Scoot over to Charles Pierce’s place and take a good, long look at the photograph of Mittens with some Ohio coal miners. This is a great photo. Look closely at the expressions on the miners’ faces. Look at their posture and their hands. Compare/contrast their work garb with Mittens’s white white white shirt. Look at the discomfort written on Mitt’s face.

I say we’re looking at some working-class men who are not wild about Mittens. I wonder if the photo was taken before or after Mitt addressed the miners and called the mine owner a “great boss.”

I grew up around miners; in the world of mining, there is no such thing as a “great boss.” There are tolerable bosses; there are bosses the mine workers may be ambivalent about; yes. Those are the “good” bosses. But no miner ever born has gushed with love for the guy who signs his paycheck.

And there’s this —

“His vice-president,” Romney told the miners, “said that coal kills more people than terrorists. Can you imagine that?”

Leaving out 2011, which was an exceptional year for terrorism — from 2002 to 2011, 306 American coal miners were killed on the job. That’s an average of 34 coal miners a year. How many American civilians were killed by terrorists in those years?

Miners know about those mine deaths. So, yeah, I think they can imagine that.

And did you know black lung disease is making a comeback? I can’t find data on how many coal miners are dying from black lung lately, just that it’s showing up more often in younger miners. But this NPR report says that since 1970, “black lung contributed to the deaths of more than 70,000 miners.” So that beats 9/11 pretty handily.

The boss of these particular coal miners is named Robert Murray. Peg McCentee writes for the Salt Lake City Tribune:

Maybe Romney was too busy running for president in 2007 to notice that Murray’s Crandall Canyon coal mine collapsed twice in 2007, killing six miners and three would-be rescuers. Or that Murray claimed an earthquake caused the first failure even when seismologists determined it did not.

Or that the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration issued a report a year later finding that Genwal Resources, a Murray Energy Corp. subsidiary, was operating under three findings of high “negligence” in three of its Crandall mining plan elements and with “reckless disregard” in three others.

Perhaps it also did not come to the candidate’s attention that earlier this year an outraged federal judge fined Genwal just $500,000 for the disaster — all that the law would allow.

The victims’ families were devastated.

Murray’s behavior during the Crandall Canyon recovery effort bewildered many observers and family members: he bragged about his private jet, yelled at those families and decried the notion of global climate change.

Murray is a big Romney supporter, and I take it he and Romney traveled together from a fundraiser in West Virginia to tour Murray’s Century mine in Ohio. There’s where he told the Century miners that Murray is a “great boss.” I’m sure those fellas know exactly what sort of boss Murray is.

Then Romney used the same group of miners as a prop, standing in front of them to deliver a speech about how President Obama’s energy policies are costing jobs, although I can’t find any data to indicate that is true. The numbers on coal mine employment I could find were not recent enough to know if there is any significant change in coal mine employment numbers during the Obama Administration. The coal mining industry doesn’t employ nearly as many people as it did 20 and more years ago, but that’s mostly because of changes in mining technology and making the miners work longer hours (one reason black lung is on the rise).

But just look at the miners in this photo, while Mittens was speaking. Be sure to click on the photo to enlarge it. See the body language, the posture, the folded arms, the frowns. Folded arms don’t always signify resistance or defiance, but folded arms with sullen expressions tells me that whatever Mittens is selling, they ain’t buying.