Herman Cain Suspends Presidential Campaign 3DEZ11

herman cain at a press conference....." I swear I never touched that woman down there......Oh, did you ask me about Libya?????" 

by The Associated Press

Enlarge Scott Olson/Getty Images Herman Cain and his wife Gloria Cain arrive at a speech in Atlanta where Cain announced he would be suspending his presidential campaign. He said he will continue to promote his 9-9-9 tax plan around the country.

The Cain train has come to a stop.
Herman Cain suspended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Saturday following a steady drumbeat of sexual misconduct allegations he said were harming his family and drowning out his ability to deliver his message.

So one of the first declarations that I want to make to you today is that I am at peace with my God. I am at peace with my wife. And she is at peace with me.

- Herman Cain

With just one month to go until the lead-off Iowa caucuses, Cain's announcement is tantamount to a concession. Still, he told supporters, he planned to continue his efforts to influence Washington and announced "Plan B" what he called a grassroots effort to return government to the people.
Cain denounced the accusations of impropriety against him as "false and unproven" but said that they had been hurtful to his family, particularly his wife, Gloria.
"So as of today, with a lot of prayer and soul-searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign. I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distractions and the continued hurt caused on me and my family," a tired-looking Cain told about a 400 supporters.
It was a remarkable turnabout for a man that just weeks ago vaulted out of nowhere to the top of the GOP field, fueled by a populist, outsider appeal and his catchy 9-9-9 tax overhaul plan.
Saturday's event was a bizarre piece of political theater even for a campaign that has seemed to thrive on defying convention.
Cain marked the end of his bid at what was supposed to be the grand opening of his new campaign headquarters in Atlanta. Minutes before he took the stage to pull the plug with his wife, Gloria, at his side, aides and supporters took to the podium to urge attendees to vote for Cain and travel to early voting states to rev up support for his bid.
"Join the Cain train," David McCleary, Cain's Georgia director, urged the audience.
Cain said he would offer an endorsement in the near future and he predicted a scramble among Republicans in the field to win the backing of his conservative, Tea Party base.
Former GOP rivals quickly issued statements Saturday praising Cain's conservative credentials and appeal. His withdrawal could help those seeking to run as an alternative to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, seen by some as too moderate.
Cain's announcement came five days after an Atlanta-area woman claimed she and Cain had an affair for more than a decade, a claim that followed several allegations of sexual harassment against the Georgia businessman.
"Now, I have made many mistakes in life. Everybody has. I've made mistakes professionally, personally, as a candidate, in terms of how I run my campaign. And I take responsibility for the mistakes I've made, and I have been the very first to own up to any mistakes I've made," he said.
But Cain intoned: "I am at peace with my God. I am at peace with my wife. And she is at peace with me."
Cain, the former Godfather's Pizza chief executive who has never held elected office, rose just weeks ago to lead the volatile Republican race. But Cain fumbled policy questions, leaving some to wonder whether he was ready for the presidency. Then it was revealed at the end of October that the National Restaurant Association had paid settlements to two women who claimed Cain sexually harassed them while he was president of the organization.
A third woman told The Associated Press that Cain made inappropriate sexual advances but that she didn't file a complaint. A fourth woman also stepped forward to accuse Cain of groping her in a car in 1997.
Cain has denied wrongdoing in all cases, and continued to do so Saturday.
Polls suggest his popularity has suffered. A Des Moines Register poll released Friday showed Cain's support plunging, with backing from 8 percent of Republican caucusgoers in Iowa, compared with 23 percent a month ago.
But Cain said Saturday he would not go away and would continue trying to influence Washington from the outside,
He announced the formation of CainSolutions.com, which he said was a grassroots effort to bring government back to the people.
"I am not going to be silenced, and I am not going away. And therefore, as of today, Plan B. Plan B," he said.

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Zach Wahls Speaks About Family 3FEB11

SPEAKING of family (my post below, THANKSGIVING 2011 & TATTOO) check out this amazing speech by Zach Wahls....And consider that right now the republican party's presidential party front runners are a man who has cheated on two of his wives, one while she was dying from cancer, and is now on his third marriage (newt gingrich), one who is married but is facing accusations of sexually harassing several women and having a 13 year extramarital affair with a Georgia woman (herman cain), and one who's faith claims to reject polygamy but in practice tolerates and even protects it in Utah (mitt romney). This is the party, repiglicans and tea-baggers, who rants and raves about the threat civil unions and gay marriage poses to the American family and yet at the moment seem poised to nominate and vote for one of these three men for president of the United States.......  
Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa student spoke about the strength of his family during a public forum on House Joint Resolution 6 in the Iowa House of Representatives. Wahls has two mothers, and came to oppose House Joint Resolution 6 which would end civil unions in Iowa.

Herman Cain's Plan to Double Your Taxes from MOTHER JONES & There is no such thing as the 9-9-9 tax from WAPO13OKT11

Herman Cain's tax plan will cost the poor, working class and middle class more in taxes, it is that simple. This from Mother Jones followed by an in depth analysis by Ezra Klein of The Washington Post.....

The University of Southern California's Edward Kleinbard performs the thankless task of trying to figure out the actual impact of Herman Cain's 9/9/9 campaign slogan cum tax plan, and he comes up with the following. Warning: It gets a little complicated:

Now let's put the three taxes together. Starting with $100 of pretax firm-level gross income available to pay salaries, the employee receives $91 in wages, and the firm pays $9 in "business flat tax." The employee then pays $8.19 in "individual flat tax" (9 percent of $91.00). Finally, the employee incurs a $7.45 further tax (the sales tax, measured as 9 percent of $82.81 in post-flat tax cash available for consumption), leaving her with $75.36 after all federal taxes to invest or spend. That represents a 24.6 percent all-in tax on the firm's gross income attributable to the employee's added value. Converting the $24.64 in total tax to a payroll tax equivalent, by comparing that tax to the $91 in salary the employee receives, yields a payroll tax equivalent rate of 27 percent ($24.64/$91).

In other words, when you take a look at the actual effect of the three different parts of Cain's plan, they all act similarly to a flat payroll tax. And the three parts add up to 27 percent. This means that if you're an average worker who spends most of your paycheck each month (in other words, virtually all of us), you'll be paying 27 percent of your income in federal taxes under Cain's plan. This compares to a current federal tax burden of about 14 percent for an average family.
Bottom line: If you make, say, $50,000 a year, your current total federal tax burden is about $7,000. Under Herman Cain's plan, it would be about $13,000. Even if you tweak the numbers a bit to make up for different measurement methodologies, that's a big difference.
So here's Herman Cain's new slogan: If you want to double your federal taxes, vote for me! I know I'm not a conservative and can't really pretend to understand what conservatives want, but I'm pretty sure this is not a tea party winner.
Via Ezra Klein, who adds the obvious point that Cain's 9/9/9 plan isn't a real plan anyway; it's just a brief set of bullet points. Which is just another way of saying that it's a joke.

There is no such thing as the 9-9-9 tax 

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post

Let’s get something straight: There is no 9-9-9 plan. Not, at least, in the sense that most people think there is.
Herman Cain has not proposed three entirely separate taxes -- one a 9 percent corporate income tax, another a 9 percent consumption tax, and then a final 9 percent personal income tax. Rather, he has proposed an 18-9 plan: an 18 percent consumption tax and a 9 percent personal income tax. Or maybe he has proposed a 27 plan: a straight 27 percent payroll tax on wage income. Depends on which tax professor you ask and how deep into the details you want to go.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain (Jim Cole - AP) As Daniel Shaviro, a tax professor at New York University, notes, “a key part of 9-9-9’s intuitive appeal is the idea that, not only is 9 a low number, but the plan’s three 9’s appear to be spread out.” The only problem? The business tax and the sales tax are “effectively the same tax.”
The business tax is not a corporate income tax. It’s essentially a value-added tax. And a value-added tax is simply a form of a consumption tax. To tax wonks, this is comedy gold. Here they have spent years arguing whether a sales tax or a VAT tax is the better way to tax consumption, and Cain just went ahead and put both taxes in his plan. “So two of the 9’s in the Cain plan are simply redundant versions of almost the same thing,” writes Shaviro. That’s how you get to an 18 percent consumption tax.
But if you go deeper with the tax wonks, they’ll tell you that in the long run, all income is spent. This is the really long run we’re talking about here, to be fair. This is a long run that can last multiple lifetimes, as a father passes on savings to his more spendthrift kids, who hand it over to their more spendthrift kids. But in that world, Shaviro says, “a wage and a consumption tax are ultimately the same. Wages are ultimately spent. I guess you could burn your wages. but otherwise, you’ll spend them.”
That’s how USC tax professor Edward Kleinbard, in an extremely thorough analysis, can conclude that “the 9-9-9 thus replaces current law’s payroll tax and income tax with a new system that is the economic equivalent of a 27 percent payroll tax on employees.”
Yikes. It’s fairly well understood that in our current tax system, the income tax is progressive, in that the rich pay more and the poor pay less, and the payroll tax is regressive. Cain’s system is that system on steroids: There’s no longer a progressive income tax; all there is is a regressive payroll tax. A huge regressive payroll tax. “The 9-9-9 Plan would mean a huge tax hike for the working poor and middle class,” writes Kleinbard. Bruce Bartlett makes it even more straightforward: “The 47 percent of tax filers who now pay no federal income taxes will pay 9 percent on their total income,” not to mention another 18 percent on the goods they purchase.
So what does Cain say about this? Well, usually he deflects the question. But my colleague Jennifer Rubin got his economic adviser Rich Lowrie to confront it directly. And Lowrie says that this just wasn’t something he or Cain was interested in when developing the 9-9-9 plan. He called it “Washington thinking” to worry about who would pay how much under the new system, and he “repeatedly refused to say how much more of the tax burden would be borne by the poor and middle class.”
There are other problems and oddities in the plan. For instance: Cain says it’s just a step on the way to implementing “the FairTax” proposal. But as Bartlett writes, “whatever one thinks of the Fair Tax, it makes not the slightest bit of sense to have a plan that requires fundamental changes to the federal tax system twice to achieve its objective.”
Moreover, the plan has all sorts of inconsistencies, obvious oversights and simple mistakes: Cain’s plan doesn’t allow employers to deduct the cost of their wages; he does allow them to make a tax shelter out of borrowing money to pay dividends; and he uses a sales tax, which is notoriously easy to game. Indeed, the plan’s holes loom so large that Kleinbard, in a dryly humorous section, explains that he’ll pass on assessing portions of the plan, such as its treatment of interest income, because he assumes they are an “inadvertent error.” The opportunities for tax evasion would be dramatic.
Which gets to perhaps the main way in which there is no 9-9-9 plan: This plan wouldn’t work. Not as policy and, as I expect Cain will soon find out, not as politics. Moving to an 18 percent consumption tax is, among other things, very bad for older voters, who make up a substantial portion of the Tea Party base. Jacking up taxes on the poor and the middle class even as you sharply reduce them on the rich and completely eliminate them on overseas income for corporations isn’t popular among anyone in the political system who isn’t specifically paid by the Club for Growth. The 9-9-9 plan is a great slogan. But the more seriously Cain gets taken, the more seriously the plan is going to get taken. And as that happens, it will soon become clear that it’s very poor policy.

The Republican Spectrum of Ignorance from HUFFPOST 6JUL11

WELL SAID! From HuffPost.....

Republicans and conservatives make it really, really difficult for us to avoid focusing on their lapses in intelligence. And with a conga-line of top shelf Republicans front and center for the 2012 presidential nomination, we're being treated to more examples of nitwittery from these people.
In the last six or seven months alone, there are enough examples of Republicans botching very basic ideas and facts to fill volumes of "Bushism" style novelty calendars.
Sarah Palin, the matriarch of Republican idiocy, didn't just botch the Paul Revere story. Among a variety of other gaffes on Twitter ("cackle of rads?") and elsewhere, she has repeatedly botched the First Amendment suggesting it protects radio show hosts and others from offended citizens. Both John Boehner and Herman Cain have confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. Eric Cantor tried to pass a bill that would somehow magically become law with just a House vote, and this magical law would inexplicably force a separate bill to also magically become law without a Senate vote, a conference committee or a presidential signature. Speaking of lawmaking, Herman Cain wants bills that are three pages or less -- presumably with cartoony illustrations by Richard Scarry. Michele Bachmann thinks John Quincy Adams is a founding father and mistakenly linked her campaign with creepy clown/killer John Wayne Gacy. The list goes on and on.
That's not to say all modern conservatives are stupid. I simply don't subscribe to the crowd-pleasing notion that they're idiots.
However, there's a spectrum of anti-intellectualism on the right, and that's a fact. The Republican Spectrum of Ignorance runs the gamut from "genuinely smart but wrong" on one extreme to "genuinely stupid" on the other with various points in between. (The categories can be overlapped, Venn Diagram style, and applied to specific conservative players.)
The categories:
Genuinely Smart but Wrong. These are modern conservatives who are, as the category title suggests, very well-educated and bright, and therefore an endangered species. They can construct coherent thoughts and they try to be intellectually honest in constructing their arguments. But where they fall short is their adherence to ideology. Despite, for example, generally agreed-upon economic arguments about stimulating job creation, they'll insist that tax cuts and spending cuts that impact the middle and working classes are the only solution even though tax cuts do not stimulate job or economic growth, and spending cuts actually make things worse.
Deliberately Ignorant. This brand of conservative exploits the idea that voters want leaders who remind them of themselves -- someone they can have a beer with -- so they deliberately act like slack-jawed yokels at every opportunity. But just below the surface, they're very clever and calculating. Irrespective of political affiliation, we shouldn't want leaders who are just like us, or, for that matter, a random shit-kicker at the bar. We ought to instinctively demand leaders who are better, smarter and more disciplined -- times a thousand. But Republican voters disagree. And so they get these phony-baloney hacks posing as ordinary yickadoos.
Un- or Miseducated. These conservatives are often the ones who botch general knowledge trivia and historical facts, or who don't understand how basic democracy works. I've coined the term "miseducated" here to encompass politicians like Michele Bachmann who, while she studied tax law at William & Mary, obviously missed out on proper history classes during her education. They believe that secession is somehow a noble pursuit despite the fact that 600,000 Americans were killed the last time it was attempted. They don't get it because they never learned it -- or they mislearned it. George W. Bush had extensive schooling but didn't really study because he didn't have to. His family name carried him through his higher education.
Incompetent and Incapable. George W. Bush and Sarah Palin also fit squarely in this category of conservative anti-intellectualism. While Palin, for example, might have been given information by her advisers about the role of the vice president or tidbits about Paul Revere and bell-ringing of some sort, she utterly scrambled the re-telling of that information, which exposed her general incompetence. If you're unable to capably regurgitate information, you really have no place in a role that's almost entirely dependent upon communicating ideas. And if you can't communicate ideas, there's even less of a chance you'll be able to come up with passable ideas of your own, making you increasingly susceptible to the ambitions and political machinations of your advisers.
Genuinely Stupid. At the far end of the spectrum, this category speaks for itself. These Republicans fortuitously stumbled their way into elected office or the news media due to their congeniality or money or both despite being dumber than a sack of Jell-o.
The wild card category is, simply put, Crazy. Going back to Michele Bachmann, I don't think she's stupid. I think she's crazy. Not in the clinical sense (which is her own business), but specifically with regards to her radical ideas blended together with her miseducation -- a concoction that makes her so far removed from even the fringes of the mainstream that I can't believe she's actually being taken seriously as a presidential candidate.
So it stands to reason that a massive assault against our system of public education has been a priority of modern conservatism during this era of incomprehensible austerity.
For Republicans, education and intellectualism is the enemy of their wafer-thin bumper-sticker marketing strategy, and so denying people an affordable education has become a matter of survival for the Republican Party. An uninformed voter can be manipulated by sloganeering and trickery. A smarter voter is more likely to see through shallow appeals to fear and transparently deceptive marketing schemes.
On another level, Republicans insist the federal government should stay out of the business of education (considering the Republican effort to privatize education, "business" was used here intentionally) and leave it up to the states, yet Republicans nationwide are slashing education budgets at the state level. Pennsylvania's Republican governor Tom Corbett proposed cutting $825 million from the state's higher education budget. Florida's Republican governor (and Middle Earth gangrel creature) Rick Scott proposed $1.75 billion in cuts to K-12. Chris Christie cut the New Jersey education budget by $812 million, while protecting tax rates for the super rich. Fortunately, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled the cuts to be unconstitutional.
Progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann reported on the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling in this video. While I'm here, it's worth noting that Hartmann is a phenomenon. A Renaissance man of the highest order and a personality who conservatives would do well to pay attention to. As the host of the most popular nationally syndicated liberal radio show, and the host of a daily TV show, Hartmann, much like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, possesses a killer mixture of both passion and stone cold wonk, informed by a strong academic background. And, unlike many Republican media personalities, Hartmann treats conservatives directly and fairly on his show, even though he routinely (and politely) shreds their myopia by employing a wicked sharp, encyclopedic grasp of history, facts and reality. I don't hear any Republicans doing the same, and I'm not holding my breath. Instead, on the right, we most often tend to hear repackaged fiction torn from the pages of modern conservatism's answer to L. Ron Hubbard, the atheist fiction author and socialized Medicare recipient Ayn Rand, who is worshipped by everyone from Rand Paul (named after Ayn Rand) to Alan Greenspan to Paul Ryan and the bulk of the tea party.
There are very obvious solutions to both increasing funds for public education as well as improving it. Rather than the trendy move towards right-leaning reforms proposed by Michelle Rhee or "Rhee-form" (get it?) it makes better sense to pursue reforms proposed by education specialists like Steve Edwards. Edwards' plan includes increased emphasis on developing leadership skills and de-emphasizing both testing and conformity. But primarily, Edwards suggests tailoring reforms to specific community needs, and to subsequently adjust those reforms as the community demographics shift, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach rigidly foisted upon both city and suburban schools. As the principal of East Hartford High School in East Hartford, Connecticut, Edwards reforms significantly improved graduation rates, reduced suspensions and drop-outs, and even reduced the number of fights by half. A breath of fresh air to say the least. So what are we waiting for?
Progressives and Democrats need to shout the following question into every microphone available: Who is best able to contribute to deficit reduction: the super rich or our embattled public school system? The single most effective antidote to our national decline is education. It stimulates the economy over the long run, it encourages innovation, it resurrects the American dream and the middle class and, most importantly, it encourages informed civic participation. Clearly an array of benefits the Republicans and modern conservatives are merrily against as they undermine education in lieu of tax cuts for Koch Brothers and Donald Trump.
The Republicans are welcome to act like idiots as a means of pandering to dumbstupids. Just leave the rest of us alone. America needs more smarties, and I don't think we can afford to wait for the right-wing to catch up to speed.
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