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Your Binders Full of Women Wednesday Morning Discussion Post

By Dustin Rowles | Miscellaneous | October 17, 2012 |

By Dustin Rowles | Miscellaneous | October 17, 2012 |


Out of respect for our conservative and Republican readers — who I appreciate and respect, especially when you articulate your points cogently — I ask that you consider not reading this post. There is no other way to characterize it other than gloating, and gloating is very unbecoming. However, while I understand many of you don’t like your politics mixed up with your pop culture, last night’s televised debate spilled into our territory, and besides, it’s the only thing I’ve been able to concentrate on this morning. But instead of serving up my own easily refutable opinions (I’m lousy at discussion politics; my brain has been addled by too many episodes of “Sons of Anarchy”), allow me to offer links to the best posts I’ve seen about the debate so far this morning (and by “best,” I mean: Those that reflect well on the President).

If our conservative readers do decide to engage, please show them some respect. It’s a hostile environment, and while many of our conservative readers do have differing opinions on the economy and on fiscal matters, 99 percent of them do agree with liberals on social issues.

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The Binders Full of Women point in last night’s debate that has elicited so much Internet ridicule wasn’t even true, according to the Boston Phoenix.

Because every website on the Internet is doing it already, here are my favorite television and movie related Binders Full of Women Memes.

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Naturally, there’s already a tumblr account associated with it, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you should. (Can someone please explain to BWeaves what a tumblr is?)

The Guardian does a great job of articulating why the Binders Full of Women comment was offensive.

Why did the phrase resonate? Because it was tone deaf, condescending and out of touch with the actual economic issues that women are so bothered about. The phrase objectified and dehumanized women. It played right into the perception that so many women have feared about a Romney administration - that a president Romney would be sexist and set women back.

The most tone deaf part of Romney’s answer wasn’t actually the binders full of women; it was the concerns that he had that women might not be able to come home in time to make dinner.

I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.

She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

I also loved Amy Sullivan’s take on the debate in her “A View from a Woman” post on The New Republic.

The dismissive lecture Romney gave Crowley was devastating—but not in the way he intended. He defended his honor as a businessman, but at the cost of reminding undecided women of every man who ever made them feel stupid or who cut them down just to win an argument.

If you thought the cost of gas price that Mitt Romney cite when Obama came into office sounded suspect, it’s because it was. From HuffPo.

What they won’t tell you, for example, is that under George W. Bush, the price of gasoline increased from $1.60 per gallon when he took office in January 2001 to $4.40 per gallon in July 2008, a jump of 275 percent.

Now it’s true that when the economy crashed, the price of gasoline decreased temporarily, in part because the economic meltdown suppressed demand. When Obama took office in January, 2009, the economy was at its low point, and as a result the price of gas was at a low point as well. As the economy improved under Obama’s direction, the price of gas returned to its pre-crash baseline.

According to the Daily Kos, the odds of Obama winning the election increased by 4.4 points on Intratrade within 20 minutes of the debate beginning.

All the polls have Obama winning the debate, but I’m going with Politico because it shows the highest margin of victory: 68 to 25.

Finally, because most folks were probably digesting the debate at 11:00 last night, rather than watching The Daily Show, Jon Stewart went to town on Paul Ryan for his cynical soup kitchen photo op, in which he cleaned already clean dishes for the cameras.

If you’re curious, here’s raw footage from the photo op.