In the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration, big investment banks (which we normally associate with Wall Street, even though they’re no longer located there) made more money than they did during the eight years of the Bush administration.

Just saying.

I don’t bring this up because I’m particularly anti-President Obama; he’s more conservative than I am, but then, just about every American politician on the national stage is more conservative than I am, with the possible exception of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

I become more pro-Obama when the alternatives are presented. Mitt Romney, for instance, who apparently has never met a principled stand that he couldn’t pivot 180 degrees away from faster than Jacoby Ellsbury can steal second base. (Don’t try this at home; it tends to break the dishes drying in the dish rack. Just trust me on this one.)

(And if you didn’t have the slightest idea who Jacoby Ellsbury is, well, your condition is not terminal, as far as I know. But then, I’m not a physician. Thank god for that, I hear one of my ex-girlfriends saying, who is, as it happens, a physician.)

Or, for that matter, Herman Cain, who, if he’s not a nut case, certainly does a damn fine job of portraying one on TV.

There’s the small matter of Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, which he introduced on Sept. 15. However, the Tax Policy Center discovered would raise taxes on 84 percent of Americans (oddly enough, the bottom 84 percent; you’d think that Cain was a Republican or something).

Then, more than a month later, on Oct. 21 in Michigan, Cain said his plan was 9-0-9, which would protect poor families from a rise in their income tax. He then told Bob Schieffer of "Face the Nation" on Oct. 30 that there had been no change in his plan.

9-9-9? 9-0-9? It’s as if we’re talking area codes here.

(Part of me wishes we were.)

And then there’s the not-so-small matter of sexual-harassment charges against Cain, when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the ’90s, first reported by Politico on Oct. 31. Politico also reported that the restaurant group had made settlements with the two (at that time) women.

Cain denied the charges, saying, according to many reports, "I have never sexually harassed anybody in my life."

He also at first denied that the association had made any settlements with the two women. Then, he allowed that maybe there had been a settlement, "three to six months’ severance pay, something of that nature," he told CNN on Nov. 1.

The New York Times, on Nov. 2, reported the settlements were one year’s salaries.

Then, a third woman came out and said she had been sexually harassed by Cain. Now granted, these women are anonymous, two of them prevented from disclosing their indenties by confidentiality agreements included in their settlements. At least one of them, according to many reports, is trying to get out of her confidentiality agreement.

Innocent until proven guilty, always. And the charges are old, from the 1990s. But Cain’s twists and turns — he doesn’t remember; he doesn’t remember what he doesn’t remember; he doesn’t remember what he doesn’t remember what he doesn’t remember — don’t inspire a great degree of confidence. Oh, and by the way, what’s the difference between "settlement" and "agreement."

But then, on Monday, a fourth accuser came out publicly — Sharon Bialek, another restaurant former employee described quite graphically an alleged sexual-harassment encounter with Cain in a car in D.C.

Such "dignitaries" as Ann Coulter can yammer all they want about "if you are a conservative black, they will believe the most horrible sexualized fantasies of these uptight white women feminists." ("Sean Hannity Show," Oct. 31) (I’m not saying Coulter is a nut case, but she does a damn fine job of portraying one on TV.)

Four women? All of them with "fantasies"?

And what, exactly, are "horrible sexualized fantasies," anyway?

[Information from FactCheck.org, the Washington Post, Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, often overlapping, was used in this column.]