‘…during his time as head honcho of Bain Capital, there were no women partners in the firm. Today, only 4 of 49 partners are women. The candidate did mention that women need special accommodations “if” they work.  

And just as the poorly chosen words rolled out of Romney’s mouth, social media users latched on to the phrase. #Bindersfullofwomen trended on Twitter while an industrious user created an@Romneys_Binder account; it currently boasts more than 14,000 followers. “Binders full of women” was the “third-fastest rising search on Google during the televised debate,” according to the Daily Beast.’

Submitted by Bill Weinberg @ ww4 report    on Tue, 10/23/2012 – 00:2

Bill Weinberg is an award-winning 25-year veteran journalist in the fields of human rights, indigenous peoples, ecology and war. He is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso Books, 2000) and War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America (Zed Books, 1991). As a correspondent and contributing editor for Native Americas, Cornell University’s quarterly journal of hemispheric indigenous issues, he won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association for his reportage from Nicaragua to Arizona. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Village Voice, NACLA Report on the Americas, Middle East Policy,  Al Jazeera, Yes! Magazine, Indian Country Today, The Ecologist 

Mitt Romney clearly wants to run away from the Bush legacy of unnecessary war, budget-busting tax cuts for the rich and economic collapse. When a town-hall debate questioner finally forced the GOP nominee to directly compare himself to Dubya earlier this week, Romney insisted: “President Bush and I are different people.” But place the two men’s biographies side by side, and the similarities that emerge are not just striking, they’re uncanny…

click here for piece in full @ Rolling Stone (US)

…and here @ the interpretOr, we view Romney as a disingenuous, oleaginous and highly dangerous Reagan/Bush Mk II figure of fear and loathing, with a bulging Swiss bank account, private jet and bizarre Tupperware fetish…

I remember as a young kid asking my lovely English grandma – “granny, what was the most scary thing about the war?”

…and she answered immediately and unequivocably – “the Doodlebugs, darling…the Doodlebugs.”

– “oh, what are those?”

“V2 rockets, love. I was back in London with your mum and aunties and grandpa was still at sea. Mister Hitler fired them over the Channel and they’d come down when they ran out of fuel…they’d explode and were very powerful. Absolutely dreadful.”

– “very, very bad, then?”

“Well, yes, you’d hear noise in the sky…and then if it became suddenly silent….that meant the rocket had run out of fuel…the silence was very, very frightening.”

– “oh.”

This reaction came from a modest, strong and resilient woman who had survived an unexploded bomb descending through her sitting room, raised four kids and endured the pain of separation – her husband, my grandpa, on Arctic patrol, dodging U-boats, as best he could.

I was reflecting on this recently when I came across the following….

Men, women and children are subjected to almost constant trauma – including fear of attack, severe anxiety, powerlessness, insomnia and high levels of stress – says a nine month investigation into CIA drone strikes in Pakistan by two top US university law schools. More than 130 ‘victims, witnesses and experts’ were interviewed in Pakistan for the study.

An interpretOr heard Wayne Swan say this on RN (Oz) a few weeks back….

“Changes start long before they 

become statistics”

Coming from the Oz Treasurer, quite a refreshing contrast to the voodoo-economic bull and conformist, fear-twaddle peddled by the Opposition and the Sheridan, Christopher Cheeseman chorus in the ghastly Caucasian…

Concerned about US Republican “cranks and crazies”, Swan’s seemingly not too taken with the book of Mor(m)on either…Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz may be more his thing… come to think of it, he’s shown a bit of oomph on Gina-greedy-guts and not-so-‘fair’-dinkum Andy too…wonder if he’ll join some of us in our efforts to send Sheridan, Howard, Blair et al to Guantanamo, via the ICC in the Hague? Now, that really would be a change.

more here @ the book of Mor(m)on: a histOry

‘The wrecking by Rumsfeld of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries that had not and could not have done us the slightest harm. Simultaneously as their cities were being knocked down at enormous expense to us, the tax payers, contracts were being given to the vice-president’s company, Halliburton, to rebuild those same cities that his colleague at the Defense Department had knocked down. This is a win-win situation for the higher corruption that governs us.’

Gore Vidal

Point to Point Navigation, 2006.