There's a part of me that wonders whether it's worth expending time and energy explaining just how shallow and uninformed Herman Cain is, since he is most assuredly not going to be the Republican nominee for president. But at the moment he's actually leading the polls, so I guess we have no choice. To wit, there is something he has said a few times in interviews that has bugged me, when he's asked about how the figures add up in his 9-9-9 tax plan. Here's an example:

Had you asked Mitt Romney a year ago how he would have liked the pre-primary period of the 2012 presidential election to play out, he probably would have said something like this: First, I'd like to be widely assumed to be the inevitable nominee. Then, I'd like to have a series of candidates emerge, capture public imagination for a few weeks or so, and then flame out spectacularly. It's OK with me if some of them move ahead of me in the polls briefly, if they come under the harsh glare of the media spotlight, then whither and die. It doesn't even matter if they all actually get in the race, so long as they take up all the oxygen one by one until they implode, all while making sure as few people as possible are paying attention to the reasons they don't like me.

As I wrote yesterday, 2010 has been a rough year for voting-rights advocates. Under the guise of fighting voter fraud, Republicans have exploited their new legislative majorities in the states to pass a slew of bills that will restrict access to the ballot.

At last night's Republican debate, Newt Gingrich got asked about the fact that Medicare spends a huge amount of its funds on procedures in the last two years of patients' lives, much of which are pointless or even harmful. His answer was, essentially, that the government should pay for any medical procedure anyone wants, no matter if it works or even if it kills people. And more than that, the government shouldn't even endeavor to find out whether particular procedures work. "The most recent U.S. government intervention on whether or not to have prostate testing is basically going to kill people," he said (video here).

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When a candidate from the party you dislike has no chance at all of being successful, it's hard to get too worked up about him or her. Yes, Rick Santorum is repellent, but how mad can you get at him? It's not as though he'll have the power to affect millions of lives anytime soon. But once the oddball longshot candidate starts getting some juice, exploring just what a jerk he or she is begins to seem more urgent.

Here, courtesy of Think Progress, is Herman Cain doing a little preemption for when future interviews reveal him to be not particularly knowledgeable about the kind of stuff a president needs to know:

Yes, he said, "Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan." And it's good to know that before he departs for a state visit to a foreign country, he will indeed learn the name of that country's president.