Mark Byron

I'm Going to be POed at Someone

I'm not quite sure what to make of the latest news from the Cain campaign's "reassessing" things.

Either the allegations are false, in which case Cain needs to get out a polygraph and show he's being straight with folks, or they are true.

If they are true, then we've been sold a bill of goods by Cain; people gave good money to that campaign under false pretenses if the stories are largely true.

If they're not true, then we have some sort of concentrated effort to get him out of the race; a Vast anti-Cain Conspiracy, to borrow from the boss-lady of Foggy Bottom.

Somebody is getting a major diet of crow in short order and some 'splaining to do.

The usual script is a withdrawal speech, but occasionally there is truly nothing there; Nikki Haley faced adultery charges going into her primary in 2010 and faced them down.

I'd like to see Cain pull that off, but I've seen enough politicians with a wayward eye to not be too positive about that.

Hot Stove Hoops

I'm working back into blogging after finally getting over a month-long bronchitis bug. Hopefully, we'll be getting back to multiple posts a day going forward.

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Baseball's offseason trades and signings has the long-standing nickname of the Hot Stove League. Such a moniker doesn't work well for basketball, for its downtime is during the warm weather months where the AC-League would be more like it.

Except for this year, where the NBA finally got a deal with the players set over the weekend. That means that there will be a rush of activity in December between the start of training camp and free-agent signings on the 9th and the first games on Christmas Day. With our first serious snow coming this evening (only 1-3 inches, so it won't shut much down), we could use some old-school BTUs cranking as we look at things.

The Pistons have an interesting dilemma, where a one-time contract amnesty has been created with the new CBA; do you use it on Rip Hamilton, Ben Gordon or Charlie V?

Villanueva is overpayed for what he produces; he looked like a good fit as a replacement for Rasheed Wallace when he signed, but Charlie is 6-11 two-guard without a good defensive or rebounding game. That being said, a guy who can match up with opposing bigs off the bench and can play a stretch-four is worth having around.

That makes the first two of the troublesome troika most likely to mistakenly catching flak from conservatives ("Yes, I'm in favor of amnesty... Rip is badly overpayed"). With Rodney Stuckey better suited to the two, Detroit has three twos and time for 1.5 of them. Hamilton can play some small-ball 3, while Gordon isn't built for that double-duty. A Stuckey-Rip backcourt with rookie Brandon Knight getting about 25 minutes off the bench seems plausible; Stuckey can slide to the two with Knight in the game, and all three could go for a few minutes mid-halves.

 

Early Winter of Our Discontent

I can't quite recall where I saw this in the last few days, but it had Newt noting that conservatives should be happy with his 90% ACU career rating. [Update 9:30AM-It was in the Corner.]

Not quite, Newt. At least in this campaign season where the deer hunters want a side of RINO. During last year's campaign season, Utah Republicans dumped a 90-ACU senator and Indiana would have done the same to Dan Coats had they coalesced around a single conservative. Conservatives seem to pick on the 10% you were with the center-left camp rather than the 90% you were with them.

Rick Pery gets written off for not perp-walking undocumented teens back to Mexico and Newt gets both barrels for wanting to normalize illegals of long-standing. Herman Cain gets trashed for saying some libertarian things on abortion. And, of course, we have Willard M Romney, who was portrayed in yesterday's Midland paper as a rhino with strapped-on elephant tusks. The only thing missing was the John Kerry sandal collection ("a fashionable flip-flop for every occasion").

Cain seems to be the most down-the-line conservative, but his command of policy details is lacking; he's also a chick magnet of the sort, with an purported mistress coming forward over the weekend along with the harassment charges from his Washington days. He's not out of the race, but he needs to find some way other than saying it didn't happen to clear the air.

Perry has a track record as a solid conservative government; his non-hawkish views on immigration soften the don't-mess-with-Texas vibe (for me, that's a feature rather than a bug, but I'm for both a fence and normalizing those who have been here for a while; one of my centrist stands). He's not a Heritage-Cato kind of wonk, but he'll surround himself with those folks once he's there. He's fallen off the pace, but with Mitt stuck in the low 20s, there is room for recovery.

Newt is a wonk, sometimes hopelessly so. He might not be a tea-sipping intellectual, as he's a historian and generalist rather than knowing everything about nothing. No, he's not a fire-breathing reactionary; he actually thinks he can improve government's function. That might actually sell well in a general election as an elder statesman who had his Tea Party phase two decades ago.

Romney has the downside of being a clear one-percenter, the Chamber of Commerce president. However, that's not always good for the economy or the country, as K-Street works for Big Business and Big Labor rather than small business and the average worker. He'll be better than Obama, but about 75% of the phone book would be an improvement.

One of these guys will likely get the nomination, unless we get a dead heat primary and a "brokered convention" with no brokers.

The Other Black Friday

For a number of years growing up, Nebraska-Oklahoma was a traditional Black Friday game, typically deciding the Big 8 title and an Orange Bowl bid (back in a pre-BCS era where you knew where you were going if you won the conference title. I remember the tradition in those parts was to throw oranges when your team was doing well, which prompted one coach to be glad they weren't heading to the Gator Bowl.

When the expansion to the Big 12 put the Huskers and Sooners into different divisions, Nebraska kept the Black Friday tradition going by playing fellow Northerner Colorado instead.

Now both Nebraska and Colorado have moved on, Nebraska on to the Big 10 and the Buffs on to the Pac-12, both are continuing the Black Friday game, with Nebraska playing new neighbor Iowa and Colorado playing fellow Pac-12 newbie Utah in new Turkey Sandwich traditions.

However, the big draw of the day is LSU-Arkansas. That looks like an afterthought of last-week matchups as it creates a matched-set with Auburn-Alabama and Ole Miss-MSU in-state brawls in the SEC West; since the Hogs are newbies to the SEC, they don't have that much of a history with their neighbor to the south. However, when they are ranked 1-3 and a division title and shot at a national title on the line, it could be LSU and Eastern Illinois and things would be cranked to 11.

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Sadly, one Thanksgiving week tradition seems to be going the way of the dodo; with A&M heading to join Arkansas in the SEC, the Texas-Texas A&M match of Thanksgiving Night will be the last for a while. There would be no reason they couldn't play it as a non-conference game, as there are a number of in-state but out of conference grudge matches (Clemson-SC, Florida-FSU, Georgia-Georgia Tech, Kentucky-Louisville) that are regulars on the schedule.

The bonfire tragedy of a few years back took a bit of the steam out of the rivalry, but I hope that cooler heads prevail and that the two schools restart the series once the bad blood of A&M bolting the Big 12 subsides. As of now, it's going off the schedule.

Just For Fun, He Says "Get a Job... and a Bath."

This Bruce Hornsby earwig was presented by Newt dissing the Occupiers-

The movement "starts with the premise that we all owe them everything," said Gingrich. And the movement's sense of entitlement is a "symptom how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" the former speaker of the House concluded.

With unemployment up around 9% and underemployment close to twice that, that's easier said than done; I'm in the latter category, holding down a nice part time job but wanting more. It's a nice line that goes over well in a Republican primary, but it sounds a bit too much like Hornsby's silk-suited one-percenter from The Way it Is, taunting the folks at the unemployment office.

However, Newt has a very good point slightly overplayed. A lot of college grads have the assumption that a good job is waiting for them once they graduate; the archetypal Occupier is the guy who can't find work with his master's degree in puppetry. Many less comic people with more marketable degrees are still on the outside looking in; everybody in the education system gave them the assumption that they had a career automatically waiting for them when they graduated, and the harsh reality doesn't match, making them bitter since their entitlement wasn't cashed in.

Part of that is the more disorganized US economy. In a more European system, more structured economies will feed college grads into standardized positions, but that structure doesn't help create a dynamic economy, disenfranchising folks who can't get a foot in the door.

In a US system, an over-emphasis on education as a door-opener creates a bit of systematic unemployment as people with liberal arts degrees and some specialist degrees chasing a declining number of jobs looking for their skills, with elementary ed degree folks working at a day-care center and Master of Library Arts grads clerking at Barnes and Noble... or PhD's in finance tutoring part time on-line.

Glenn Reynolds has been blogging on a pending higher ed bubble as of late; many of the Occupiers bought into the bubble and are grousing about their busted can of Jooky.

A Newt Kid in Town

We're getting into some odd territory. A three-way race with Cain, Romney and Newt Gingrich is upon us. All three can point to a national poll with them in the lead.

Rick Perry has done some nice damage control and seems to be looking to get back into the lead pack. He had a winning line in the SC debate with doing zero-based budgeting on foreign aid, especially with some folks like Pakistan where they are playing both sides of the fight. He also was able to make fun of his brain fart in Rochester to good effect.

I actually like Jon Huntsmann's line on waterboarding, that such low-level torture damages the American brand overseas. Not that I'm going to vote for him or toss Cain overboard for his whole-hearted support for waterboarding, but that's not a Golden Rule kind of thing. Calling it Moderate Physical Pressure or Enhanced Interview Techniques doesn't make it not-torture.

Expect Newt to get the eagle-eye from the oppo teams, especially on his more establishmentarian moments like NY-23 and that global warming ad with Princess Nancy. However, he has a track record as a solid conservative that goes back a few decades, as opposed to Romney's track record of being a solid conservative for a few years. Yes, his moral compass misfired in the past, but he seems to have settled in to a heartfelt Catholic faith that you can live with.

Cain is starting to back up a bit, as the harassment albatross is starting to weigh on him. What's interesting is that the main beneficiary of that is a guy who was cheating on wife #2 with the lady who'd become wife #3 about the same time Cain was accused of being frisky with the staff at the restaurant association. However, we've known of Newt's wandering eye and he's fessed up to it; Cain has yet to clear his name fully and might not be able to do so, even if he passes a lie detector test.

I'm leaning towards a Newt vote right now, but Cain isn't out of the mix and Perry is starting to grow on me, even if his alternative maximum tax leaves me cold.

 

NAR-Whale Sightings

Here's an interesting case of strange bedfellows. Hank Hanegraaff is normally harsh towards charismatics, but he came to the defense of Ron Luce and Teen Mania after a harsh MSNBC's documentary “Mind Over Mania” came out a few days ago; Bene was on that one earlier.

The problem, Hanegraaff says, is their evidence falls short of their accusations, and “many of the arguments proffered against TMM could just as easily be used to establish historic Christianity as a thought reform cult.” He says the model the Duncans used to attempt to prove their point has been “utterly discredited.”

There's probably a my-way-or-the-highway-to-Hell tone to the TMM crew, if their Acquire the Fire outings are any indication; sensitive souls might not be a good fit for such high-octane leaders. However, that's an ongoing problem in churches of any type when they have pushy leaders.

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Lou Engle is a guy who gets Bene's eye from time to time; I've only seen him mentioned once outside of Bene's blog as being part of a larger pan-evangelical outing in the Bay area a while back. That is, until he showed up in Detroit for a rally at the Lion's new stadium-

Speaking to thousands inside Ford Field, the controversial leader of a 24-hour prayer rally in Detroit called Friday evening for Jesus to rule over Detroit, Dearborn and America. Otherwise, he warned, the U.S. will fall into ruin.

"We need Jesus' face to appear all across America," Lou Engle thundered to a cheering crowd at TheCall, a movement that has drawn criticism.

Before the rally began, about 150 people protested against Engle, who is with a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. Its leaders often rail against Muslims, gays, abortion, Catholics, African Americans and politicians who support abortion rights.

This is a rare NAR-reference in mainstream media, but I don't think they are anti-black. All the other ones are legit. Most charismatics and NAR types are fairly color-blind.

They say Dearborn is under demonic control because of its Muslim population. And they say they believe African Americans have been cursed by Satan in recent decades because they vote Democratic.

Blacks weren't doing much better when they voted Republican back before FDR and were doing worse than that when they couldn't even vote. No major correlation there; it's actually a bit in the other direction, if anything.

The correlation could be in the other direction in that they turned to the party of the have-nots after being crapped on my our culture; the "curse" (or whatever you want to chalk their condition up to) came, then the left-wing voting followed.

On Dearborn... while I wouldn't be surprised to see some extra demonic activity there, using them as a whipping boy isn't helpful in trying to turn them to Jesus.

Here's an interesting point at the end of the piece-

"We believe that God wants to raise up a new worship sound out of Detroit," said Engle, who is based in Kansas City, Mo., at the International House of Prayer.

I thought Engle was California based. IHOP got moved down a few pegs after seeing that factoid, and they weren't that high in the first place.

Thursday Night Musings

Nebraska folks are nervous about going to Penn State Saturday after some PSU folks rioted last night after the news of Joe Paterno's firing came out. It's not good to see PSU fans taking lessons from Michigan State fans about how to be classy after losing.

My hunch is that Cornhusker fans are safe as they'll ever be. The goonishness that marked their last trip to "Happy Valley" is ancient history and fans would be more frustrated with PSU personnel than anyone from Nebraska. A police escort might be inviting trouble, since any would-be goons would be more upset with the PSU police than with Nebraska. Tom Osborne hasn't covered up any pedophiles that I know of.

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UCF is in trouble for breaking NCAA rules and George (LIT 321:The American Resume as Fiction) O'Leary tells us that things are "isolated." If you take that at face value, I have some toll roads in metro Orlando to sell you.

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A rogue US soldier got convicted of murder for dispatching three Afghanis without cause. That would be the kind of thing that would warrant war crimes trials at the Hague were we not up to trying them ourselves. Others want the whole war (or large chunks of it, like waterboarding suspects) chalked up as a war crime, which is why the US is not generally open to having Americans hauled there.

Brain Burps Big and Small

I was watching a documentary on Dixie the other day; one of the comments is that one of the worst things you can say in Southernese is "Bless his heart", for that usually means someone did something stoopid or otherwise came up short.

Rick Perry, bless his heart. As a teacher, I've had my memory go AWOL on occasion in the middle of a class and had to look something up or ask a better student the missing factoid. However, I didn't have the misfortune of doing it on national TV in the middle of a presidential debate.

I watched the first hour of last nights debate, which wasn't much of a debate, as most everyone had overlapping views on the economy and "what he said and what she said" was the main order of the day. Mitt graciously passed on a question of whether he'd hire Herman Cain in the middle of his ethical cloud and even Ron Paul made partial sense, given that he had to stay away from foreign policy and blaming Iranian nukes on the US installing the Shah a half-century ago.

Thus, I missed Perry's mental air-ball. It doesn't help his persona, since folks outside of the south take 20 points off of your IQ if you speak with a drawl and an extra 5 points for being from Texas. He seemingly won't live this one down, not unlike Howard Dean's post-Iowa war cry back in 2004.

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Herman Cain now has two public accusers. It's an odd place to have a polygraph test settle a nomination race, but that might be Cain's best path. If he is seen not to be nervous when he disclaims any charges of sexual harassment wrongdoing, that should be enough for most Republican voters. Yes, some folks can give a false negative on a lie-detector, as they are so sociopathic where they can lie without being nervous about it, and some naturally nervous folks can give false positives. Thus, a polygraph can't be totally trusted as evidence in criminal cases, but they can be in the court of public opinion.

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If we're talking brain burps, the NBA is on the verge of a massive one. They seem to be close to settling on a 50-50 split of revenue and are working on the cap-and-trade issues (salary caps and team-changing rules in this case, no global warming here). Both sides will lose more than the 3% they're fighting for (the players had 53 as their bottom line and owners had been shooting for 47) by trashing the 2011-12 (mostly 12 at this point) season over it.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail. However, there are a lot of egos who don't take getting dissed lightly, and hotter heads could well blow up the NBA as we know it.

 

Prime Minster Greenspan?

Greece has a new PM, a banker named Lucas Papademos. He had been the #2 guy at the European Central Bank and was the head of the Greek central bank when it joined the Euro and put itself out of business as a monetary policy-making body. Critics have noted that the numbers used to get Greece into the Euro were... less than accurate and that Papademos should have known better.

However, he's largely apolitical and in a time where no one wants to be blamed for the political Superfund site that is Greece, bringing in a guy who is both a financial insider and political outsider with ECB experience to calm the rest of the Eurozone and the world financial community might be a smart move.

No Ex Post Facto in the Court of Public Opinion

To borrow from John Calipari, there's nothing good that can happen at a nightclub at 1AM and a college board press conference at 10PM. JoePa got the ax last night; defensive coordinator Tom Bradley will take over for the rest of the year, including a key game against Nebraska Saturday. Instead of celebrating the matchup between the two newest members of the Big 10, we get the fallout of the worst scandal to hit a college football program in recent memory.

That being said, I'm not sure if firing Paterno for an error of omission nine years ago is the right path, especially when he announced he was stepping aside at the end of the year. If we rewind the tape to the summer of 2002, we knew a lot less about child sexual abuse than we do now.

We were just starting the big coverage of the Catholic priest sex abuse stories; that was one of the big stories that got a lot of Catholic writers to start blogs back in 2002 as the Blogosphere was in its infancy. In the near-decade that has followed we've learned that even decent-looking people can have an inner pervert and to err on the side of reporting stuff to authorities. That's 20/20 hindsight that Paterno didn't have at the time.

Paterno did report stuff, but not quite to the right authorities. The folks in the athletic department sat on the information and some of them are being charged for those misdeeds. When you couple that with the seemingly glowing reputation of Jerry Sandusky (from a distance, I knew him as the headmaster of Linebacker U, but his charitable work with kids made it seem even less likely to have him as a sex abuse suspect at the time), it's easy to see where Paterno might not have been bugging his bosses for feedback on the incident or sicking a county DA on the case.

One upside of firing him ASAP is that he won't have to deal with question for the last 4-5 games of the season; PSU has three regular seasons games left, plus a bowl game and probably a slot in the first Big Ten title game. Given l'affair Sandusky, we wouldn't get to see the Goodbye JoePa tour that would have normally have accompanied the announcement of his retirement; too many folks would be saying Goodbye and Good Riddance instead.

Good Riddance to one of the straightest shooters in the history of college football? It might be needed in a fire-the-whole-chain-of-command response to such scandals that is common these days, but Paterno deserved a better exit. A year or two from now, if he's still with us, Paterno should get the kind of elder statesman of the game spot that John Wooden held for a good quarter-century after stepping aside at UCLA.

A New Hill to Climb

We now have a flesh and blood Cain accuser. Of course, the woman has gotten the full character assassination treatment from the right; you could see that coming from a satellite view.

The downside is that she doesn't seem to be a choir girl, has a litigious streak and has Hollywood lawyer Gloria Allred running point. The upside is that she told a plausible story of Cain trying to turn his car into a casting couch. The downside points make it more likely that she was making things up, but at least there is a person making the charge and time frames that can be double-checked.

Allred's presence is interesting. Since there is no possible legal avenue to pursue on the alleged groping, she seems more agent than lawyer, possibly being at the ready if they sue Cain for going after the accuser vigorously in the days to come.

A few points to remember. People of less-than-saintly character can be groped; her background can inform our judgement but not preclude her from being right. Also, having a high-profile lawyer who's a Democrat doesn't mean you're not right.

In addition, a "Bill Clinton did far worse" defense doesn't hunt. It might be a fair shot at the media who gave Clinton far more slack that Cain has gotten, but the argument that Clinton got treated with kid gloves doesn't give Cain a get-out-of-a-few-gropes-free card.

That is, if there were any gropes to begin with. Cain is having a presser at the top of the hour; we've seen the she said, now we'll get the he-said.

 

Sunday Musings

There's a bit of flak over Nickleback playing with the Lions on Thanksgiving Day, less than that of Tia Tequilla and David Bowie playing during their Bi Week festivities today. I'm not sure what the flak is over; I'm all in favor of adding to the secondary, which is one of the Lions weak points.

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On a more somber note, JoePa's longtime defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, has been busted for child molestation, charged with sexually abusing a half-dozen boys over the better part of a decade; Sandusky is now persona non grata on campus. Penn State AD's is up on perjury charges for covering at least one incident up a la Jim Tressell, except that illicit tattoos aren't a felony and hold the legal requirement of reporting them. Paterno is not part of the case, as he did report the one abuse case he was aware of.

Sandusky had retired back in 1999, but was part of the campus community and used the facilities to run football camps, which gives a would-be abuser access to a lot of nice-looking athletic boys to work with.

One only wonders how many alumni of Linebacker U got the same treatment from Sandusky, or if he was only interested in middle-school aged kids like some priests (and others, to be fair to the Catholic Church) we've seen in the last decade.

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I'm not a Washington Times guy, but I appreciate this Wesley Pruden piece on Herman Cain. We're a week into the current harassment mess, and we've yet to see Cain be accused of anything coherent. If someone came forward to say that he complemented someone on part of their anatomy in a crude way and spelled out exactly what was said, that would be one thing, but you can say "I'm going to church tonight" and make some people uncomfortable.

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Have we seen the last of the NBA? It leave a bit of a hole in the sports calendar, as only hockey fills in the weekday spots now that baseball is done and college basketball is still a few days off from kicking off, unless Tuesday MAC games get you juiced.

Some semi-organized barnstorming, or some sort of ad-hoc league could emerge. During the summer, you had all-star teams from various summer leagues going up against each other. An organized circuit of such teams could prove to be a viable alternative to the NBA; if properly marketed and given a good TV contract, it could make the players involved a good living, and might even build to near-NBA levels once things matured.

Comfort the Afflicted and Occupy the Comfortable

I've been trying to reflect on the proper biblical response to the rich in response to the Occupy craze. Looking after the poor is a biblical mandate, but does that mandate include trashing the rich in the process?

The rich are blasted when they oppress the poor; Nathan's "You are the man" speech to David has the analogy of a rich man stealing a poor man's sheep.

Trusting in one's riches is not good, as the writer of Proverbs tells us.

The rich are seen as harsh and uncaring, and are warned here in Proverbs 22-

 ¹⁶ One who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth
   and one who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty.

The oppressive rich will "get theirs", but I don't see where the believer is supposed to be the vehicle of that downfall, other than siding with the poor when they are unfairly oppressed.

How does blockading a port help the poor? Truck drivers are getting an unpaid vacation and stores expecting goods coming in from Asia will get those deliveries a bit later than planned, thus driving up prices somewhat. Asian customers of US companies and the people involved in getting those goods to market on the other end will be sitting on their hands to the extent that our exports are stopped flowing.

Helping the little guy is a Christian calling. One that comes to mind is barring US-born kids of illegal immigrants from getting in-state tuition despite being raised in the state. Yes, that would raise taxes a smidge to help pay for that small subset of folks, but it would seem to be within the scope of what we want state colleges to do; to not do so is taking the frustration of usually better-off immigration hawks out on struggling youth.

Working on a case like that, or finding such kids private-sector donations to help them through school, would be a better ministry than camping out in front of a bank or port. You're actually helping someone rather than gumming up the works of the current economic system.

Tebow and Bo

The Lions are starting to get a bit of a Bad Boys motif going, so much so that Ndamukong Suh went to New York to clarify where the lines were; Suh is confident but not nasty and wants to keep from getting bad-rep calls.

One sore point to me was seeing a Lion LB "Tebowing" (striking a prayerful pose) after administering a sack to Tim Tebow. Taunting is bad form to begin with, making partial fun of his faith is bad as well. However, Tebow seems to be a good sport about it, being more upset over being sacked in the first place.

Tebow seemed to do well in the 4th quarter when they put him in a spread formation and let him be himself. A number of grains of salt need to be applied here, as it was garbage time and he was going up against some of Detroit's second stringers. However, if Denver wants to see what Tebow can do, letting him set up in the shotgun and do the stuff he did at Florida would help.

If you look at high-powered offenses like New England, they spend quite a bit of time in the shotgun. There is no rule that says Thou Must Put the QB Under Center. The Denver brass might keep that in mind.

UofM too, since Denard Robinson is best as a spread QB and is muzzled when put under center. A few I-formation plays aren't bad, but that doesn't play to his strength unless you start getting the 70s era playbook out and let Robinson run the option a la Rick Leach.

Political Smear the Weirdo

I'm reminded of an old playground game where everyone tacked the guy with the football; it was called Smear the [word that rhymes with smear that can be used as a homophobic tone]. We've got a political version of it with Herman Cain at the bottom of the media pile-on.

So far, Cain's poll numbers are holding up. A Rasmussen poll done Tuesday, well after the free-for-all started, has Cain up in SC with 33% of the vote. Romney trails with 23 and Newt is a surprisingly solid 15% in third.

The question of who pointed Politico on their merry way is still open, but a former campaign aid to Cain's 2004 Senate run, Curt Anderson, is now a Perry guy and Cain's team is pointing fingers his way. It seems that at least the one case that Cain noted (where he claims innocence and that the case was setted by their HR team) was mentioned to Anderson.

One interesting point of all of Herman's hermits fixin' to come out of hiding is that the flap has taken all the oxygen out of the race for the moment. Perry can't do much to get out from under the Pauldoza line except say "No, it wasn't us." Other folks in the pelaton can't gain traction, either, and half to wait to see if this brings Cain back down to earth.

My hunch; this will either knock Cain out of the race or make him a near-untouchable conservative hero.

One analogy that comes to mind is of Nikki Haley leading into the SC primary last year; her foes tried to come up with an adultery rap (with folks affliated with her foes saying she got it on with them) to get her GOP foes ahead of her. It didn't stick and she made it to governor.

Unless someone comes forward with credible evidence of wrongdoing, this could change, but this smells a bit like SC of 2010, where oppo teams want to head Cain off at the pass. I'm not sure if it is Republican foes or liberals at this point; most likely, if Haley's case is the analogue, it may be folks in the Perry or Romney camp wanting to bring Cain down. Left-of-center folks in the media will be happy to go along, but it might well not be a liberal hatchet job, so blaming the Obama camp might not be proper.

However, it is very ugly, and it is hard for me to keep up with things. I'm used to keeping up with current events, but when they become a cesspool of nasty, it's hard.

 

Don't Have a Dawg in that Fight

Here's an interesting brawl fixin' to happen; the hacktivists at Anonymous are going after the Zetas-

A group claiming affiliation with the international hacking group Anonymous posted a video demanding that the Zetas release a hostage in Veracruz. The person in the video claims to have information about the names of the Zetas and of corrupt public officials working with the Zetas. They say they will release the names and addresses of people linked to the Zetas online.

The group then hacked the website of the former attorney general of the state of Tabasco, someone who has previously been accused of ties to criminal organizations, and posted a note claiming he works for the Zetas.

Here we have two folks on the dark side of the law going mano-a-mano. In most recent cases, Anonymous has been a pest from the anti-powers-that-be left, often hacking to pay back foes of Wikileaks. Here, they seem to be on the side of the angels for a change, assuming their outings are legit.

However, the outings will likely cause a few folks to die at the hands of rival gangs or the new Mata Zeta hit squads, assuing those two are not one and the same. Rough justice, indeed.

Two Blocks from K Street

Here's an interesting point to ponder in the current Herman Cain saga. The damaging part of the current issue his being accused of sexual harrassment while head of the National Restaurant Association might not be the harrassment part but the fact that he was head of the National Restaurant Association. That's not something that had been stressed in Cain's bio to this point.

If part of Cain's shtick is that he is a Washington outsider, how does that jibe with a guy who spent years as the restaurant industry's main man in Washington? This NRA is at the corner of 17th and M Street in Washington, which is just two blocks from K Street.

That isn't disqualifying, but it puts a bit of his outsider shtick into question.

One of the accusers is fixin' to go public, so we're due for a set of he-said-she-saids, which rarely bodes well for the he side.

Bass Musings

I'm starting to get over my bronchitis, but my voice is still raspy and works far better at the lower registers. I can do a killer Barry White imitation, but my Finding Nemo seagull (done best in French- a-moi, a-moi) is a no-go.

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Clarance Cain....almost. Right now, there is no accuser out there, so Cain's explanation is good enough for now. One gal gave a seemingly bogus claim after leaving the restaurant association and got merely standard severance pay; at least that's the story to date.

Now the media get to critique his response. If they can't pin anything on him, they get on his case for being slow to give a blow-by-blow refutation of the charges. Given that personnel privacy rules preclude a data-dump to defend Cain's version of the story, he's done about the best he can except waiting about 24 hours to give a detailed account.

At this point, there is no Anita Hill analogue to testify. Also, the audience for such is not swing senators but conservative Republican voters. So far, he seems to largely get a sympathy vote on the right, where Politico's lack of named sources is more of an issue than Cain's behavior or lack thereof.

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Meanwhile, the buck stops... with the Greek people. Rather than put their necks on the line, the Greek government is opting for a January popular vote on whether to put the country into receivership for the rest of the decade. That won't sell well, which will create a full meltdown if the vote fails.

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We've already seen part of that meltdown stateside, as MF Global went under, largely on losses from European debt markets. There are a number of interesting things going on, including a failure to keep company-owned funds and investor-owned funds separate, that the FBI is looking into.

MF Global is, as the VP might say, a MFing big deal for the Obama team; the head honcho there is Jon Corzine, former Democratic senator and governor of New Jersey. If the Occupiers are taking out their frustration on Wall Street, this is a good reminder that the politics of Wall Street plays both sides of the aisle.

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It will likely fizzle, but the Oakland version of the Occupiers are going for a general strike, including a evening blockade of the Port of Oakland. Given that the mayor is a fan of the movement, might it be up to Alameda County officials or state officials to keep the flow of goods through the port going? That's a major trade nexus, with a lot of goods heading for the Midwest from Asia going through Oakland.