Month: October 2011

National Review takes aim at Cain's tax plan. Wilkinson piles on:

Why would you propose to raise taxes on the poor, making yourself vulnerable to charges of monstrous callousness, when, as the NR editors note, your ultimate plan would only cut them later? Well, you wouldn't, if you knew what you were doing. It requires only superficial examination to see that Mr Cain's 9-9-9/Fair Tax scheme is more an ill-considered, hand-waving improvisation than a serious plan from a serious policymaker. He's winging it, which I suppose makes it all the more impressive that he's been able to wing it all the way to pre-eminence in a few polls. But now he's made himself a target, and an easy one at that, so I doubt Mr Cain will wing it all the way to the nomination.

From the quite creative tumblr Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses, via Drawn.

Endorsements:

As best I can tell, the most prominent conservative voice to endorse Cain is … Dennis Miller. Unlike Romney and Perry, Cain just doesn’t have any elected officials and party leaders who are widely known and generally respected by the GOP base making his case.

His campaign-stop strategy could use some work too:

One wonders if Cain’s campaign has any idea what it’s doing. This past weekend, Cain took a bus trip through Tennessee (a March 6 Super Tuesday primary state, really?) from Memphis, his birthplace, in the west all the way to Cookeville in the east. Such counterintuitive campaigning suggests Cain’s schedule is determined as much by random chance as by political strategy (though opportunities to sell autographed copies of his book at $100 a pop seem to make it onto the schedule). This is not the way to win a Republican nomination, particularly one that seems to have growing value by the day.

"Vocations," designed to boost recruitment to the priesthood in Ireland. Yes, it's come to that.

They're college know-it-all hippies:

Henry Schleifer thinks the 10% chance Intrade is giving him is too low:

Mitt Romney is not as strong as he seems. Yes he has done well in debates. Yes he has looked the most presidential. But he has yet to take any body blows on his Massachusetts mandate and he still does not crack 25% in most polls.

The most troubling part of the polling is that while Perry’s support has fallen, it has gone to Herman Cain and not to Romney. Cain is merely a placeholder for the most conservative voters who right now are dwelling on Governor Perry’s immigration stand. These voters will come home to Perry – after all Cain is more intent on hawking his book rather than campaigning in the early primary states.

E.J. Dionne adds:

All the political logic says that, well, this is now Romney’s race to lose. I just can’t believe that (1) it’s over this early or (2) that the entire pundit class (myself included) can be right in pegging Romney as the winner already.

A couple days ago, Cain said he wants a deadly electrified fence on the border. After outrage at his remarks, he claimed he was joking. Now he says he isn't ruling out an electric fence but that he doesn't want anyone to be offended:

Kevin Drum expects the issue will be raised in tonight's debate:

First: What do you think Herman Cain will say about this? Second: with plenty of time to prepare, what do you think Rick Perry will say about it? Will he be able to string together 30 seconds worth of coherent thoughts on the issue? Or will he screw up completely as he usually does?

"Round up [Gilad Shalit's] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose," – Rachel Abrams, neocon doyenne, on the release of Gilad Shalit.

Award glossary here.

Don't watch hungry:

(Hat tip: BF)

The American Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce is not amused by "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan," for reasons best explained by this Dish reader.