It is here. Just interviewed him.

More later with video.

Sure it’s fun trying to figure this out, but in the end it really doesn’t matter because Herman Cain has been accused of some variety of sexual harassment by at least three former employees. And unless we’re going to play the part of Lanny Davis and James Carville in 1996, Herman Cain owes everyone some answers.

For the record, despite the pathetic mewling by Cain and his campaign manager Mark Block blaming the Perry camp for pointing Politico towards the Cain sex scandal story, I don’t see anything there more substantive than some enmity Cain obviously holds for Perry. I say enmity because of his egregious pile-on of the nothingburger “N*****head Rock” story and his statement that he would not support a Perry candidacy. Personally, I think the preponderance of evidence points to Romney.

Having said that, I don’t care. Whomever pointed this story out to Politico did the GOP a great service. I can’t imagine what the landscape would look like if Cain had won several primaries, or Heaven forfend, the nomination and then had this drop.

The fact is that despite Politico’s editorial sleaziness and water carrying for Democrat politicians, they got this story 100% right. The fact is that Cain had ten (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) days to prepare for this story and either couldn’t or didn’t. The fact is that Cain has changed his story at least four times since Monday. If you count the fact that he lied to the guy he’s accusing of leaking the story (no Herman there wasn’t “one” case, there are at least three, and I’m betting some multiple of that are yet to emerge), he’s changed it five times.

Cain’s sex scandal is a self-inflicted wound from the word “go”. If he wants to blame someone and demand an apology from that person he should send Mark Block out to Dollar General to buy a mirror.

I believe that the word that both the senior Democratic Senator from NJ, and the Democratic Congressman from NJ-12, would insist on seeing here would be allegedly. As in, allegedly former canvass worker Christopher Nastuk was told that it would be, ah, “demographically undesirable” to use African-American canvassers in Holt’s lily-white district. Or, allegedly the minority canvassers that Nastuk did hire were fired anyway “and replaced by white canvassers whose names were provided by e-mail in a text document titled “nobrolists” — which Nastuk said he took to mean “no bro-thers,” in a disparaging slang.” Not to mention, allegedly Nastuk got fired after raising a stink about this. And, finally, allegedly Nastuk and four other plaintiffs took this to court and got a 40K settlement out of Lautenberg and Holt.

No, wait, that last one is a matter of record.

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We have the response from the Cain campaign. It’s all Rick Perry’s fault. Or rather, it is Rick Perry’s consultant Curt Anderson who is to blame.

And Chris Wilson, who says he knows about it because of his time at the National Restaurant Association, works for a Perry Super PAC.

Curt Anderson was Herman Cain’s strategist when he ran for the Senate.

So let’s get this straight.

Herman Cain has at least ten days notice from the Politico. Curt Anderson was only hired by Perry in the last week, i.e. after the Politico had the story.

He also knows his former strategist was a Romney guy in 2008 and now is definitely not on Team Cain for 2012.

He also knows that Anderson knows about this stuff.

And he still can’t come up with a measurable response when the story finally comes out?

Even more damaging, I think, is when people tie it all together. Herman Cain’s consultant from 2004 uncovered it in 2004 and Cain launched a Presidential bid in 2011 without coming up with a damage control plan on a major issue that could destroy his campaign?

(Never mind that Herman Cain says he only told Curt Anderson about one woman)

And now there is a third woman?!?

What. The. Hell.

UPDATE:
In response to Cain calling him the source of the story, Curt Anderson made this statement:

“I’ve known Herman Cain for about 7 years. I was one of several consultants on his Senate race in 2004 and was proud to help him. I’d never heard any of these allegations until I read them in Politico, nor does anything I read in the press change my opinion that Herman is an upstanding man and a gentleman. I have great respect for Herman and his character and I would never speak ill of him, on the record or off the record. That’s true today and it’s not going to change.”

AP Exclusive: Third Worker Says Harassed By Cain

WASHINGTON (AP) — A third former employee says she considered filing a workplace complaint over what she considered aggressive and unwanted behavior by Herman Cain when she worked for the presidential candidate in the 1990s. She says the behavior included a private invitation to his corporate apartment.

She worked for the National Restaurant Association when he was its head. She told The Associated Press that Cain made sexually suggestive remarks or gestures about the same time that two co-workers had settled separate harassment complaints against him.

The employee described situations in which she said Cain told her he had confided to colleagues how attractive she was and invited her to his corporate apartment outside work. She spoke on condition of anonymity, saying she feared retaliation.

Cain’s campaign declined to comment.

I don’t know if it is time to stick a fork in this particular deep crust but things aren’t looking good for the Cain Campaign.

Declined to comment? What planet does his campaign think they are living on?

Obviously the big story this week in the Republican Presidential race is the story Politico broke discussing sexual harassment allegations, and whether Herman Cain would be helped or hurt by that story.

As it turns out, if the new Quinnipiac poll is to be believed, he was already on the way up before the story broke.

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A few days ago, Ben Domenech made this statement in his indispensable Transom

One more thing: The timing and nature of this story in interesting. Many staffers were struck throughout the 2008 campaign by how often leaks about certain candidates would come out right before previously scheduled media availabilities or TV appearances, forcing a candidate to immediately answer difficult questions to a horde of rabid journalists or duck the avail and make it seem even worse. Now Cain has this story drop at 8 PM on a Sunday night—whole cloth, with no evidence of investigation beyond calling the people named in the documents—a mere 12 hours before he’s supposed to have a full day of media availability in Washington, DC at the American Enterprise Institute and the National Press Club. I feel like I’ve seen this movie. There are only two candidates running this time who ran then, and I don’t think Ron Paul even has an oppo research arm. Curiouser and curiouser.

Now the story has moved forward. We have a suspect … but no suprise.

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Ben Howe. You may know him from such RedState posts as Attacking Attack Watch’s Attack on my Attack on the Auto Bailouts and Happy Birthday President Obama!

What you may not know though is that he’s in the running to have his own radio show on WBT in Charlotte. Please consider going to the WBT website today and clicking the “Like” button (this isn’t a Facebook thing) on that webpage to vote for Ben Howe in the WBT’s Next Talker event.

Ben’s a good guy. I’ve met him a couple of times. The man can tell a story and I think he’d be great on radio.

One of the more positive ancillary benefits of this presidential primary season is the newfound focus on taxation, regulation, and energy production.  The prominence of the presidential election has helped jumpstart a vital discourse on long-term reforms for those three policies.

The RSC, which is the most respected conservative group within Congress, has proposed a jobs growth plan today, which seeks to achieve those reforms, albeit in a more inclusive way than some of the proposals from presidential candidates, like Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain.  It appears that they are seeking changes to the tax and regulatory system that have already received broad support within the Republican party (and some lip service from Democrats, in regard to certain provisions), and are bundling them into one package, “The Jobs Through Growth Act.”

Here are some of the major provisions of the proposal:

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I have had fun with it too. I think it is hilarious that the same day the Politico’s Roger Simon claims being racist gives you an advantage within the GOP, the Politico does a hit job on the black Republican running for office. It is kind of humorous.

I know the left accuses the right of racism at the drop of a hat, but I think we should resist actually buying into the Politico hit job being racist. Race has nothing to do with it. Opposition research does.

Below is all informed speculation on my part. I could be off base. But re-reading everything so far, looking at the timeline, and drawing on my past experience as a lawyer doing sexual harassment cases, I think I have a pretty good idea of what happened and what the ramifications are.

The short answer is that this is an opposition research hit by another Republican candidate against Herman Cain, it is not fatal in and of itself, but the Cain response will probably make for self-destruction. And there is one big question — even if this is a nothingburger, which I suspect it is for reasons I’ll go into, can Herman Cain survive a crying victim of sexual harassment on television? Probably not well.

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Brett Stevens of Amerika.org theorized that human societies can have two forms of culture; Managerial and Organic. He describes these two options below.

• Managerial. Like attending a job, days at an American high school or going to a mall, the managerial state consists of people who have nothing in common except wanting to make money and not get murdered. As a result, a strong nanny/police state is needed to make lots of little laws, enforce them, and subject children to intense propaganda for the “morally right” way to behave.
• Organic. More like an extended family, this society has an organic values system arising from culture in the form of shared values, customs, language, heritage and beliefs. As a result, less police enforcement is needed and commerce is restrained by what the people value based on their shared ideals.

Nothing short of the Politburo of The Chinese Communist Party represents the Managerial culture better than the Eurocracy attempting to govern a continent from the smug, baronial confines of Brussels, Belgium. Greek Prime Minister George A. Papandreou is nearly a walking caricature of that entire school of morality. Yet recently, despite his Socialistic ideology, Greek Prime Minister George A. Papandreou, has decided to reassert the old Athenian Democratic ideal. He will put the latest EU Bailout plan for Greece up to a national referendum.

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File this one under “Shutting the Barn Door.”

On Monday, Herman Cain gave an interview to PBS’s Judy Woodruff.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you view China as a potential military threat to the United States?

HERMAN CAIN: I do view China as a potential military threat to the United States.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what could you do as president to head that off?

HERMAN CAIN: My China strategy is quite simply outgrow China. It gets back to economics. China has a $6 trillion economy and they’re growing at approximately 10 percent. We have a $14 trillion economy — much bigger — but we’re growing at an anemic 1.5, 1.6 percent. When we get our economy growing back at the rate of 5 or 6 percent that it has the ability to do, we will outgrow China.

And secondly, we already have superiority in terms of our military capability, and I plan to get away from making cutting our defense a priority and make investing in our military capability a priority, going back to my statement: peace through strength and clarity. So yes they’re a military threat. They’ve indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

Yes, they have indicated they are trying to develop a nuclear capability. They did so rather convincingly in 1964.

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