Bring Me Binders Full Of Women!

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It’s odd sometimes how the things you think are going to end up being a big deal aren’t, and the things that end up being a big deal are the ones you wouldn’t have suspected.

This was recently illustrated in the aftermath of the latest debate between President Barack Obama and Lord Mitt Romney, the Earl of Etch A Sketchington, and how a comment by His Lordship made “binders full of women” an Internet sensation.

When asked by a member of the audience how the candidates would deal with the issue of gender inequality in the workplace, in particular pay inequality between men and women, Obama noted that the first bill he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which increases the ability of women to seek recourse against discriminatory pay practices.

He mentioned education, particularly Pell grants, which allow both men and women better access to education. He promised enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

When it was Lord Mitt’s turn, he began with a recollection of how he’d hired a bunch of women for Cabinet positions when he became governor of Massachusetts:

“Well, gosh,” he said, “can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?” He went on to relate: “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Now, I confess, I didn’t pay much attention to that phrase when Romney said it. It went right by me, probably because I was too busy griping that Romney hadn’t done squat to answer the actual question. But hoo-boy, did some people, mainly women, notice it.

“Minutes after” the fateful phrase was uttered, it was “lighting up Twitter and had already spawned a new website,” according to the L.A. Times. The website  mocked Romney’s phrasing in typical online fashion, with references to various other Internet memes and sarcastic pictures.

It didn’t end there. Someone created a Facebook page that immediately garnered more than 200,000 positive votes (“Likes,” in Facebook parlance). USA Today dubbed “binders” its “Obama-Romney Word of the Day.” It seems a lot of people found the image of Mittens paging through “binders full of women” more than a little creepy.

You knew the phrase was really taking hold when conservative pundits started whining that the Obama campaign was “trivializing” the issue by bringing up the words their candidate actually used. Pro tip: When they’re whining, you’re winning.

Then people who were actually around in Massachusetts at the time Romney took office began to speak up, and — surprise! — it turns out that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. Again.

Romney’s former lieutenant governor noted that the “binders” were prepared by a group called the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, through a program they called MassGAP. In a statement from that group released Wednesday, spokesman Liz Levin noted that Romney hadn’t come to them after the election; they’d come to both him and his opponent, Shannon O’Brien, before the election even took place, and that “both campaigns made a commitment” to work with them on hiring more women.

And while they applauded Romney’s initial commitment, which resulted in women filling “42 percent of the new appointments made by the Romney administration,” they noted that “from 2004-2006 the percentage of newly appointed women in these senior appointed positions dropped to 25 percent.”

But the initial question, and the big issue, wasn’t about whether Romney’s a good guy for perusing “binders full of women” to find candidates for Cabinet posts. It was about gender inequality in the workplace. So what did Lord Romney or his campaign have to say about the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which, as noted above, increases the ability of women to seek redress for income discrimination in the workplace?

Well, according to Romney spokesman Ed Gillespie, Romney opposed the passage of the bill, but would not repeal it.

Then, the very next day, Gillespie performed one of the flip-flops that have become such a regular part of the Romney campaign that no one in the mainstream media even seems to comment on them anymore: Romney, Gillespie told the political blog Talking Points Memo, “never weighed in on [the Act]. As president, he would not seek to repeal it.”

Once again, Mittens displays the breathtaking ability to take up to three positions on a single issue within the space of 24 hours: He doesn’t support it, takes no position on it, but won’t repeal it.

Awkward, out-of-touch, and condescending remarks, lies and shameless flip-flops, followed by whining about what people are quoting what the candidate actually said. Just another day on the campaign trail for His Lordship.

Sluice Tundra, Private Eye In: The Case of the Bothered Bird

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The street was clean, colorful, brightly lit. The doors were painted a vivid, friendly green, and cheerful red curtains hung in the windows. The place looked welcoming and warm, a neighborhood anyone would want to live in.

It gave me the creeps.

My name is Sluice Tundra. I'm a private eye. I usually make my living on meaner streets, where the only thing hotter than the dames is the lead that flies when the bad guys meet the badder guys, where the only thing darker than the night is the evil that lurks in every alleyway, where men's lives are often measured out in intervals shorter than this monologue.

But it wasn't the contrast between this street and the ones where I ply my usual trade that sent a shiver of warning up my backbone. It was the fact that the street, which you'd expect to be full of happy people doing happy things, was empty. I knew there were people behind those doors and windows, but no one moved. No one made a sound.

Something was seriously wrong on Sesame Street. And I was here to get to the bottom of it.

"Hey, buddy," a growly voice said behind me. I looked around.

The guy addressing me from the trash can was covered in green fur, with a bushy unibrow over wide, bulging eyes. He looked a lot like my brother-in-law from my first marriage. Or my sister-in-law from my second.

"My name's Tundra, not buddy," I said.

"What's your business here?" he demanded.

"My business is my business," I said. "And it's not with you."

"Awright," he said. "You had your chance to play nice."

I felt a sudden sharp pain in the back of my leg. I looked down. Another little furry guy, this one covered in what looked like crimson shag carpeting, was whacking the back of my leg with a lead pipe.

"Hey!" I snapped. "Cut that out!"

He ignored me, just kept waling away, as if he was trying to chop me down like a tree. I reached down and picked him up by the scruff of the neck.

"I said -" I began, before I realized my mistake. I'd raised him to head level. He nailed me right on the forehead, and everything went black.

I awoke on a hard concrete floor. As I sat up and rubbed my head, I noticed the guy who'd hit me a few feet away. But it was the figure next to him I'd come to see. Eight feet tall, covered with bright yellow feathers, and sporting an absurdly long beak.

"Big Bird, I presume," I said.

The little guy spoke first. "Elmo's really sorry, Mister," he said. "But Elmo can't be too careful."

"That's OK," I said. "Elmo was just doing his job." Dang, now he had me doing it.

"Sorry," Big Bird said. "But with you-know-who gunning for us, me in particular ... well, we're all a little jumpy."

"I get it," I said.

"Well, I don't," said the bird. "What did I ever do to him? We take up less than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the federal budget."

"He's trying to make an example of you," I said.

"Why?" he said bitterly. "To scare other puppets?"

"No," I said, "because he won't be specific about any other things he wants to cut, except ones that don't add up. He said he wants to save money by repealing Obamacare, but the Congressional Budget Office says that while that would reduce spending by $890 billion, it'd cut revenues by $1 trillion and increase the deficit.

"He says he wants to cut taxes, raise military spending, and maintain Medicare and Social Security at the current levels for people 55 and older. To do that, he'd have to cut all other government spending by at least 53 percent. On everything. Student loans, national parks, cancer research, food and drug inspection, environmental protection, small business loans, highways, the State Department ..."

I was running out of breath. When I recovered, I went on. "If he talks about the rest of the stuff he'll need to do to make his promises come true, he'd be about as popular as stomach flu. So he name-checks you."

"This doesn't make me feel any better," Big Bird said.

I shrugged. "Cheer up. The way this guy flip-flops, tomorrow he may be claiming he'll nominate you for secretary of education."

"So what can we do?"

"One, hope the president's on his game enough to try and pin you-know-who down on his claims. Two, get out the vote."

"We can't vote," he said. "We're Muppets."

"What, no photo ID?"

He shook his giant head. "You're really not from around here, are you?"

A Night Of Blown Chances

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For Obama supporters, Wednesday's debate was a frustrating exercise as we watched the president let one easy pitch after another go by him without taking a swing that could have let him hit the ball out of the park.

For instance, during the debate over taxes, Mitt Romney continued to make his absurd assertion that he could make his plan to lower tax rates "revenue neutral" by eliminating unspecified "loopholes and deductions." Obama could have turned to him and simply asked, "So which of these deductions and loopholes do you plan to close, governor?"

In the past, Romney has tried to weasel his way out of answering this question, saying only that he'll have to "negotiate with Congress on that" (in other words, we have to elect him and pass his tax reform bill to see what's in it). But nonpartisan tax policy analysts have stated that the only way to make up the revenue would be to eliminate popular tax breaks like the deduction for home mortgages and the child care tax credit.

President Obama did bring up that study, and made a reference that the "arithmetic" didn't add up, but when Romney intimated that his "plan" didn't include eliminating those middle-class tax breaks, he failed to press him to be specific. Romney hates being specific, largely because the more specific he and Ryan get about what they really want to do, the more horrified voters become.

Likewise, the president missed an opportunity to point out Romney's hypocrisy on the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. "The president should have grabbed that," Romney said. But Obama could have easily pointed out that Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, voted against sending the final proposal of the Simpson-Bowles commission to Congress. "Their proposal is a serious and credible plan, but I cannot support it," Ryan said at the time. Obama just let that one go by.

On health care, President Obama forgot the wise words of Sun Tzu that the best policy in waging warfare is to "attack the enemy's strategy." Mitt Romney's strategy is based entirely on lying through his teeth.

Remember, this is the campaign that said they weren't going to let the fact checkers dictate to them, and Obama let him get away with some whoppers.

For instance, Romney hearkened back to Sarah Palin's mythical "death panels" when he talked about "an unelected board that's going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have."

But as fact checkers, including The Associated Press, have pointed out, the health care law "explicitly prohibits" the Independent Payment Advisory Board "from rationing care, shifting costs to retirees, restricting benefits or raising the Medicare eligibility age." So the board doesn't have the power to dictate to doctors what treatments they can prescribe.

Romney also continued to double down on the thoroughly discredited claim that Obama is "cutting $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare." As the fact-checking site Politifact points out, Obamacare "does not literally cut funding from the Medicare program's budget." They go on to say that "the cuts are from future spending, not the program's current budget" and that 'the spending reductions were mainly aimed at insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries."

This has been debunked so many times by so many fact checkers that for Romney to keep bringing it up is an act of sheer outrageous chutzpah, but I can't imagine that, as commentator David Gergen put it, Obama was caught by surprise by Romney telling a bald-faced lie. And that is exactly what it was.

Romney wasn't expressing opinions upon which reasonable people can disagree. He said things that were factually untrue, and the president let him get away with it.

I don't know what this was all about. Maybe Obama went into this debate assuming he could coast on the lead he has in the swing states. Maybe he thought going for Romney's throat (metaphorically, of course) would look "unpresidential."

He may have thought Romney would do the job for him by saying something egregiously stupid, like dismissing half of the American people again (another thing he inexplicably failed to mention). Maybe he was just unhappy because he was having to do this on his anniversary.

But Obama needs to get his head back in the game here. You give Mr. Etch A Sketch the chance to weasel and lie, he'll take it. Please, Mr. President, don't let it happen again. Next time Mittens serves up a slow pitch, you need to pound it over the left-field wall, then go upside his head with the bat.

Metaphorically, of course.

GUEST BLOGGER: Pam Stack

Pam Stack is one of the "smart and sassy" hosts of the web-based interview show  Authors on the Air.  Check it out! And thanks, Pam for the guest blog.


Time for me to ‘fess up.  Come clean. Do confession.  I am one of Paul’s 30% or Mitt’s 47%.  Yes, it’s true.  I am one of those lapsed Americans who went to the guv-mint for, er….  a hand-out.  Here’s my story.  I’ve been working all of my life, since I was 15 in fact.  Parents raised me right. Got good grades throughout school.  But last year, I went with my hat in my hand and asked, nay, BEGGED, my guv-mint for a handout and was granted it.  That started my shame spiral toward the hell known as UNEMPLOYMENT.  I jumped through the required hoops and did the requisite dance and I was the recipient of $84.00 a week of entitlement money for a hellishly long 6 months.

I’m trying to look at this in a fair and conscientious way. After all, I’m not the only one on the dole here. I’ve researched this and found that I am in fine company with these other slackers.  I’ve identified some of them lest you think it’s just me who was a money-grabbing low life.  Here they are, in no particular order:

• Our infirm elderly.  Imagine working all your life, paying your fair share of taxes, buying American cars and other products produced in the good old USA, purchasing a home and sharing in the excitement of a mortgage-burning party with family and friends, only to find yourself so sick after retirement, that you must be confined to one of our nations finer establishments known as a NURSING HOME.  You old folks gave up your homes, your cars and all your worldly possessions and hand over your Social Security checks just to go on Medicaid so you can live with ‘round the clock nursing care?  How dare you ask the government for help.  You’ve been misled down that entitlement path.  If this is what the rest of us have to look forward to, well, this country is in sad shape.  And this is the result of our American Dream?
• Of course I cannot forget to mention those other slackers – our wounded warriors.  How dare these brave men and women go and fight in the Middle East or somewhere around the world in a war that WE started, only to come home with Traumatic Brain Injury, missing limbs and the horrors of killing so etched in their brains that normal functioning seems a lost cause.  And you dare ask your government to help you out with medical and psychological assistance, housing, a job or food?  Pull yourself up by those military bootstraps and kick it in gear, soldier.
• What about those who were born with physical, mental and emotional challenges?  You expect the hard-working tax-paying citizens of this country to give you a hand up?  Why?  You’re not society’s responsibility.  Your family should take care of you.  
• And of course – the bane of all that is good and right with this country. WOMEN.  And WOMEN WITH CHILDREN.  You ho’s and welfare moms. Shame on you.  Doesn’t matter that you have been the backbone of the working middle class and get paid less for the same job as your male counterparts do.  Doesn’t matter that you birthed them babies and their daddy ran off with another woman and he refuses to accept even the slightest financial responsibility (after all, he as a new family now).  Doesn’t matter that half of all women and their children who are homeless are such because of domestic violence.  Women, you can’t take care of yourselves enough to figure out that your produce “chemicals”, kind of like the South’s version of “the vapors” to ward off pregnancy.  Like Eve tempted Adam with her apple, society has gone to hell in a handbasket because you can’t pull yourself by your bra straps and be a contributing member of this American society.

So, you see, I’m in fine company with my hand-out.  I paid my taxes on that $84.00 a week that I received for six months.   So Mitt and Paul must have seen into my dark heart and realized that, yes, I no longer an interested in the “American Dream”.  Thank the lord for our Republic's public servants.  Yeh.

Romney vs. The Narrative

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Today, I’m going to do something that may shock you. I’m going to express some sympathy for Mitt Romney. But only a little.

Right now, Willard Mitt Romney is in the fight of his political life. He’s behind Barack Obama by an average of four points in national polls, according to the poll-aggregating website Real Clear Politics.

But, as we all know, elections are won, not in the popular vote, but in the Electoral College, where the same site shows the president leading by enough in enough swing states to snag 265 of the 270 Electoral votes it takes to get him a second term, and he’s got small leads in most if not all of the states listed as toss-ups.

He picks just one of those off, and it’s over. He picks off Florida, it’s over by 9 p.m. Eastern on election night. I’m not going to take a victory lap here, but you’ve got to admit, things look grim for Lord Romney.

But Romney’s fighting a foe more dangerous to his campaign than sliding poll numbers, more powerful than Barack Obama. He’s fighting The Narrative.

I’ve talked in this column before about The Narrative: that shared consensus of opinion that, at some point, begins to grow like a crystal among our lazy press and sensational media. Once it’s fully grown, every story, every quote, every fact reported is viewed through the prism of The Narrative.

While the right may claim that narratives are always a product of the “liberal media bias” of which they’re always whining about being the victims, they’ve benefited from them as often as not. Just ask Al Gore, who never actually said he “invented the Internet,” yet The Narrative — in this case, that Gore was a “serial exaggerator” — decreed that every pundit repeat the misquote as if it was Gospel. Time magazine reporter Margaret Carlson explains why: It was “greatly entertaining to us.”

So what is The Narrative that Romney’s fighting? Surprisingly, at least to me, it’s not that he’s a flip-flopping, pandering, spineless weasel who’ll say anything to get elected. I mean, all that’s true, but that’s not what the media have seized on. No, The Narrative in this case is: Romney’s running an inept, internally fractured campaign and is, therefore, a bumbling loser.

One characteristic of The Narrative is that things that might have gone unnoticed or unremarked become signs and portents of it.

For example, in 2008, The Narrative was that Barack Obama was an “elitist,” a “celebrity,” that he was out of touch with regular folks. This became so entrenched that Chris Matthews (a slave to The Narrative if ever there was one) was aghast that Obama ordered orange juice instead of coffee at a diner, as if orange juice was some kind of exotic, hard-to-find liqueur.

In Romney’s case, there have been some very real missteps and misfires in his campaign. Take, for example, Romney dissing the British at the Olympics. Or his spokesperson responding to the now-infamous “Romney killed my wife” ad by extolling the virtues of Romneycare, which the campaign would really rather pretend never happened (see “flip-flopping, pandering spineless weasel,” above).

But now, thanks to The Narrative, things that might be ignored are being brought to the forefront, such as a video of a recent joint appearance in Ohio with Romney and vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. When Ryan’s introduced, the crowd begins chanting his name. Romney then tries to lead them — awkwardly, of course — in chanting “Rom-ney, Ry-an, Rom-ney, Ry-an.”

This video might have just been another one of thousands lost in the background noise of YouTube, unremarked by anyone but a few left-leaning blogs. But thanks to The Narrative, the video was featured on conservative talk show host Joe Scarborough’s nationally seen “Morning Joe,” followed by Scarborough putting his hands over his face and moaning “Sweet Jesus” in despair.

The Narrative is hard to fight. Once it really gets going, trying to change it is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier plowing ahead at flank speed by standing in a rowboat and hitting it with a broom as it passes.

I don’t think it’s going to be possible for Romney, because in this case, The Narrative, unlike some, has a solid basis in truth. Not all of the things reported as Romney gaffes or missteps as a result of The Narrative are actually going to be either of those, but enough are.

This may not be, as some have claimed, the most inept campaign ever, but it’s certainly inept enough.

Romney Camp: REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELLLLLLL!

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Well, it looks as if in the Battle of the Conventions a couple of weeks ago, the Democrats came out on top. The Republicans got a weak-to-nonexistent “bounce” in the polls, and Barack Obama surged ahead.

One way you can tell that the Democrats took that round is the way the Romney campaign is trying to pretend that conventions and post-convention “bounces” just don’t matter.

Romney pollster Neil Newhouse sent out a memo that reminds one of that Kevin Bacon character from “Animal House” screaming, “Remain calm! All is well!” before the panicked crowd runs him over and literally stomps him flat.

“While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar high from the conventions,” Newhouse said, “the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly.”

Well, Neil, if you mean the structure where Barack Obama has been leading for months in enough states to give him more than the 270 votes he needs to win the Electoral College, then I guess you’re right.

But that doesn’t really help you. And it doesn’t explain why your campaign is pulling ad buys in crucial high-electoral-vote states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. It also leaves out the significant gains President Obama has made in the crucial swing state of Ohio.

It doesn’t explain why Mr. Etch A Sketch suddenly backpedaled on the bill the right loves to hate (the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare) by saying, “Well, I am going to keep some parts that people like.” Then he had to backpedal yet again when the Rabid Right went back into its customary full-blown tantrum mode.

Remember, the Republicans are the party that’s “not letting fact-checkers determine their campaign,” the party that believes that if you just repeat a lie enough times, it doesn’t matter that it’s not true.

And I think they’d really like it to be true that nobody’s affected by conventions, because the image of their convention that’s burned into everyone’s mind is that of a old man stumbling through an argument with a chair.

In contrast, the Democratic convention was forward-looking and upbeat. Again and again, the Democrats took R-Money’s tired old talking point that “Obama can’t run on his record” and stuffed it back in his face like Shaquille O’Neal dunking on a hapless defender.

I confess, when Joe Biden’s speech began, I was holding my breath hoping he wouldn’t say something stupid. But he delivered one of the best lines of the convention, the one that sums up not only why Barack Obama can run on his record, but why he is: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”

Because here’s the thing. In many ways — not all, but many — we really are better off than we were four years ago.

The stock market is up, and corporate profits are at all-time highs. Statistics from the National Association of Realtors show that national sales of existing homes are up about 10 percent from July 2011 to July 2012. Auto sales are up as well. If, for some reason, you don’t think these numbers helped the economy, then I guess you’re telling us that the kind of trickle-down economics espoused by RomneyCorp isn’t working, right?

Add to this the fact that we’re well out of the quagmire that The President Who Must Not Be Named created in Iraq, and are on our way out of the morass in Afghanistan. I’d have to say that the people fighting those wars, and their families, are better off.

Of course, since Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to think those soldiers and their families are “important” enough to be mentioned in his convention speech (according to a campaign spokesman), I suppose that doesn’t count to him.

As for the president’s own speech, it concentrated on shared sacrifice and hard work rather than soaring “yes we can” rhetoric. It was a reminder that we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go, and that “we” means all of us.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, blew smoke about how he was going to create “12 million jobs” (a figure which some economic forecasters say is going to happen no matter who’s president) but offered no forecast of how he’s going to do it, other than pursuing the same policies that were in place when the economy tanked.

He says he’s going to cut taxes and still balance the budget by closing loopholes, which he refuses to identify. He’s already proven he’ll say anything to get elected. Meanwhile, Barack Obama talks to us like we’re grown-ups. And that’s one of the many reasons I’m voting for him.