October 2012

Leave it to Matt Drudge to come up with some new conspiracy that all the little minions on the right can latch onto. Today's conspiracy involves the release of October's jobs numbers. Here's the headline he is pushing right now:

Mystery? Oh must be bad numbers and Obama is going to wait until after the election!!!

But let's look at the article that Drudge is linking.

“It is our intention that Friday will be business as usual,” said Carl Fillichio, a senior press advisor at Labor. Mr. Fillichio’s statement provided clarity to an earlier Labor statement that said the agency would assess how to handle data releases this week after the “weather emergency” is over.

Friday’s employment report will be the final read on the labor market ahead of the November elections. Initial reports that a delay was possible briefly fueled speculation that the jobs data, good or bad, might not be revealed until after the elections.

Federal government offices in Washington are closed Monday and may be shut again Tuesday due to the storm.

(emphasis added)

Apparently Matt Drudge hasn't realized that there is a hurricane battering the east coast right now and that has shut everything down. You really think he would notice though, considering right above that headline is this:

It used to be that politics in the workplace was a very taboo subject. I have worked for companies in the past that would go as far as reprimand any employee or management that would engage in such conversation, simply because it is so easy to create animosity amongst workers. But that was then and this is now. Now we have people like Mitt Romney, who think politics in the workplace is a very good idea.

Back in June of this year, Romney held a conference call with the conservative National Federation of Independent Business. In that call, Romney had this to say about the upcoming election:

I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.

I will give Romney credit here; he played it very safe. If Romney told these people that they should tell their employees to "vote for Romney", then we would be looking at something illegal. Instead he did some wordsmithing to stay away from any legal problems.

But even if this does fall into the realm of being legal, it is still morally questionable. Having an employer say something like that to an employee carries a certain weight of threat to it. They don't have to say "vote for Romney or lose your job", but simply saying "A Romney win is in your best interest," is the nicer way of putting it.

The latest in the crazy capers of Mitt and Paul has Paul Ryan pretending that he cares:

The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week “ramrodded their way” into the group’s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall.

Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, said that he was not contacted by the Romney campaign ahead of the Saturday morning visit by Ryan, who stopped by the soup kitchen after a town hall at Youngstown State University.

What about government coming into our homes and businesses? Paul Ryan just forced his way into one. Not only that, but what Ryan washed was already clean!

But it gets worse. There is fear that Ryan's shenanigans could cause the kitchen some donations:

He noted that the soup kitchen relies on funding from private individuals who might reconsider their support if it appears that the charity is favoring one political candidate over another.

“I can’t afford to lose funding from these private individuals,” he said. “If this was the Democrats, I’d have the same exact problem.”

I'm sure many would think this sounds petty; not supporting a charity because it looks like they support a certain candidate. They would be right. It would be as petty as churches that shun members for supporting a certain candidate or mega-millionaire business owners threatening their employees over support for a candidate (*cough* KOCH!).

During an open and televised hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, House Republicans decided to out a CIA base Benghazi. The hearing, which was in fact nothing more than another witch hunt conducted by Darrell Issa, the following occurred:

Through their outbursts, cryptic language and boneheaded questioning of State Department officials, the committee members left little doubt that one of the two compounds at which the Americans were killed, described by the administration as a “consulate” and a nearby “annex,” was a CIA base. They did this, helpfully, in a televised public hearing.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was the first to unmask the spooks. “Point of order! Point of order!” he called out as a State Department security official, seated in front of an aerial photo of the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, described the chaotic night of the attack. “We’re getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropriate in an open forum such as this.”

Now this may seem rather cryptic, but Dana Milbank goes into further detail, using his knowledge of Washington, to describe what was actually being talked about:

May still be a facility? The plot thickened — and Chaffetz gave more hints. “I believe that the markings on that map were terribly inappropriate,” he said, adding that “the activities there could cost lives.”