Herman Cain’s New Book

After months of languishing on the sidelines of the GOP presidential race, Herman Cain has skyrocketed to the top of the national polls and now looks like he might actually be a real contender for the Republican nomination in 2012.

Until Cain and his “9-9-9” tax plan dominated Tuesday’s presidential debate and vaulted him into the national spotlight, few outside of the Tea Party knew much about Cain, other than that he is black and likes pizza.

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 Union Myth of Representing ‘Working People’

Unions and their mouthpieces continually bombard us with the catch phrases about standing for “working people,” “working families,” and the poor, oppressed and exploited “working” classes. Truth is, unions represent a privileged minority, a politically connected class, the aristocrats of middle-class workers. And the mainstream of American workers, the real working people agree; it’s why only 6.9% of private sector workers are in unions and union membership overall has decreased from nearly one-third of all workers in the 1940s.

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.

Obama’s worst nightmare

President Obama can see the writing on the wall: His days in the White House are numbered. This is the real meaning of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entry into the Republican presidential race. The GOP now has a candidate who can not only defeat Mr. Obama, but crush him.

For months, the mainstream media anointed Mitt Romney as the presumptive front-runner. The former Massachusetts governor is their ideal GOP candidate – a moderate technocrat from the Northeast, who flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights and enacted universal health care in his state. He is a Rockefeller Republican wolf in Reaganite clothing. His strongest asset is his business background. In a moribund economy, Mr. Romney came across as the only competent, experienced nominee who could kick-start the private sector. No longer.