Cain "jokes" about putting lethal electric barbed wire fence on border

[Revy]

ugh
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/markos-moulitas/188341-cains-joke-crosses-line



Cain’s ‘joke’ crosses line


By Markos Moulitsas - 10/18/11 06:39 PM ET
Pizza mogul Herman Cain has had a good few weeks. He’s vacuuming up Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s former supporters, rising in the polls and turning the GOP nominating contest on its heels. It’s a testament to the pathetic GOP field that someone as quixotic as Cain has risen this far.


But as Michele Bachmann and Perry found out, being the front-runner is no picnic. People suddenly pay attention to what you say. And it hasn’t taken long for the front-running Cain to hit his first pothole.


“We’ll have a real fence, 20 feet high with barbed wire, electrified, with a sign on the other side that says, ‘It can kill you,’ ” Cain said at a campaign stop in Tennessee, to rowdy applause. And if someone thought that was insensitive, he had an answer: “What is insensitive is when they come to the United States across our border and kill our citizens and kill our Border Patrol people.”

Don’t ask Cain for an accounting of all those mass-murdering landscapers, busboys, nannies and crop pickers, because they don’t exist. Just as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) invented stories of beheadings in the border desert during recent campaigns, so too is Cain playing on voters’ fears with mythology.

Yet the comment about killing immigrants raised some eyebrows, and Cain had to clarify that he was “joking” (even if Cain’s audience was cheering, not laughing)

[Makaru]

The guy is a complete idiot. I just subjected myself to two hours of Republican bullshit and my belief in that is only confirmed. He can't defend a single position and when it came to discussing hostage swaps he said "I won't negotiate with terrorists" but then said he'd tackle the matter on a case-by-case basis.

Not that the others are much more intelligent. Bachmann thinks Israel is America's greatest ally and Newt Gingrich can't trust someone who doesn't pray. All of this would be so amusing if half of the country didn't buy into their crap.

[Philosopher Jay]

I've been studying his record as CEO of Godfather's Pizza from 1986-1995. The guy kept making delusional claims about how well the company was doing and how he had turned it around. Unfortunately the sales figures show that it was nonsense. The chain did $270 million in sales the year before he took over. It did $265 million in 1995, the year he was forced to resign by his board of directors. Adjusted for inflation sales were down 40% in 9 years. The company went from the 4th biggest pizza chain to the 8th biggest during this time. He has never released profit and loss statements and there is no evidence he ever made a profit. In 1988, he predicted he would increase the number of franchises by 600 to a total of 1200 by 1990. Instead, he went down to under 550.
I won't even mention that he closed some 200 of the 765 stores he started with and put about 1,500 people out of work.
For more info see http://jayraskin.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/complete-godfathers-pizza-sales-figure-from-the-herman-cain-years/

My honest opinion is that he suffers from a narcissistic-God complex and is a pathological liar.

[Revy]

The guy is a complete idiot. I just subjected myself to two hours of Republican bullshit and my belief in that is only confirmed. He can't defend a single position and when it came to discussing hostage swaps he said "I won't negotiate with terrorists" but then said he'd tackle the matter on a case-by-case basis.

Not that the others are much more intelligent. Bachmann thinks Israel is America's greatest ally and Newt Gingrich can't trust someone who doesn't pray. All of this would be so amusing if half of the country didn't buy into their crap.

They say he is a successful pizza CEO and that he "rescued" Godfather's Pizza...he only did that by closing more than half their restaurants.


Aiming to cut costs, Cain, over a 14-month period, reduced the company from 911 stores to 420. As a result of his efforts, Godfather's Pizza became profitableThat must be thousands of workers who were out of a job as a result of his "efforts"...

[Seth]

The Republicans are a drug cartel, they deal in KochCain.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

The Republicans are a drug cartel, they deal in KochCain.
Reagan and the Iran-Contra Affair ....

[阿部高和]

They'll need it to keep all the Americans in after Bush, Obama, and Cain will destroy there.

[Hexen]

They'll need it to keep all the Americans in after Bush, Obama, and Cain will destroy there.

Yep, their real attention is to build a Prison....

[Philosopher Jay]

Actually, Cain closed many stores, but not that many. The real figures are a drop of about 720 to 520 stores between 1986 when he took over to 1991. About 1,500 people lost their jobs. The problem was not that these stores were not making money. In most cases they lost their franchises because they refused to toe the line in following Cain's iron fisted policies. Cain was really an amateur with no real background in business management and only three years experience running Burger Kings when Pillsbury selected him to run its 720 newly purchased Godfather's Pizzas. Pillsbury was facing a racial discrimination suit for not hiring black executives. By giving Cain this high profile executive job, they probably hoped to show that the law suit was without merit. Pillsbury lost the law suit in 1990.
What is really amazing is that Cain has spun the story into an Horatio Alger success story. The truth is that Cain took a very promising sucessful company which was the 4th largest Pizza franchise in America and smashed it. Pillsbury ended up selling the company to him and a management group 2 1/2 years later. The value of Godfather's was about $130 million when Pillsbury gave it to Cain. Cain got a $30 million dollar loan from Citibank to buy the company 2 1/2 years later. Thus under Cain Godfather's went from a value of $130 million to about $30 million in 2 1/2 years. Pillsbury, an American company for over 130 years was in such bad financial shape that it was bought by a British company, Grand Metropolitan, in 1990. Cain's mismanagement of Godfather's was at least partly responsible for Pillsbury financial problems.

Cain spun the story around, claiming that he took a bankrupt company and made it a success. Godfather's was still paying back the loan in 2002 when Cain left the company. The racist American mass media, delighted to find a conservative black man, simply echoed Cain's false story without really checking the facts of the case.