Cain and Jordan

News flash: Herman Cain is still a presidential candidate.

Yes, the former pizzeria chain CEO stopped his campaign over charges of an extramarital affair, but if you listened closely he said he was "suspending" his campaign. Suspending your campaign means you've temporarily halted your run for office so you figure out how or whether to go forward. Ending your campaign is withdrawing from the campaign and not going forward at all. Gary Hart, when he was faced with charges of an extramarital affair as his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination was gearing up in May 1987, suspended his run for the White House on May 7; he then ended his campaign on May 8. (He did re-enter the race seven months later, but that's a different issue.)

So Cain is still assessing his viability as a presidential candidate. The joke is that everyone else has assessed it for him.

Meanwhile, Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and a leading rightie, expressed pleasure with the fact that President Obama opposes any attempt to attach a rider authorizing an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas on a payroll tax cut extension bill.

"Frankly, Jordan said, "the fact that the president doesn't like it makes me like it even more."

Miracle of miracles! A Republican comes clean! He admits that he supports a bad idea just because the President opposes it!

Jordan is no stranger to expressing his opposition to policies without a lot of rationalized B.S. He also opposes high-speed rail, and remember, he came right out and said it was because he didn't want to see intercity passenger rail to compete with the business of selling cars - not because of wasteful government spending or any crap like that.

So we have one Republican who can't not be a candidate and another who can't not tell the truth. Yeah, those are double negatives. So are Cain and Jordan.

Here and There

Some updates . . .

Yesterday I mentioned that Herman Cain's "9-9-9" plan - which he mentions so much while talking about the economy I feel like I'm listening to the White Album ("industrial output . . . financial imbalance . . . ") -  would cost middle-income taxpayers more.  How could an across-the-board tax do that? Because Cain's nine percent sales tax would mostly affect people who spend much of their money on food, clothing and shelter - middle-income and lower-income people.  While he would eliminate the payroll tax (causing a loss of $100 million in revenue) he would eliminate d the estate, gift and capital gains taxes (and cause and $800 million revenue loss ) that would benefit the wealthy.  The combined $900 million loss of revenue is the the "9" that Cain does not bring up.  

More breaking news - Muammar el-Qaddafi has reportedly been killed by Libyan revolutionaries.  No confirmation on this yet, as far as I know . . ..  

Ha Ha Herman!

That Herman Cain - what a sense of humor.  He somehow managed to become the rarest of birds - a black front runner for the Republican presidential nomination - and now he's joking about putting up an electric fence on the Mexican border to discourage and possibly electrocute illegal immigrants.  Here's a man whose father who worked at three jobs to own his own house and whose mother was a cleaning woman, and he's telling the unemployed and underemployed Wall Street occupiers that it's their fault, not the fault of greedy banks, if they're not well-off or gainfully employed.  Even Ron Paul was aghast at Cain's remarks. (Cain is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri, something you don't hear about because the media keep playing up the fact that he was the chairman of a pizza parlor chain.)

Cain has shot up to the top of the Republican field for the same reason Michele Bachmann  and Rick Perry did - he's seen as a "conservative" alternative to the likely nominee, Mitt Romney, who's seen as more "moderate" (until you look at his record).  His "9-9-9 plan" - a nine percent national sales tax, a nine percent flat tax, and a nine percent business flat tax - seems reasonable enough until you realize that it will raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans making an average of 35,000 a year while lowering taxes on those with an a average annual income of $350,000.

But he's sure to do some damage to the body politic while he's around.  Cain is getting the bulk of his economic ideas from the greedy Koch brothers, who hope to turn America into one big strip mine, and his effect could force Romney, as the nominee, to move so far to the right that the Tea Party will be able to write the entire 2012 Republican platform.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Cain was instrumental in sabotaging President Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan when he challenged the President at a town hall meeting in Kansas City.  Cain told Clinton that a proposed employer mandate would hurt small businesses, and that subsidies to help such businesses guarantee health insurance to workers were inaccurately calculated.  Cain, according to Bob Cohn of Newsweek, "transformed the debate" on health care reform, which went down in flames for Clinton in 1994 and was never revisited in the remainder of his Presidency.

So how much do Republican voters like Cain? They love him.  At a Republican debate, they applauded his assertion that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their plight, just as they cheered Rick Perry's executions in Texas and booed at a gay soldier in earlier debates.