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‘Binders Full Of Women’ Was A Lie But Exposed Romney’s ‘Ozzie And Harriet’ World View

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Mitt Romney lied 31 times at last night’s presidential debate, including his now-infamous claim that as governor he had “binders full of women” — a lie to cover up the fact he doesn’t believe in equal pay for women.

But first, here’s how Romney last night described his idea of working women, talking about his time as Governor:

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.

We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.

Wow. Women have to be home at five o’clock to cook, and employers are going to need so many new employees they’ll have to hire women.

This is straight out of “Ozzie And Harriet.”

If Romney paid women as much as men — which Romney does not believe in — they could hire housekeepers, maids, cooks, and pay for child care. And who says it’s women who have to cook and clean? Are we still in the 1950s?

Romney is not a job creator for this very reason. He didn’t hire women at Bain for high-level positions. There were no female partners working at Bain. And Bain Capital doesn’t create jobs. But had Romney hired women and paid them equally, they would have.

When employers pay employees fair wages, and pay women equally, those employees are the ones who can create jobs. By putting more money back into the economy, and by hiring caregivers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XxgAY6PgXq0%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

Romney, addressing the “equal pay” question, also said “I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.”

And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?”

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

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.

Of course, the Interwebs being what they are, have rushed to the opportunity, as Gawker notes:

Needless to say, the Internet had quite a bit of fun with that turn of phrase: From parody Twitter accounts, to a single-topic Tumblr blog, to a Facebook fan page with nearly 250,000 likes.

Meanwhile, in the world of truth-telling, what actually happened was this:

“What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government,” David S. Bernstein reports:

 There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

I have written about this before, in various contexts; tonight I’ve checked with several people directly involved in the MassGAP effort who confirm that this history as I’ve just presented it is correct — and that Romney’s claim tonight, that he asked for such a study, is false.

And Bernstein adds one final note, that, “in Romney’s story as he tells it, this man [Romney] who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn’t know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?”

It says he had never hired any women for high-level positions at Bain, and, perhaps most telling, was Romney’s comment that women needed to be home to cook was pretty offensive. If they were paid as much as men — which Romney does not believe in — they could hire housekeepers, maids, cooks, and pay for child care.

Romney is not a job creator for this very reason. Bain Capital doesn’t create jobs. But had he hired women and paid them equally, they would have.

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‘Bring Back Joe McCarthy’: Fox Host Rages at Democrats’ ‘Communist’ NYC Candidate

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July 31, 2025

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Fox News intensified its ongoing attacks on Zohran Mamdani on Thursday, as host Jesse Watters delivered a sweeping monologue accusing the popular but controversial Democratic mayoral nominee of being a communist, portraying his supporters as “radicals,” and calling for the return of an anti-communist crusader.

“These are the same dumb Marxist ideas that we’ve been hearing for decades,” Watters declared, “and it’s just destruction. At a certain point, you have to think, democracy is not a suicide pact, right?”

“We’re just not gonna allow a faction of radicals in a great city like this to come in, elect the guy, and have it destroyed,” he said, appearing to suggest some form of action against Mamdani, who is not a communist but a self-described Democratic socialist.

“What kind of democracy is that?” Watters asked, suggesting electoral outcomes he opposes are not true democracy. “It’s not tolerable to do that.”

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Describing Mamdani as “Kamala Harris with a beard,” he went on to declare that while America “won the Cold War … Marxism survived, and these teachers at universities got bolder.”

“So you have unchecked immigration, and you have unchecked indoctrination, and you spit them all out into Manhattan, and they vote for a communist who wants to destroy the city, and we’re supposed to sit back and let it happen? I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Watters declared, appearing to suggest, falsely, that undocumented immigrants and non-citizens are voting.

“I think we have to bring back Joe McCarthy.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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White House Pushes for Trump to Be Awarded Nobel Peace Prize—and One for Economics

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July 31, 2025

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President Donald Trump has long craved a Nobel Peace Prize, and has bemoaned that President Barack Obama was awarded the honor but he never has. Now, it appears, the White House is campaigning for the President to receive, not one but two Nobels—one for peace, and one for economics.

In a rant during Thursday’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to make the case, rattling off a list of his supposed successes.

“President Trump helped deliver an immediate and unconditional ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia. The two countries were engaged in a deadly conflict that had displaced more than 300,000 people until President Trump stepped in to put an end to it,” she claimed, appearing to imply that his involvement alone halted the hostilities.

“The president spoke directly on the phone with the acting Prime Minister of Thailand and the prime minister of Cambodia to inform both leaders that unless they brought their conflict to an end, there would be no trade discussions or agreements with the United States,” she continued. “Almost immediately afterward, a peace was brokered that will save thousands of lives and allowed for trade negotiations with these countries to resume, and they have.”

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“The president has now ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia,” Leavitt claimed—crediting Trump with a sweeping series of diplomatic breakthroughs.

“This means President Trump has brokered on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office. It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

In March, The New York Times reported on Trump’s Nobel “obsession.”

“For nearly a decade, Mr. Trump has publicly and privately complained that he has yet to win the prestigious prize. He has mentioned the award dozens of times in interviews, speeches and campaign rallies dating back to his first term.”

“If I were named Obama,” Trump lamented last year during the campaign, “I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds.”

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Leavitt was not alone in promoting the President for a peace prize.

Senior Counselor to the President Peter Navarro, also on Thursday, suggested that handing Trump a peace prize has been widely discussed, before offering another prize he feels Trump has earned.

“You know, a lot of people,” Navarro told Fox Business, “talk about Donald Trump for the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Navarro then pushed for another prize.

“I’m thinking that since he’s basically taught the world trade economics, he might be up for the Nobel in economics, ’cause this is a fundamental restructuring of the international trade environment in a way where the biggest market in the world has said, ‘You’re not going to cheat us anymore.'”

“We’re going to have fair deals, and everything he’s doing has defied the critics. The tariffs have been tax cuts rather than inflation,” Navarro once again falsely claimed.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is generally awarded to researchers.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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‘Doesn’t Even Mention Them’: Judges Question Trump’s ‘Emergency’ Tariff Powers

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July 31, 2025

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Just one day before sweeping—and in some cases massive—tariffs are set to take effect on goods from numerous countries, many of which have not struck trade deals with President Donald Trump, federal appeals court judges voiced skepticism that the administration has the legal authority to impose them.

The Trump administration claims a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), allows the President to impose and negotiate tariffs, but no other president has ever used it for that purpose.

“IEEPA doesn’t even say tariffs, doesn’t even mention them,” one of the eleven judges on a panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. told Trump’s lawyers on Thursday, as USA Today reported.

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The plaintiffs—including several states and businesses—who are “challenging the tariffs argued that they are not permissible under IEEPA and that the U.S. Constitution grants Congress, and not the president, authority over tariffs and other taxes,” the paper also reported.

“One judge [wondered] if Trump has the extraordinary, unbounded power to tariff on basis of ’emergency’ — and that he has total discretion to [declare] an emergency — why would any president bother with longstanding trade powers that have more onerous limits?” reported Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

“Judges [also wondered] whether they can review Trump’s claim of an emergency over the trade deficit, which has been persistent for years,” Cheney noted.

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The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) earlier this year ruled Trump’s tariffs against goods from various nations including China, Mexico, and Canada were “unlawful,” as Law & Crime reported.

Observing that the Trump administration was “getting beaten up badly at oral arguments,” Washington Post columnist Jason Willick made this prediction:

“After this morning’s oral argument on Trump’s tariffs at a federal appeals court in D.C., the markets, the media and foreign countries will start taking much more seriously the possibility that Trump’s trade policy is in doubt.”

The Cato Institute’s Thomas Berry offered this view: “Holding that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs would be the cleanest and simplest way to resolve this case, and it appears that the Federal Circuit may be leaning toward that result.”

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