[...shakes head, wonders whether William Randolph Hearst is still around...]

Elizabeth Mehren of the Los Angeles Times offers "Workers a thorny issue for Romney":

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2008 GOP presidential aspirant and an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, apparently employed undocumented landscape workers at his home near Boston.

Responding to a report in Friday's Boston Globe, the governor's communications director said Friday that Romney was unaware that several of the landscapers who kept up his suburban Belmont property were in this country illegally...

At this point in time, I'd like to turn it over to a labor lawyer for analysis, but lacking that I'm going to say that Elizabeth Mehren is being extremely misleading, and perhaps intentionally so. Romney did not directly "employ" the alleged illegal aliens. They were the employees of a gardening service with which he apparently had some form of contract.

Personally, I think this blurring of the lines is an intentional smear, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt. After all they're good enough to provide us with this news:

The Guatemalan laborers told the Globe that the governor sometimes greeted them by saying buenos dias.

What we're supposed to draw from that is unclear.

Please write readers.rep *at* latimes.com with your thoughts.