United Liberty

Even though he endorsed him in 2008, the ever-consistant Herman Cain slammed Mitt Romney over the health care plan he worked to pass in Massachusetts back in 2006:

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on Wednesday said his rival Mitt Romney would have to “deal with” the health care law he passed in Massachusetts, which Cain grouped with ObamaCare as “government-centered” health care.

“I do not support the Massachusetts health care law,” Cain said at a lunch sponsored by the American Spectator and held at the offices of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform.

While he didn’t explicitly say the two laws were similar, he did mention them in tandem, emphasizing, “I want to get to get away from this government takeover to health care.”

He said he preferred a patient-centered approach to a government-centered one.

Later, when asked about key differences among the candidates, he singled out RomneyCare.

“I haven’t heard one of the potential candidates say that they agree with ObamaCare,” he said. “But former Gov. Romney is going to have to deal with the issue of what he did in Massachusetts.”

Due to the lack of candidate annoucing early for the next presidential election cycle, a debate sponsored by NBC and Politico that was originally planned for early May at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library has been pushed back to September 14th:

The first GOP presidential primary debate of the cycle has been pushed back from May to September.

The Ronald Reagan Foundation announced Wednesday that the debate will take place on Sept. 14.

The decision was made due to the lack of candidates who have taken tangible steps toward running for president. In addition, hardly any candidates had committed to attending the debate.

“Although there will be a long and impressive list of Republican candidates who eventually take the field, too few have made the commitment thus far for a debate to be worthwhile in early May,” John Heubusch, the Reagan Foundation’s executive director, said in a statement, according to NBC. “The Reagan Foundation’s first Republican presidential primary debate will move to the fall, allowing enough time for the full slate of candidates to participate.”

You can’t have a debate without candidates. Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain have formed exploratory committees. Gary Johnson is expected to formally announce his campaign next month (he’ll skip the exploratory phase). Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tax Hike Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour and others have played coy about their plans for 2012.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has announced the formation of an exploratory commitee for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. Among the themes Pawlenty discusses in the video are creating jobs, limiting government and reforming entitlements:

“This is our country. Our founding fathers created it, Americans embraced it, Ronald Reagan personified it, and Lincoln stood courageously to protect it. And that’s why today, I’m announcing the formation of an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States,” Pawlenty declared in the two-minute video.

The Republican ex-governor invokes his hard-luck upbringing in the video. “At a young age, I saw up close the face of challenge, the face of hardship, and the face of job loss,” he says. “Over the last year, I’ve traveled to nearly every state in the country and I know many Americans are feeling that way today. I know that feeling—I lived it.”

Here is the video of his announcement, which was released on his Facebook page yesterday afternoon:

Given his all but certain entrance in the Republican presidential primary, you’d think that Newt Gingrich would be shifting to the right on economic issues. He’s not. In fact, he recently told a reporter during a press conference that he doesn’t regret expanding Medicare, an entitlement already projected to have trillions in unfunded liabilities over the several decades, by supporting and lobbying for passage of prescription drug benefit - Medicare Part D - in 2003:

At a press conference on Friday, CNSNews.com asked Gingrich, “You were a prominent supporter of the Medicare prescription drug plan that President Bush signed into law in 2003. The Medicare trustees now say that plan is $7.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years. Do you regret your support for the plan looking back?”

“No,” said Gingrich. “I think that we—I mean, I am for dramatic reform of Medicare. I chaired the Medicare reform task force which saved it in 1996 when the trustees said it was going to go broke, and we passed changes which enabled them to say that we had postponed any problem for well over a decade.

Here is the video with Gingrich’s full comments:

I find stuff from all over the place.  Occasionally, someone will email me something.  Other times, someone will post something on Facebook.  That happened today when I found this article at Big Journalism written by Dana Loesch.  The Loesch’s piece indicated something pretty bad from Alternet, but surely she was blowing it out of proportion, right?  After all, I see that pretty regularly from the right.

It ain’t the case this time.

After clicking the link to Alternet’s piece, I found this:

In the immortal words of Megatron in Transformers: The Movie, Herman Cain’s speech at CPAC really is bad comedy. As you know, I find black garbage pail kids black conservatives fascinating not because of what they believe, but rather because of how they entertain and perform for their White Conservative masters.

When race minstrelsy was America’s most popular form of mass entertainment, black actors would often have to pretend to be white men, who then in turn would put on the cork to play the role of the “black” coon, Sambo, or Jumping Jim Crow. Adding insult to injury, in a truly perverse and twisted example of the power of American white supremacy black vaudevillians would often pretend to be white in order to denigrate black people for the pleasures of the white gaze.

Herman Cain–an ironic name if ever, and one more suited to a tragic figure in a Harlem Renaissance era novella–is not “blackening twice” as some race minstrels chose to do.

Holy crap.

It went on to say:

For the second year in a row, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) won the CPAC presidential straw poll. According to organizers of CPAC, more than 11,000 people attended this year’s conference, with 3,742 of them casting ballots in the straw poll (also a record number).

Here are the results of the straw poll. You can see last year’s results here:

• Ron Paul: 30%
• Mitt Romney: 23%
• Gary Johnson: 6%
• Chris Christie: 6%
• Newt Gingrich: 5%
• Tim Pawlenty: 4%
• Michele Bachmann: 4%
• Mitch Daniels: 4%
• Sarah Palin: 3%
• Herman Cain: 2%
• Mike Huckabee: 2%
• Rick Santorum: 2%
• John Thune: 2%
• Jon Huntsman: 1%
• Haley Barbour: 1%
• Other: 5%
• Undecided: 1%

Other highlights from the straw poll:

While filling in on The Neal Boortz Show on December 29th, Herman Cain launched into a rant defending Federal Reserve and downplaying efforts for an audit. His point was that the Federal Reserve wasn’t doing anything secret, to his knowledge, and that the movement for an audit amounted to nothing more than a lack of understanding as to how the nation’s central bank operates.

Here is a transcript of Cain’s remarks:

[T]he Federal Reserve already has so many audits, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know why people think we’re gonna learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. Now, I no longer serve on the board of the Federal Reserve. I’m not being defensive of the Federal Reserve; in fact, some of the policies and some of the actions of the Federal Reserve, I don’t agree with because the attitude and the non-politization in the 90’s when I served is totally different than what’s going on today. But that’s another matter.

But people who say, “we outta audit the Federal Reserve because we don’t know enough about it.” Well, here’s the advice I’ve given to people who ared worried about an audit of the Federal Reserve; call ‘em up, and ask ‘em if you can stop by and have one of their PR people or one of their Public Relations people explain to you how the Federal Reserve operates.

I think a lot people are calling for this audit fo the Federal Reserve because they don’t know enough about it. There’s no secrets going on in the Federal Reserve, to my knowledge. And I tell people, we’ve got 12 Federal Reserve banks, find out which district you’re in, call ‘em up and go from there.

We don’t need to waste money with another commission, or an audit that’s not necessary, because, folks, we’ve gotta lot of other problems we need to worry about.

Over the weekend in New Hampshire, the state’s Republican Party along with WMUR and ABC News conducted a presidential straw poll a year in advance of the primary; with Mitt Romney winning big:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won the first presidential straw poll of the 2012 cycle, kicking off New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary election race.

Romney won with 35 percent, beating second-place finisher Ron Paul by 24 points in the WMUR-ABC News straw poll of members of the state Republican Party. In third place was former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who won 8 percent—just one point ahead of Sarah Palin, who drew 7 percent.

Because Romney has such high name recognition here and has a home in Wolfeboro, N.H., he was widely expected to win—and observers here were far more interested in who would come in second and third.

Only three candidates—Romney, Pawlenty and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum—have spent significant amounts of time on the ground in the state over the past few months. At today’s convention, Pawlenty staffed a table to promote his new book while Santorum consultant and longtime New Hampshire operative Mike Biundo had a table and worked the crowd.

Romney, who is adding staff in preparation for his bid, has the money to build an influential campaign in the state. He is also focusing more on economic issues, which is a smart move in New Hampshire. For a social conservative like Santorum, who has spent a lot of time in the state, or Huckabee, New Hampshire represents a significant challenge; where as Iowa may be more welcoming.

Here are the full results of the straw poll:

Herman Cain, who went on record on recently opposing an audit of the Federal Reserve, launched his incredibly long-shot bid yesterday in the Republican presidential primary for 2012, becoming the first person to announce their candidacy:

Conservative talk radio host Herman Cain on Wednesday announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee.

The former Godfather’s Pizza CEO created a website with a message to potential supporters and links to donate money.

“Fellow patriots, now more than ever, we must come together to take a stand for the future of America,” he writes. “I make this promise to you as I deliberate the ways in which I can do my part to restore and protect the American Dream: I would be the voice of the American People. I will keep you in my thoughts and prayers. I ask you to do the same for me.”

Should he decide to formally enter the race, Cain would be considered an extreme long shot for the GOP nomination.

When Cain redesigned his website, he scrubbed the articles where he endorsed the TARP bailout, or the “recovery plan,” as he called it on his radio show. In the articles - you can read them here and here - Cain wrote that nationalizing banks “is not a bad thing.” He even went as far as criticizing opponents of the bailout, calling them “free market purists” and absurdly claiming that no valid criticism had been brought forward.

Those are not the words of a free market, tea party conservative. They are the words of someone that defers to government when it comes to matters of principle.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m skeptical of Herman Cain, who expected to make his second presidential bid official any day now, in part because of his deference to government over the free market. For example, he backed TARP at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 - calling it a “recovery plan.” He slammed opponents of the program on the right, calling us “free market purists.”

Now, Cain, a former board member of the Federal Reserve, is telling us that the central bank already has internal audits, that there isn’t anything new that we’d learn from a significant audit and they haven’t been hiding anything from Americans. He chalks it up to people not knowing enough about the Fed.

Hm. Ok. If the Fed wasn’t trying to hide anything, why did they want until legislation was passed with a statutory requirement forcing to release the names of foreign banks they loaned money to?

I’m not saying there is a government conspriacy here, but there has been an incredible lack of transparency on the part of the Federal Reserve. For example, why does Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke claim that they aren’t printing money when that’s exactly what quantitative easing is?

Despite Cain’s claims to the contrary, he is defending the Federal Reserve. And it doesn’t reflect the behavior of someone claiming to be a conservative.

Here are Cain’s comments: