1.) Nobody’s able to get specific about Cain — It’s Caingate Day 5, and we still don’t know what Herman Cain is supposed to have done wrong or who claimed he did it. Never have so many said so much about so little. Why is that? TheDC’s Matthew Boyle reports: “Since Politico first reported the existence of past sexual harassment accusations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, that publication — along with every other that claims to have learned the identities of the women involved — has refused to publish them. Regardless of whether the allegations against Cain are true or false, or whether they land in some nether region or ‘he said, she said,’ the public has yet to hear the accusations directly from those who are making them. Politico won’t provide a reason why it has not published the names of the women, even though it has claimed from day one that it knows who they are. Politico executive editor Jim Vandehei and spokeswoman Anna Bacon declined to answer The Daily Caller’s requests for comment on why the news outlet has the accusers’ identities hidden. Politico reporter Ken Vogel, who co-authored the story, however, defended his publication’s decision to protect Cain’s accusers from the sort of close scrutiny Cain has already undergone. ‘Well, we have been extremely careful with their identities not to reveal them, both out of concerns for their own privacy as well as out of concerns for the nondisclosure agreements that they signed,’ Vogel said on MSNBC Tuesday.” That’s right: Politico has protected these women’s privacy by publishing stories about alleged incidents — the details of which Politico won’t tell us — that the women agreed to settle at least a decade ago. See, a little bird told Politico that something scandalous happened a while back, but they’re not going to tell us who said so or even what exactly is supposed to have happened. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were indulging in the lowest sort of rumormongering while hiding behind a tissue-thin veil of journalistic integrity. But that can’t be it. After all, this is Politico we’re talking about. P.S. This would still be happening if Cain were a Democrat, right? There’s a precedent for this sort of media firestorm surrounding such anonymous, unspecified allegations, right? Somebody must be able to point to a previous example.
2.) Cain colleague contradicts cavalcade of canards — In other news about the Cain story of which we still don’t know the details, one of his old colleagues strongly refutes the nebulous accusations against him. TheDC’s David Martosko reports: “In an interview with The Daily Caller, former National Restaurant Association board chairman Joseph Fassler offered a firm defense of GOP presidential front-runner Herman Cain, along with an explanation for how Washington’s best-kept secret — the identities of Cain’s sexual-harassment accusers — was also kept from the association’s board. ‘The accusations? It’s a hatchet job, in my opinion,’ Fassler told TheDC from his Phoenix, Ariz. office… He told TheDC that he ‘never heard anything about Herman that would suggest he had those sort of allegations lodged against him. He was a professional. Thoroughly professional.’ Severance agreements, he said, were — and remain — ‘common’ in human resource management. ‘You offer people severance agreements, unless they are for cause, all the time,’ he said… Asked why no complaint about Herman Cain ever reached the board, Fassler put the episode in perspective, essentially seeing the amount of money involved as small-potatoes. ‘This agreement? If it was of a major magnitude, I would have been shocked to not have known about it. So my takeaway was that it must not have been of a major magnitude,’ he told TheDC.” But can we really trust what Fassler says? After all, he’s making specific assertions and he’s not doing so anonymously.
3.) Things are getting colder for Holder — Matthew Boyle reports: “At least two of the 34 members of Congress calling for Attorney General Eric Holder’s immediate resignation think the White House is ignoring them. Texas Republican Rep. John Culberson, who first called for Holder’s resignation earlier this week, said that the Obama administration, either in the person of the president himself or some other White House official, ‘absolutely’ needs to address congressional calls for his resignation now. ‘We, on behalf of our constituents, are demanding his resignation,’ Culberson said in a phone interview. ‘It’s not just the people we represent, but a clear majority of the country that has got to be just outraged with the Attorney General’s clear involvement and knowledge of the Fast and Furious scandal and the fact that he believes foreign terrorists captured on foreign battlefields have Constitutional rights under the U.S. Constitution…’ The White House and the Justice Department continue to ignore the many requests for comment TheDC has sent in, refusing to defend Holder amid the rising tide of allegations.” Meanwhile, the victims of the Fast and Furious debacle are still dead.
4.) ACORN goes nuts with the paper shredders — If your windows have been broken, you’ve been attacked, your local park has been turned into a disgusting shanty town, and/or your squad car has been defecated upon, chances are you’ve encountered the Occupy Wall Street movement. The great thing is that it’s completely grassroots, a people-powered movement with no outside help from any partisan political organizations. Which is why ACORN is now furiously trying to cover up their involvement. Fox News: “Officials with the revamped ACORN office in New York — operating as New York Communities for Change — have fired staff, shredded reams of documents and told workers to blame disgruntled ex-employees for leaking information in an effort to explain away a FoxNews.com report last week on the group’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street protests, according to sources. NYCC also is installing surveillance cameras and recording devices at its Brooklyn offices, removing or packing away supplies bearing the name ACORN and handing out photos of Fox News staff with a stern warning not to talk to the media, the sources said.” This is what duplicity looks like!
5.) Woodstock generation goes Republican — It’s amazing how your perspective can change once you start paying attention to how your tax dollars are spent. TheDC’s Neil Munro reports: “The long-haired, dope-smoking, free-loving baby boomers are becoming majority-Republican and politically indistinguishable from their elder cousins in the so-called ‘silent generation,’ according to a new Pew Research Center study… ‘You see people in that generation supported [George] McGovern over [Richard] Nixon by 16 points… [but] many of them now are supporting Romney over Obama,’ said Carroll Doherty, Pew’s associate director… When asked, the boomers ‘are more likely to call themselves Democrats,’ even while they vote mostly GOP, Doherty said. The survey’s trend lines show the much-lauded boomer generation drifting steadily towards the conservative views held by the much-derided silent generation of people born just before or during World War II.” Growing up is hard. Better late than never!
6.) Today’s words of wisdom from wealth-redistribution advocate Alec Baldwin — “My phone was stolen today”
VIDEO: Finally, some direct, irrefutable evidence of an older man sexually harassing a younger woman
To read TheDC Morning before everybody else, click here.
