He's Done, He's Gone, He's Over - Herman Cain't!

Ya know......if Herman DIDN'T have an affair, I don't think he'd be quitting.  If Herman wasn't afraid of MORE allegations of sexual harassment, I don't think he'd be finished.

Herman has some stupid ideas about tax changes; his 9 9 9 plan is unmitigated shit.  It deserves no support, and is unlikely to get any.

I figured it would be yesterday, but instead the official announcement came this morning.


Herman can call it 'suspending', but it's done, it's over, it's kaput, finito, finis, dead, dead, dead.

I predict we will be seeing more PROOF of Cain's misconduct.  And I doubt that his hopes of making a bigger buck off of a failed Presidential campaign will be realized.

Bye bye Herman, Good Riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. You are exactly the kind of pervert that women have to worry about in the work place, you are just like every other philandering husband on the planet, you hypocrite family-values-baptist-minister guy.

Rumor has it that Herman has been negotiating with other candidates, apparently to get money out of them to pay off his campaign debts, which rumor has it are greater than the money he has been raising.

Don't go away mad, Herman. Just go away, and unless you have something more worthwhile to say than you've shown so far, shut it, you stupid hypocrite.

This Doesn't Sound Good for Cain....

I wonder what talking head shows on the Sunday morning circuit had scheduled Cain for this weekend?

If I were a betting woman - and I'm not - I'd be betting that if Herman were to end his campaign, he'd do it after 5 p.m. eastern time on Friday.

Unless Herman is scheduled for the talk shows....

I imagine it will be significant to see what additional proof comes out between now and then.  And I can't help but wonder who was leaking the info that Ms. White was trying to get in front of with her interviews.

In any event, this from one of the New York news sources was interesting. I don't see Herman leaving the chance to rub elbows with celebrities willingly.

From MSN's breaking news sources and NY1:

NY1 ItCH Alert: Herman Cain Cancels Dinner With NYC Media Elite

By: NY1 News

As Herman Cain's woes continue to mount on the presidential campaign trail, he abruptly canceled a private dinner with New York's media elite planned for this Sunday. Cain had reached out to New York Post columnist Cindy Adams to host a gathering at her Park Avenue apartment so that he could meet some of New York’s top journalists and politicians.
Among those on the guest list were Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer, Bill O'Reilly, Lesley Stahl, Senator Chuck Schumer and Greta Van Susteren who recently interviewed Cain and his family on Fox News.
Van Susteren's husband, lawyer John Coale is a friend of Cain’s and serves as an advisor to him.
Cindy Adams tells NY1 she received a call this morning from Coale after Cain asked him to cancel the dinner in case he drops out of the race.
NY1’s Roma Torre was also invited to the event.

He's Done, and He KNOWS It.

I'm guessing that Herman Cain is fooling himself by waiting for another 24 to 48 hours to discontinue his campaign.  I doubt anyone believes this is REALLY about saving his family from stress; if that were the case, he wouldn't have been putting his family through the stress of the multiple sexual harassment accusations.  That THOSE were paid off, in at least a couple of cases, suggests strongly to me that they did in fact occur.

Rather this is everything about saving Cain's own face / ass.  This tells me that he really HAS had a 13 year affair, and that there is plenty of proof.  The phone records that show 4 a.m. phone calls rather convincingly belie that his relationship was about financially helping this woman, particularly when the relationship ever so conveniently ended just a week or so before entering the presidential race.  The man is a hypocrite.  That the right wing base in places like Iowa would excuse sexual harassment, but then get bent over a sexual affair, seems to me a questionable moral compass on the part of the right wing / conservatives polled over primary candidates.  Personally, I have no problems believing any of these claims about Cain; all his denials lack the ring of truth.

Stick a fork in yourself Herman; you're done and past done.  And after this.... I can only wonder what your future job prospects are going to be.  Because apparently you're not only stupid about current events in Becky Becky Stan, and Libya, you're not able to keep your private parts in your pants, and your hands off the female employees; and your track record as a CEO is in reality considerably less than distinguished.

But I'm betting some think tank, probably funded by the Koch Brothers, will provide a comfortable niche out of sight of the media for a while.  That seems to be the unofficial golden parachute for failed right wing culture warrior failed politicians.  Maybe they'll give you an office next door to Michele Bachmann, if she doesn't manage a gig over on Faux Nuisance.

The "I didn't do anything wrong, but I have to protect my poor pitiful weak wife and kids from all that stuff I didn't do" line, in my opinion, merely increases what I think of here as the 'sleazy weasel factor'.  In point of fact, I would credit his wife and kids with more moral fiber, courage and strength of character than the asshole candidate Herman Cain.  Taking this tack multiplies the consequences of his failing; it does not mitigate or ameliorate it in any degree whatsoever.

Herman, you're pond scum.

Reassessment= political speak for my re-ASS-essment is grass, and the press and my political adversaries have a lot of lawn mowers.

I have to wonder if a new disappointment and condemnation of Cain over an affair is going to translate into a revived unhappiness with Nut Gingrich and HIS inability to keep his bits in his pants, not to mention HIS hypocrisy in having an affair while condemning Bill Clinton for far less egregious sexual misconduct.  Bill was wrong, Bill was bad, but Bill didn't divorce Hilary, and he didn't go all the way, while Newt rounded all the proverbial bases a few too many times.

So, it's unlikely Nut Gingrich will last; there's too much newt news coming out about him for that to happen.  Who will be the next not-Romney flavor of the month?

From MSNBC.com:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cain tells staff he's reassessing campaign

Will the newest recent allegations Herman Cain seal his fate?

By NBC's Alex Moe and Andrew Rafferty

Herman Cain told senior campaign staff members Tuesday that he's "reassessing" his campaign in the wake of a fresh allegation that he engaged in a 13-year-long extramarital affair.
Steve Grubbs, the candidate's Iowa campaign chairman, confirms to NBC News that Cain said he's taking a step back, much as he did after his finish in the Ames Straw Poll in August, to evaluate the direction of his campaign. The call included Cain's 50 state directors, and the reassessment will occur over the next two days.
This reassessment coincides with a new allegation from Ginger White, an Atlanta woman who says that she and Cain engaged in an affair for well over a decade, one that ended only recently. Cain has denied the affair.
Cain reiterated his claim, made yesterday in reaction to the new allegation, that White was simply a friend who he had sought to help financially, and that nothing inappropriate had happened between the two of them.
The former Godfather's Pizza CEO, who has faced a string of different allegations of sexual harassment, also said that he had no immediate plans to cancel his campaign events; he still intends to deliver a major foreign policy speech tonight in Michigan.
But Cain acknowledged the emotional toll that the claims against him had taken on his family. He said yesterday on CNN that he would stay in the campaign as long as his wife continued to believe he should stay in the race.
In the same interview, though, Cain opened the door to a possible exit from the race.
"It's just the way it is, but I'm not going to allow this sort of thing to cause me to drop out simply because it's tough on me. I don't want it to be tough on my family. And there comes a point that if it's tough on my family, I have to consider that at that particular point in time," he said.
Asked whether he would drop out if the race became too tough, Cain said: "I'll make that decision depending upon the circumstances and how it is impacting my wife and my family. That's my number one concern by all of these accusations."
SLIDESHOW: Herman Cain
***UPDATE*** Cain spokesman J.D. Gordon tells NBC News: "It's a reassessment of where we stand and the road ahead, similar to other times in the campaign's history. We're looking forward to getting back on message tonight with the Foreign Policy and National Security speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan."

A New Development in Libya

I wonder if this is something that 'we need a leader, not a reader' anti-intellect candidate Herman Cain will notice?  Or is it yet another instance where he will be caught unprepared and inadequate when faced with a challenging (rather than softball) question?  I'm betting that if he hasn't yet, Cain will be paying someone soon to read for him.  Or to him.

From MSNBC news and news services:

Libyan commander: Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam arrested

Younger Gadhafi captured with two aides while trying to cross into Niger, commander says 

NBC, msnbc.com and news services

updated 2 hours 28 minutes ago

 breaking news

TRIPOLI, Libya — Moammar Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam was captured in a southern Libyan city along with two of his aides who were trying to smuggle him out of the country, a militia commander said on Saturday.

Bashir al-Tlayeb of the Zintan brigades said that Seif al-Islam was caught in the desert town of Obari, near the southern city of Sabha about 400 miles south of Tripoli. He didn't elaborate on how Seif al-Islam was captured, but said that he was brought to the city of Zintan, the home of one of the largest revolutionary brigades in Libya.
Al-Tlayeb said that it would be up to the Libya's ruling National Transitional Council to decide on where the former Libyan leader would be tried.
However, NBC News reported that according to sources, al-Islam would be tried in Libya, not handed over to the International Criminal Court.
Al-Tlayeb also said that there was still no information about wanted former intelligence director Abdullah Senoussi or where he is located.
Libya's interim justice minister told Reuters that the younger Gadhafi was in good health.
Interactive: Gadhafi's children (on this page) Seif al-Islam is the last of Moammar Gadhafi's sons to remain unaccounted for.

Secret negotiations over a surrender?

Born in 1972, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi is the oldest of seven children of Moammar and Safiya Gadhafi.
He drew Western favor in previous years by touting himself as a liberalizing reformer but then staunchly backed his father in his brutal crackdown on rebels in the regime's final days.
Seif had gone underground after Tripoli fell to revolutionary forces.
Story: Libya: Gadhafi son offers to surrender to Hague The International Criminal Court had earlier said that it was in indirect negotiations with a son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi about his possible surrender for trial.
This is a breaking news story. Please check again for more updates.
NBC News, msnbc.com staff, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

 

Is This Right Wing Racism?

Herman Cain has been promoting lies, including the most convincing kind of lies, the ones that have some grain, some detail, of truth in them.

From the Guttmacher Institute:

Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States

August 2011

INCIDENCE OF ABORTION

• Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]
• Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 67% among blacks and 53% among Hispanics are unintended.[1] In 2008, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in 2000. However, between 2005 and 2008, the long-term decline in abortions stalled. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions occurred.[2]
• Each year, two percent of women aged 15–44 have an abortion. Half have had at least one previous abortion.[2,3]
• At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, one in 10 women will have an abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.[4,5]

However, Cain is not the only prominent figure on the right to repeat these lies.

Only Cain himself can know if he sincerely believes these lies.  Whether he believes them, or as he has demonstrated on a number of occasions --- like his foreign policy statement about China intending to become a nuclear power, which they did decades ago back in 1964,  or his misinformation about homosexuality as a choice - he is simply Michele Bachmann-like sloppy about facts, the result is to create racially based ill will where there is no valid basis to do so.

 We should not be demonizing Planned Parenthood. we should instead be helping to provide women with effective contraception, and the education to use it consistently to find better alternatives to control their reproductive decisions and their reproductive health.

Herman Cain seems to be playing the so-called 'race card' here, and it seems to be the Joker - the trickster, the dishonesty card.

If he gets this kind of thing wrong, and so many other items of information wrong, how can he presume to be qualified to serve as President?  How can any of the candidates currently in contention for the GOP nomination?

From Factcheck.org:

Cain’s False Attack on Planned Parenthood

Posted on November 1, 2011

Herman Cain has offered an alternate version of history in claiming that Planned Parenthood’s founder wanted to prevent “black babies from being born.” We find no support for that old claim. Cain also states that the organization built 75 percent of its clinics in black communities, but there’s no evidence that was true then. And today, only 9 percent of U.S. abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where half or more of residents are black, according to the most recent statistics.
The GOP presidential candidate made these comments back in March, telling an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation that “[w]hen Margaret Sanger — check my history — started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.” He called it “planned genocide.”
In an interview on “Face the Nation” on Oct. 30, Cain did not back down from those allegations. Here’s his exchange with host Bob Schieffer:

Schieffer: … you said that it was not Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide because you said Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the black communities because they wanted to kill black babies –
Herman Cain: Yes.
Scheiffer: — before they were born. Do you still stand by that?
Cain: I still stand by that.
Schieffer: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?
Cain: If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from. Look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history — secondly, look at where most of them were built; 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community — and Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word “genocide,” but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.

Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its head.
Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.” Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community:

Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”
It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

Nine-Nine-Nine (999): EMERGENCY

One problem with some ideas is that you need to see if they have other negative connotations--such as calling a car "Nova" and trying to sell it in countries where they speak Romance Languages and "Nova" means "won't go".

In this case, Herman Cain's 999. That's the Emergency number in the UK and a few other countries. First introduced in the London area on 30 June 1937, the UK's 999 number is the world's oldest emergency call service.






It will be interesting if the other candidates pick up on this.

Gross Understatement"I don't have the facts to back this up": Herman Cain

Mr. Cain, you don't have the facts to back up a lot of what you believe.

You are speaking in every media venue that will have you, and you are running not just for any office, but for the most powerful office in the country, possibly in the world.  You have a duty, if you wish to be considered for candidacy to FIND THE DAMN FACTS before you form or express an opinion.  Shame on you and on those who stupidly and ignorantly support you without those facts.

Being Gay is a choice?

No.  Here is the response from gays within your own party, Herman, the Log Cabin Republicans (my emphasis added- DG):

For Immediate Release

Log Cabin Republicans to Herman Cain: We Can Show You the Science

“If Herman Cain truly wants to see the science proving that sexual
orientation is not a choice, Log Cabin Republicans would be happy to
show it to him,” said Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director R. Clarke
Cooper. “The claim that a person chooses to be gay or lesbian has been
discredited by every major professional medical organization, starting
with the American Psychological Association and the American Medical
Association. An individual’s orientation is no more a choice than the
color of his skin or whether he is left-handed, and too many people have
been hurt because of failed attempts to change the way they were born.”

“I would also be happy to discuss my experiences as a current Army
reserve officer and combat veteran, and the testimony of military
leadership that the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ strengthens our
armed forces and furthers America’s national security interests. It is
unfortunate that Mr. Cain chose to divert attention away from a solid
platform of greater liberty and smaller government by indulging in
anti-gay rhetoric. Log Cabin Republicans sincerely hope that Herman Cain
is open to hearing the evidence and changing his mind on these issues.”

But better than I could point out Cain's other inconsistencies and hypocrisies and failures to base his position on facts (or reason), and there are MANY of them is.......who else, but the inimitable satirists on the Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2012 - Rising Cain
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Oh, well - at least Herman Cain (or Herbert Cain, as 'Sandra'/ Sarah Palin likes to call him - another person who doesn't have much acquaintance with facts - has replaced both Palin and Bachmann as the token Right Wing minority first tier candidate. Because with statements like this, we can hardly take him as anything but a token.  These are not the statements of a serious person.

I think this one might be my favorite though, of all of the many inconsistencies and fact-free  claims of Herman Cain:

I was particularly struck by Cain's observations, about 6 minutes into the interview, that tries to argue that Hank Williams Jr. did not intend to make a comparison between Obama and Hitler because he did not name Obama specifically. Williams in the interview makes it very clear that he is referring to a specific event and specific people, including Obama. Further, he references Obama by name in other parts of that same interview as the person to whom he refers. This is not just being disconnected from fact and reality, it is intellectually dishonest.

Don't even get me started on all the problems with his 9-9-9 economic proposals for which Cain is reluctant to provide any names for consultants.  That is a joke, and not a very funny one.  It is not a seroius economic proposal, except perhaps in the mind of Herman Cain.  Or.......Herbert Cain.

Florida Straw Poll - Herman Cain

In case we needed more proof.

Herman Cain Wins Florida Straw Poll