It's not conservative to trash the entire system of funding the federal government and replace it with something concocted more out of numerology than economics.... but Michelle Cottle really makes the connection:
In Chapter Nine of This Is Herman Cain—entitled “‘Forty-Five’—A Special Number,” Cain notes that his “conception, gestation, and birth all occurred within” the year 1945 (true of pretty much anyone born in the last three months of that year). He then launches into a detailed account of how “45 keeps on popping up as I go about the business of being elected—you guessed it—as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.”
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, ... said, “There are manifestations in the movement of anti-Semitism, but they are not expressing or representing a larger view.”Foxman observed that polls show that 1 in 6 Americans think Jews have too much political and economic power: “So it’s not surprising that in a movement that deals with economic issues you’re going to get bigots that believe in this stereotype....."
There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society....
Instead of talking about a fair share or spending time trying to push those at the top down, elected leaders in Washington should be trying to ensure that everyone has a fair shot and the opportunity to earn success up the ladder. The goal shouldn’t be for everyone to meet in the middle of the ladder....
We must ensure that those who abuse the rules are punished. We must ensure that the solution to wealth disparity is wealth mobility. We must give everyone the chance to move up. Stability plus mobility equals agility. In an agile economy and an agile society, people are climbing and succeeding.
Unlike a clear constitutional holding that racial preferences in state educational institutions are impermissible, or even a clear anticonstitutional holding that racial preferences in state educational institutions are OK, today’s Grutter-Gratz split double header seems perversely designed to prolong the controversy and the litigation.Ah... notice the baseball. There's baseball in the above-linked article too. Asked by his Chicago audience "White Sox or Cubs?," Scalia said "Yankees."
Stein hates commas passionately. I wish she were just a little more fond of them, LOL. Even I have a nagging desire to insert commas in her prose!
Commas are servile and have no life of their own... what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma.She uses them instead of question marks, though, because she hates them even more! She says the question mark looks like "a brand on cattle."
After Carlos finished speaking to the group huddled together by the Occupy Madison camp in Veterans Park, listeners purchased the new book he co-wrote with sportswriter Dave Zirin, titled The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World.And that's what it's all about, kids: taking a real serious stand against a lot of issues. And moving merchandise.
John Pope waited in a short line for Carlos to autograph his copy. "[Carlos] was at the top of his athletic prowess and instead of coming home as a hero, he came home as someone who was despised by a lot of people because he took a real serious stand against a lot of issues," he said.
Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair — Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing — received us with perfect equanimity.Doesn't that sentence make you feel like diagramming it... just for fun?
A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park -- keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.
“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.
“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.
Hessler — who ironically is married to a banker — arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.Hey, check the dashes: "— who ironically is married to a banker —." Ironic? Or not ironic at all? It's just what you'd expect if you were reading a novel about a woman married to a banker. Stacey Hessler immediately called to mind Mrs. Jellyby. Remember Mrs. Jellyby? She's a minor character in "Bleak House." Here's a summary/spoiler:
[Mrs. Jellyby] resolutely devotes every waking hour to the “Borrioboola-Gha venture.” The reader never discovers the details of the endeavor except that it involves the settlement of impoverished Britons among African natives with the goal of supporting themselves through coffee growing.Like a sentence with well-deployed dashes, it all comes together in the end.
Mrs. Jellyby is convinced that no other undertaking in life is so worthwhile, or would solve so many problems at a stroke. Dickens’s interest is not in the project, however, but rather in Mrs. Jellyby, who is so wedded to her work that she has no time for her several children, with the exception of Caddy, a daughter she has conscripted as her secretary. Ink-spattered Caddy puts in nearly as many hours as her mother in the daily task of answering letters and sending out literature about Borrioboola-Gha.
Caddy, however, has come to hate the very word “Africa” or any word that has the remotest suggestion of causes. For her, causes simply mean the ruin of family life. Mrs. Jellyby’s husband eventually becomes suicidal and, though surviving despair, is last seen in the book with his head resting despondently on a wall.
In the book’s postscript, we discover that the Borrioboola-Gha project failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers into slavery in order to buy rum. Mrs. Jellyby quickly found another cause to occupy her time, “a mission with more correspondence than the old one,” thus providing a happy ending for a permanent campaigner.
Is your doctor open to alternative medicine?...The rest of the column is about turmeric — the spice — and after a fair amount of blather, you get to this:
Research shows that despite longstanding resistance, alternative medicine is gaining ground in some doctors’ offices too. A study by Harvard Medical School in May found that one in 30 Americans — as many as six million people — used an alternative therapy after a doctor recommended it, and a recent report in the journal Health Services Research found that doctors and nurses are increasingly likely to try alternative or complementary medicines themselves.
But what are doctors using, and which alternative and complementary medicines would they trust enough to recommend to a patient or use in their practice? In a new occasional series, Well will talk to doctors around the country to find out what nontraditional medicines or therapies they sometimes recommend or use themselves.
A study published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2009 compared the active ingredient in turmeric, curcumin, with ibuprofen for pain relief in 107 people with knee osteoarthritis. The curcumin eased pain and improved function about as well as the ibuprofen....So, there is a specific chemical and it's been studied and proven effective. As the 3d comment over there says: "With that scientific proof it is not alternative therapy."
“It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however... “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued.Notice the consistent theme: avoiding the conventional. (The Apple slogan was "Think Different." )
When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments.
The idea of that, and how quote-unquote friends can really hurt each other deeply, and the idea that the enemy is out there somewhere, but really, where we get hurt usually comes from people we are close to. So “Cornflake Girl” really was about two women, that one felt that the other had really betrayed her.The inspiration came from Alice Walker’s book "The Temple Of My Familiar":
In the book, they talked about how young girls would be taken to a place for female circumcision, whether it was out in the desert of Africa or what have you, usually by somebody they trusted. A mother, a grandmother, somebody they loved, and of course the person that was doing this to them, taking them to the whatever you want to call it, the hacker or the mutilator, thought that they were doing the right thing, or else the girl wouldn’t be able to get married. They justify their betrayal, and that was really what prompted the idea of “Cornflake Girl.”But wait, says Adam (at Throwing Things), what about that story about how "she beat out Sarah Jessica Parker to star in an ad for Kellogg's Just Right cereal?"
“National Merit has developed a kind of grandeur that is misguided,” said Lawrence Momo, director of college counseling at the private Trinity School... “The mythology that has been created about it in the public imagination is overblown.”Dropping out of this test-based merit system because of racial/ethic disparities — assuming that's what's going on here — is distinctly different from adopting an affirmative action program to correct for disparities caused by the use of test scores in admissions.
[N]o modern law school can claim ignorance of the poor performance of blacks, relatively speaking, on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). Nevertheless, law schools continue to use the test and then attempt to “correct” for black underperformance by using racial discrimination in admissions so as to obtain their aesthetic student body... The Law School itself admits that the test is imperfect, as it must, given that it regularly admits students who score at or below 150 (the national median) on the test....Ending reliance on a standardized test is exactly the solution Clarence Thomas suggested. It does not classify individuals by race or ethnicity.
Having decided to use the LSAT, the Law School must accept the constitutional burdens that come with this decision. The Law School may freely continue to employ the LSAT and other allegedly merit-based standards in whatever fashion it likes. What the Equal Protection Clause forbids, but the Court today allows, is the use of these standards hand-in-hand with racial discrimination....
One student, who asked to remain anonymous, said "Misty Gaines" approached her on Library Mall saying she was depressed, three months pregnant and in an abusive relationship.$100! Was that her parents' hard-earned money she handed over?
The student, a sophomore, said she fell for the story and ultimately, "under pressure," gave Gaines $100 for a hotel, believing Gaines when she said all the Madison shelters were full.
Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.
“A rounder nail is more elegant,” celebrity manicurist Kimmie Kyees said in the LA Times. “But then there are some people who love a super square shape with pointy edges.” Kyees cited Kim Kardashian as one of the celebrities who sports square nails.Because it's not really about the male/female distinction here. It's about different types of women. Put down you sexism detector. Pick up your cattiness sensor.
But “Squared-off at the tip, her high-gloss french manicure never varies at all, and acrylic extensions help her to achieve lengths that are visible even from the nosebleed section,” wrote the Huffington Post’s Christina Wilkie and Lauren Rothman. “We’ve even heard them clickety-clacking against her debate podiums a few times, which means the rest of America heard it, too — even if they were unaware of where the noise was coming from.”
Unsurprisingly, there has been no discussion of the length, color or cleanliness of Bachmann’s opponents’ fingernails.
We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.From an essay involving an controversy about who won and who didn't win a literary prize, something I really don't care about. But the test... the test is interesting. I don't know whether it's right, and actually I don't care. What difference does it make, the definition of "literature"? Unless you care about the prize. But it seems interesting, even though I don't care if it succeeds in testing what it purports to test. And frankly, I think it's quite silly to care about the 2 capacities. It's a double aptitude test, looking backward at the capacity the writer brought to the project of writing the thing and forward to the increased capacity the reader took away from reading it. What about the reading itself?
Nobody blames maths for being difficult – and it isn't difficult – but it is different, and demands some time and effort. It is another kind of language. Literature is also another kind of language. I don't mean literature is obscure or rarefied or precious – that's no test of a book – rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation.
"She was very proud of that picture," Grace said of her mother. "If company was coming over, that light was going on. We would tease her. I used to call it the dartboard."Who would want it? (It's free.) Could a hipster decorator imbue it with irony by hanging it in the right way in the right place? Might an artist repaint it, adding bizarre and disturbing extra touches? Of course, a photographer could cut out the face and do portraits of people who stick their face through it. And the woman's own children already thought of using it as a target.
Irma was a beautiful woman. The portrait freezes her in her blond, blue-eyed prime and flowing satin dress. She is smiling and looking up and into the future.
Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.Just something I ran into when I Googled the phrase "mental furniture," which came up during the conversation excerpted in the previous post. We'd been talking about how people have opinions and beliefs that are like rooms that they've got arranged some way that they like or they're used to, and if you want to come in and say maybe the sofa would be better on the other side of the room, and they're not up for moving it over there to check your theory, well... you can understand how they feel.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Tuesday night, more than 50 law enforcement officials... patrolled the 40-acre (16-hectare) farm and the surrounding areas in cars and trucks, often in rainy downpours. [Muskingum County Sheriff Matt] Lutz said they were concerned about big cats and bears hiding in the dark and in trees.Here's some video.
I didn’t ask a lot of things. I didn’t need to. I just enjoyed the experience. I liked a painting called La Belle Cascade because it looked to me like one of Cézanne’s Bathers. And Cézanne’s Bathers are some of my favorite works of art: The paint is nice and thin, like it’s been applied directly on the wall of a Roman emperor’s home. I’m not sure of the time they’re set in—it could be any time. And the geometry is interesting. It’s real. The lines break up the space as if he was anticipating Cubism.Oh, really? Well, you know, speaking of geometry, did you hear about the time the geometry of innocence flesh on the bone caused Galileo’s math book to get thrown at Delilah who was sitting worthlessly alone? The tears on her cheeks were from laughter.
The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.It's obviously risky for Obama to identify too closely with these people, but there are also risks in distancing himself. If you look at the various statements by Obama and his advisers, I think you'll see that they have positioned themselves in the middle ground with the message: We understand the protests as an emotional expression about current economic conditions. There's no identification with the protesters' abstract ideology or policy proposals — which Schoen's polling may reveal, but which are not that apparent in the protests. So Obama may have the right strategy: Characterize the protests as inarticulate cries of pain about problems that are real and that affect all Americans.
Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda....
Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).
It all started in 1998. I was on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine, then a very classy and influential art quarterly, and one day in a meeting the editor of the magazine, Karen Wright, wondered out loud if there was a way we could introduce some fiction into the mix of artists' profiles, exhibition reviews and general essays in which the magazine specialised. I don't know what made me speak out but I said, without really thinking: "Why don't I invent an artist?" And so Nat Tate was born.So Boyd wrote his story, making Tate an Abstract Expressionist who gets depressed about his art after meeting Picasso* and ends up burning all his artwork and committing suicide.** Boyd allowed his fictional story to be published as a glossy art book with illustrations of artwork, and it was presented as if it were about a real artist. That it, it was a joke — the launch party was on an April Fool's Day 1998 — or, if you prefer, a hoax. People fell for it. The truth was revealed. Boyd professes himself hurt that it was called a hoax and not a joke. (Contemplate the hoax/joke distinction.)
If this fictional artist could sell an artwork for real money then the Nat Tate story would have reached some kind of apotheosis and consummation. So I "found" another Nat Tate drawing – one from his famous bridge sequence... Sotheby's had form when it came to selling art by fictional artists, having successfully auctioned a Bruno Hat painting some years previously. Hat was a spoof artist that a group of bright young things had invented in 1929 and staged an exhibition of his work in a London town-house.... Hook consulted with colleagues and in due course I was told the sale was on...Presumably, the form attends to all the incipient legal issues. If you go looking for closure, you surely don't want to touch off litigation. But the notion of closure is also fictional, no? I hadn't remembered the 12-year old story, and now I'm propagating it.
... Nat felt vastly more at ease with Braque than with Picasso and gladly accepted when Braque offered to show him around his studio. Braque was then reworking his painting La Terrasse, which he had begun some eleven years earlier, a fact that Tate found astonishing, not to say incomprehensible. He was also deeply moved and captivated by some of the smaller elongated landscapes and seascapes in the studio. Apparently Tate ventured the opinion that they reminded him of van Gogh’s late landscapes. After gently correcting Tate’s pronunciation (‘Van Go? Non, mon ami, jamais’), Braque commented that he ‘regarded van Gogh as a great painter of night.’ The observation seemed to trouble Nat unduly, as if it was prophetic or gnomic in some sinister way... There is a photograph of the fête champêtre that Nat and Barkasian had with Braque and his family and friends during that visit, taken by Barkasian, one assumes, as he is absent from the picture. Braque himself sits at the centre of the table, dappled with autumn sunshine, while the women of the household fuss over the food and the placement. Nat stands close to the master, on his left, a plate in his hand, almost as if he is about to serve him. But his gaze is unfocused, he looks out of frame, at something in the middle distance, or perhaps just lost in his darkening thoughts. Nothing would ever be the same again.So what was it about Braque that could drive you to suicide? His douchebag pronunciation of "Van Gogh"? His high school French? (I can talk French like that: Oui, mon ami, toujours!) Or was it the fact that — unlike an Abstract Expressionist — he fussed over a painting for 11 years, and — unlike an Abstract Expressionist — he maintained a calm and pretty domestic life? Dammit, that's it! I can't take it anymore!
"There is overwhelming evidence that the University of Wisconsin in engaging in racial and ethnic discrimination, and it should stop," Clegg told the committee during a tense hearing. "In a country like ours, the only system that will work is one that plays no racial favorites. Anything else is a recipe for disaster — for division, strife and balkanization."
Paul DeLuca Jr., UW-Madison provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, stressed that academic performance remains the key factor in admissions. At the same time, though, the school wants to build a diverse student body.Whether the University complies with the standard laid down in the Supreme Court case law is, of course, crucial, but the state legislature has the power to impose a stricter standard on the University (if it thinks that's a good idea). In addition, it's possible that the CEO plans to use this case to get affirmative action back into the Supreme Court with the hope of changing the legal doctrine.
He pointed out that Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen issued a 2007 opinion that found the school's admissions approach complied with a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that race can be one of many admission considerations. He also pointed out that only 14 percent of UW-Madison students are minorities....
Soon, “multiple personality disorder,” or MPD, became an officially recognized diagnosis, and a handful of cases exploded into 40,000 reported sufferers, nearly all of them female. The repressed-memory industry was born. Only in the last decade or so has the psychiatric profession begun to question the validity of Sybilmania.Why weren't we — and all those doctors — much more skeptical all along? It was a ridiculously lurid story —"scenes of Sybil’s demented mother defecating on lawns, conducting lesbian orgies and raping her daughter with kitchen utensils." Why did we believe that? And what other hoaxes are we believing?
“I'm really old-fashioned. I feel I have made my contribution," Clinton said. "I’m very grateful I’ve had a chance to serve, but I think it’s time for others to step up." Writing, teaching, and working on issues that affect women and girls will be in her future, Clinton assured NBC's Savannah Guthrie; that and relaxing at home.Mmm. Yeah. So... that means she's running, right?
She praised Obama for doing “an excellent job under the most difficult circumstances.”Yes. I see.
Clinton attributed her current popularity simply to her two decades in the public eye. “Because I have been on the public consciousness for so long and on the television screens and people's homes, I think there is a comfort,” Clinton said.Oh, there's comfort all right. Like I'm comfortable saying she's doing what she can right now to get to the presidency. It's a long, winding road. And right now, she's looking forward to helping women and girls... relaxing at home... shall we say: baking cookies?
Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media....Here's the searchable data base.
In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)...
We know that the original movement was kicked off by a Soros-funded group called Adbusters; that union groups and radicals routinely overthrow leadership unfriendly to an occupation of the occupation (check out how Occupy St. Louis was hijacked by ACORN off-shoot MORE); and now we know that media, including MSNBC itself, is apparently helping occupiers better influence the public by both writing their messages and giving them a platform.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski... said people often tell lies about themselves in day-to-day social interactions. He said it would be "terrifying" if people could be prosecuted for merely telling lies....
It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.
The Supreme Court was a fitting venue for this demonstration both to honor Dr. King and demonstrate solidarity with the #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement. As Dr. West said prior to being arrested, there is “a relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in Supreme Court decisions.”How is that "far greater detail"? With no reference to Supreme Court at all, it seems like less detail. Or by "detail," did Ms. Thisltethwaite mean verbosity? Thisltethwaite continues:
In Democracy Matters, West makes this point in far greater detail “(The) illicit marriage of corporate and political elites — so blatant and flagrant in our time — not only undermines the trust of informed citizens in those who rule over them. It also promotes the pervasive sleepwalking of the populace, who see that the false prophets are handsomely rewarded with money, status, and access to more power.” (p. 4)
Here’s the point: If you are content to think that corporations are people and money is speech, as the Supreme Court decided in the by a vote of 5-4, in their Citizens United v Federal Election Commission decision, then indeed you are sleepwalking through your citizenship and giving over your faith to false prophets.
I believe, when future accounts of this era are written, historians will judge that the wake up call for many people in America was in early 2010 with that Supreme Court decision. The winter of 2010 is what led to the #OWS demonstrations in the fall of 2011.
Can we as citizens accept this definition of person, and of speech? This is what Dr. West, by his action on the steps of the Supreme Court, is asking us to stop and ponder. Corporation as person? A soulless legal entity as human being? No. We can’t and we must not. As I have written before, God didn’t create corporations.And God didn't create The Washington Post, which is a corporation. Could Congress criminalize WaPo's reporting about political candidates in the 2-month period preceding an election? It would protect us from distorted ravings like yours, Ms. Thisltethwaite. What do you say? You must say yes! I mean, if you care about coherence. And I know you don't.
... Dr. West did not call for anger, he actually called for “deep love” in his remarks before his arrest, and he spoke his solidarity even with the police, those who were about to arrest him.
This is worthy of another jail, at another time. In 1963, Dr. King wrote, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail....
It's beating out the Where's Waldo, the Harry Potter, and the Full Body Spandex Suit.
Cain's campaign manager and a number of aides have worked for Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, the advocacy group founded with support from billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which lobbies for lower taxes and less government regulation and spending. Cain credits a businessman who served on an AFP advisory board with helping devise his "9-9-9" plan to rewrite the nation's tax code. And his years of speaking at AFP events have given the businessman and radio host a network of loyal grassroots fans.
On Sunday, Mr Obama honoured Martin Luther King at a dedication to a new memorial on National Mall in Washington. Referring to protests that have spread from Wall Street to London, Rome and elsewhere, Mr Obama said: “Dr King would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonising those who work there.” Mr Obama had previously said the protests “express the frustration” of ordinary Americans with the financial sector.So that's what counts as "more support"? It sounds to me as though he's undermining the message of the protesters who are demonizing the Wall Street crowd. Of course, he's got lots of friends among the demons, but he wants the protest kids to feel like they're his friends too. If only they would see how we all need each other, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.
The reality of the plan is that some people pay more, some people pay less.... You're saying [prices] actually go down?... This isn't about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay--if you don't pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes.... Mr. Cain, we talked to independent analysts ourselves.... We're not just reading newspaper clips here... They tell us, they've looked at this, based on what's available of the plan, and it's incontrovertible.Gregory's experts are incontrovertible? What kind of a question is that? How does Cain deal with this barrage of disbelief from Gregory? He stands his ground and explains his program:
Some people will pay more, but most people would pay less is my argument.... Who will pay more? The people who spend more money on new goods. The sales tax only applies to people who buy new goods, not used goods....This discussion got me thinking about the positive side of switching to sales tax. With a progressive income tax, the political process sets different percentages for different income levels, so, for example, the majority can vote jack up the taxes on other people — "the rich" — and those other people can work on extracting various exemptions and credits and so forth in an elaborate, inscrutable government system. With a sales tax, you control what you pay through your shopping decisions. Every time you forgo a purchase or buy used goods — and isn't that good for the environment? — you pay no tax. And every time you choose smaller amounts or cheaper goods, you pay less tax. Now, you have various needs that you have to meet, but you have far more control, and you aren't at the mercy of the ever-ongoing machinations of the political process.
What is their message? That's what's unclear. If that message is, "Let's punish the rich," I don't empathize with that message. They should be protesting the White House. The White House has basically enacted failed economic policies. The White House and the Democrats have spent $1 trillion that did not work. Now the president wants to pass another $450 billion. They have their frustrations directed at the wrong group. That's what I'm saying.Nice clarity and brevity and excellent sharp perception of the opportunity in the question asked.
MR. CAIN: People who are uninformed. People who will not look at an alternate idea. People who are so dug in with partisanship and partisan politics. Open-mindedness is what's going to save this country. The reason that my message is appealing is because it's simple and people can understand it. You know, a good idea transcends party politics...Somehow, the next question on Gregory's list was: "Is race a factor in this campaign?" Obviously, Cain's answer is going to be no. I'm more interested in why Gregory jumped from "stupid people" to race. Gregory next displays the new Newsweek cover, which calls Cain "the Anti-Obama," and starts to put together a question: "You've actually talked a bit about race, though, and you've created a contrast between yourself and your experience as an African-American, a term you don't like, by the way."
Because my roots go back through slavery in this country. Yes, they came from Africa, but the roots of my heritage are in the United States of America. So I consider myself a black American.That's a very rich statement. Slavery is a heritage. But Gregory goes for the implicit distinction between Cain and Obama: "So you draw some distinction between yourself and your experiences as a black man in America and the experience of President Obama."
Absolutely. I came from very humble beginnings. My mother was a maid, my father was a barber and janitor and a chauffeur. We, we had to, we had to learn--do things the old-fashioned way. We had to work for it. I--my parents never saw themselves as a victim, so I didn't learn how to be a victim. I didn't have anything given to me. I had to work very hard in order to be able to go to school and work my way through school....Notice how simply and vividly he struck a chord — the classic black American experience — and made it resonate for anyone who works for living. There is a quality of nobility, that fits with the idea of heritage. Gregory is at a complete loss, I think, to do anything with this:
MR. GREGORY: You actually said President Obama's outside the mainstream. So you're making a different, more of a social cultural background distinction between you and the president.YET MORE: I liked the way, when asked to name his model for the ideal Supreme Court justice, he focused on Clarence Thomas:
MR. CAIN: More experiential. Look at his experiences vs. my experiences. It was more at a contrast of experiential differences than anything else.
MR. GREGORY: Let's talk about foreign policy...
I believe that Justice Clarence Thomas, despite all of the attacks that he gets from the left, he basically rules and makes his decisions, in my opinion, based upon the Constitution and solid legal thinking. Justice Clarence Thomas is one of my models.Gregory declines to follow up about what the unfairness was. He moves on to the topic of Cain's wife Gloria, who's been invisible so far. He gave a lovely explanation:
MR. GREGORY: Has he been targeted unfairly, you think?
MR. CAIN: I think he has been targeted unfairly.
My wife and I, we have a family life, and she is maintaining the calmness and the tranquility of that family life so, when I do get a day off of the campaign trail, I can go home and enjoy my family.She's his wife, not America's wife. Home is a refuge. That's a good traditionalist message.
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