doesn’t need to know what a neocon is, he can weather campaign-funding irregularities, he can have his campaign manager blow cigarette smoke in a campaign ad, he can skip the early primary states in favor of a book tour of the south, and he can sing about pizza to a John Lennon tune. If Herman Cain were found to be a serial killer, his supporters would take this, too, as reassuring evidence that he is not just another career politician.
This allows Cain to perform as a self-parody on the campaign trail, confident that whatever absurdity he comes up with will only add to his outsider mystique. Arriving on stage for the AEI speech, he began by asking his microphone be turned down because “I’ll blow this thing to smithereens.”
He then proceeded to blow up the usual political constraints. He responded to a British reporter with a phony English accent. When asked about energy policy, Cain said he’d get to it on day two of his administration. “Day one, I’m going to take a nap.” Asked about his prospects to remain a top-tier candidate, he replied: “This flavor of the week is now the flavor of the month, and it still tastes good.”
Cain’s hosts at AEI forbid any questions about the sexual harassment claims; ABC’s Jonathan Karl had the microphone taken from him and shut off when he tried to ask about the “big cloud” over Cain.
That had the effect of moving the reporters’ interest to Cain’s second appearance of the day, at the National Press Club. “I have never sexually harassed anyone,” the candidate said. If the trade group paid a settlement, “I hope it wasn’t for much.” (Later in the day he acknowledged remembering one of the settlements.)
So would he ask for records of the investigation to be released in order to shoot down the allegations? “No, there’s nothing to shoot down,” he replied, and “the policies of the restaurant association is not to divulge that information.”
Nothing to see here. Move along. And Cain did. He had more fun with his signature policy proposal (“How did we come up with 9-9-9? Why not 10-10-10, why not 8-8-8?). And he asserted his belief that life imitates the pizza business. “The way we renewed Godfather’s Pizza as a company is the same approach I will use to renew America.”
When asked to go beyond the slogans, Cain requested a lifeline, inviting advisor Rich Lowrie to answer the question for him. Though letting his aide field the tough stuff, Cain was happy to handle the final question himself – a request for a song. This time, Cain crooned a few bars from the hymn “He Looked Beyond My Fault.”
For Cain and his forgiving supporters, it could be a theme song.
Michele Bachmann’s Mis-statements May Be Catching Up To Her
Michele Bachmann was laying out a tough immigration policy recently when she veered off script to make a point that she said underscored the national security implications of a porous border.
“Fifty-nine thousand this year came across the border, as was said in the introduction, from Yemen, from Syria. These are nations that are state sponsors of terror,” the Minnesota congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate said, citing a report she had heard. “They’re coming into our country!”
There were two problems with Bachmann’s passionate assertion. Yemen is not a state sponsor of terrorism, according to the State Department. And the Border Patrol report to which Bachmann referred said that while 59,000 apprehended illegal immigrants came from countries other than Mexico, only 663 had ties to countries with links to terrorism.
Voters here frequently say they are drawn to support Bachmann’s presidential campaign by the litany of statistics and facts that stud her speeches. Yet what she says is often inaccurate, misleading or wildly untrue.
All politicians occasionally shade the facts to their advantage. The danger for Bachmann is that her misstatements are so pronounced and so numerous that they erode her effort to regain footing in the presidential race. (Asked for reaction, a campaign aide provided information unrelated to the statements in question.)
Some of her misstatements have registered as eye-rolling blips, such as when she confused actor John Wayne with serial killer John Wayne Gacy on the day she entered the campaign in June. Others have damaged her candidacy.
She won points in a September debate when she assailed Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting a proposed requirement that young girls be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease. But then Bachmann told a post-debate television audience that the vaccine had caused mental retardation, a conclusion drawn from a brief meeting with a weeping mother. Bachmann’s hit against Perry was lost in howls of dismay from physicians who said her untrue remarks would discourage vaccination and endanger children.
On recent campaign swings through Iowa, she continued to trip over matters large and small.
In Sioux Center, Bachmann said high corporate taxes and crushing regulations had made the United States less competitive than other countries, a mantra common among GOP candidates. But then she went further.
“If you want to have a business in China today, if you want to build a building, you just build it, you don’t go through all the permitting process that we do here,” she said.
Businesses have to apply for multiple permits in China. A 2008 World Bank publication found that China was among the most difficult places anywhere to obtain construction permits, ranking No. 176 of 181. The publication ranked the best and worst places, and the United States fell in neither category.
At a rally in Denison, Bachmann touted her plan to slash federal taxes and implied that taxes are higher now than when she was young.
“How many of you think that the taxes are too high in the United States? We got any takers on that?” she said as the crowd roared in approval. “I grew up in this wonderful state and I’ll tell you, the tax rate was completely different years ago from what it is now, wasn’t it? They’re very high.”
In 2011, a married couple filing jointly would have paid 35 percent of their income in taxes if they made $379,150, the lowest income in the top bracket, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. Fifty years ago, when Bachmann was a child, the same couple would have paid 59 percent in federal taxes. The lowest federal tax bracket today is half what it was then.
The candidate bases at least some of her assertions on obscure conspiracy theories.
In Estherville, after a supporter asked her position on the Second Amendment, Bachmann said she supported Americans’ rights to own guns and that she had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
But then she added: “I don’t believe in the U.N. taking that right away from us, as well. There are international treaties that want to do that.”
The United Nations is drafting an arms treaty, but it is aimed at stemming illegal international gun sales. While many gun manufacturers are concerned that such a treaty could lead to broader gun registration, only a narrow fringe purports that Americans could see their guns taken away by the U.N., which has no authority over constitutional rights.
Bachmann’s mistakes predate her entry into the presidential race. In November, she told a national television audience that a trip by President Barack Obama to India cost $200 million a day. The report was based on an anonymous quotation in an Indian newspaper.
The White House does not release cost figures for security reasons, but people involved in travel by presidents from both political parties said the number was grossly exaggerated.
An embarrassing correction also marked a recent Bachmann move on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, she introduced a bill requiring any woman considering an abortion to undergo an ultrasound that pinpoints the heartbeat of the fetus.
“A study by Focus on the Family found that when women who were undecided about having an abortion were shown an ultrasound image of the baby, 78% chose life,” Bachmann said.
That prompted a news release from the conservative organization, which said that while it supports the legislation, it had produced no such report.
“We don’t have any ‘studies,’ and we don’t publish any percentages like that,” Kelly Rosati, Focus on the Family’s vice president of community outreach, said in a statement.
A Bachmann aide said the candidate got the statistic from a Des Moines clinic. The aide also cited a report that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News of Denver that cited a Focus on the Family statistician for a similar claim.
By: Seema Mehta, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, October 23, 2011
Christian Hypocrisy From The Religious Right
W.W.J.D.? How about what would Jesus say? What would he say about the way we treat the poor, the homeless, the hungry, the sick, the elderly?
I haven’t gone and gotten all religious on you, I promise. I was listening recently to an interview on the radio with a man from the Council of Churches on poverty. He reminded me how those on the religious right use the Bible and specifically the words of Jesus to defend their desire to overturn Roe v. Wade and fight against abortion, or to define marriage between and man and a woman to prevent gay people from marrying.
But what about the issue of those who are suffering? Those who are in need? Where are the religious right on that? Why isn’t it a value or moral to help a sick child, an elderly person or someone who is hungry?
The Bible contains over 300 verses dedicated to the poor and social injustice. In all of those verses it is clear God is concerned for both; so why aren’t those who claim to follow him?
Those on the religious right want to defund programs such as Social Security, Medicare, welfare, food stamps, healthcare, etc. What I want to know is: why aren’t these so called people of God offering their homes to the homeless, food to the hungry, a coat to someone who is poor and cold?
The concept of “it takes a village” was not Secretary Clinton’s idea; it originated with the teachings of Jesus. Don’t take my word for it, read his words. (In some books they’re in red; that should make it easier for you.)
With the current cuts in federal programs, more and more people are being turned away from shelters, yet at a time when the economy is bad, the unemployment rate is high, people keep losing their homes and there are more people living below the poverty line than in 50 years; what do we expect these people, some of whom are children, to do?!
Those in the churches aren’t helping, many church doors are locked to these people. When you phone a religious organization asking for help, they’ll send you to a shelter; which is government funded, which their congregation wants to cut the funding for. See the problem?
And it goes beyond our borders. In the horn of Africa where there is severe famine and where children are dying daily, the United States gives less than we have in the past, thanks to the cuts in funding.
I find it hard not to gag when I read “In God We Trust” on our currency when we don’t follow God’s laws. The religious right will fight hard to give a tax credit to a rich man, but doesn’t want to pay for a blanket for a homeless one. Didn’t the Bible say something about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? In America, it’s the other way around. If you’re rich, it’s like heaven; if you’re poor, it’s hell.
I was scared and shocked when I agreed with something Pat Robertson said recently. He said the right are being too extreme and to tone it down. He should’ve told the religious right to do something I think they’ve stopped doing long ago; read the book they so readily use to further their agenda.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, October 26, 2011
Republicans And Taxes: Let’s Get Real About The GOP
It would be marvelous to believe that the congressional supercommittee is going to reach a bipartisan deal. Well, actually, I’m not so sure it would be marvelous, substantively. We’ll get to that. But politically, it would be nice to see Washington function for a change. Hard experience suggests to us, however, that when all the smoke clears, there will be no deal. What will happen then? The Republicans will then go in for even emptier posturing than they’re engaging in now, this time with regard to defense cuts. You think things can’t get worse? Just wait.
For a while, when the committee’s six Democrats and six Republicans were able to talk to each other in vague generalities, Washington was able to pretend that things were looking pretty hopeful. There was no precise reason for this hope. Some senators told me that their colleagues on the committee weren’t even telling them anything. But Washington elites cling to hope of bipartisan common sense winning out the way M. Night Shyamalan fans swear that he’s going to regain form in the next movie, for real this time.
But eventually and inevitably, the negotiators had to start talking numbers. And as soon as they got to specifics, two things happened. First, they realized how far apart they were. Second, the leaks started, at which point the rest of us realized how far apart they were.
Let’s compare the plans. The Democratic proposal, released by senator and committee member Max Baucus the other day, looks to cut $3 trillion from the budget. The Republican plan, leaked in parts to The Wall Street Journal and Politico after Baucus moved, cuts just $2 trillion. If it seems odd to you that Democrats are proposing more deficit reduction than Republicans, you aren’t alone. The reason is that the Republicans—surprise, surprise—are doing it all by cuts with no tax revenue, while the Democrats include $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion in new revenue.
Now, Republicans will repeat in these coming weeks that their plan does include “revenue.” And in a way, it does. It’s just not tax revenue. Or wait—it is tax revenue! But from a tax decrease! Yes: The GOP plan says the government will raise $200 billion by cutting corporate and individual taxes. You know, the way the Bush tax cuts increased revenue, which is to say, not in the real world, but in the minds of Mitch McConnell and other delusionals who think the Bush tax cuts raised revenue. So when they go around saying “our plan raises revenues,” remember their track record.
If the time comes for Pentagon cuts, will the Democrats be willing to hold the line and risk the silly accusation of being “soft on defense”? I think we know the answer.
It bears noting, once again, that the Democrats have said with the Baucus plan that they’re ready to deal if Republicans will. Their plan includes $500 billion in entitlement program cuts. They’re prepared to attach increases in Social Security benefits to the so-called chained consumer price index, which would decrease benefits, especially for those in their 80s. That’s not some token nothing. That’s a real concession, so much so that liberals are going to be up in arms about it as time marches on. That chained CPI bit probably wouldn’t make it through Nancy’s Pelosi’s caucus, but other entitlement cuts will. So the Democrats are at least showing up to play some ball.
But the Republicans are staying in the dugout. They aren’t even bothering to take the bus to the stadium. A trillion in taxes, one dollar in taxes, it doesn’t matter; Republicans will not permit a tax increase of any kind. I’m bored of writing this sentence, so you, poor reader, must be even more bored of reading it, but it has to be said, because so many others are out there peddling the falsehood that both sides are equally to blame for the impasse: No—the impasse exists because of Republicans and taxes. Period. If the GOP moved on taxes, the Democrats would give ground on entitlements, as they have now signaled yet again. And the Democrats should not and cannot accept a deal in which there are no tax increases, because they have two-thirds of the country with them and because it’s the right thing.
Put it all together and the odds of an agreement seem long indeed. Could this rump effort of 100 bipartisan House members and 40 bipartisan senators move the boulder? It’s like asking if a Boy Scout could light a fire with two sticks in the rain. Maybe. The conditions have to be just right, and no one really knows what those conditions are.
Assuming no deal, here’s what I’m told is likely to happen after everyone has acknowledged the collapse. The Republicans will, as John McCain and others have suggested, turn up the heat on the question of defense cuts. They will introduce legislation to exempt the Pentagon from cuts. Now remember—these cuts to the Pentagon, 15 percent, were agreed to by both parties in the August debt-ceiling deal. But Republicans, being the clever dialecticians that they are, will decide that the course of history has changed, and that deal will mean no more to them than one of those secret treaties Lenin routinely abrogated back in the day.
So they’ll advance a bill saying: cuts to domestic social programs, sure; cuts to Pentagon, nyet. It will pass the House. It will go to the Senate, and all the Republicans will be for it, and they’ll need 13 Democrats. So then the questions will be: will the Democrats be willing to hold the line and risk the silly accusation of being “soft on defense”? And will the White House also hold the line—bucking, of course, its own defense secretary, who agrees with the Republican position? I think we know the answer.
So the Republicans will have killed another deal with their indefensible and immoral position on taxes, and then, having stuffed that carcass in the trunk, they will retroactively work to kill the deal they agreed to last summer, and spend December demagoguing about how Democrats are going to leave America defenseless and throw hundreds of thousands of poor aeronautical engineers into the streets.
Your tax dollars at work.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 29, 2011
The Ideological Fantasies Of Inequality Deniers
Rising income inequality, like climate change, is an ideologically inconvenient issue for conservatives. They would prefer not to discuss it altogether. If forced to discuss it, they will generally either deny its existence or simply carry on as if it doesn’t exist.
The underlying facts, like the facts of climate change, are stark. Over the last few decades, income growth for most Americans has slowed to a crawl, while income for the very rich has exploded. That’s a reversal of the three decades following World War II, when all income groups got richer, with the poor and middle class rising at a faster rate than the rich. Crucially, the Congressional Budget Office’s new analysis shows that changes in government policy over this period have made inequality worse. (In CBO-speak: “The equalizing effect of transfers and taxes on household income was smaller in 2007 than it had been in 1979.”)
We’re not having a debate about how to reverse or even stop the growth of inequality. Nobody has a real plan to do that. The Democratic plan is to slightly arrest the growth of inequality by hiking taxes on the rich a few percentage points, so as to minimize the need to cut the social safety net. The Republican plan is to slash taxes for the rich and programs for the poor, thereby massively increasing inequality.
That is a hard position to defend in the context of exploding inequality, and conservatives would rather not defend it. Instead the right’s response has been to persistently deny or ignore the facts. Rick Perry, pressed by a reporter to explain why he was proposing a tax plan that would widen income inequality further, replied, “I don’t care about that.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page today dismissed the Tax Policy Center, whose calculations persistently show the ways in which various Republican tax proposals would widen inequality, as “liberal.” It didn’t even pretend to dispute the substance of the calculations. Eric Cantor gave a speech about income inequality centering on stories about how his grandmother worked hard and pulled herself up by the bootstraps in the old days. It was a nice speech if you like stories about plucky grandmothers. It failed to grasp the central dilemma, which is that it was a lot easier for poor people to move up sixty years ago, when tax rates on the rich happened to be far higher, than it is today.
Ah, but here comes Paul Ryan, fawned over in the media as “the GOP‘s strongest policy wonk,” to take the issue head on in a speech before the Heritage Foundation, hyped in advance by conservatives as a definitive statement of right-wing thought. Ryan’s speech is the portrait of a mind in the grips of an ideological fantasy, refusing to confront inconvenient facts.
Ryan establishes the tone of his argument by accusing President Obama of attacking “straw men,” and then proceeds to build a series of his own straw men, beginning in the very same sentence:
[Obama] is going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans, setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes on job creators. … he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy, and resentment. …Also according to the President’s logic, spending restraint is incompatible with a strong, well-functioning safety net.
Right, so Obama favors “punitive” tax rates, he promotes resentment of the rich, and he opposes any spending restraint whatsoever. Ryan produces no evidence to support these statements, because none exists. In reality, Obama never attacks the rich, he constantly insists that he respects economic success and merely wants to lessen the burden of budget cuts on the most vulnerable, and he agreed to reduce spending by more than a trillion dollars just this last summer. Ryan repeatedly accuses Obama of favoring “equality of outcome,” which is absurd.
Here is the closest Ryan comes to addressing Obama’s actual argument, which is that requiring somewhat higher taxes on the rich will reduce the scale of cuts required on programs for the poor and middle class:
The President has been talking a lot about math lately. He’s been saying that “If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit… the math says… we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.”This is really a stunning assertion from the President. When you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable, responsible spending restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President’s zero-sum logic.
It’s “stunning,” says Ryan, because it relies on zero-sum math. More tax hikes on the rich means less spending cuts. Ryan finds this stunning because he believes in supply-side fairy tales in which cutting taxes for the rich will produce enormous growth. Never mind that the last two presidential administrations have disproved the supply-side theory about as conclusively as a real world experiment can do. (Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, conservatives predicted disaster, and instead we experienced a long boom; George W. Bush lowered taxes on the rich, conservatives predicted a huge boom, and instead we got an weak recovery with no income growth for anybody save the very rich.)
Ryan likewise assails Obama’s calculations by trying to persuade his audience that there’s really not much money to be raised by taxing the rich:
And his math is no better on the tax side. Let’s say we took all the income from those the President calls “rich” — those making $250,000 or more. A 100 percent tax rate on their total annual income would only fund the government for six months. Just six months!
Uh, has anybody told Ryan that there are only twelve months in a year? Because six of twelve months is not a trivial percentage. Another way to put this is that the richest 1 percent of taxpayers earn 17 percent of the nation’s income, and federal spending accounts for a little over 20 percent. Obviously, taking all the income from the top 1 percent would be a terrible idea, but taxing a decent chunk of their income clearly can get you pretty far.
Ryan likewise insists that the debate over rich investors who pay lower tax rates than the middle class is contrived:
Obama quotes Reagan as saying that bus drivers shouldn’t pay a higher effective tax rate than millionaires. Well, that’s a no-brainer. Nobody disagrees with that.
Nobody disagrees with that? How about Paul Ryan? His tax plan from 2010 would exempt all investment income from taxes, meaning that large segments of the rich would pay nothing at all. The average federal tax rate on households earning more than a million dollars a year, under Ryan’s plan, would be well under 13 percent, compared with a 19.5 percent average federal tax rate for households earning $50,000 to $75,000 a year.
Ryan concludes his speech with a ringing endorsement of equality of opportunity, which he contrasts with the stagnant, European-style class-bound society that Democrats crave to replicate:
Telling Americans they are stuck in their current station in life, that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control, and that government’s role is to help them cope with it — well, that’s not who we are. That’s not what we do.Our Founding Fathers rejected this mentality. In societies marked by class structure, an elite class made up of rich and powerful patrons supplies the needs of a large client underclass that toils, but cannot own. The unfairness of closed societies is the kindling for class warfare, where the interests of “capital” and “labor” are perpetually in conflict. What one class wins, the other loses.
The legacy of this tradition can still be seen in Europe today: Top-heavy welfare states have replaced the traditional aristocracies, and masses of the long-term unemployed are locked into the new lower class. …Whether we are a nation that still believes in equality of opportunity, or whether we are moving away from that, and towards an insistence on equality of outcome.
It’s a compelling vision. Unfortunately, Ryan’s understanding of reality is a complete inversion of actual reality. “Equality of opportunity” bears no relation to the reality of the American economy or any economy. Parents can benefit their children by giving them money, better schools, better home environments, tutoring, camp, and other advantages. Opportunity is overwhelmingly unequal. One result is that rich kids perform far better in school than poor kids. But that is not the only result. Poor kids who beat the odds and get high test scores are less likely to complete college than rich kids with middling or even low test scores. Poor kids who beat those odds and graduate from college are still less likely to grow up to be rich than rich kids who did not graduate from college. I’m not sure if there’s a perfect solution, but pretty sure Ryan’s plan to slash Pell Grants is not going to help.
Ryan’s decision to cite Europe as a place where people can’t move beyond their birth station is especially unfortunate. In fact, social mobility in Europe is higher than in the United States, a fact even Rick Santorum has acknowledged.
The way to understand Ryan is that he’s deeply influenced by the theories of Ayn Rand, who believed that the root of all evil lay in attempts to alter the wealth distribution created by the free marketplace. Rand may have been a deranged cult leader, but she did live at a time when the fear of the poor devouring the rich had an actual real-world basis. She escaped communist Russia for the United States, Franklin Roosevelt — while not a reprise of the communists, as she mistakenly believed — really did denounce the rich and impose confiscatory tax rates. The world of Rand’s imagination bore a slight resemblance to the world she inhabited, but it bears no resemblance to the contemporary United States.
Ryan cannot process the realities of this world because they are so at odds with the imagined world of his ideology. After his speech, he was asked about the CBO’s report on inequality, and he brushed it off, falling back on Rand-esque lingo the virtuous rich (“takers”) and parasitic poor (“makers”):
“Let’s not focus on redistribution, let’s focus on upward mobility,” he said. “If these studies are used as justification for erecting new and more barriers for making it harder for people to rise, all that will do is reduce our prosperity in this country.”“We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition.
Don’t confuse Paul Ryan with the facts. If studies run up against Ryan’s ideology, then the studies must give way.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, New York Magazine, October 26, 2011
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