UNLIMITED GOP 2012 PRIMARY CANDIDATE THREAD

[Luna]

It's not mandatory you show up in a rally to support Mitt Romney, you just have to do it, or else:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/coal_miners_forced_to_attend_r039537.php

So the Romney campaign visited a coal mine on August 14th, for a speech with a bunch of suitably dirty miners standing behind him, with his podium bearing a placard that read "Coal Country Stands with Mitt." But apparently it should have said "or else" at the end:

The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview.

A group of employees who feared they'd be fired if they didn't attend the campaign rally in Beallsville, Ohio, complained about it to WWVA radio station talk show host David Blomquist. Blomquist discussed their beefs on the air Monday with Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore.

Moore told Blomquist that managers "communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend." He said the company did not penalize no-shows.

Because the company's mine had to be shut down for "safety and security" reasons during Romney's visit, Moore confirmed workers were not paid that day.

Even better, the company is keeping a list of all politically active workers:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/28/coal-miners-say-they-were-forced-to-attend-romney-event-and-donate/

"Yes, we were in fact told that the Romney event was mandatory and would be without pay, that the hours spent there would need to be made up my non-salaried employees outside of regular working hours, with the only other option being to take a pay cut for the equivalent time," the employees told Blomquist. "Yes, letters have gone around with lists of names of employees who have not attended or donated to political events."

All of this is, most likely, legal.  While threatening someone to attend a political rally at gunpoint is illegal, threatening them to attend a political rally by destroying their likelihood is actually very legal in most US states, as is firing someone for their political views.  As such, when your manager says "attend a rally", unless you want to be in a soup kitchen next week, you do as you're told.

If an employer states an event is mandatory, then it must be paid, under the FLSA.  If I were working payroll at that place, and saw that notice go out, I'd be on the phone with the boss letting him know that we were going to be in violation of the FLSA, and that if anybody kicked up a fuss, we'd likely be up to our necks in the shit.

[Luna]

An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said "This is how we feed animals" before being removed from the convention, a network official confirmed to TPM.

Stay classy, GOP, stay classy.

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/cnn-republican-convention-black-camerawoman.php?ref=fpblg

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

It's not mandatory you show up in a rally to support Mitt Romney, you just have to do it, or else:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/coal_miners_forced_to_attend_r039537.php

So the Romney campaign visited a coal mine on August 14th, for a speech with a bunch of suitably dirty miners standing behind him, with his podium bearing a placard that read "Coal Country Stands with Mitt." But apparently it should have said "or else" at the end:

The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview.

A group of employees who feared they'd be fired if they didn't attend the campaign rally in Beallsville, Ohio, complained about it to WWVA radio station talk show host David Blomquist. Blomquist discussed their beefs on the air Monday with Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore.

Moore told Blomquist that managers "communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend." He said the company did not penalize no-shows.

Because the company's mine had to be shut down for "safety and security" reasons during Romney's visit, Moore confirmed workers were not paid that day.

Even better, the company is keeping a list of all politically active workers:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/28/coal-miners-say-they-were-forced-to-attend-romney-event-and-donate/

"Yes, we were in fact told that the Romney event was mandatory and would be without pay, that the hours spent there would need to be made up my non-salaried employees outside of regular working hours, with the only other option being to take a pay cut for the equivalent time," the employees told Blomquist. "Yes, letters have gone around with lists of names of employees who have not attended or donated to political events."

All of this is, most likely, legal.  While threatening someone to attend a political rally at gunpoint is illegal, threatening them to attend a political rally by destroying their likelihood is actually very legal in most US states, as is firing someone for their political views.  As such, when your manager says "attend a rally", unless you want to be in a soup kitchen next week, you do as you're told.

If an employer states an event is mandatory, then it must be paid, under the FLSA.  If I were working payroll at that place, and saw that notice go out, I'd be on the phone with the boss letting him know that we were going to be in violation of the FLSA, and that if anybody kicked up a fuss, we'd likely be up to our necks in the shit.

Does that violation have any real teeth, or would you just get fired and placed on a private blacklist that business owners have a "gentleman's agreement" about enforcing?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

[LMNO]

Well, they weren't going to get the women's or black vote anyway...

[Luna]

It's not mandatory you show up in a rally to support Mitt Romney, you just have to do it, or else:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/coal_miners_forced_to_attend_r039537.php

So the Romney campaign visited a coal mine on August 14th, for a speech with a bunch of suitably dirty miners standing behind him, with his podium bearing a placard that read "Coal Country Stands with Mitt." But apparently it should have said "or else" at the end:

The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview.

A group of employees who feared they'd be fired if they didn't attend the campaign rally in Beallsville, Ohio, complained about it to WWVA radio station talk show host David Blomquist. Blomquist discussed their beefs on the air Monday with Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore.

Moore told Blomquist that managers "communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend." He said the company did not penalize no-shows.

Because the company's mine had to be shut down for "safety and security" reasons during Romney's visit, Moore confirmed workers were not paid that day.

Even better, the company is keeping a list of all politically active workers:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/28/coal-miners-say-they-were-forced-to-attend-romney-event-and-donate/

"Yes, we were in fact told that the Romney event was mandatory and would be without pay, that the hours spent there would need to be made up my non-salaried employees outside of regular working hours, with the only other option being to take a pay cut for the equivalent time," the employees told Blomquist. "Yes, letters have gone around with lists of names of employees who have not attended or donated to political events."

All of this is, most likely, legal.  While threatening someone to attend a political rally at gunpoint is illegal, threatening them to attend a political rally by destroying their likelihood is actually very legal in most US states, as is firing someone for their political views.  As such, when your manager says "attend a rally", unless you want to be in a soup kitchen next week, you do as you're told.

If an employer states an event is mandatory, then it must be paid, under the FLSA.  If I were working payroll at that place, and saw that notice go out, I'd be on the phone with the boss letting him know that we were going to be in violation of the FLSA, and that if anybody kicked up a fuss, we'd likely be up to our necks in the shit.

Does that violation have any real teeth, or would you just get fired and placed on a private blacklist that business owners have a "gentleman's agreement" about enforcing?

Violating the FLSA?  Bad juju, that.

Having shot my mouth off, I went and grabbed some backup:

http://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/

I'd figure the hours that employees were required to spend at a rally would be considered "hours worked" based on:

Lectures, Meetings and Training Programs: Attendance at lectures, meetings, training programs and similar
activities need not be counted as working time only if four criteria are met, namely: it is outside normal hours, it
is voluntary, not job related, and no other work is concurrently performed.

I'd say it would count as a meeting, and, as it was listed as mandatory, it fails the test and needs to count as worked time.

Now...  The company is trying to say that they're forbidden by campaign law to pay employees to attend the event...  By making attendance mandatory, they painted themselves into a corner.

[LMNO]

Whooooo!


http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/08/hbc-90008805

it was astonishing to see all the brittle work of narrative construction that is a modern political convention suddenly crack before our eyes. None of us could quite believe what we were seeing: A sea of twentysomething bowties and cowboy hats morphing into frat bros apparently shrieking over (or at) a Latina. RNC chairman Reince Priebus quickly stepped up and asked for order and respect for the speaker, suggesting that, yeah, what we had just seen might well have been an ugly outburst of nativism.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Somebody just mailed me and said Chris Christie thought his mic was off a couple of days before the convention and he told somebody "Romney's gonna lose"...when he got caught he tried to backpedal.

Doing phone internet until the mailman brings me a new power cord, but still want to find that link.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

A group called 'Protect The Polls' was passing out threatening flyers at a Tampa Anti-Suppression Rally protesting HB 1355 (the FL voting law currently stalled in the courts), and apparently these flyers make threats of violence.

By passing out flyers, some say 'Protect The Polls' is trying to intimidate voters who may have fallen off rolls from showing up at polling places to fill out provisional ballots.

From the 'Protect The Polls' website:



Florida gun owners are uniting to bring a new law to the table called Protect the Polls. The logic behind Protect the Polls is simple. If you are a legal gun owner in the state of Florida and you suspect someone on Election Day is committing voter fraud you can shoot him or her with your licensed weapon and not be charged with a crime. Precedents have already been set allowing these rights, like the important Stand Your Ground law, and in this case, there is more at stake than just one person's life; this is for the life of this great country.

http://protectthepolls.com/What_is_PTP_.html

(This might be a hoax, according to huffpo)

[Juana]

Ugh. I hope it is.

'We're Not Going to Let Our Campaign Be Dictated by Fact-Checkers'

Critics have for many years inveighed against "false equivalence" or "false balance" in the mainstream press. This long crusade has finally achieved its grail, or at least a version of it: In this campaign season, political reporters have been shucking the old he-said-she-said formulation and directly declaring that certain claims are false. This new approach was signaled on Sunday, when, as James Fallows has noted, The New York Times, in a front-page story, flatly stated that a Romney ad was "falsely charging that Mr. Obama has 'quietly announced' plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for welfare beneficiaries."
But what if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?

Here in Tampa, the new assertiveness is getting its first test on a big stage, and so far the results are not encouraging. As Ben Smith of BuzzFeed has pointed out, the Romney campaign is simply swatting aside the media's objections to its welfare ad: "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," said Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.

Watch this exchange, from a panel here this morning. On one side is my colleague Ron Fournier, the editor-in-chief of National Journal, together with John Dickerson of CBS and Slate; on the other, Ron Kaufman of the Romney campaign. Both journalists call the ad false; Kaufman rejects their view -- both of the details of the ad, and of its political thrust, that it is, as Fournier argues, "playing the race card." The result is a stalemate -- or, actually, a kind of mind-blowing media-political meta-vortex that might be better fodder for students of epistemology or semiotics, and certainly of American Studies, than for journalists, though they should probably watch it, too.

The relevant section runs from about 26:30 to about 35:30 in the video here, with a slight digression in the middle to a different issue, energy. (The Fora player will only embed a short clip from the video, not including the passage cited here.)

From a heated argument over the racial content of the ad (Fournier: "You know an ad like that touches a racial button." Kaufman: "No it doesn't. I don't agree with you at all.") the conversation pivots pack to the press's role as fact-checker when the audience begins asking the questions - and chooses to pose them to Dickerson and Fournier. Finally, Mickey Kaus of The Daily Caller, a longtime student of welfare reform, takes the mike to (sort of) defend the Romney ad.

"The press is all full of itself about how they're going to declare that it's false," Kaus says, "but it's really a lot less false than you think it is."

Dickerson replies that that is merely Kaus's interpretation, and then Fournier -- a guy who, if you'll forgive my pomposity, has pretty much devoted his adult life to the pursuit of truth -- has a bit of a Howard Beale moment:

With all due respect, to say 'It's a lot less wrong that you think it is' is a lot like saying, 'She's a lot less pregnant than you think she is.' Wrong is wrong, and the ad is distorted. But to John's point, both sides are making up lies, both sides are distorting .... Both sides are demeaning the process, both sides are making the public mad as hell about the process -- including the media institution .... That's why we all have to take a good look at how we're conducting ourselves

The bottom line, of course, is that the ad is continuing to run. It is continuing to run because the Romney campaign's polling shows it to be effective. And therefore, kind of by definition, the press pushback is not having much effect -- at least not so far, and at least not in the battlegrounds where the ad is playing.

Instead of being able to stand above the fray as some sort of neutral arbiter of the truth, the press may be finding that it is winding up on one side of a new kind of he-said-she-said argument.

If I didn't already think we were doomed, this is would be the clincher. We're fucking doomed.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

WH travel pool reports that the president did not watch the GOP convention last night. Carney: "He had other things to do."

Poor Obama.  Too busy for a laugh.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

WH travel pool reports that the president did not watch the GOP convention last night. Carney: "He had other things to do."

Poor Obama.  Too busy for a laugh.

If I was Obama I would stop in unannounced and just walk around the place with a camera crew.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

WH travel pool reports that the president did not watch the GOP convention last night. Carney: "He had other things to do."

Poor Obama.  Too busy for a laugh.

If I was Obama I would stop in unannounced and just walk around the place with a camera crew.

With his best shit-eating grin on, too.   

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Christ, almight, this is HILARIOUS!

Maybe the GOP should call up the Shriners and get some tips on running a convention.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Gov. Mitt Romney's campaign toasted its top donors Wednesday aboard a 150-foot yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands.

The floating party, hosted by a Florida developer on his yacht Cracker Bay," was one of a dozen exclusive events meant to nurture those who have raised more than $1 million for Romney's bid.

  Romney Party Yacht Flies Cayman Islands Flag



http://wonkette.com/482488/romney-campaign-throws-fancy-fundraiser-on-cayman-island-yacht#more-482488