Coulter: Our Negroes are Better Than Your Negroes

mAnn Coulter is at it again. Check this out:

Did you know that Coulter has a new book out, so she's making the rounds of the Wingnut Media to flog it?

“That’s why our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” Coulter said. “To become a black Republican you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.”
“Our blacks?” ….oops, sorry. Thought the calendar just rolled back to 1861.
. . .
Perhaps Coulter would like to debate a fellow Republican on this. How about former Republican Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — herself on book tour. She was asked about Cain in an interview to be broadcast Wednesday on CBS’ “Early Show.” Her advice: Don’t play the race card.

Go ahead and read the whole story and come away shaking your head at the over-the-top musings of the Republican Party's only known transexual yapping mouth.

Jeez, I'd love it if she just went away, and took Herman "I Don't Know" Cain with her.

The Constitution? It's Just a Piece of Paper

Remember when Dubya made that statement? His actual words were "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!", an appalling statement that I wrote about at the time.

And that's evidently what current Rethug front-runner, former pizza chef chief and full time cynical manipulator of the low-information voter Herman Cain thinks as well. He's a little more slick than Baby Doc, but he is either woefully misinformed on exactly what is in the constitution, or he's pandering to the Rethug base.

Why else would he make so many egregious constitutional errors in his speeches, in his off-the-cuff remarks, such as these:

• Pledging to “sign” a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion if he is elected president: Actually, presidents have no duties at all when it comes to amendments.
• Confusing Founding Documents: In his speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency, Cain lectured the nation to “reread the Constitution.” Rather than take his own advice, however, Cain quoted the Constitution as saying that “when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Those words are not in the Constitution, although a very similar phrase appears in the Declaration of Independence, which, in case Cain is not aware, is actually an entirely different document than the Constitution.
• Banning Worship: As part of a wide-ranging campaign of hate against Islam, Cain claimed that local communities have a right to ban mosques. The Constitution disagrees. It forbids laws restricting the “free exercise” of a person’s faith.
• No More Medicare or Medicaid: During his time as a talk radio host, Cain claimed that absolutely every single line of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. One problem with this radical view is that if Congress cannot subsidize health care — one of the key functions of the ACA — then Medicare and Medicaid are also unconstitutional.
• Unrepealable Laws: Cain doesn’t just support a radical tax plan that would create the largest deficits since World War II, slash taxes on the wealthy and jack up taxes on the poor, he proposed effectively locking that plan in place permanently. The Constitution forbids lawmakers from preventing their successors from repealing new laws.
• Letting Arizona Start A War: Cain also wants to give each state the power to set its own immigration policy. The Constitution, however, leaves immigration almost entirely up to the national government because immigration policy is so closely tied to foreign policy. Nations have gone to war over another nation’s treatment of their citizens, so no one state should have the ability to force the entire United States into this kind of conflict.

And I believe that this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to that vast but empty storehouse of knowledge residing in the brain of Cain. But, since there is virtually zero chance that he will actually become president, I think we can relax.

Actually the Cain campaign is nothing more than a public relations tour designed to sell more books and get higher speaker's fees from the frothing wingnut morons who are willing to pay this joker for the privilege of being snookered by his moronic but undoubtedly charismatic snake oil.

Looking More Closely at Herman Cain

Now that Herman Cain's star has, kind of by default, started to rise, I think a closer look at him is warranted.

Especially that 666 999 tax plan of his.

Bruce Bartlett, a senior Republican economist and long-time associate of the likes of Ronald Reagan, George Bush I, Jack Kemp and Ron Paul, has some impressive credentials to bring to the discussion, and he recently had a column in the NY Times, Inside the Cain Tax Plan:

Little detail has been released by the Cain campaign, so it’s impossible to do a thorough analysis. But using what is available on Mr. Cain’s Web site, I’m taking a stab at estimating its effects.
First, the 9-9-9 plan is actually an intermediate step in Mr. Cain’s plan to overhaul the tax system and jump-start growth. Phase 1 would reduce individual and business taxes to a maximum of 25 percent, which I assume means reducing the top statutory tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent.
No mention is made on the site of a tax cut for those now in the 10 percent, 15 percent or 25 percent brackets. This means that the only people who would get a tax rate cut are those now in the 28 percent, 33 percent or 35 percent brackets. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only 4 percent of taxpayers pay any taxes at those rates.
. . .
This means that the 47 percent of tax filers who now pay no federal income taxes will pay 9 percent on their total income. And elimination of the payroll tax won’t even help half of them because the earned income tax credit, which Mr. Cain would abolish, offsets both their income tax liability and their payroll tax payment as well.
Additionally, everyone would now pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases. No mention is made of any exemptions from this tax, so we may assume that it will apply to food, medical care, rent, home and auto purchases and a wide variety of other expenditures now exempt from state sales taxes. This would increase their cost of living by 9 percent while, at the same time, the poor would pay income taxes.
. . .
And here’s the kicker in the Cain plan. Phase 2 is merely a transition to yet another fundamental tax reform. In Phase 3, the United States would adopt the so-called Fair Tax, which would replace all federal taxes with a 30 percent [!!!] sales tax on all goods and services.
...
At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distributional monstrosity. The poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase.

Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.

Got that? THIRTY percent tax on all goods and services. Memo to Herman Cain, who as a "business executive" pizza vendor, ought to know this: Our capitalist society is based on buying stuff, and if you put in place a tax that increases the price of that "stuff" by one third, then people are going to buy less of it. And there go the jobs (and this time they just disappear, instead of being outsourced to some Third World country), along with any chance of recovery, along with the very fabric of our society.

This is not rocket surgery. I learned this fifty years ago, way back in Econ 101. The real question is why didn't Herman Cain learn it?

News Flash: Herman Cain IS Black

Herman Cain, famous for his incomprehensible "999" plan (just turn them upside down and you'll get -- gasp --- 666!) has finally found his "black" voice.

Seems Rick Perry's dad leased some land in Texas near a rock formation known locally as "N****rhead", which was painted on the rock. However, it seems that it had been painted over some 20+ years ago and finally it was turned completely over so no one can see even where it had been.

End of story, you'd think Not for old Herman, though. He came right out and called it "troubling" and "insensitive".

All of which led the Perry campaign to fight back. Yadda yadda yadda.

How about all the black prisoners that Perry executed? Whattaya got to say about that, Herman?

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's the mark of a desperate campaign when they have to trot out a non-issue from a quarter century ago and try to make a big deal of it.

The name itself dates from a distant time, when geographical names were not by any stretch of the imagination "politically correct". It's a sad commentary on the way things used to be. In the state of Washington we've had any number of racist and/or sexually suggestive place names, e.g., Squaw Tit Mountain, Cock Rock, etc. Those have all been changed now, and Cock Rock -- so named because it resembled a giant erect penis -- has been changed to the neutral "Rooster Rock", which leaves most people wondering what happened to all of the roosters.