No, it’s you who has your facts mixed up. From the horse’s mouth:
So in the middle of this catastrophic disaster, the Red Cross has to pull people off their normal duties to PROCESS UNWANTED SUPPLIES from the craven Romney campaign. Shame on him. Shame, shame, shame on him.
No, that’s not even close to the worst that can be said about this opportunistic, arrogant, self-righteous jerk.
Drilling down, it’s not clear to me what JM doubts. That said, I located an ABC news article. It says:
The Red Cross prefers donations of cash and blood.
The Red Cross thanks Romney and will schlep his stuff over to a warehouse for processing.
Buzzfeed reports that Romney staffers bought $5000 of supplies at Walmart. “The campaign confirmed to BuzzFeed that it had contributed supplies to the drive, although they did not specify how much.” So the Romney campaign isn’t offering a denial at least yet.
I’m not sure what John Mace’s problem is with RM’s reporting. The Romney campaign wanted photos of people handing over supplies to the candidate, to show how generous they were, though the supplies in practice were not especially helpful.
At any rate let’s correct the record. Here’s what the Red Cross’ official website says about in kind contributions. I’ll add emphasis:
I would like to donate clothes, cars or other items to charity. Does the American Red Cross accept donated goods?
Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel. So please. Give to the American Red Cross. But don’t pay attention to Mitt Romney: that would be wrong. The Red Cross really could do without the canned goods and blankets, especially during an emergency. I applaud those who did not bring canned goods etc. to what was essentially a hastily renamed campaign rally: that was the right thing to do. Let the Romney campaign buy its stage props at Walmart. Frequently Asked Questions | American Red Cross
Link to the original source of the information about the $5k purchase and the repurposing of the Victory Rally.
ETA: I imagine that Red Cross posted the public thank you to the Romney campaign to get the reporters off their phone lines. As stated in their thank you note, they prefer cash and blood. If you have canned goods that you want to donate, consider your local food banks or the food bank in Youngstown where Ryan helped out.
Maybe because that church doesn’t need to have a candidate who is not in a leadership position in the church tell them to do what they’re already doing?
I think it’s good that he donated $5,000, but that is undermined by how he did it. If he’d simply taken five thousand dollars out of his campaign funds and given it straight to the Red Cross, excusing it after the fact by jokingly saying, “The money was donated to my campaign to get me elected. Helping here is good PR, so it counts, right?” I’d have more respect for him.
Hell, how much in the way of campaign funds does he have left? Just give half of it straight to charity and I’m sure he’d see a corresponding boost in his polling numbers.
I appreciate your honesty, if only the other 95% of the board was as candid. 
I agree. It would also be nice if some people admitted that they refuse to believe it, or (more likely) totally believe it and are prepared to refute or defend it by any means necessary anyway.
You realize there was no cash prize associated with bengamo’s challenge, right?
Just to be clear, the OP did not link to the RM piece or quote from it, and I’m not going to his homework for him. All we have is his summary. But I would treat RM as I would any Op Ed piece-- a good start, but I’d need to see the source material. She is not on the air to present the news-- she is on the air to push a political agenda (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).
As for cash donations, the article you linked to included:
This is the kind of thing you’d expect from the boy in the balloon. Mitt likens the Sandy cleanup to his experience picking up trash following a high school football game. Rather than asking the Red Cross what he should do, he takes it upon himself to do something the Red Cross specifically doesn’t want you to do. Money and blood help- material goods slow things down.
Regarding Rachel Maddow’s reporting- certainly she’s opinionated and certainly she delights in pointing out Romney’s shortcomings. But she isn’t allowed to make stuff up- the NBC editors do not permit this. She doesn’t work for Fox, she works for a legitimate news operation. Comparing her to Bill O’Reilly is nonsensical.
So the Romney campaign spent $5,000 on supplies that the Red Cross doesn’t want. Color me unimpressed. Does the Obama campaign contribute? I have no idea- what’s important is that Obama is doing his job and doing it exceedingly well, according to the Republican governor of the most distressed state.
The wheels are coming off the Romney campaign. Stupid stunts like this are acts of desperation.
It’s being reported on Fox News via them reporting on reporters reporting “biases”.
Maddow was quoting from a Buzzfeed article, a site I was not familiar with. Looking at it, they seem to report on stupidity from both sides of the political aisle, so it’s difficult to tell what their politics are.
As reported there, I can’t work up a lot of outrage. They tried to convert a campaign rally to a relief rally at the last minute, and got a few things wrong. I don’t think this amounts to a “fake charity event”, and that article doesn’t support calling it that. I think this quote summarized things nicely:
If RM called it “fake”, then I think she’s wrong. If she didn’t call it that, then you did her a disservice with your thread title.
Mitt didn’t want to be shownup by Ryan washing clean pots. He had to be shown doing something besides changing his mind.
Whether or not this can be fairly described as a “fake” charity event is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that the Romney campaign’s response is completely tone-deaf if they think this was an adequate way to react to the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy. If Romney wanted to help, he could have (1) publically requested that his wealthier donors allow their contributions to go to disaster relief, or (2) written a check himself out of his vast pile of wealth. Everyone knows he’s rich and he has rich friends; the fact that he staged a ham-fisted soup-can drive in a swing state just confirms he’s also an asshole.
What’s not fake about it? When you go out to buy props, and set them out so that people can grab them to hand over to Romney, that pretty much does it for me.
ETA: Like CJJ* said. Isn’t Romney’s big achievement supposed to be saving the Winter Olympics by marshalling the forces of the corporate elite? A UHaul with stuff you bought at walmart in Ohio seems a little paltry.
Why should he? All those people on the East Coast most likely won’t be paying income tax next year due to deductions for storm losses. Makes them part of the [del]47[/del] 48% he despises.
He just needed to be seen doing something. He just hasn’t quite grasped this Internet thing that keep spreading the truth.
If you read the linked article, you’d see that he did both of those things.
Right. He was originally schedule to have a political rally on that day. There’s nothing wrong with that. Then they changed it from a political rally to a “storm relief” event, and that seems reasonable. But even though it was supposedly no longer a political rally, all the same speakers that were scheduled for the political rally still spoke, including McCain, who said
Also, Romney’s bio video played at the event, which someone tried to blame on a volunteer pushing play.
It probably would have been better for him to just go ahead with the regular political rally like was scheduled, and maybe say a few words at some point about how our thoughts and prayers are with those in the north east. It’s the fake posturing about charity that doesn’t really help a whole lot and pretending that it’s not a political rally that’s what bothers people.
I’ve seen some people using the hashtag #ThanksDonald to troll Trump about that. Obviously it won’t shame Trump into donating any money, since he doesn’t have shame, but it’s still funny to me.
Maddow is often over the top in her opinion pieces, IMO, and I don’t watch her show very often. Whether or not she actually used the word “fake” is irrelevant, and I have no recollection of it, but the tone of her piece was most definitely in that vein.
The Romney campaign had stated that they would not hold a campaign event, so in order not to renege on that statement, they scrambled to turn it into a faux charity event, which was a not-so-thinly disguised campaign event. The man is sadly desperate to be called “president” in his lifetime, and the campaign has been given license to suspend any notions of shame or dishonor to get him there. So far in this election year, Romney has campaigned over the corpses of diplomats and citizens, and the misery of the survivors. He has no shame, and neither do those who support these actions.
Fair enough. I’m not berating Chefguy, but it’s true that this is hearsay.
A better analogue would be to a columnist. A typical OpEd writer only gets published occasionally. In contrast, the factual accuracy and fairness of a columnist can be evaluated because they have a track record.
I’d consider this story to show a substantive mis-step of the Romney campaign from the point of view of the country (because it misleads the public about the advisability of giving blankets and the like) but not from the POV of Romney’s electability as this isn’t significant enough for the mainstream media to pounce on.
Once upon a time, Republican politicians would have played this differently: they would have convincingly held a rally for the storm victims, told their speakers to cool it and speak in platitudes and emphasize that they were NOT repeat NOT going to politicize all this. Which would look decent and in fact be good politics. Chris Christie operates in this old school tradition. Mitt Romney does not: his attitude is basically: “Who cares? Nobody reads fact checkers and the base doesn’t grok to our obstructionism anyway.”