Biden "will surely take it to Ryan on... his statement yesterday that inner-city kids need to be taught 'good discipline' and 'character.'"

Writes John Cassidy, in The New Yorker, observing that tonight's VP debate is high stakes.

Cassidy doesn't link to the Ryan statement, which — I found on my own — is part of the video that made the rounds the other day, the one that supposedly showed Ryan being "testy." (We talked about it here.) Anyway, let me put the "good discipline" and "character" remark in context. Ryan was asked the question "Does the country have a gun problem?" Ryan took the position that the problem is crime, not guns, and that we already have enough "good, strong gun laws," which we ought to enforce better.

But the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society, that's what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another, make sure they realize the value in one another.

Let's try to understand why people like Cassidy think that's outrageous (as opposed to platitudinous).  Here's Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

What you don’t often hear spoken (out loud, anyway) is that the real problem with gun violence in America is the “character” and “discipline” of people in the “inner cities,” a very specific delineation from other city folk...

Apparently, crime in our cities has nothing to do with poverty, and systemic failures, fueled by generations of institutionalized racism, but with the character of those people. So says Paul Ryan, and so says Mitt Romney. If you’re poor, it’s because your culture is inferior.

Ryan’s assessment of “inner city” people is of a piece with the not-at-all subtle (and even out-and-proud overt) attitudes of the leading lights in the Republican Party, best exemplified by racism decoder-ring Newt Gingrich, who helpfully singled out black people as the Food Stamp-satisfied people we already knew they were talking about, and who echoed Ryan’s chatter about the low character of the inner city denizens who “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

We already knew who the “those people” Romney and Ryan were talking about were, but thanks for the hint, all the same.

In this frame of mind, Ryan was talking down to black people — to use a phrase once aimed at Barack Obama himself. And let's take another look at Obama's 2007 speech to a predominately black audience:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office. We have to help them get there.

Unlike Ryan, who looked to "civil society... what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another," Obama thought there should be federal government programs to teach poor (black?) people to "act appropriately." The difference between conservatives and liberals is about how to solve what they are perceiving as a problem. Pointing out that there's a problem is a sensitive matter, so sensitive it might be better not to point it out at all, as Jesse Jackson's famous open-mike pushback showed.

Will Biden "surely take it to Ryan" on this issue? He might, but it's treacherous. Ryan should be prepared with something elegant to say, but I predict it won't come up because Biden's the one who's gaffe prone, and you don't want to make a gaffe about race.

"Herman Cain Tells Piers Morgan That He Is Anti-Abortion, Yet Pro-Choice?"

Mediate has that headline, as if it's hard to fathom. But I think most Americans are anti-abortion yet pro-choice. I am.

As I view the clip at the link — and it cuts off just at the point where I'd ask a few more questions — Herman Cain believes abortion should be legal. He can maintain his own opinion that abortion is always wrong and, at the same time, that it is the woman's decision and that it is not the role of government to intervene.

In the clip, he says the same thing about homosexuality. He thinks that it's wrong, and also that it's not the government's role to prevent anyone from choosing to engage in homosexual behavior. Piers Morgan drags him into the question whether homosexuality is inborn, and the 2 men never draw the distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual behavior. Whether it's inborn or not, there's a choice about acting out on your desires, and since Cain — I think! — sees that choice as belonging to the individual and not to the government, the science question about the origin of homosexual orientation is irrelevant. I love the idea of freedom of choice, based on a commitment to freedom, as opposed to a concession to the hard facts of biology. (And I remember when people who supported gay rights were enthusiastic about sexual orientation as a choice and got quite angry at a scientist who studied sexual orientation at the biological level.)

What's missing from that Mediaite clip — perhaps not from the interview as a whole — is whether Cain wants to see the Supreme Court overrule the cases that find constitutional rights to choose abortion and to choose to engage in homosexual behavior. You can't tell from the statement in the clip that he thinks there are rights that preclude legislation. Cain might be saying that he wouldn't sign legislation depriving the individual of those choices, but that his disapproval of that legislation doesn't mean that there is a constitutional right — which is what his favorite Supreme Court justice says about such things.

[The law criminalizing homosexual behavior] “is … uncommonly silly.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 527 (1965) (Stewart, J., dissenting). If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.

Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a member of this Court I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated. My duty, rather, is to “decide cases ‘agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States.’ ” Id., at 530. And, just like Justice Stewart, I “can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,” ibid., or as the Court terms it today, the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions,” ante, at 1.