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We've already discussed what a piece of work this Robert Murray is, whether it's his terrible safety record, coercing employees on who they're going to donate to and forcing them to appear as props at political events, so it isn't really a big shock he'd pull something as cruel and heartless as this -- Midwest coal firm CEO reads staff a prayer for 'divine intervention' after Obama re-election and then lays off 156 of them:

President Obama's re-election was so unpopular with one Midwest industrialist that he prayed for divine intervention the day after and claimed it forced him to lay off 156 staff.

Robert E. Murray, the chairman of Ohio based Murray Energy said that the Democrat would now wage a 'war on coal' and led a prayer in front of a group of company staff members in which he implored forgiveness for firing his employees.

'Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build,' said Murray in his public prayer.

As head of the largest privately owned coal mining company in the country, Murray issued a denial in August that he forced miners to attend a Romney speech in southeastern Ohio in August and it has been reported that his workers have donated $1.4 million to the Republicans since 2007.

Laying off the staff from his subsidiaries American Coal and Utah American Energy, Murray Energy currently has approximately 3,000 employees and produces around 30 million tons of nituminous coal a year - according its website.

My guess is this guy had every intention of laying off those employees already and decided to use them as political pawns once the election was over. As Ed Schultz noted in the clip above, nothing changed for his company from the day before as compared to the day after the election.

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As Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future noted last week, even though Mitt Romney's been running nothing but one dishonest campaign ad after another since announcing his recent run for president, the media has finally found a campaign ad they can "cluck tongues at" and it's not a Romney ad:

After a series of blatantly dishonest Mitt Romney campaign ads have been saturating the airwaves -- one even editing audio to make it sound as if the President said something that he never said --our media elites have finally found an ad to click their tongues at. A pro-Obama ad from super PAC Priorities USA Action features Joe Soptic explaining what happened to his wife after the Bain Capital laid him off, taking away their health insurance. The ad has not even been run on TV [...]

Note, this is not an Obama campaign ad. It is illegal for a campaign to coordinate or even communicate or coordinate with these outside groups.

The Romney campaign responded with an ad saying that this ad came from the Obama campaign itself -- yet another in a series of lies from the Romney campaign. [...]

Again, this was not an Obama campaign ad, and has never been aired on TV. Contrast the elite media reaction to this ad with their reaction to the dishonest ads that the Romney campaign has been running on TV, using doctored audio, claiming Obama is "gutting welfare reform," accusing Obama of "war on religion," accusing Obama of corruption, etc. The media elites say this ad, showing what happens to families when they are laid off and lose their health insurance, "crossed a line." Not calling a sitting President a "Marxist" ot the lie about "death panels" or "palling around with terrorists" or doctored audio in an ad from a presidential candidate -- but explaining the tragedy of being laid off and losing health insurance is what "crosses a line."

Case in point, this Sunday's Meet the Press and David Gregory doing his best to add to the list at Dave's post. I was glad to see some push back from Axelrod though.

DAVID GREGORY: Those of us who cover these campaigns understand that even though there's a big choice here it's not as if some of the personal destruction back and forth is going to go away. And we've seen a lot of that this week. And Governor Romney has taken particular aim at an ad that's being run by the president's own Super PAC run by a former press aide to the campaign and in the White House. And this is a campaign about Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain, even though the story that's highlighted in the Super PAC ad happened after Mitt Romney left. Let me play a portion of this and also show you how Mitt Romney's responding to it. Watch.

(VIDEO NOT TRANSCRIBED)

DAVID GREGORY: Disrespecting the office of the presidency is the charge from Mitt Romney about ads like that with the implication that somehow Bain and Mitt Romney was responsible for that woman's death. How do you respond to that?

DAVID AXELROD: Well, I certainly don't think that would be a fair implication. That isn't stated in the ad. It's not a fair implication. But what is true is that Governor Romney and his partners loaded that company with debt, walked away with millions of dollars and left the workers there bereft, without the healthcare they were promised, without the pensions and other benefits that they were promised. And that is emblematic of the kind of--

DAVID GREGORY: You don't think that ad-- (OVERTALK)

DAVID AXELROD: --of work that he did. That is important.

DAVID GREGORY: It doesn't cross the line--

DAVID AXELROD: But let me ask you--

DAVID GREGORY: --in the debate?

DAVID AXELROD: --ask you something, David. How does Mitt Romney, in the very week that he's running an ad that he approves. At the end he says, "I'm Mitt Romney and I approve this message." Millions and millions and millions of dollars accusing the president of removing the work requirement from welfare, which every single person who's looked at it, every expert, every news organization, every fact checker has said is patently false.

And he is lecturing people on the quality of campaigns? He ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to tell his own campaign in the commercials that he controls, "Take that off. It's not true. It's not fair." When he does that, maybe he'll have some standing to lecture other people on the quality of the campaign.

DAVID GREGORY: We're in a new gear in this campaign, clearly. David Axelrod, thank you very much.

DAVID AXELROD: All right, thank you.

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President Obama didn't waste any time going after his presumed opponent Mitt Romney now that the general election is underway. The President officially kicked off his campaign with a stop in Columbus, OH this Saturday and went straight after Romney for everything from laying off workers, to tax avoidance, to union busting, to wanting to lower his own taxes while cutting investments that help the working class and for his now infamous line that "corporations are people."

Obama In Ohio: ‘Corporations Aren’t People. People Are People.’:

President Obama began speaking at a campaign rally at the Value City Arena-Schottenstein Center in Columbus, Ohio, shortly after 1 p.m. ET on Saturday. The run-up to the rally included an number of video pieces that emphasized the importance of organizing and the successes from the 2008 Obama campaign’s grassroots field work that became the hallmark of his effort.

“We are going to win this thing the old fashioned way: door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood,” Obama said, adding later some contrasts between himself and his likely Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

“Gov. Romney has much to be proud of. He’s run a large financial firm and a state. But I think he’s taken the wrong lessons from those experiences. He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors make money, the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” Obama said, citing Romney’s support for traditional Republican ideas policies like tax cuts that they say will spur growth. He also hit Romney on one of his gaffes along the campaign trail, when the former governor told a hostile crowd in Iowa, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

“I don’t care how many times you try to explain it – Corporations aren’t people. People are people,” Obama said, getting huge applause from the crowd.

As TPM also noted, there are some pretty stark contrasts between the rallies being held by the two candidates right now -- Obama Rally Vs. Romney Rally: What’s Different?:

RICHMOND, Va. – On Saturday, President Obama officially kicked off his general election campaign with a pair of big rallies on college campuses – one in Ohio and one on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University here in Virgina’s capital.

Now that both Obama and Mitt Romney are in their full general election swing, some contrasts can be drawn between Obama events and Romney events. Some takeaways:

• Size: The Obama campaign told reporters the president drew 14,000 to his first rally of the day in Ohio and 8,000 to his rally at VCU. While the Ohio speech left about 4,000 empty seats in the arena on the campus of Ohio State University, both crowds dwarfed anything Romney’s been able to draw so far.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday told a story about his father closing a factory in Michigan that he said tickled his funny bone.

Speaking to thousands of Wisconsin voters during a tele-town hall, the former Massachusetts governor recalled what he described as a "humorous" anecdote that left some Michigan workers without jobs, according to the Journal Sentinel.

"One of [the] most humorous I think relates to my father," Romney remarked. "You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors. ... They had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin."

"Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign," he continued, explaining that his father later participated in a parade where a high school band only knew how to play Wisconsin's fight song.

"Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin," Romney chuckled.

The Detroit News noted that Hudson Motor Car Co. production was moved from Michigan to Wisconsin in 1954 after the company merged with Nash-Kelvinator and became American Motors. While some workers were asked to relocate to Wisconsin, 4,300 more lost their jobs.

Romney's awkward sense of humor has been a problem for him throughout his campaign.

During a January Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Nashua, New Hampshire, the candidate joked that he liked "to be able to fire people."

At an event in Rochester, New Hampshire, the multimillionaire told voters that he also had also worried about getting a pink slip.

“I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired,” Romney said. “There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”

In February, he tried to relate to voters in Michigan by telling them that his wife "drives a couple of Cadillacs."

The Wall Street Journal determined that Bain Capital, a venture capital company founded by Romney, forced about 22 percent of the companies it acquired to file for bankruptcy or shut down completely, “sometimes with substantial job losses.”

(H/T: Maddow Blog)

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As The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur rightfully pointed out in the segment above, here's another glaring example of just what's wrong with our society, where the rich rig the system to their benefit and leave the 99 percent with nothing in return.

Newspaper Giant Gives CEO $32 Million Severance Package After Laying Off 20,000 Workers In Six Years:

When Craig Dubow resigned as CEO of the nation’s largest newspaper conglomerate amid health problems last year, he ended a six-year stint that “was, by most accounts, a disaster.” Gannett, the parent company of the USA Today and 80 other American newspapers, had seen its revenue plummet $1.7 billion and its stock price fall 86 percent, from $72 a share to just over $10.

To counter those losses, Gannett shed jobs, and a lot of them. Industry estimates say the company has laid off at least 20,000 workers since 2005, reducing its workforce from 52,000 to roughly 32,000. Despite those losses, Gannett awarded Dubow a severance package worth $32 million, NPR reports:

Dubow’s final compensation package includes $12.8 million in retirement benefits, $6.2 million in disability benefits and a $5.9 million severance payment, according to the filing. Gannett stock options and restricted stock, which Dubow had accrued during his years of employment with the company, were also part of the package. Those stock awards are valued at nearly $7 million.

Separately, Gannett will pay $25,000 to $50,000 annually for a $6.2 million life insurance policy covering Dubow and another $70,000 annually for benefits such as health insurance, home computer and secretarial assistance and financial counseling. He will receive most of these benefits for three years unless he goes to work for a competitor, according to the filing.

The lavish severance package Gannett is giving Dubow stands in stark contrast with how it treated many of the 20,000 employees it let go. Read on...

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Chris Wallace might have given Reince Priebus a hard time about Republicans being the party that looks out for the rich, but he quickly made up for it by attacking President Obama and carrying some water for Mitt Romney with the GOP's favorite whipping boy of the day, the failed solar company, Solyndra. Wallace did his best to hammer home one of the Republicans favorite talking points, that President Obama was somehow the "CEO" of General Motors or of Solyndra due to the government investment in both of them and therefore personally responsible for any layoffs at either company.

As DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz rightfully pointed out it is comparing apples to oranges:

WALLACE: Let me ask you about that. Is the president responsible for laying off the people at Solyndra?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, because the president wasn't the CEO of Solyndra.

WALLACE: Well, Romney wasn't the CEO of these companies, either. The president was --

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, Romney --

WALLACE: Excuse me. The president was not a venture capitalist. He put taxpayer money into Solyndra and a thousand people lost their jobs.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: OK.

WALLACE: So is the president responsible for the thousand people who lost their jobs at Solyndra?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Not even close. But Mitt Romney is responsible for being CEO of companies that he took over. That --

WALLACE: No, he wasn't the CEO.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: He was the CEO of Bain. Bain bought these companies, took them over --

WALLACE: Well, the president is the CEO of the country.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: But he's not the CEO of Solyndra.

And it went on and on like that with Wallace continuing to conflate Romney personally profiting from taking businesses over to the government investing in solar companies. And naturally Reince Priebus got the last word and chimed in with more of his usual attacks blaming President Obama for our economic woes while his party is busy actively sabotaging the economy on purpose.

Full transcript below the fold.

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As Al Sharpton rightfully noted in the segment above, this article from The New York Times isn't going to do much for Mitt Romney trying to paint himself as some ordinary "man of the people", not that he seems to be having much luck in that area as it is.

Last June, Romney joked that "I am also unemployed", even though, as Karoli noted, "with $200 million in the bank and a few houses around the country, maybe he's not quite as desperate" as the group he was speaking to."

Last September at a town hall event in Florida, Romney told a group of voters that he was part of the middle class as he threw out the canard that "almost half of Americans that are not paying income tax," as though that means those who are too poor to pay income taxes aren't paying any taxes at all.

And yesterday on Fox News, Romney again showed how out of touch he was when he told Chris Wallace he didn't think cutting $700 billion in aid to the states was going to harm the poor.

Now we have this story from The New York Times -- Buyout Profits Keep Flowing to Romney:

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From the Rachel Maddow Show -- The GOP's 1% Problem:

Rachel Maddow shows how the two Republican frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have more 1 percent baggage than their political savvy might reasonably be expected to overcome.

She's exactly right that those old campaign ads are going to come back to haunt both Romney and Gingrich should either of them eventually become the Republican presidential nominee.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Sunday that saving the jobs of police and firefighters was not the role of the federal government.

CNN's Candy Crowley reminded the Kentucky Republican that a recent Gallup/USA Today poll found that 75 percent of Americans supported President Barack Obama's plan to provide additional money for teachers, police and firefighters.

"Republicans helped not break a filibuster, if you will, in a procedural vote," Crowley explained. "You basically got rid of that jobs bill which would have given money to the states, designed to hire or retain fireman, policeman and teachers. When we look at the polling, 75 percent of Americans supported that and yet, the Republicans were against it. So, how do you justify that in your mind?"

"Well, Candy, I'm sure that Americans do," McConnell remarked. "I certainly do approve of firefighters and police. The question is whether the federal government ought to be raising taxes on 300,000 small businesses in order to send money down to bail out states for whom firefighters and police work. They're local and state employees."

"The question is whether the federal government can afford to be bailing out states. I think the answer is no."

"The fact is that when you do ask people about this surtax on millionaires, and small businesses as you put it but millionaires in general, people support that, when it comes to not just firemen, policemen and teachers but also the infrastructure bill that's coming up, which you're also opposed to, as I understand it, which would help put people back to work on roads and bridges and rebuilding and that sort of thing," Crowley noted. "It seems to me that politicians are always talking about doing the will of the American people, and that the Republican Party can be seen at least politically as going against that."

"Yeah, these bills are designed on purpose not to pass," McConnell asserted. "I mean, the president is deliberately trying to create an issue here. Look, the American people don't think, I'm sure, that it's a good idea. Four out of five of the so-called millionaires are business owners, over 300,000 small businesses in our country that hire people. I don't think the American people think that raising taxes on business, small business in the middle of this economic situation we find ourselves in is a particularly good idea."

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Rachel Maddow did a really good job of laying out just how completely insane these so-called negotiations going on right now over raising the debt ceiling, a manufactured, purely political crisis are, when there's a real crisis going on with the lack of jobs and one that's going to me made worse by these cuts in government spending they're debating.

And sadly it looks like the Obama administration has completely bought into Republican framing on the issue that somehow reducing our deficit right now is going to make the real crisis with jobs better and not worse.

As she noted in the beginning of the segment, Republicans were more than happy to take credit for good job numbers this spring which they're now trying to lay at the feet of President Obama. And as she noted, Steve Benen has a really good post on that here -- Post hoc ergo propter hoc:

There’s a fair amount of talk today about who’s to blame for the weakening job market. It got me thinking about how Republicans play this game.

When the jobs reports were looking quite good in the early spring, Republican leaders were eager to take credit for the positive numbers they had nothing to do with. Needless to say, GOP officials are no longer claiming responsibility, and are in fact now eager to point fingers everywhere else. It’s a nice little scam Republicans have put together: when more jobs are being created, it’s proof they’re right; when fewer jobs are being created, it’s proof Obama’s wrong. Heads they win; tails Dems lose.

With this in mind, let’s consider the recent developments the way a Republican would. Here’s a chart showing private-sector job creation in the latter half of 2010, when stimulus money was still being spent, and when Democrats enjoyed the congressional majority.

And here’s a chart showing private-sector job creation so far in 2011, after stimulus spending largely ended, Republicans took control of the U.S. House and most of the nation’s gubernatorial offices, and the national discourse pivoted from jobs to the deficit and debt.

As Steve and Rachel noted, even if you might not be able to specifically blame this on House Republicans, it's worth asking just who made things worse?

Rachel went on to point out that the main reason for these horrid jobs numbers that just came out are because of the huge number of losses in government jobs.

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