Herman Cain: Runaway Slave

I keep having images of Herman Cain barefoot, covered in sweat and mud, wearing an old patchwork shirt and handmade burlap pants held up by a rope rather than a belt, out of breath and frantically running for his life; to freedom. Menacing sounds of barking dogs in the distance focused on Cain’s scent. Not far behind, hot on Cain’s trail, are black overseers determined to keep their fellow black slaves in check for their white liberal Democrat massas.

FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The media’s love affair with a disastrous president

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

The Player and the President

Anyone watching Sunday’s women’s final at the U.S. Open tennis tournament was treated to an appalling display of temper on the part of Serena Williams. At the beginning of the second set, Williams was judged to have hindered her opponent by shouting “come on” in the course of play. The point, and, as it turned out, the game, was awarded to Williams’s opponent, Samantha Stosur, who went on to win the match quite convincingly.

The Wacky World of Liberal Fundamentalism

The candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Bible-affirming Christians, predictably have ignited the liberal media’s zeal for exposing their allegedly odd if not wacko religious beliefs (see here). Support for some version of creationism, a faith in the efficacy of prayer, and actual belief in scriptural condemnation of homosexuality (among other religious views) are taken as prima facie evidence of presidential unsuitability. To be sure, millions of Americans (assumed to be ill-educated trailer-court denizens with rotting teeth and beer guts) may share these odd inclinations, but, at least according to liberal pundits, holding them betrays a lack of intellectual sophistication plus an aversion to modern science. Such antediluvian fundamentalism should, say the experts, have gone extinct with the Scopes Monkey Trials.