"It is true, of course, that the
phrase 'separation of church and state' does not appear in the Constitution. But it was
inevitable that some convenient term should come into existence to verbalize a principle
so clearly and widely held by the American people.... [T]he right to a fair trial is
generally accepted to be a constitutional principle; yet the term "fair trial"
is not found in the Constitution. To bring the point even closer home, who would deny that
"religious liberty" is a constitutional principle? Yet that phrase too is not in
the Constitution. The universal acceptance which all these terms, including
"separation of church and state," have received in America would seem to confirm
rather than disparage their reality as basic American democratic principles."..............Leo
Pfeffer.
Rick Santorum
has always supported a extreme Conservative Christian position especially
when it comes to Church and State issues. It is apparent from the data
collected, that the first amendment may be in danger from his past and
future actions.
Upon calling his office we find that Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Wicca "..aren't "Real" religions."
What is a real religion, Mr Santorum? What you have been practicing?
Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be known."
We believe that Rick will one day reside in Dante's ninth level of Hell!
(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when
looking at allegations about anyone. Don't believe us,
think for yourself and investigate for yourself! And remember, the
Freedom of Religion Coalition does not represent any political party nor do
we recommend any political candidate, nor are we involving ourselves in the
political process.
"Rick Santorum is one of the
great pulsars of our times: a collapsed gravity well of unblinking
stare. People innocently walking down the street, are drawn
into his orbit, helplessly drawn in by how utterly dense he is.
They cannot escape the completely impenetrable mass of darkness
surrounding his mind and become totally crushed & moronized by him."
By a Friend of
Religious Freedom
I've been scratching my head about two things
lately. One, how can someone who isn't a multimillionaire
vote Republican? Every platform they support is contrary to
the average working class citizen's needs. Two, how can anyone
profess to be a Christian when they obviously
are a hypocrite and
Liar?
But when I listen to people like Rick
Santorum, Glen Beck, Mitt Romney, Bill OReilly, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin,
or Michele
Bachmann, speak, it becomes
clear how these things exist and why they are glorified.
Intelligence is awareness of ignorance.
Stupidity is ignorance of ignorance.
Now it all
makes sense. "It is better
to be silentand be thought a fool
than to speakand remove all doubt. "Variously
attributed to Lincoln, Elbert Hubbard, Mark Twain, Benjamin
Franklin and Socrates.
Extremist Conservative Republicans are selfish, power hungry, hateful of the poor, disloyal
to the nation and its people, dishonest, avaricious, scornful of the
nation's history, the dignity of its institutions, its standards of
political morality, and its vision of advancement for all the
people. These Republicans love war as long as they and theirs do not
have to put on helmets and carry guns into the fighting. They use lies
to start wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocents and thousands
of our own military service people. They love massive war-time profits,
unavailable to their rich masters if war is absent.
Those
Extremist Republicans hate the rest of us, which they must, in order to
pass away from themselves and onto us, the financial burdens and losses
their crimes, schemes and thefts cause. They are prolific, incessant,
and destructive liars. They are blasphemers for they insist that
their hateful and destructive deeds are the work of God. They are
apostates for they gleefully attack the poor, the immigrants, the
old and the sick, of whom God has commanded all of us to be mindful.
There is no reasoning with them, for all their logic is built on false
premises. There is no appealing to them for honor's sake for they have
lost all sense of shame and have no honor, there is no appealing to them
for the nation's sake for that it what they hate the most.
WASHINGTON -- Ryan Miner remembers
watching a fat piece of sausage
splatter with a thud against a
picture of Sen. Rick Santorum
adorning the side of the senator’s
campaign RV.
It
was fall 2006, and Miner, then a
Santorum intern, was helping feed a
group of Pittsburgh Steelers fans
tailgating outside of Heinz Field.
But it was a tough sell --
especially because the Santorum
volunteers were peddling snacks and
campaign literature to rowdy, buzzed
hoards. The crowd eventually turned
on the volunteers, and a weapon of
choice was Polish.
"Fuck
you Rick Santorum!" Miner recalls
the sausage-tosser shouting.
In
short order, the tailgaters assailed
the Santorum volunteers with
whatever they could get their hands
on: sausage, cookies, half-empty
cups of beer, and beer cans.
"For
the most part it was pretty
unpleasant," recalls Bryan Nagy, who
had joined his friend Miner for the
event so he could get some free
food. "A lot of booing. Some people
would spit in the general direction
of the bus."
The
event was supposed to build
camaraderie and sell Santorum as a
beloved member of Steeler Nation.
Yet, like much of that brutal 2006
campaign that ended Santorum's
Senate career, it simply reinforced
the impression that Santorum -- whom
the electorate had come to regard as
sanctimonious and out-of-touch --
played for the away team.
By
that point, the dark-haired grandson
of a steelworker had represented
Pennsylvania for more than 15 years.
But he was at the nadir of his
popularity and it wasn’t clear to
political analysts and other
campaign observers whether voters
ever truly liked him. After all,
Santorum had lived most of his
political career on the margins. He
barely defeated entrenched incumbent
Rep. Doug Walgren (D) in his first
run for Congress in 1990. In 1994,
he beat Sen. Harris Wofford, an
establishment Democrat, by two
percentage points during a terrible
year for Democrats. He won
re-election to the Senate easily in
2000.
But
by 2006, the state had grown tired
of the former Pittsburgh attorney
and Penn State graduate. He would
lose to Democrat Bob Casey by 18
percentage points -- the largest
margin of defeat for an incumbent
senator since 1980.
Now,
as Santorum runs for the White House
and heads into a Republican primary
in the Keystone State in late-April,
memories of that 2006 race -- much
like the sausage launched at his RV
-- loom for him and his team.
Forced to address Santorum's
historic drubbing, his top advisers
have argued that then-President
George W. Bush’s unpopularity,
coupled with voters’ dramatic turn
against the Iraq war, made winning
impossible.
"The
entire loss [of support] was due to
independents and Democrats, which
tells you that its more
environmental than anything else,"
John Brabender, Santorum’s longtime
and current political guru recalls
in an interview. "They were very,
very angry at Bush. They were very
angry at Washington, and Rick was in
the leadership in Washington.”
Santorum insists he’s grown from the
experience.
"It
was a painful night, that night, in
many respects, but it was a night
that I felt that I needed to sort of
reassess and take a good look at me
and my family and being a husband
and a father and take that
responsibility a little bit
differently and a little bit more
seriously,” he said during
a speech at
the Pennsylvania Leadership
Conference
outside Harrisburg last weekend.
Interviews with more than a dozen
former aides, adversaries, and close
observers of the ‘06 contest,
however, show that important lessons
-- about the need to stay on
message, convey warmth to voters and
appear less patronizing -- haven’t
been learned at all. The senator who
stumbled so badly six years ago,
many say, is the same candidate now
locked in a hotly-contested race for
the Republican presidential
nomination: pugnacious and
unscripted, talented at retail
politics, but often his own worst
enemy.
“As
you have seen in this campaign, Rick
has a tendency to get off-message
and say things that he believes, but
things that better wisdom would have
left unsaid,” former Pennsylvania
Gov. Ed Rendell (D) tells The
Huffington Post. “The parallels
[between the two races] are
shockingly similar, shockingly
similar.”
OFF THE DEEP END
It
didn’t take long into the ‘06
campaign for Democrats to become
convinced Santorum would lose.
Saul
Shorr, a top adviser to Casey, says
that he had reached that conclusion
“by the end of 2005,” well before
Bush or Iraq became major factors.
Jay Reiff, Casey’s campaign manager,
explains that by the turn of the
year, the image of Santorum as a
senator who had “really grabbed on
to the ultra-right wing elements of
his party” was firmly cemented.
One
top Pennsylvania Democrat says it
dawned on him during a 2003 opening
event for the National Constitution
Center in Philadelphia that Jon
Stewart hosted. The "Daily Show"
anchor thanked Tom Ridge, the former
Pennsylvania governor who was then
Homeland Security secretary, for
protecting America's borders. Then
Stewart thanked Santorum for
protecting America from the rear.
“He’d
become a caricature,” explains the
Democrat, who requested anonymity
out of wariness that he’d be
endorsing a crude attack on someone
he still considered a friend.
As
early as September 2005, troubling
signs emerged for Santorum's
re-election.
Penn, Schoen &
Berland,
the high-powered consulting firm,
conducted three focus groups in
Pennsylvania -- two in Pittsburgh
and one in Johnstown -- on behalf of
a Santorum Watchdog 527 group called
The Lantern
Project.
Those interviewed were all
identified either as "weak
Democrats" or independents. The
final focus group
report,
obtained by HuffPost, portrayed a
skeptical electorate.
"None
of these groups,” the consultants
wrote, “had any great love for
Senator Santorum."
The
actual responses were painful. "He's
a very arrogant person," said one
Johnstown woman. Santorum's
deepening religiosity troubled some.
"I think he's going off the deep
end," said one senior Pittsburgh
woman.
"Give
me my God. You can have your God,
but it doesn't mean we have to take
[his] God," said a blue-collar male
in Pittsburgh.
These
impressions had been fed by a
variety of controversial statements
and associations that Santorum had
made during the preceding months and
years. The senator was close to K
Street lobbyists, and had angered
conservatives with his support for
fellow Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen
Specter (a moderate voice within the
Republican Party before officially
becoming a Democrat), even though he
was portraying himself as a fiery
cultural conservative.
In
2005, Santorum had gone to the
bedside of a brain-damaged Terri
Schiavo in the face of widespread
public criticism of government
intervention in the controversial
case. Earlier, he had argued that
Boston’s liberalism played a role in
the Catholic Church's child sexual
abuse scandal --
earning a
rebuke
from then-Gov. Mitt Romney, the man
now besting Santorum for the
Republican presidential nomination
Santorum had also written a book,
"It Takes A Family: Conservatism and
the Common Good," that would
eventually help undermine his
re-election ambitions. It portrayed
him as a fearless culture warrior,
painting the public school system as
dangerous, inveighing about race and
gay marriage in eyebrow-raising
passages, and arguing that mothers
benefit from staying at home.
“Santorum's loss in 2006 was so
overwhelming that you can hardly
attribute it to any single factor,”
says Specter in an interview. “You
have Santorum's views. When the
people of Pennsylvania found out
about them -- his attitude that
women don't belong in the workplace,
his Neanderthal view on
contraception and the book he wrote
about the gay rights, [his comments
about] man-on-dog bestiality. ...
The only thing he didn't do in his
'06 campaign was attack Jefferson.”
LETTING RICK BE RICK
Santorum began the ‘06 campaign with
a simple enough strategy, according
to his campaign manager at the time,
Vince Galko: draw stark contrasts
between himself and Casey. He would
emphasize his seniority in the
Senate, arguing that being third in
line in the GOP leadership meant a
wealth of federal dollars for the
state. Casey was blessed with a
famous last name, Santorum would
argue, but he'd be entering the
Senate as a powerless freshman.
The
Santorum campaign certainly enjoyed
the benefits of seniority. Galko
says the team raised tens of
millions of dollars and shattered
volunteer and door-knocking goals.
But connecting with average voters
was much harder.
"That
message never resonated,” says
Galko. “People didn't really care
about the whole seniority thing.”
Instead, Santorum’s ties to D.C.
proved toxic. The senator had won
his first election in 1990 by
pounding Walgren for his Virginia
residency. As Santorum's ‘06
re-election campaign kicked into
gear, those attacks became a
liability.
Santorum’s kids were living in
Virginia while his Pennsylvania
school district
paid $55,000
to reimburse that state for their
education through the Pennsylvania
Cyber Charter School. Jon Delano, a
political operative-turned
television anchor in Pittsburgh,
recalled that the arrangement
dominated news coverage for weeks,
with Santorum’s old foils revelling
in the chance to call out hypocrisy.
“You
know, what goes around, comes
around,” Walgren told WTAE news in
May 2006, adding later in the
interview: "I know that he knows
that that attack on me was something
that he probably says to himself
often, ‘Gee, here I am, I’m doing
the same thing.’”
Santorum did not handle the school
controversy calmly. He accused a
Casey operative of illegally
trespassing onto his Pennsylvania
property to get information. The
Casey campaign denied the charge,
but Santorum wouldn't drop it. When
a local reporter asked him what
proof he had, he unintentionally
acknowledged he didn't live
Pennsylvania.
"I
have proof that he says, that he
claims that there was no furniture
in there and that there were no
blinds in the window," he told a
reporter from KQV, a local radio
station, about his Pennsylvania
home, according to a transcript.
"You cannot know that unless you’re
looking in the window."
Though Santorum withdrew his kids
from school in Virginia, he refused
to acknowledge wrongdoing, airing
two separate ads during the fall of
‘06 -- narrated by his
wife
and
children
-- that pushed the idea that his
residency was out of bounds as a
campaign issue. But it wasn’t until
later in 2006 that the senator
finally gave in on the matter,
forfeiting tax
breaks
he received on his Penn Hills home
to get the issue behind him.
"It
had prevented there being real
scrutiny on Bob Casey," Brabender
says, explaining the residency
controversy damage.
This
became a familiar pattern throughout
2006, and it’s one that has
resurfaced in 2012. Rather than
bending to electoral realities,
Santorum tried to reshape them --
sometimes successfully, more often
not.
There
is no more vivid example of this
than his book. Santorum ignored
aides who urged him to wait until
after the election to publish the
provocative screed. Instead, he dove
head-first into controversial
subject matter.
"I
didn't really want to write this
book,"
he explained
during a July 2005 C-SPAN interview.
"I was asked to do it. And yet when
I sat down and really started
thinking about things -- as how
America should be and what is going
to make America successful in the
future, I didn't want to cheat
myself by not putting me in that
book. And so I ended up dumping me
in the book."
The
book’s passages would haunt
Santorum, leaving fellow Republicans
with little to do but shrug their
shoulders.
The
book "created difficulty with
ordinary voters," says Lowman Henry,
a Republican state committee member.
"Rick made it worse by being Rick --
by publishing his book."
Santorum couldn't resist plowing
into controversial social issues,
Henry explains. "It's like dangling
a shiny object in front of a child."
Jim
Roddey, the Allegheny County GOP
chairman, put it more bluntly: "It
would have been better had he not
written the book.”
By
the end of the race, Santorum's
campaign had reached that same
conclusion. Struggling to overcome a
serious perception problem with
female voters, Santorum held a Sept.
1, 2006, news conference at the Omni
William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh to
showcase endorsements from prominent
women lawmakers. Meanwhile, on its
website, his campaign placed a page
titled “I
heard around the water cooler.”
It included five bullet points, each
with a read-more section offering
explanations for some of the more
alarming passages in the book.
"It
certainly, you know, caused problems
at times," says Galko. "It hurt in
the sense that it was just another
thing that, you know, another
obstacle that we had to overcome
each week."
As
the 2006 campaign made its way
through the summer, aides found
themselves unspooling the very image
that they and Santorum had
originally constructed.
Reportedly wary of his image as a
paragon of religious conservatism,
Santorum was forced to decline an
offer from then Sen. Sam Brownback
(R-Kansas) -- a leading Christian
conservative -- to appear on the
stump. Instead, Santorum blasted out
press releases touting support from
centrist
senators,
a “Democrats for Santorum”
coalition led
by
Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.),
even nice
words
from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
Santorum aired an ad that showcased
his work with
Hillary
Clinton
and compared working in Washington
to participating in a professional
wrestling match. In another spot, he
declared
himself
neither conservative nor liberal,
nor well-regarded by President Bush.
The
repackaging of the Santorum brand
included an ambitious
12-page
booklet
titled "50 Things You May Not
Know About Rick Santorum," which
attempted to sell the senator as a
global healer and protector of
everything from children to puppies.
The highlights included "working
closely with Bono" to eliminate
world poverty and AIDS (No. 4),
supporting efforts to clean up the
Chesapeake Bay (No. 6),
"aggressively pursuing breakthrough
stem cell research" (No. 9) and
working with John McCain on lobbyist
reforms (No. 10). His efforts to
abolish puppy mills ranked 19th.
But
for all his glossy pamphlets and
puppy love, Santorum still couldn’t
stick to a script. The campaign
tried to plan things ahead of time,
recalls Galko. “But to stop Rick
Santorum from being who he is, he
would have never achieved what he's
achieved.”
“You're going to take three steps
forward one step back every now and
then," says Galko. "But you have to
let Rick be Rick."
RED IN THE FACE
Santorum had always been one of
Pennsylvania’s most able and
hard-working retail politicians. He
won his first congressional race by
walking the streets, without support
from the official GOP apparatus. One
close Casey aide recalls warning his
boss that he’d be running against
someone “who has the political
skills to run for president.”
In
2006, however, glad-handing could be
hazardous. Ryan Miner, the Santorum
intern and campaign volunteer,
remembers knocking on doors in a
30-mile radius of Pittsburgh and
encountering rage.
"I'll say this emphatically -- there
was a seething, vehement hatred of
Rick Santorum," says Miner, who was
attending Duquesne University at the
time. "We would go door to door.
They would tell us to go fuck
ourselves."
"You're a young guy, what the hell
are you working for this idiot for?"
he recalls residents asking.
Sometimes they'd wonder, "Why are
you wasting your time?"
On
occasion, Miner was tasked with
driving Santorum to campaign events.
These were not always happy road
trips. "He was somebody that could
get very upset very quickly," says
Miner, who is now supporting Romney.
"Rick had a short fuse."
After
a tour of an animal shelter north of
Pittsburgh in August, Miner says
Santorum became germaphobic. "He
demanded that we drive back in, pick
up some hand sanitizer from the
Giant Eagle back in the city of
Pittsburgh," Miner recalls.
Miner
remembers Santorum expressing
disgust with a kid he saw standing
in the grocery store parking lot
with baggy pants, declaring he'd
never let his son dress that way.
Even in the most private, apolitical
moment of the day, Santorum couldn't
suppress the urge to judge.
"Santorum was at a constant state of
unrest. There was not a moment that
wasn't intense with him," Miner
says. "I don't think that Rick
Santorum ever turned it off."
Santorum's temperament turned off a
lot of voters too -- not just
motivated liberals, but Tea
Party-precursing conservatives who
felt scorned by their junior
senator.
By
early summer 2006, it was clear that
retail politicking wasn’t going to
save Santorum’s campaign. A study by
the polling firm SurveyUSA
ranked
Santorum
as the least-popular senator in the
U.S.
Later, in July, the Santorum
campaign set up a private meeting in
Harrisburg to patch up relations
between the candidate and leaders of
the disaffected base. But what had
been billed as a reconciliation
quickly devolved into a screaming
match, according to three attendees.
About a dozen activists, many of
whom had supported the conservative
Club for Growth candidate Pat Toomey
in his losing 2004 Senate race
against Arlen Specter, brought up
Santorum's support of Specter, in
addition to his record on earmarks
and deficit spending.
Sitting among the critics was Ryan
Shafik, a former Santorum intern who
went on to work in several campaigns
before becoming a political
consultant. "He defended deficit
spending," Shafik recalls. "He
screamed at people defending deficit
spending. ... He really went nuts."
Bob
Guzzardi, 67, had donated $30,000 to
Republican groups that year,
including maxing out to Santorum.
Even he left the meeting
unimpressed.
"He
was Prince Rick," Guzzardi says. "He
was just full of himself."
Jason
High, a conservative activist,
remembered Santorum swearing during
the back-and-forth.
"At
one point, Rick said, 'You know if I
don't have the people in this room
passionate about me, then I've lost
already,'" High recalls. "And I
looked at him and I said, 'Rick I
don't know anyone else who will tell
you this to your face, but I'm
telling you -- I'm not passionate
about you.'"
Santorum's argument to the activists
mirrored his broader campaign pitch:
Without him, there would be no
conservative power in Pennsylvania.
Galko concedes the meeting got
"contentious," but says accounts of
his candidate's meltdown are
overblown and amount to "recreating
history."
Brabender, who says he doesn't
recall the meeting, says the
activists were applying an
unreasonable and unfair “purity
test” to Santorum.
“We
certainly found it a bit odd at
times that anybody who was a social
or a fiscal conservative against
Casey would do anything but support
us and support us enthusiastically,”
Brabender says. “Rick had written
more pro-life legislation than
probably anybody at that time and at
the same time he was a fiscal
conservative, one of the strongest
and with the highest ratings.”
Six years later, however, attendees
still shudder at Santorum’s
abrasiveness that day.
"I
know he banged on the table a few
times," High tells HuffPost. "Very
red in the face. Just very
confrontational. ... One person
called me on the way home and told
me they were voting for Bob Casey
because Rick had to lose. He was
just so arrogant."
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC
Now
one of two Republican presidential
candidates with a believable reason
to keep campaigning, Santorum says
he’s been humbled and mellowed by
that sobering ‘06 experience.
"The
people of
Pennsylvania
didn't always give me what I wanted,
but they always gave me what I
needed," he said at the recent
Pennsylvania Leadership Conference,
adding that it was a “great gift to
get away” from Washington.
The
benefits of getting away seemed
apparent as he trekked through the
dog days of summer last year.
Toiling at the bottom of the Iowa
caucus polls, he nevertheless
carried a positive message, homing
in on the need for a manufacturing
renaissance and leaving divisive
cultural issues to the side.
But
as primary wins piled up and the
spotlight grew a bit brighter,
self-damaging tendencies resurfaced.
He argued that health insurers
should be able to deny contraception
coverage for women, called setting
the goal of higher education for
everyone snobbery, said President
Barack Obama’s politics were
tantamount to a phony theology,
declared that prenatal care was
designed to encourage abortions, and
called public schools indoctrination
factories.
There
were tactical lapses inside Santorum
headquarters as well. Santorum’s
failure to get on the ballot in
critical districts and states denied
him opportunities to keep up with
Romney in the delegate hunt -- the
byproduct of the same
fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants
approach that personified his past
runs. In 2006, Santorum burned
through his massive cash advantage
so quickly that the campaign was
forced to
stop
advertising briefly
in late-October.
There
is the apocalyptic rhetoric as well.
Six years after closing his Senate
campaign by accusing Casey of
failing to appreciate the threat of
“Islamic fascists,” Santorum is
now running
similar ads
against Obama.
“There are a lot of parallels and
similarities on how Rick Santorum is
running his campaign now and what he
did in ‘06," says Reiff, Casey’s ‘06
campaign manager. "When the
spotlight gets turned on, and he's
in front of a friendly crowd, he
feeds off that crowd and can't stop
himself from pushing the envelope
just a little too far -- or a lot
too far, depending on your
perspective.”
When
envelope-pushing cost him a chance
to win the Michigan primary last
month, Santorum lost an opportunity
to lay legitimate claim to being the
likely Republican nominee. His wife,
Karen,
warned him
not to get distracted by the shiny
side-issues. He subsequently won a
few more primaries.
Time
and delegate math, however, aren’t
on his side. And as the primary
shifts to more moderate states,
including Pennsylvania on April 24,
opponents are making the case that
the ‘06 race was
more norm
than anomaly. But there are no plans
for a course correction.
“Why is Rick Santorum the only
remaining viable alternative to Mitt
Romney?” asks Brabender. “My belief
is that people see what comes with
him being willing to do what is not
always the politically smart thing
to do. That’s answering questions or
talking about topics that maybe
others wouldn't. At the same time,
it creates a genuine nature of who
he is. ... It means you have to fly
without a net in a sense.
“I always kid people that on some
days what I'm doing may be media
malpractice, except that this is
what Rick Santorum has made it clear
for me he wants for the candidate
and I believe it is working.”
What's
stunning about this year's crop of endorsers
is the torrent of venom, mendacity and
absurdity that spills from their mouths and
pens.
March 18, 2012
|
A
man, the
ancient fable
tells us, is known by the company he keeps.
In a presidential primary, the endorsement
game is one of the great spectator sports.
Every four years comes the parade of
politicians, preachers and a smattering of
politically inclined demi-gods of popular
culture stepping forward to endorse one or
another of the presidential candidates.
Some
are positioning themselves for a prime slot
in what they hope will be a future
administration. Others are making a
statement to the folks back home about the
authenticity of their ideological
credentials. A few have designs on the
levers of creative destruction in their own
political party. And that's before we get to
the washed-up rock 'n' rollers and comedians
who are clearly just looking for a gig, or
relevance, or both.
What's
stunning about this year's crop of
endorsers of Republican presidential
candidates is the torrent of venom,
mendacity and absurdity that spills from
their mouths and pens -- not to mention
the fact that most of these endorsements
have been warmly received, and none have
been rejected. There's also a peculiar
dichotomy of styles represented: They
either hail from the priggish, uptight
wing of the party that loathes popular
culture as coarse and sinful, or they
represent that coarse and sex-laden
culture. The thing they have in common?
Hatred -- of somebody who's not like
them.
The
Obama campaign may have a Bill Maher
problem, but compared to the
smorgasboard of slander and contempt on
display by the GOP's great wits, Maher's
garden-variety misogyny seems almost
quaint. That the corporate media have
failed to note most of these quotes --
or to challenge the candidates on
accepting the support of these
luminaries -- speaks less to any willful
complicity than to the fact that
"hatefully insane" has become the new
normal.
Sixteen years ago, Pat Buchanan's
presidential campaign had to let go of
campaign co-chair Larry Pratt, president
of the Gun Owners of America, just
because Pratt once gave a little lecture
to a gathering of white supremacists.
Today, Mitt Romney shows no intention of
rejecting the endorsement of a racist
who said that President Barack Obama
should "suck on my machine gun."
The
list below is hardly definitive; one
could surf the Web for days, racking up
an epic stack of crazy and worse from
endorsers of one or another of the
Republican candidates, but at some
point, one just needs to get on with
writing the dreaded listicle. Presented
below, in reverse order of their
prospects (according to delegate counts)
for seeing their endorsed candidate
actually win the Republican presidential
nomination, are the endorsers who have
uttered some of the most jaw-dropping
words I've stumbled upon.
With a
presidential candidate who has stated
his personal opposition to birth
control, pegged African Americans as the
sole recipients of public assistance,
cited John F. Kennedy's speech on the
First Amendment as something that makes
him "throw up," and declared that Satan
has made significant inroads in his
demonic quest to take over the United
States, you'd expect him to have a whole
passel full of crazy and/or nasty
endorsers -- and you'd be right!
From reality TV stars Jim Bob and
Michelle Duggar (parents of 19, all
Michelle's) to the immigrant-bashing
former congressman Tom Tancredo, to the
Islamophic retired general William
"Jerry" Boykin, the birther Joseph Farah
and the racist and homophobic lawmaker,
Sally Kern, Santorum would seem to have
covered all corners of the right-wing
hate coalition. Oh, and the
heavy metal
community,
too.
Michelle Duggar, co-star
of TLC's 19 Kids and Counting: This
reality-TV mega-mom likely endorsed Rick
Santorum because her husband told her
to. Or at least that's what I read in
this excerpt from her marital advice
pamphlet, The Seven Basic Needs of a
Husband, as
reported
by RadarOnline:
A
Husband Needs A Wife Who Accepts Him
As A Leader And Believes In His
God-Given Responsibilities”:
Husbands are commanded to govern
their wives; God works through a
man’s decisions — good or bad; Bad
decisions reveal his needs and allow
the wife to appeal and demonstrate
Godly character; The more a wife
trusts her husband, the more careful
he will be in giving her direction;
Never ask others for counsel without
your husband’s approval; reassure
your husband that you understand and
believe that he is your God-given
leader.
A
husband needs a wife who will
continue to develop inward and
outward beauty: How can you become
more of the wife of your husband’s
dreams?; discover and conform to
your husband’s real wishes; explain
your hairstyle to others on the
basis of your submission to your
authority; separate your “rights”
from your responsibilities.
Ask
your husband to define your
responsibilities; Ask your husband
to tell you when you have a
resistant spirit; dispel a
backbiting tongue by silence.
Tom Tancredo,
former U.S. congressman: For
the overlapping racist and
anti-immigrant faction, there's twofer
Tom Tancredo, the former congressman
from Colorado, and Constitution Party
candidate in that state's 2010
gubernatorial election. At at 2009 Tea
Party Nation convention, Tancredo called
for the reinstatement of literacy tests
for voting eligibility, such as those
famously used in the Jim Crow days of
the South to keep African Americans away
from the polls. As
reported
by ABC News:
The opening-night speaker at first
ever National Tea Party Convention
ripped into President Obama, Sen.
John McCain and "the cult of
multiculturalism," asserting that
Obama was elected because "we do not
have a civics, literacy test before
people can vote in this country."
"People who could not even spell the
word 'vote' or say it in English put
a committed socialist ideologue in
the White House...Barack Hussein
Obama."
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William
"Jerry" Boykin: The
religious right's favorite general,
Boykin retired after a Pentagon
investigation found his statements about
Islam and Christianity to have violated
military rules. From a
new report
by People for the American Way:
[W]hen
Boykin was still on active duty, he
generated criticism for public
comments, given while he was in
uniform, indicating that he saw U.S.
military engagement in religious
terms, as “our God” (Christian) vs.
Satan or the “idol” God he said was
worshiped by Muslims.
Since then, Boykin has become a minister
and hit the stump for Santorum,
reiterating his belief that the First
Amendment does not apply to Muslims, and
that "no mosques" should be permitted to
be built in the United States. PFAW's
Right Wing Watch
reported
these remarks from Boykin, from an
exchange with AFA's Bryan Fischer from
his radio program, Focal Point:
But Islam, we need to think Sharia,
it is not just a religion it is a
totalitarian way of life. A mosque
is an embassy for Islam and they
recognize only a global caliphate,
not the sanctity or sovereignty of
the United States.
Joseph Farah,
editor, WorldNetDaily:
While Farah echoes Boykin's anti-Islam
sentiments, he gets a bit more personal
when it comes to Barack Obama, whose
birth certificate he refuses to accept
as legitimate. On the occasion of the
president's 50th birthday, Farah penned
an
op-ed
that called for Obama to be carried out
of the White House, face down:
How long will it take to see him
frog-marched down Pennsylvania
Avenue?
How will this charade finally be
resolved?
What steps need to be taken to see
justice prevail?
Sounds
a little lynchy, doesn't it?
Sally Kern,
Oklahoma state legislator: When
the Republican-controlled Oklahoma state
House of Representatives passed an
amendment to the state Constitution last
year that would eliminate affirmative
action rules, Sally Kern was all in, and
with her own theory of why African
Americans didn't fare as well as whites
in places of employment and institutions
of higher education. As reported by the
Tulsa World
via ThinkProgress:
Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City,
said minorities earn less than white
people because they don’t work as
hard and have less initiative.
“We
have a high percentage of blacks in
prison, and that’s tragic, but are
they in prison just because they are
black or because they don’t want to
study as hard in school? I’ve taught
school, and I saw a lot of people of
color who didn’t study hard because
they said the government would take
care of them.”
Kern said women earn less than men
because “they tend to spend more
time at home with their families.”
EXCLUSIVE: The 2012
candidate once argued it was
wrong for the federal
government not to be
"proactive" in shaping the
health care market and
boasted his voting record
was "in the middle."
This
article contains excerpts
from an article in
motherjones.com by
Andy Kroll and
Tim Murphy
on Mar. 5, 2012
2012
Republican presidential
candidate Rick Santorum.
Pete Marovich/ZUMA
Press
Rick
Santorum's pitch to Republican
voters is
simple:
He is the "true" and
"consistent" conservative in the
GOP's presidential nomination
fight. He
describes
himself as "a candidate who,
throughout [his] career, has not
only checked the box on
conservative issues but has
fought for conservative issues."
And he slams front-runner
Mitt
Romney
for flip-flopping on abortion
and the Wall Street bailouts
and, most of all, for passing
government-mandated health care
reform in Massachusetts. If
elected president, Santorum
vows, he will end the "tyranny"
of President Obama's Affordable
Care Act.
Yet as an up-and-coming
congressman in the early 1990s,
Santorum took a much different
line. Then—like now—health care
was one of the nation's most
divisive issues. In 1993,
Republicans were up in arms
about a health care reform bill
spearheaded by Hillary Clinton
and pushed by President Bill
Clinton. Republicans decried the
measure as excessive government
intervention in the marketplace,
and Santorum opposed the
legislation. But his position
was not so clear-cut.
During that fiery debate,
Santorum said it would be a
mistake to allow the delivery of
health care services to be
determined only by the market.
He asserted that Republicans
were "wrong" to let the
marketplace decide how health
care works. He instead argued
that government should play a
"proactive" role in shaping the
health care marketplace "to make
it work better." (Santorum
spokesman Hogan Gidley did not
respond to requests for
comment.)
Santorum's
call for more government
intervention in health care came
during a December 1993
appearance on a Pittsburgh TV
program, The Editors,
hosted by the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette's Jane Blotzer
and John Craig. At the time,
Santorum was running in a
Republican Senate primary and
looking to challenge Democratic
incumbent Sen. Harris Wofford.
Mother Jones obtained a
previously unreported transcript
of the interview made by
staffers for the Wofford
reelection campaign. In 1994
Santorum eked out
a narrow
win
over Wofford, 49 percent to 47
percent, in a bitterly fought
race that gained national
attention.
In the
1993 interview, the 35-year-old
Santorum sounds little like the
unflinching conservative he
claims to be today. He describes
his voting record in the US
House of Representatives, where
he represented the eastern
suburbs of Pittsburgh, as
"pretty much in the middle"
compared with the rest of the
Pennsylvania delegation, which
included
11 Democrats and 9 other
Republicans. His record, he went
on, was "pretty compatible" with
that of Arlen Specter and the
late John Heinz,
both
moderate
Republican senators from
Pennsylvania. (Specter later
switched to the Democratic
Party.)
In the interview, when asked
about the role of government in
Americans' lives, Santorum
responded, "I believe that the
federal government should set up
a system where we create the
right incentives for you to make
efficient choices."
Santorum said of health care
in 1993: "A lot of folks
believe, 'Well, just keep
government out of it.' I
don't believe that."
On health care, as he called for
more government involvement,
Santorum said Republicans had
"dropped the ball" by not making
health care reform a headline
issue in recent elections. "I
even said it to President Bush
when he came to Pittsburgh to
campaign for Dick Thornburgh
[then running for US Senate] in
1991, that health care was gonna
be the big issue and that we had
to take responsibility for
trying to solve this problem,"
Santorum said. "We can't
continue to ignore it and say,
'Oh well, you know, it will work
itself out in the marketplace.'
That's wrong."
Government intervention, he
continued, was key to creating a
functioning health care
marketplace. "The government
helps set the marketplace up, so
we have some responsibility to
alter that marketplace to make
it work better."
Talking about health care,
Santorum explained: "I take a
much more proactive position in
government in solving problems
than most Republicans, because I
believe government has a role. A
lot of folks believe, 'Well,
just keep government out of it.'
I don't believe that." He added,
"I think government has a role
in making sure that there is
equal opportunity."
On the
campaign trail these days,
Santorum denounces government
and maintains that it is not
government's job to help those
who are suffering (because
suffering has its positive
consequences,
he
contends).
His top priority, he says, is
repealing
"Obamacare." He also
wants to
privatize Medicare and eliminate
the agency that oversees it.
"You want the private sector out
there competing, driving down
costs, improving efficiency," he
said
recently.
At a November 2011 debate,
Santorum boasted about his
unwavering conservative record
on health care. "I was always
for having the government out of
the health care business," he
said, "and for a bottom-up,
consumer-driven health care,
which is different than Governor
Romney and some of the other
people on this panel." Yet
Santorum, who has attacked
Romney for reversing his
positions, has flip-flopped as
well.
He keeps saying stuff
and then denying he said it.
This article contains excerpts from an
article on alternet.org on February 28, 2012 by
Adele M. Stan
Photo Credit: A.M. Stan
The topic was a
speech that Rick Santorum, really, really didn't
like -- the speech John F. Kennedy gave during the
1960 presidential campaign, in which Kennedy
declared his belief in an "absolute" wall of
separation between church and state.
"That makes me
throw up," Santorum, the former U.S. senator from
Pennsylvania
told George Stephanopolous
on the ABC News program, "This Week."
That got me to
thinking about speeches that might make me
throw up, and, funny thing, an awful lot of them
were delivered by Rick Santorum. I mean, this guy is
the oratorical equivalent of a bottle of
ipecac.
The thought of
living under a neo-theocracy makes me kind of
queasy, and Santorum's lectures often render
judgment on the theology of others, not to mention
the supremacy of his own, which he seems keen to
throw, like a wet blanket, over the writhing body
politic -- a worldview that Santorum would seek
institutionalize in policy and law.
Then there's
the anti-intellectualism, and the demonization of
educators as "indoctrinators" -- not to mention his
customary celebration of ignorance. Santorum's plan
for reviving American manufacturing seems to rest on
making it more difficult for people to go to
college, forcing them onto his 19th-century idea of
what a factory floor looks like. Ew, that's a nasty
taste in my mouth.
Another thing
that gives me a case of
agita:
demeaning the memory of the Holocaust and its
victims, as Santorum does when he uses what he calls
"World
War II metaphor[s]"
to compare President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler,
or Democratic procedural moves in the Senate to the
Nazi invasion of France.
And racism --
damn, that stuff just gives me a major fit of
chalushes,
as in when the very pious senator repeatedly
characterizes food-stamp recipients as black or
members of "minority communities."
This list of
nauseating pronouncements by the current frontrunner
for the GOP presidential nomination consists of
remarks derived only from speeches (hence, none of
his trademark anti-gay comments). There are many
more invitations to cookie-tossing in the senator's
numerous television appearances and written
statements.
These speech
excerpts are presented in no particular order, and
this is, by no means, a comprehensive list. But with
such an embarrassment of vomitorious riches, one has
to stop somewhere.
1. Hailing
the Crusades;
Spartansburg, S.C. (Feb. 22, 2011). While
yet undecided on whether he had heard the call to
run for the presidency, Santorum traveled to South
Carolina to deliver a speech to the students of
Oakbrook Preparatory School, a private Christian
academy. There he educated the young men in
attendance on the virtues of the Roman Catholic
Church's crusades against the Muslims of the Holy
Land. From
GoUpstate,
a South Carolina Web site:
"The idea
that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom
against Islam is somehow an aggression on our
part is absolutely anti-historical," Santorum
said. "And that is what the perception is by the
American left who hates Christendom. They hate
Christendom. They hate Western civilization at
the core. That's the problem."
But
Santorum, 52, disagreed with the "Christian
Soldier" assessment.
"I don't
see it that way at all," he said. "What I'm
talking about is onward American soldiers. What
we're talking about are core American values.
'All men are created equal' -- that's a
Christian value, but it's an American value.
It's become part of our national religion, if
you will. The point I was trying to make was
that the national faith, the national ideal, is
rooted in the Christian ideal -- in the
Judeo-Christian concept of the person."
During the same
campaign trip, Santorum lashed out at African
American women during a visit to a right-wing
"crisis pregnancy center." As reported by GoUpstate:
He talked
in part about what he said was the high rate of
abortion among black women: "The most dangerous
place for an African-American in this country is
in the womb." He likened abortion to slavery,
saying that Roe v. Wade treated unborn
children as property, without rights -- just as
black people had been defined years before under
slavery.
2. Black
People Take Your Money;
Sioux City, Iowa (Jan. 1, 2012). At
a campaign stop two days before the Iowa caucuses,
Santorum stood before a nearly all-white crowd,
telling them:
I don't
want to make black people's lives better by
giving them somebody else's money. I want to
give them the opportunity to go out and earn the
money, and provide for themselves and their
families. And the best way to do that is to get
the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling
again.
Three days
later, Santorum
denied
that he said "black people," but had instead
stumbled in his speech, using the syllable "blah"
before the word "people." You can view the video
here.
3.
Education = Snobbery, Food Stamps = 'Minorities';
Troy, Mich.
(Feb. 25, 2012). Addressing
a crowd of activists for Americans for Prosperity,
the Tea Party-allied organization founded by David
Koch, Santorum derided the notion of making college
available to all by calling Obama "a snob" -- a
remark that drew cheers from the audience. College,
after all, was basically a left-wing plot, Santorum
seemed to say. (Earlier in the weekend, Koch, in a
radio interview, suggested that Santorum was too "nuts"
to be the GOP nominee because of the candidate's
statements decrying birth control as "harmful to
women.")
In the same
speech, the former senator reprised his suggestion
that recipients of food stamps and other safety-net
aid are non-whites. CBS News has the
video;
the following transcript is mine:
...and I
know what it means to have those manufacturing
jobs at that entry level that get you in there.
It gives you the opportunity to accumulate more
skills over time and rise, so you can provide a
better standard of living for your family. Those
opportunities for working men and women. Not all
folks are gifted in the same way. Some folks
have incredible gifts with their hands. Some
people have incredible gifts [unintelligible ]
use it and want to work out there making things.
President
Obama once said he wants everybody in America to
go to college. What a snob! There are good,
decent men and women who go out and work hard
every day and put their skills to tests that
aren't taught by some liberal college professor
to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand
why he wants you to go to college: to remake you
in his image. I want to create jobs so that
people can remake their children into their
image, not his.
Then this, from
the CBS News report:
Santorum
said he planned to "talk to minority
communities, not about giving them food stamps
and government dependency, but about creating
jobs that they can participate in and rise in
society."
You can view
the whole speech here,
but you may want to have a pail at the ready.
4.
The Would-Be Theologian-in-Chief;
Columbus, Ohio(Feb.
18, 2012). Talking to supporters at a
rally in Ohio, Santorum suggested that the whole of
the Obama agenda is based on "a phony theology." As
reported
in the New York Times:
"It's about
some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a
theology based on the Bible, a different
theology," he said. "But no less a theology."
In later
comments to reporters, Mr. Santorum said while
there are "a lot of different stripes" of
Christianity, he believes that "if the president
says he's a Christian, he's a Christian."
"I'm just
saying he's imposing his values on the church,
and I think that's wrong," he said, adding that
he did not believe Mr. Obama was less of a
Christian for doing so.
On CBS News'
"Face the Nation" the next day, Santorum said he was
talking specifically about the president's
environmental policy and, no, he didn't mean to
suggest that Obama is a Muslim or anything like
that. (Actually, he was suggesting that the
president is an earth-worshipping pagan whose
earth-worship is a path to growing the size of
government.) Transcript from
ThinkProgress:
When you
have a worldview that elevates the Earth above
man and says that we can't take those resources
because we're going to harm the Earth; by things
that frankly are just not scientifically proven,
for example, the politicization of the whole
global warming debate — this is all an attempt
to, you know, to centralize power and to give
more power to the government.
5. Bomb
Iran Because its Shi'ite Theology Is Scary;
Salem, N.H. (Jan. 10,
2012). Speaking
to New Hampshire primary voters gathered at an Elks
Lodge, Santorum suggested that the reason Iran
deserves to be bombed is that its nuclear program is
based on some mighty scary Shi'ite end-times
theology (that sounds suspiciously like pre-millennialist
evangelical Christian end-times theology). From my
own
report:
They've
located the facility in a little town called Qom
[which he pronounced Kwome]. Qom happens to be a
rather significant city in Iran. It's outside of
Tehran, and their savior, if you will, from the
Shi'a, the Shi'ite -- that's, the ruling class,
the ruling government of Iran is Shi'ite, which
is a minority among the Muslim world, but is a
majority in Iran and in Iraq. But the Shi'ites
have one of their holiest sites -- in the Shi'a
religion, not as Muslims generally, but as
Shi'ites -- is in Qom, because there's a well
there called the Jamkaran well -- which is a
well where their, they call it the the Mahdi --
the equivalent of, in some respects, of a Jesus
figure -- who is gonna come back at the end of
times and lead Shi'a Islam in the ruling of the
world in peace and justice. That's what their
end-of-times scenario is. Well, he comes back at
a time of great chaos. And so there are many who
speculate that there are folks over in Iran who
wouldn't mind creating a time of great chaos,
for religious reasons. And the fact that they
built this nuclear program in this city, next to
where this man is supposed to return, leads one
to think that there may be more to it, since
they could pick any other place in the state, in
the country, to do so -- that there may be other
reasons than to develop domestic nuclear power.
6. Satan
Is Taking Over the U.S.;
Naples, Fla. (Aug.
29, 2008). Santorum knows what's wrong
with America: Satan has taken possession of our
once-great nation by inhabiting the bodies of
liberals. That's the essence of the message he
delivered at Ave Maria University more than three
years ago, a message in which he says that the
"father of lies" has run rampant in the academy and
even through the mainline Protestant denominations
(which are largely run by Christians with a
progressive point of view). Right-Wing Watch dug up
this speech, which despite its incendiary rhetoric,
failed to merit a single question at the most recent
debate, which was hosted by CNN. The video is
here;
part of RWW's
transcript
appears below:
This is not
a political war at all. This is not a cultural
war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of
Lies has his sights on what you would think the
Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good,
decent, powerful, influential country -- the
United States of America. If you were Satan, who
would you attack in this day and age. There is
no one else to go after other than the United
States and that has been the case now for almost
two hundred years, once America's preeminence
was sown by our great Founding Fathers.
He didn't
have much success in the early days. Our
foundation was very strong, in fact, is very
strong. But over time, that great, acidic
quality of time corrodes even the strongest
foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking
the great institutions of America, using those
great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as
the root to attack all of the strong plants that
has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.
He was
successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks
all of our institutions. The place where he was,
in my mind, the most successful and first
successful was in academia. He understood pride
of smart people. He attacked them at their
weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than
everybody else and could come up with something
new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the
existence of truth, play with it because they're
smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.
[...]
We all know
that this country was founded on a
Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian
ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic,
sure the Catholics had some influence, but this
was a Protestant country and the Protestant
ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and
of course we look at the shape of mainline
Protestantism in this country and it is in
shambles, it is gone from the world of
Christianity as I see it.
[...]
...now I
know you're going to challenge me on this one,
but politics and government was the next to
fall.
7. Wasting
Energy Makes a Nation Great;
Washington, D.C. (Feb. 10, 2012). There
was much in Santorum's speech to the Conservative
Political Action Conference speech, delivered while
surrounded by his wife and six of his seven
children, to give one the bends: the standard smear
of Obama as an enemy of religion (because of his
administration's mandate that even women who work
for businesses affiliated with the Roman Catholic
Church should enjoy the same access to birth control
as those who don't), and the derision of climate
change science, which Santorum contends is a lie.
But the kicker wasn't even his assertion that
government attempts to make the nation more
energy-efficient are a conspiracy for greater
control over the lives of individuals; it was his
contention
that the more energy the nation wastes, the greater
it will be:
One of the
favorite tricks of the left is to use your
sentimentality, is to use your proper
understanding that we are stewards of this
earth, and that we have a responsibility to hand
off a beautiful earth to the next generation.
And so they use that, and they've used it in the
past to try to scare you into supporting radical
ideas on the environment. They tried it with
this idea, this politicization of science called
manmade global warming.
You look at
any country in the world...the higher the energy
consumption, the higher their standard of
living.
8.
Democrats Are Just Like Nazi Invaders;
Washington, D.C. (May 19, 2005). During
the fight over President George W. Bush's nomination
of Priscilla Owen to the federal bench, Democrats
sought to delay the nomination by using a
filibuster. Owens was known to have taken campaign
cash from Enron executives, and Democrats fought her
nomination because they alleged she was ethically
unsuitable. Santorum, then the junior senator from
Pennsylvania, stepped out on the senate floor to
declare his opponents the moral equivalent of the
Nazi army. ThinkProgress has the
video;
transcript from
The Raw Story:
Some are
suggesting we're trying to change the law, we're
trying to break the rules. Remarkable.
Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has
been in place for 214 years that this is the way
we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two
years ago, and the audacity of some members to
stand up and say, "How dare you break this
rule?" It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in
1942: "I'm here in Paris. How dare you invade
me? How dare you bomb my city? It's mine." This
is no more the rule of the Senate than it was
the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster.
It was an understanding and agreement, and it
has been abused..."
9. Not
Really Comparing Obama to Hitler While Comparing
Obama to Hitler;
Cumming, Ga. (Feb.
19, 2012). Visiting one of the most
conservative states on the March 6 Super Tuesday
roster of primaries, Santorum turned to Hitler
again, this time as a "metaphor" for the allegedly
misplaced trust the American people have placed in
Obama. Transcript via
The Raw Story.
CBS News has the
video:
"Why?
Because we're a hopeful people. We think, 'You
know it will get better. Yeah, I mean, he's a
nice guy. It won't be near as bad as what we
think. You know, this will be OK. You know,
maybe he's not the best guy.' After a while, you
found out some things about this guy over in
Europe and maybe he's not so good of a guy after
all. But you know what? 'Why do we need to be
involved? We'll just take care of our own
problems, just get our families off to work and
our kids off to school and we'll be okay.'"
Santorum later
denied
he was comparing Obama to Hitler, but it's hard to
come away with any other conclusion. Pass the Pepto,
please.
A law school peer of
Santorum's offers a
lesson on what the
Constitution says about
religious freedom for a
wayward classmate and
his followers.
February 23,
2012 |
Samuel Johnson famously
wrote,
in 1775, that a false
“patriotism is the last
refuge of the
scoundrel.” Now, it
appears that modern
scoundrels – politicians
and their puppet masters
– have added another
disguise to their
wardrobe: false
constitutional
scholarship.
Not content to wrap
themselves in the flag
alone, financial wolves
are now relying on
politicians, wrapped in
the sheep’s clothing of
uninformed
constitutional
platitudes, hoping to
sway the voting masses
who lack the inclination
to study the
Constitution themselves.
Nowhere is this more
true in 2012 than with
pronouncements
concerning religious
freedom, especially
those made by my fellow
law school graduate,
Rick Santorum.
How might extremely
wealthy, largely
Republican
power-brokers sway
the financially
challenged
middle-class to vote
for Republican
candidates who will
serve the interests
of the very rich?
White House insider,
David Kuo,
wrote
that, back in
2001-2002, Karl Rove
and his White House
staff routinely
referred to
fundamentalist
Christians as
“nuts,” “ridiculous”
and “out of
control,” even while
cultivating their
loyalty. The Office
of Faith-Based
Initiatives operated
by the White House
under Rove was,
according to Kuo, a
veiled
get-out-the-vote
machine in targeted
races, not an
instrument of
policy. Every
Sunday, the devout
place money in the
collection plate, an
effective rehearsal
for reliable voting
habits.
By convincing Joe
Lunchbox that there
is a war on
Christianity by
Barack Hussein
Obama, Muslims,
ethnic groups,
immigrants, the
welfare class, and
godless elite
liberals, etc., and
by arguing that our
“national religion”
can only be saved by
Republicans, the GOP
is working to ensure
that the real cargo
– deregulation, tax
cuts and other forms
of control over the
corporate/financial
system – may be
delivered into
Republican hands.
Enter Rick Santorum.
In 2008, Santorum
claimed that America
was under attack by
Satan, in a
“spiritual war.” In
South Carolina last
month, Santorum left
no doubt as to his
desire to conform
American law to the
law of Santorum’s
God: “So don’t claim
His rights, don’t
claim equality as
that gift from God
and then go around
and say, ‘Well, we
don’t have to pay
attention to what
God wants us to do.
We don’t have to pay
attention to God’s
moral laws.’ If your
rights come from
God, then you have
an obligation to
live responsibly in
conforming with
God’s laws, and our
founders said so,
right?”
On Feb. 18, 2012,
Santorum questioned
President Obama’s
Christianity,
claiming that
Obama’s agenda was
based on “some phony
theology, not a
theology based on
the Bible.” Santorum
went on to complain
that Obama “is
imposing his values
on the Christian
church.” In Florida,
recently, Santorum
declined to correct
a voter who called
Obama an “avowed
Muslim.”
Onward, Christian
Soldiers
Through the
conflation of
freedom of religion,
with the more
nuanced concept of
freedom from
religion, Republican
king-makers have
schemed to sway
middle-class
evangelicals to
rally around a
Constitutional
Trojan horse.
Santorum and I
attended Penn
State, Dickinson
School of Law,
and studied
constitutional law
with the same
professor. Our
professor, now
retired, declined to
respond to emails
inviting her input,
but a brief
constitutional law
lesson is called for
here, one that
Santorum seems to
have overlooked.
A Constitutional
Lesson in a
Paragraph
The Declaration of
Independence (1776) invokes,
as justification for
the dissolution of
the United States’
political bands with
Britain, “the
separate and equal
station to which the
Laws of Nature and
of Nature’s God
entitle them...”
This is Santorum’s
ostensible anchor.
Reference to the
“Creator” which has
endowed us with
certain unalienable
rights such as
“Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of
Happiness” is the
only other mention,
in the Declaration
of Independence, of
God or religion,
other than an
invocation of “the
protection of divine
Providence” in
declaring
independence from
the British tyranny.
Reference to God and
religion in the
Constitution itself
is even scantier:
Article VI (1787)
provides
that “No religious
test shall ever be
required” for a
public officer, and
the First Amendment
provides “Congress
shall make no law
respecting an
establishment of
religion, or
prohibiting the free
exercise thereof…”
Amendment I
(1791).
That’s it.
'The Impious
Presumption....'
Like the Bible,
Supreme Court
pronouncements
interpreting
constitutional law
may be parsed to
support nearly any
proposition, but the
summary above
constitutes the
totality of
references to God
and religion found
in the Constitution
and Declaration of
Independence. At
the risk of
venturing onto this
slippery slope of
interpretation, the
treaty
America entered into
with Tripoli in
1797, during
Washington’s
presidency, and
approved by the U.S.
Senate under the
leadership of John
Adams, declared that
“the Government of
the United States is
not, in any sense,
founded on the
Christian religion.”
The
Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom
(1779), authored by
Thomas Jefferson,
one of the primary
authors of the
Declaration of
Independence,
stated, in pertinent
part,
“Whereas,
Almighty God
hath created the
mind free . . .
"That the
impious
presumption of
legislators and
rulers, civil as
well as
Ecclesiastical,
who, being
themselves but
fallible and
uninspired men
have assumed
dominion over
the faith of
others, setting
up their own
opinions and
modes of
thinking as the
only true and
infallible, and
as such
endeavoring to
impose them on
others, have
established and
maintained false
religions over
the greatest
part of the
world and
through all
time. . . .
"That it tends
only to corrupt
the principles
of that very
Religion it is
meant to
encourage, by
bribing with a
monopoly of
worldly honours
and emoluments
those who will
externally
profess and
conform to it .
. .
"Be it enacted
by General
Assembly that no
man shall be
compelled to
frequent or
support any
religious
worship, place
or ministry
whatsoever, . .
. but that all
men shall be
free to profess,
and by argument
to maintain,
their opinions
in matters of
Religion . . .
and [we] do
declare that the
rights hereby
asserted, are of
the natural
rights of
mankind, and
that if any act
shall be
hereafter passed
to repeal the
present or to
narrow its
operation, such
act will be an
infringement of
natural
rights.”
Pity Joe Lunchbox,
who is poorly
disposed to
constitutional
scholarship, yet
devoutly believes in
freedom of religion.
Our money says “In
God We Trust,” and
our Pledge of
Allegiance declares
us to be “One Nation
Under God.” Are we
not a Christian
nation, Joe asks?
In 1954, during the
McCarthy era,
Congress
inserted
the words “Under
God” in the Pledge
of Allegiance and
“In God We Trust”
appeared
on paper currency
only in 1956. No
constitutional
pedigree there.
Freedom of
Religion Depends on
Freedom From
Religion
Here is the crux of
the matter. Freedom
of religion was
entirely dependent,
in the views of the
constitutional
framers, on freedom
from a governmental
establishment of any
one religion. The
references to
Nature’s God,
Creator and divine
Providence in the
Declaration of
Independence do not
establish
Christianity as a
national religion.
Deism was
influential
among the Founding
Fathers like
Madison, Franklin,
Jefferson and
Washington, and was
based on the notion
that observation of
the natural world,
without the
necessity of
organized religion,
supported the
conclusion that the
universe was the
product of an all
powerful
creator. However one
understands a
“Natural God” –
either as Spinoza
theorized, a
monistic metaphysics
in which God is
nature itself, or
through Plato’s
natural theology
described in 360 BC,
or Thomas Paine’s
book on the natural
religion titled
The Age of Reason,
in which man calls
the designer of
nature by the name
of God, or through
some other school of
thought – the
Constitution’s
natural god is
assuredly not a
Christian god.
Extensive writings
by the Founding
Fathers and former
presidents leave no
doubt on this
point.
Consider these words
from John Adams:
"The United
States of
America have
exhibited,
perhaps, the
first example of
governments
erected on the
simple
principles of
nature; and if
men are now
sufficiently
enlightened to
disabuse
themselves of
artifice,
imposture,
hypocrisy, and
superstition,
they will
consider this
event as an era
in their
history.
Although the
detail of the
formation of the
American
governments is
at present
little known or
regarded either
in Europe or in
America, it may
hereafter become
an object of
curiosity. It
will never be
pretended that
any persons
employed in that
service had
interviews with
the gods, or
were in any
degree under the
influence of
Heaven, more
than those at
work upon ships
or houses, or
laboring in
merchandise or
agriculture; it
will forever be
acknowledged
that these
governments were
contrived merely
by the use of
reason and the
senses."
Under a
representative
democracy, the
majority has no
right to tyrannize
the minority on
matters of religion;
our constitutional
law summary above
may be helpful to
Mr. Santorum on this
issue. Rick
Santorum, and his
convenient confusion
about the difference
between freedom of
religion and freedom
from religion, may
or may not succeed
as the sort of
Trojan horse
welcomed into
Washington by
middle-class
evangelicals, to
support the sort of
plutocracy favored
by the power-brokers
behind the
Republican party.
But one thing’s for
sure: Santorum’s
constitutional law
is as fuzzy and
dangerous as a wolf
wrapped in a
sheepskin.
P. Scott Russell is
an attorney
practicing law in
Jacksonville,
Florida.
Republican
presidential candidate Rick
Santorum accused President
Obama of a "phony theology"
over the weekend, a theology
that takes seriously
"serving the earth."
I
agree with
Paul
Raushenbush:
Rick Santorum was terribly
unwise to make theological
correctness an issue in a
political campaign. But I
think he was right about his
differences with President
Obama being theological in
nature. Many of us see
ecological concern to be
eminently theological and
biblical . . . not that
political arguments should
be framed in terms of
theological or biblical
correctness, of course.
Leaving Senator Santorum's
choice of pronouns aside
(the earth was made, he
says, for "man's" use), his
attack on the president
strikes me as a classic
example of a false
dichotomy, biblically
speaking.
The Republican candidate
follows the hallowed
interpretive tradition of
the Industrial Era by
emphasizing Genesis 1:26,
which speaks of humanity
"having dominion" over the
fish of the sea, birds of
the air, and so on.
Now, many of us notice that
this "dominion" is an
expression of humanity being
created in "the image of
God." That framing seems to
imply that human beings
should show the same care
for creation that the
Creator does—respecting and
conserving God-given
balances and systems. As
image-bearers of God, we
should, for example, show
foresight to conserve
God-given resources to
benefit future generations
rather than grasping for the
most profit in the least
amount of time to benefit
today's one-percenters. (One
might even argue that this
approach is more truly and
deeply conservative.)
But those are quibbles that
some of us would make and
that candidate Santorum and
his base are likely to
ignore.
If, however, they were to
turn the page in the Book of
Genesis, they would come to
Genesis 2. There the Garden
of Eden is described as
fertile, beautiful,
well-watered, and rich land,
and we find these words:
The Lord God took the human
and settled him in the
garden of Eden to farm it
and to take care of it.
Quite
stunningly, the Hebrew words
(shamar and
abad) behind "farm" and
"take care of" (or "till"
and "keep") suggest exactly
the kind of care, foresight,
conservation, responsible
use, and foresight-ful
protection that the
president has stood for—with
many of us standing with
him. Here's how Christian
environmental scholar and
activist Cal DeWitt has
explained it in an interview
(see
this
full article
for more details):
On earthkeeping, the
reference there is to
Genesis 2:15, where Adam is
expected to till and to keep
the garden. "To till" is the
Hebrew word 'abad;
elsewhere in the Bible
outside of agricultural
context, this word gets
translated "serve." So we
read in "Choose ye this day
whom you will serve ("'abad"),
as for me and my house we
will 'abad
Jehovah." In Genesis Adam is
asked to 'abad the garden.
The idea is that the
garden—the creation—serves
us and other creatures by
providing habitat, food and
shelter, and beauty. And in
turn we must serve it. So
there is this idea of
con-service, con-servancy,
con-servation.
The Genesis 2 passage
continues, "Eat your fill
from all the garden's
trees." There is abundance
to be sure—abundance to be
enjoyed, as Industrial Era
interpreters rightly affirm.
But that is not the whole
story, because the next word
is "but"—but there are
limits to our enjoyment that
must be respected . . . if,
that is, we are to embody
the image of God and live by
the tree of life rather than
by the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil.
Candidate Santorum is moving
up in the poles. He is
saying things people want to
hear: we can "have dominion"
over the earth without
accountability for how well
we "till and keep" or "serve
and preserve" it. This is a
theology—an orthodox
theology in the minds
of many.
But
not to all of us. As the
title of a book
Everything Must Change
suggestes, many of us think
it's time to retire
Santorum's Industrial Era
theology of dominion and
exchange it for a more
ancient understanding . . .
and one with more foresight
for the future as well. He's
right: it is about
theology—the question is
which theology is phony and
foolish and which is
authentic and wise.
If Santorum gets to bear the
standard for the GOP, the
party moves even further to
the right. Here's a taste of
what's on that plate.
February 22, 2012
|
Photo
Credit: A.M.
Stan
It says quite a lot about
the state of the Republican
Party that the right-wing
extremist Rick Santorum -- a
politician so despised by
his own Pennsylvania
constituents that he lost
his U.S. Senate seat by an
18-point margin -- is now
the frontrunner for the GOP
presidential nomination. And
not by a little, I might add
-- by 10 points, according
to that latest national
tracking poll by Gallup.
As increasing numbers of
people identify themselves
as
independent voters
-- independent of the major
political parties, that is
-- the essence of the
Republican Party has
distilled into a toxic brew
of resentment, prejudice,
anti-intellectualism and
misogyny. In truth, the
party has been headed this
way for a long time, but the
election of Barack Obama --
a moderately liberal African
American man with an
African-Islamic name --
offered the perfect catalyst
for the alchemists of the
right to convert their
everyday potion of pique
into something far more
fortified.
Enter Rick Santorum, a
presidential candidate
regarded as little more than
a joke a mere month ago.
Santorum presents himself as
everything Obama is not, and
represents the opposite of
everything those anti-Obama
right-wing tropes, the lies
both whispered and shouted,
purport the president to be.
There are liberals who
relish the possibility of a
Santorum nomination; at the
Daily Kos, founder Markos
Moulitsas is urging liberals
to vote for Santorum in open
primaries, on the reasonably
sound theory that Santorum
is too crazy to win the
presidency. Perhaps.
"The longer this GOP primary
drags on, the better the
numbers for Team Blue,"
Markos
writes.
Fair enough, but is it good
for America? If Santorum
gets to bear the standard
for the GOP, the party moves
even further to the right
from where it is now.
Difficult to imagine, I
know. But sooner or later
the Republican Party wins
big, when voters tire of the
Democrats, or the Democrats
screw up in a major way. And
then, we'll all be ruled by
the Santorum agenda, or
something like it. Here's a
taste of what's on that
plate, based on Santorum's
own extremist claims.
1.
The End of the Secular
State. The Pope Will
Be Santorum's Brain. Santorum
is a big proponent of the
religious-right assertion,
which he recently reiterated
at the Conservative
Political Action Conference,
that the rights of American
citizens come not from the
U.S. Constitution or the
laws of man, but
from
God.
(To prove their point, they
cite the Declaration of
Independence, and the line
that "men" are "endowed by
their Creator with certain
unalienable rights.") Not
just any God, mind you, but
the authoritarian,
patriarchal God of
right-wing Christian
theology. And Santorum has
reserved for himself the
role of theologian-in-chief,
the arbiter of true
religion, the messenger
privy to the things God
really wants -- and the
things Satan really wants,
which, according to a 2008
speech he delivered at Ave
Maria University in Florida,
is the demise of the United
States.
"This is not a political
war at all. This is not
a cultural war at all.
This is a spiritual
war,” Santorum said,
describing how American
institutions and our
nation’s way of life are
falling to evil forces.
“And the Father of Lies
has his sights on what
you would think the
Father of Lies, Satan,
would have his sights
on: a good, decent,
powerful, influential
country – the United
States of America. If
you were Satan, who
would you attack in this
day and age?"
At a February 18 campaign
stop in Ohio, Santorum made
the case that Obama is not a
true Christian, that his
overal agenda is based on "a
phony theology."
From
Politico:
Slamming the president's
agenda on a range of
points, Santorum said
the agenda is "not about
you. It's not about your
quality of life. It's
not about your jobs.
It's about some phony
ideal, some phony
theology. Oh, not a
theology based on the
Bible, a different
theology, but no less a
theology."
On CBS News' "Face the
Nation" the next day,
Santorum said he was talking
specifically about the
president's environmental
policy and, no, he didn't
mean to suggest that Obama
is a Muslim or anything like
that. (Actually, he was
suggesting that the
president is an
earth-worshipping pagan
whose earth-worship is a
path to growing the size of
government.) Transcript from
ThinkProgress:
When you have a
worldview that elevates
the Earth above man and
says that we can’t take
those resources because
we’re going to harm the
Earth; by things that
frankly are just not
scientifically proven,
for example, the
politicization of the
whole global warming
debate — this is all an
attempt to, you know, to
centralize power and to
give more power to the
government.
Some, including me, heard in
Santorum's original comments
a dog-whistle to
right-wingers intent on
viewing Obama as a
crypto-Muslim. But Political
Animal's Ed Kilgore
reminds us of Santorum's
assertion
in a 2008 speech that
mainline Protestants
(basically, Protestants from
the major sects who are not
part of the religious right)
are not Christian, either.
Whichever it is, Rick
Santorum clearly reserves to
himself the right to
determine who is and isn't a
Christian, a particularly
outrageous claim by a
presidential hopeful who
asserts that rights are
bestowed on humans by his
idea of the Christian God.
In the practical sense,
then, a President Santorum
would render himself as God.
2. The End of Modern Science
and a Return to Flat Earth
"Created in 7 Days" "6,000
Years Old" Philosophy. While
it may be de rigueur
for Republican candidates to
deny the science of climate
change, Santorum takes it a
step further, claiming not
just that humans make no
contribution to changes in
the climate, but implicitly
arguing
that in order to be a great
nation, America needs its
citizens to waste energy,
especially through such
greenhouse-gas producing
products as
gasoline-guzzling cars and
incandescent lightbulbs. For
starters, that will give a
rationale for raping the
U.S. environment through
fracking -- of which he's a
big fan, especially near
population centers --
offshore drilling, and
plundering the Alaskan
wilderness.
At the Conservative
Political Action Conference,
Santorum made the point
that, among the nations of
the world, those that use
the most energy have the
highest standards of living.
(It doesn't take a genius to
accept that people who live
in centrally heated and
air-conditioned homes, and
who have refrigerators and
ovens that run on fuel other
than dung probably have a
higher standard of living
than those who don't.) So,
by Santorum's reasoning,
that means we should step up
the energy gluttony if we
want an even higher standard
of living. (If you can come
up with some scientific
reasoning for that
conclusion, you deserve a
very special prize.)
At Talk to Action, Rachel
Tabachnick
attributes
Santorum's anti-green
messianism to a strain of
religious-right theology
known as "Biblical
economics," which,
Tabachnick says, is " a
world in which unregulated
free markets are holy and
the opposition is literally
demonic."
But it doesn't end there. At
the intersection of
Santorum's anti-science
stance and his misogyny
stands his opposition to
prenatal testing.
3. A
Return to Old Testament
Patriarchy. The
leaders of Rick Santorum's
religion -- the Roman
Catholic Church -- oppose
abortion and birth control,
and so does he. Combined
with his opposition to
science, the fact-free mind
of the GOP frontrunner has
transformed his personal
religious beliefs to a
contention that prenatal
screenings of pregnant women
and their fetuses are a bad
thing, so he wants to end
any requirement on
health-insurance companies
that they be covered. Via
First
Read:
"One of the mandates is
they require free
prenatal testing in
every insurance policy
in America," Santorum, a
conservative Roman
Catholic, told a
Christian Alliance
luncheon in Columbus.
"Why? Because it saves
money in health care.
Why? Because free
prenatal testing ends up
in more abortions and
therefore less care that
has to be done, because
we cull the ranks of the
disabled in our society.
That too is part of
ObamaCare — another
hidden message as to
what president Obama
thinks of those who are
less able than the
elites who want to
govern our country."
"That ugly meme is
completely made up," writes
health expert Harold Pollack
at the Reality-Based
Community.
"By any reasonable measure,
the proliferation of genetic
diagnostic technologies
coincides with great
progress in public
acceptance and support for
people with disabilities."
And those technologies
actually save fetuses with
anomalies, allowing pregnant
women to have healthy babies
because their pregnancies
were monitored. One case in
point is the daughter of
writer Sarah Fister Gale,
whose rH blood disease was
discovered while she was
still in the womb, by the
use of amniocentesis, which
Santorum claims, "does, in
fact, result more often than
not in this country in
abortions." He added, "That
is a fact."
Actually, it's not. Here's
Gale,
writing at Salon:
If Rick Santorum had his
way, I wouldn’t have
been able to get that
test, and she most
likely would have died.
Because according to
him, tests that give
parents vital
information about the
health of their unborn
children are morally
wrong.
(Meanwhile, at the Nation,
Ben Adler
details Santorum's
opposition
to programs on which
disabled people depend.) Yet
Santorum talks constantly on
the stump about his seventh
child, Bella, who was born
with a brutal chromosomic
disorder.
The truth is, Santorum will
use any rationale that suits
him to deny women any kind
of reproductive healthcare
that informs their
decision-making process,
whether the decision is
about getting pregnant or
whether to bring a fetus to
term. When arguing the
merits of his so-called
"partial-birth abortion"
ban, a law enacted in 2003
to ban a particular abortion
procedure, Santorum claimed
that the procedure was used
to abort fetuses that were
not deformed or disabled in
any way. But on "Face the
Nation," as Slate's Will
Saletan
points
out,
Santorum claimed just the
opposite, saying the
procedure had been primarily
used to abort fetuses that,
if brought to term, would
become disabled children.
Then there's birth control,
which Santorum
told a
right-wing Iowa blogger at
Caffeinated Thoughts, is
"not okay" because it takes
the procreation out of sex.
In fairness to Santorum, he
does say that, as a matter
of public policy, he would
not try to outlaw
contraception: he just wants
to make it harder for you to
get (especially if you work
for a business that is owned
by a church-affiliated
institution).
Like the other Republican
presidential candidates,
Santorum says the Obama
administration's mandate
that health insurance
provided by employers must
cover prescription
contraception (and with no
co-pay) is a violation of
the religious freedom of
employers whose consciences,
like Santorum's, are
offended by the very notion
of birth control. But what
makes Santorum unique is a
novel interpretation of what
health insurance is meant to
do, which is not, according
to the candidate, to pay for
things that only "cost a few
dollars." Which brings me
back to the notion that
Santorum will use whatever
rationale he finds necessary
to deprive women of the full
range of reproductive
healthcare. He has not
voiced similar concerns, for
instance, over having
insurance plans pay for
low-cost generic
antibiotics, or
Tylenol-with-codeine pills.
4.
The Glorifying of Ignorance. Although
his wife home-schools their
own children, Rick Santorum
isn't completely against
public education. He just
wants to starve it. At an
Ohio campaign stop, Santorum
hailed the fact that most of
the early U.S. presidents
"home-schooled" their
children (he neglected the
mention of any tutors),
adding, according to the
New
York Times:
"Where did they come up
that public education
and bigger education
bureaucracies was the
rule in America? Parents
educated their children,
because it’s their
responsibility to
educate their children."
Which is great for parents
who don't want their kids to
learn actual science or
facts. (The mind boggles to
consider what the Santorum
children are learning in
science class at the kitchen
table.) The Times
goes on to note that federal
government, which Santorum
would cut out of the
education process,
contributes 11 percent of
most schools' budgets, and
is targeted for the
enforcements of standards
which would, of course,
include the teaching of
science. Meanwhile, the
United States lags behind
most of the industrialized
world in
turning out scientists and
engineers.
5. The Demonization of
Everybody but White,
Heterosexual, Right-wing
Christian Males. In
Rick Santorum's mind,
everybody who is not like
him is some form of demon:
Obama is like Hitler, gay
people are like beastialists,
women who have sex for
pleasure are licentious,
working mothers take the
easy way out, single mothers
are welfare queens,
undocumented immigrants are
thieves, black people are
lazy and Muslims are
bloodthirsty infidels.
At a February 19 campaign
stop in Georgia, Santorum
compared the 2012
presidential election to
World War II, when the U.S.
initially stood by as
Britain was showered with
Nazi bombs. Via
The
Raw Story:
"Why? Because we’re a
hopeful people. We
think, 'You know it will
get better. Yeah, I
mean, he’s a nice guy.
It won’t be near as bad
as what we think. You
know, this will be OK.
You know, maybe he’s not
the best guy.' After a
while, you found out
some things about this
guy over in Europe and
maybe he’s not so good
of a guy after all. But
you know what? 'Why do
we need to be involved?
We’ll just take care of
our own problems, just
get our families off to
work and our kids off to
school and we’ll be
okay.'"
Santorum later denied he was
comparing Obama to Hitler,
but it's hard to come away
with any other conclusion.
Santorum also denied he was
talking about black people
when he was quoted as
saying,
at an Iowa campaign stop in
January, "I don't want to
make black people's lives
better by giving them
somebody else's money; I
want to give them the
opportunity to go out and
earn the money." (He
laughably claimed three days
later that he said "blah"
people, not "black" people.)
Of working women, Santorum
wrote
in his 2005 book, It
Takes a Family, that
they find it easier and
"more socially affirming" to
keep up their careers than
to "stay home and take care
of their children." In other
words, women who work
outside the home are not
taking care of their
children.
Single mothers often refuse
to marry their partners,
Santorum told Fox News in
December, so they can
collect welfare.
And of women who use birth
control in order to have sex
for (horrors) pleasure,
Santorum told
Caffeinated Thoughts:
"[Contraception is] not okay
because it’s a license to do
things in the sexual realm
that is counter to how
things are supposed to be."
And while Santorum
disavowed the comments of
his sugar daddy, billionaire
Foster Freiss, who suggest
that women just clamp their
knees together as a means of
birth control, there have
been no reports that he's
stopped taking the old
sexist's money.
Immigrants fare no better
under Santorum's gaze.
Undocumented workers aren't
just people who came to the
U.S. because they wanted to
feed their families,
Santorum said in a January
debate: they're thieves, and
should be sent home, even if
it means separating parents
from their children. Via
ThinkProgress:
"I understand
Congressman Gingrich
saying, ‘Well, you know,
people have been here
and they’ve been good
citizens and paying
taxes.’ Yeah, under
somebody else’s Social
Security number because
you stole it."
Then there are the Muslims,
about whom Santorum has a
phantasmagorical
imagination. At a campaign
stop in New Hampshire last
month, the former
Pennsylvania senator
suggested that the U.S.
should bomb Iran
-- not simply because of the
allegation that the Muslim
nation is building a nuclear
bomb, but because the
bomb-building is all part of
a Shi'ite plan to bring
about the apocalypse to pave
the way for the return of a
messianic figure known as
the Mahdi. Lost on Santorum
was the irony that in
several corners of the
religious right, support for
an aggressive Israel is
based on just such a
scenario, designed to pave
the way for the second
coming of Jesus.
Finally, I would be remiss
not to mention Santorum's
jihad against LGBT people.
Suffice it to say, "man
on dog."
Contains excerpts from an
article on dailykos.com on Feb
20, 2012 by Joan McCarter
Rick Santorum,
getting creepier by
the day. (Rick
Wilking/Reuters)
Rick
Santorum was really on a
roll this weekend,
apparently assuming that his
surge means that he'll be
the nominee, putting
President Obama in his
incredibly skewed sights.
First, he stepped in it over
Obama's "phony theology."
Having gone there, it wasn't
much of a stretch to turn
Obama into a
eugenics-supporting monster.
Because, in Santorum's
world, the fetus is king.
He lambasted the
president's health care
law requiring insurance
policies to include free
prenatal testing,
"because free prenatal
testing ends up in more
abortions and therefore
less care that has to be
done because we cull the
ranks of the disabled in
our society."
"That, too, is part of
Obamacare, another
hidden message as to
what President Obama
thinks of those who are
less able than the
elites who want to
govern our country,"
Santorum said.
He
went on in this vein in his
Face the Nation
appearance on Sunday.
The— the bottom line is
that a lot of prenatal
tests are done to
identify deformities in—
in utero and the
customary procedure is
to encourage abortions
and in fact, prenatal
testing that— that
particularly
amniocentesis. I'm not
talking about general
prenatal care. You said
prenatal care. I— I
didn't say prenatal care
shouldn't be covered.
We're talking about
specifically prenatal
testing and specifically
amniocentesis, which is
a— which is a procedure
that actually creates a
risk of having a
miscarriage when you
have it and is done for
the purposes of
identifying maladies of
a child in the womb. In—
in which in many cases
and in fact most cases a
physicians recommend,
particularly if there's
a problem, recommend
abortion. [...]
When asked specifically by
Scheiffer if Santorum meant
to say that "the President
looks down on disabled
people," Santorum doubled
down, and went on a rant
about late term abortion,
concluding "The president
has a very bad record on the
issue of abortion and
children who are disabled
who are in the womb."
President Obama wants to
kill special children,
that's the message. While
free prenatal testing might
sound like a critical tool
for women to have the
healthiest pregnancies and
babies, it's really a trick
to get rid of "those who are
less able than the elites
who want to govern our
country."
But
when that severely disabled
child is born, either
because affordable prenatal
testing wasn't available or
the parents decided to keep
the fetus, well, that family
is on their own. Suck it up,
Santorum has told
one parent struggling to
afford to keep her child
alive.
As far as Rick Santorum is
concerned, mainstream
Protestantism "is gone from
the world of Christianity."
That's what he told students
at Florida's Ave Maria
University, founded by
Domino's Pizza mogul Tom
Monaghan, during a 2008
lecture.
"We all know that this
country was founded on a
Judeo-Christian ethic. But
the Judeo-Christian ethic --
sure the Catholics had some
influence -- but this was a
Protestant country," said
Santorum. "And the
Protestant ethic,
mainstream, mainline
Protestantism, and of course
we look at the shape of
mainline Protestantism in
this country and it is a
shambles, it is gone from
the world of Christianity as
I see it."
Rick Santorum is easily the most likable
candidate remaining in the contest for the Republican presidential
nomination. Of all the Not Romneys to emerge this year, he’s the first
that’s the antithesis of Romney: comfortable in his own skin,
intellectually consistent, and in touch with ordinary Americans–everything
Romney is not.
He’s a man of deep religious faith who
seems to truly live by his beliefs.* Indeed, it is this which makes him so
grounded and consistent. In this case, however, extremism is a vice that
makes him unfit to govern a free nation. His extreme homophobia and bizarre
views on women are enough to make him someone that I can’t support but I
recognize that a huge swath of America–and especially the Republican
nominating electorate–have similar views. But there’s actually much more
beneath the surface.
Right Wing Watch‘s
Kyle Mantyla points
to an August 2008 speech that Santorum gave at Ave Maria University. The
video is there for you to view in context but a few quotes stand out:
[Satan] attacks all of us and he
attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the
most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood
pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they
were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with
something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of
truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time
ago, fell.
And you say “what could be the
impact of academia falling?” Well, I would have the argument that the
other structures that I’m going to talk about here had root of their
destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate
the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society,
particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.
To be sure, Republican candidates have
been attacking academia for years. Faculty at elite colleges, for a variety
of reasons, tend to lean left. Further, it has long been common for
preachers at Evangelical churches to counsel students about to go off to
college to resist attempts by liberal professors to indoctrinate them and
undermine their faith. The general attitude is what gives the Left the
“Republicans are anti-science” talking point.
Still, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a
serious national politician claim that this is all a plot by . . . could it
be . . . Satan.
The speech gets creepier from there.
And so what we saw this domino
effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our
institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the
Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a
Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant
Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this
was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline
Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline
Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the
world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline
Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after
smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride
to also go after the Church.
That’s right: Somewhere along the
way, Satan successfully destroyed mainline Protestant churches such that
they’re not really Christian. (Thankfully, he spared the Catholic Church so
that they could do God’s work and rape little boys.) As
Ed Kilgore observes,
this notion may be problematic with the Republican nominating electorate.
Now there is no uniform
definition of “mainline Protestantism,” but most people would understand
it as including the religious denominations affiliated with the World
Council of Churches (which claim 560
million members), or in the U.S., with the National
Council of Churches (about 45 million
members). That’s a lot of church-going Christians. And while it’s not
unusual to hear the occasional Protestant fundamentalist or Catholic
traditionalist mock us mainliners as morally and theologically lax,
excessively “secular,” too “liberal,” too friendly to feminists and
sodomites and so on and so forth, you don’t hear many politicians
publicly talk that way, much less suggest all these Christians are really
in the grasp of Satan.
Granting that I’m a recovering
academic and nonbeliever it’s just bizarre that an obviously bright
fellow–who, incidentally, has a BA and JD from Penn State and an MBA from
Pitt, so don’t be sure that he’s free from Satan’s influence,
either–believes this nonsense. It’s Michele Bachmann level crazy. Yet he’s
arguably the Republican frontrunner
right now.
We’ll see soon enough whether
Santorum’s retrograde views are a bug or a feature with the nominating
electorate. At this point in the game, it’s quite possible that the extent
of his zealotry is simply not well known. Santorum was never considered a
serious contender for the nomination and his rise seems to be mostly a
function of people wanting someone other than Romney to vote for, everyone
else (even Herman “Shucky Ducky” Cain!) getting their turn, and Santorum
seeming to be a humble, blue collar guy.
Historically, the religious
extremists–Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan, and others–have had
brief surges and then fallen by the wayside to more mainstream candidates
for the nomination. But the only alternative who remains standing is,
ironically enough, a Mormon. And one Republicans decidedly don’t want to
nominate.
Excerpts
from an article posted in
the huffington post by
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush on
02/18/2012
On
Saturday, the presidential
hopeful was addressing a
group in Ohio when he made
the unfortunate assertion
that
Obama's agenda
is:
not about you. It's not
about your quality of
life. It's not about
your jobs. It's about
some phony ideal. Some
phony theology. Oh, not
a theology based on the
Bible. A different
theology.
The
first reason this is a
mistake is that Santorum has
decided to make the
presidential campaign about
religious orthodoxy and
introduced theology into
politics in an aggressive
way. His less than subtle
message is that anyone who
believes in the Bible, or
even takes the Bible
seriously, should be suspect
of the president who is
serving up 'false teachings'
referencing
Matthew 7:15
which reads: "Beware of
false prophets, who come to
you in sheep's clothing but
inwardly are ravenous
wolves."
Santorum's recent comments
should be a major turn off
to anyone who understands
that while all politics are
informed by values,
religious and secular, we
should be very wary when
politicians begin to assert
religious creedal tests into
electoral politics.
Earlier this year I spoke
with
Senator John Danforth
who has thought a lot about
religion and politics.
Senator Danforth reminded me
that:
The language of politics
is different than the
language of religion --
politics is not
religion. The language
of religion is based on
creedal affirmation,
while the language of
politics, when it works,
is the language of
compromise. To confuse
politics for religion
results in gridlock from
the political
perspective. To confuse
politics for religion
from the religious
perspective is idolatry.
The second mistake by Sen.
Santorum is that his casting
stones and judging President
Obama's biblical
understanding comes at a
time when serious questions
have to be asked about Sen.
Santorum's own grasp of
biblical teachings.
At the
Detroit Economic Club,
Sen. Santorum explained his
position on income
inequality between the rich
and the poor saying: "There
is income inequality in
America. There always has
been and hopefully, and I do
say that, there always will
be."
Senator Santorum stated this
hope for the inequality
between the rich and the
poor in Detroit -- a city
that has suffered from
enormous deprivation in the
past decades. As
Charles Blow
reminded readers in the New
York Times: "Among the more
than 70 cities with
populations over 250,000,
Detroit's poverty rate
topped the list at a
whopping 37.6 percent, more
than twice the national
poverty rate."
Mr. Santorum should be
careful in his efforts to
score political points using
biblical mandates on the
same week that he shows such
callousness towards the
lives of the poor. If we
know anything about the
concerns of the prophets of
the Hebrew Bible and of
Jesus of the New Testament,
it is that they had harsh
words for the rich who grow
richer while the poor
suffer, and the inequality
in America over the last 30
years has become biblically
blasphemous.
Rick Santorum was wrong to
make his campaign about
religious orthodoxy, and
wrong again about religious
orthodoxy when it came to
his own campaign.
Contains
excerpts from The Huffington
Post
written by
Luke
Johnson
on 02/16/2012
Foster Friess, a top donor to a Rick
Santorum-aligned super PAC,
dismissed the importance of his
candidate's stances on social issues
in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea
Mitchell Thursday, adding a bizarre
statement about birth control.
Friess was asked about Santorum's
beliefs on social issues such as
abortion and gay rights, which have
led many to question his viability
in a general election.
"I
get such a chuckle when these things
come out," he said. He added, "We
have jihadist camps being set up in
Latin America, which Rick has been
warning about and people seem to be
so preoccupied with sex -- I think
it says something about our culture.
We maybe need a massive therapy
session so we can concentrate on
what the real issues are."
Friess then turned to contraception.
"This contraceptive thing, my gosh
it's such [sic] inexpensive. Back in
my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for
contraception. The gals put it
between their knees and it wasn't
that costly," he said.
Mitchell, taken aback, said, "Excuse
me, I'm just trying to catch my
breath from that" and changed the
subject. Friess later described
Santorum as "truly the post-partisan
candidate," a line ascribed to
then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008.
Santorum said
that he personally believes in the
Catholic Church's position on
contraception, which is that it
should not be used by members of the
religion, but that he thinks it
should be available. He
noted
Wednesday that
he had voted for funding for
contraception "domestically and
internationally, and would not
support any law that would prevent
that."
Still,
Santorum has strongly opposed the
Obama administration's rule
requiring most
religiously-affiliated employers to
provide contraception in their
health plans.
He said in
2006
that he thinks that contraception is
"harmful to women."
Friess later recounted to Mitchell a
conversation he had with someone who
challenged him on Santorum's
opposition to same-sex marriage.
"So I
said to this guy, 'You know through
the beginning of time, not just the
major religions, but various African
tribal people have said that man is
marrying a woman. And at what point
in your life did that suddenly
become an extreme idea?'" Friess
said of that conversation. "Well
obviously he couldn't answer so the
whole idea of extremism seems kind
of a bizarre terminology for someone
who believes that marriage is
between a man and a woman."
Friess donated $331,000
to the Santorum-aligned Red, White
and Blue Fund in 2011, which raised
$764,000 overall. The amount pales
in comparison to the $30.1 million
raised by Restore Our Future, a Mitt
Romney-aligned super PAC, and the
$10 million donated by Sheldon
Adelson, a Las Vegas casino mogul,
to a Newt Gingrich-aligned super
PAC.
2012 GOP
presidential
candidate Rick
Santorum
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
Like any good
presidential
candidate, Rick
Santorum heaps
praise on America's
soldiers and
veterans. He's
pledged
to "make veterans a
high priority" if
elected president,
adding, "This is not
a Republican issue,
this is not a
Democratic issue, it
is an American
issue." But as a US
senator, Santorum
engineered a
controversial land
deal that robbed the
military's top
veterans' home of
tens of millions of
dollars and worsened
the deteriorating
conditions at the
facility.
The Armed Forces
Retirement Home,
which is run by the
Department of
Defense, bills
itself as the
"premier home for
military retirees
and veterans." The
facility sprawls
across 272 acres
high on a hill in
northern Washington,
DC, near the
Petworth
neighborhood. The
nearly 600 veterans
who now live there
enjoy panoramic
views of the
city—the Washington
monument and US
Capitol to the
south, the Shrine of
the Immaculate
Conception to the
east. At its peak,
more than 2,000
veterans of World
Wars I and II, the
Korean War, and the
Vietnam War lived at
the Home.
But with the rise of
the smaller
all-volunteer
military, the Home
began to run into
serious financial
problems. It was
clear that one of
its primary sources
of revenue—a 50-cent
deduction from the
paychecks of
active-duty
servicemembers—wasn't
enough to keep the
Home operating
fully. In the 1990s,
the Home scrambled
to
find ways to avoid
insolvency,
trimming its staff
by 24 percent and
reducing its vet
population by 800.
Still, the money
problems began to
show, with its older
historic facilities
slipping into
disrepair and decay.
To grapple with its
worsening shortfall,
officials running
the Home eyed a
valuable, 49-acre
piece of land worth
$49 million as a
potential financial
lifeline.
Under one scenario,
by leasing the
parcel of land and
letting it be
developed, the Home
could pocket $105
million in income
over 35 years for
its trust fund,
David Lacy,
then-chairman of the
Home's board of
directors, told
Congress in 1999.
Lacy stressed that
the Home wanted to
keep the property,
and not offload it
to a buyer. "Once
land is sold," he
said, "it is lost
forever as an
asset."
Enter Sen. Rick
Santorum (R-Penn.).
At the behest of the
Roman Catholic
Church, and
unbeknownst to the
Home, Santorum
slipped an amendment
into the 1999
National Defense
Authorization Act
handcuffing how the
home could cash in
on those 49 acres.
The amendment forced
the Home to sell—and
not lease—the land
to its next-door
neighbor, the
Catholic University
of America.
Ultimately, the
Catholic Church
bought 46 acres of
the tract for
$22 million.
The Home lost the
land for good, and
by its own
estimates, pocketed
$27 million less
than the land's
value and $83
million less
than what it
could've made under
the lease plan.
Santorum's amendment
sparked an outcry
from veterans'
groups and fellow US
senators, who
barraged his office
with complaints.
Laurence Branch,
then the executive
director of the
Home's board, says
Santorum's amendment
was "a travesty" and
the Church's
lobbying for the
land a case of
"coveting thy
neighborhood's
goods." To this day,
Branch says he
blames Santorum for
the Home not
receiving more money
for the 49-acre
parcel of land. "I'm
convinced Sen.
Santorum is no
friend of veterans,"
Branch says. (A
spokesman for
Catholic University
did not respond to a
request for
comment.)
At the time,
Santorum said the
amendment was the
product of "a
consensus agreement"
and "was certainly
not an attempt to
shortchange the
veterans." (A
spokesman for the
Santorum campaign
did not respond to
multiple requests
for comment.)
Santorum's advocacy
for Catholic
University isn't at
all surprising. A
practicing Catholic,
Santorum embodies
the church's
anti-abortion and
anti-gay-marriage
positions as well as
its support for
charities and
alleviating poverty.
While in Congress,
he was a fierce
advocate for the
Catholic Church. A
former Santorum aide
toldNew York Times
Magazine in 2005
that the senator was
"a Catholic
missionary who
happens to be in the
Senate.'' That same
year, Time
magazine
named him
one of America's
''25 Most
Influential
Evangelicals.''
Meanwhile, the $22
million from the
land sale hardly
stanched the flow of
red ink at Armed
Forces Retirement
Home. Financial
records, court
documents, and
government reports
from the 2000s show
how the Home cut
back on the services
it provided veterans
as it grappled with
funding problems.
The slashing of
services got so bad
that in 2003
veterans living at
the Home filed a
class-action suit
against the Home and
its director,
Timothy Cox,
alleging shoddy
health care and less
access to that care.
As a result of
cutbacks and
declining quality in
care, the suit
claimed, the suicide
rate at the Home
spiked from 59 in
2000 to 131 in 2003.
In 2007, an
investigation by the
Government
Accountability
Office came to
similarly troubling
conclusions. The
watchdog's head,
David Walker,
reported that one
Home resident
had been admitted
to the hospital with
maggots in a wound.
Other vets were
admitted with bad
pressure sores,
suggesting they'd
been left unattended
for dangerously long
stretches of time by
the Home's health
care employees. In
the aftermath of the
GAO's investigation,
Sens. Carl Levin
(D-Mich.) and John
McCain (R-Ariz.)
demanded an
independent
investigation into
the quality of
health care at the
Home.
Yet today, despite
some improvement in
the Home's financial
health, its campus
is pocked with
boarded-up, decrepit
buildings. All but
one of the Home's
gatehouses is
shuttered, as are
some of the Home's
more elegant
buildings, including
the historic Grant
building (named
after the Civil War
general) and the
red-brick hospital
that now sits empty,
bearing a sign
warning off
trespassers. Some
veterans believe the
Home's constant
financial struggles
have led to a
slow-motion decline
of the Home. As
longtime resident
and Navy vet Robert
Devaney says, "I
like to call it
demolition by
neglect."
Andy Kroll
is a
reporter at
Mother
Jones.
For more of
his stories
Rick Santorum
attracted a mob
of supporters,
reporters, and
Occupy protesters at
a small general
store and deli in
the small town of
Amherst this
afternoon. Later,
after shooting a
segment on Mike
Huckabee's Fox News
show, Santorum took
a question on
whether he supported
a constitutional
amendment aimed
at rolling back the
Supreme Court's
Citizens United
decision that
tore down limits
on corporate
political spending
and paved the way
for
super-PACs, the
independent groups
that can raise and
spend unlimited
amounts of cash.
"I think it's
horrible," Santorum
said. "I think it
would be against the
right to petition
your government."
Asked whether
corporations should
have the kind of
influence they do
now, Santorum
replied, "Everybody
should have an
opportunity, who are
affected by
government, to
participate in the
activities of the
government. No one
should be
disenfranchised."
Santorum is far
from the only
Republican to
dismiss the idea of
a constitutional
amendment targeting
Citizens United.
On Friday, at a
firearms factory in
Newport, former
House Speaker Newt
Gingrich similarly
dissed a
Citizens United,
in response to a
question from a
factory worker.
Instead, Gingrich
said, the nation's
campaign finance
laws should be
changed so that
outside groups—like
the pro-Romney
super-PAC Restore
Our Future that
hammered Gingrich in
Iowa—are
marginalized and
more funds go to a
candidate's actual
campaign.
As for Mitt
Romney, the
front-runner here in
New Hampshire, he's
criticized
super-PACs on
several occasions.
But, in reality,
there's no doubt
where he stands. As
he said last August
at the Iowa State
Fair, "Corporations
are people, my
friend."
The
Bureau of Labor
Statistics' December
jobs report is
full of encouraging
news, unless you're
running for
president and your
name isn't Barack
Obama. Released on
Friday morning, the
report shows that
the private sector
added 200,000 jobs
in December, while
the unemployment
rate fell from 9
percent to 8.5
percent (caveat
alert: that's due,
in part, to the
millions of
discouraged workers
who've stopped
looking for work,
and no longer factor
into the count).
That's on top of
recent Labor
Department data
showing that the
number of Americans
applying for initial
unemployment claims
is dropping.
Also buried amid
the cheery news: the
country's
long-left-for-dead
manufacturing sector
is making a serious
comeback, adding
23,000 jobs in
December. As the
New York Times'
Floyd Norris reports,
that's reflective of
a larger trend.
The BLS data is
sure to send Mitt
Romney, Newt
Gingrich, Ron Paul,
and the rest of the
GOP presidential
aspirants spiralling
into heavy spin
mode; this morning,
White House advisor
David Axelrod
tweeted "He's
kidding, right?"
after Rick Santorum
reportedly quipped
that unemployment
dropped because of
"optimism that
Republicans will
take the White
House." In fact, the
positive news on
manufacturing
presents a
particularly thorny
problem for
Santorum, who has
crafted a
reasonably credible,
pro-blue-collar,
compassionate
conservative
pitch to middle
class Republicans.
"The heartland of
America is suffering
because the
manufacturing
economy of this
country continues to
go down," Santorum
said at a
Republican
presidential debate
in December.
"And it hurts
disproportionately
small town and rural
America. So what I
learned from
traveling around
Iowa is we had to
get a plan together
that'll revitalize
manufacturing." The
culprits, said
Santorum, are
Obama's burdensome
"bevy of
regulations" and an
oppressive corporate
tax code.
There's just one
problem: in Obama's
America,
manufacturing is
slowly lurching back
to life. For the
most part,
the sector has
steadily cratered
over the past forty
years. But, as
Norris reports, from
February of 2010 to
this past November,
the economy added
2.4 million
jobs—302,000 of
which were in
manufacturing. That
adds up to the
sector's two best
years over past two
decades. Those
numbers could be
presenting a
prematurely rosy
picture. But there's
plenty of good
reason for measured
optimism.
Rick Santorum
loathes the liberal
judges of the Ninth
Circuit, the federal
appeals court that
stretches from
Alaska to California
to Arizona. In
small-town New
Hampshire on
Thursday, Santorum
unveiled his plan
for ending those
judges' "reign of
terror": Ship 'em
all to Guam.
Santorum was full
of spicy quips on
Thursday at an old
train station in the
town of Northfield.
Riding high from his
impressive second
place finish in
Iowa's caucuses,
Santorum held court
before a
standing-room-only
crowd here, with
almost as many
journalists as
voting-age New
Hampshire citizens
in attendance. He
veered from issue to
issue, from the evil
of President Obama's
Affordable Care Act
to tax policy under
Ronald Reagan,
reforming Social
Security to the 2009
Honduran coup.
On the Ninth
Circuit, a favorite
punching bag for
conservatives,
Santorum said he
supported its
abolishment—"What
the Congress
creates, it can
uncreate"—or at
least tossing out
its most liberal
judges and replacing
them with new ones.
He acknowledged
there might be some
Constitutional
problems with just
firing the Ninth's
judges. His
solution: "Maybe we
can create a court
that puts them in
Guam or something
like that," a jab
that earned him more
than a few laughs.
The Ninth Circuit
wasn't the only
court Santorum
blasted. He singled
out the Supreme
Court—at least its
more liberal
justices—for plenty
of criticism,
calling the high
court an
out-of-control
"super-legislature."
"Five people who are
not accountable to
the people should
not be able to amend
the Constitution,"
he said.
Like any good
conservative,
Santorum paid his
respects to Ronald
Reagan. In
Northfield, though,
the tax increases
presided over by
Reagan came up, in
particular the
Gipper's payroll tax
hike
passed in 1983.
Santorum winced at
this. "I love
Reagan," he said.
"He got snookered in
'83."
And in attacking
Obama's foreign
policy record,
Santorum ripped the
president for
calling the 2009
change-over in power
that ousted Honduran
President Manuel
Zelaya a coup. In
doing so, Santorum
said, Obama took his
place alongside two
other leaders: Fidel
Castro and Hugo
Chavez. "How many
times do you want to
hear America in the
same sentence as a
group of three
countries that's
Cuba, Venezuela, and
the United States?"
Yet what earned
Santorum the most
applause was not his
attacks on liberal
judges or foreign
policy but on
Obama's Affordable
Care Act. Santorum
pledged to make
repealing health
care reform his
first act if elected
president, vowing to
replace it with a
free-market system
built "from the
bottom up."
Nearly two hours
had passed since
Santorum strode into
the old train
station surrounded
by a crush of
cameras and
reporters. Now,
Santorum said it was
time to get moving
again. "I'd love to
stay and answer more
questions," he said,
"but there's miles
to go before I
sleep."
Thanks to his
surprising surge,
which brought him
within eight votes
of winning the Iowa
caucuses, Rick
Santorum is the
candidate du jour.
With his
front-runner status
is bound to come a
new level of
scrutiny directed at
his track record and
positions. One place
to start is his
stance on public
education, of which
the former
Pennsylvania senator
is not a big fan. As
he said
while campaigning in
New Hampshire back
in March, when
no one was taking
him seriously as a
candidate: "Just
call them what they
are. Public schools?
That's a nice way of
putting it. These
are government-run
schools."
Santorum has
campaigned on the
fact that his seven
kids have been
home-schooled, which
has earned him a
loyal following of
foot soldiers within
the evangelical
movement. (The
same goes for Rep.
Michele Bachmann,
who on Tuesday
dropped out of the
presidential race.)
Over the past year,
Santorum has
appeared at a
handful of
home-schooling
conferences. In
April, he won the
Home School Legal
Defense
Association's straw
poll. There's
even a
"Homeschoolers for
Santorum" Facebook
page.
But Santorum
wasn't always so
opposed to
government-run
schools—especially
one Pennsylvania
cyber charter school
that offered
students free
computers, internet
service, and online
classes. Between
2001 and 2004, that
online school
allowed the Santorum
family to live in
Virginia, while
sticking
Pennsylvania
taxpayers with a
$100,000 bill.
In 2004, Santorum
spawned a minor
scandal when
news broke that he
was no longer
residing in the
state that sent him
to Congress and was
living instead
outside the Beltway
in Leesburg,
Virginia. Santorum
owned, and still
does, a house in
Penn Hills,
Pennsylvania, next
door to his in-laws.
The Santorums bought
the three-bedroom
house in 1997 for
$87,800. But after
Santorum got elected
to the Senate in
1994, he bought a
much larger home in
Virginia that would
accommodate his
ever-growing family.
Some relatives moved
into the Penn Hills
house, but Santorum
continued to use it
to claim residency
in Pennsylvania,
where he voted by
absentee ballot.
Despite moving
his family to
Virginia, Santorum
didn't enroll his
children in a local
public school. Nor
did the Santorums
simply home-school
the kids. Instead,
in 2001, they
enrolled five of
their kids in the
Pennsylvania Cyber
Charter School,
based out of tiny
Beaver County,
Pennsylvania. The
school was founded
by Nick Trombetta, a
former wrestling
coach who set up an
online charter
school in a
depopulated part of
the state and turned
it into a financial
powerhouse that
rakes in millions
annually in public
education funds. (In
2007, Trombetta, a
major Republican
donor in the state,
was the
subject of a state
grand jury
investigation into
his use of millions
in public funds to
build a performing
arts center near the
school's
headquarters, among
other things. No
charges have been
brought.)
Considered a
public school, the
online charter's
students are
required to take
state-mandated
assessments and meet
other formal
requirements not
demanded of
traditional home-schoolers.
But it offers home-schoolers
lots of advantages,
notably free
computers and
internet
connections. When
Santorum enrolled
his kids there, the
local school
district in Penn
Hills was forced to
pick up the tab for
the cyber school,
which cost the
district $38,000 a
year for the
Santorum children.
After four years,
the press got wind
of this in 2004, and
Democrats raised a
fuss about the fact
that their senator
didn't actually live
in Pennsylvania,
much less the Penn
Hills school
district that was
footing the bills
for his children's
education in
Virginia. The local
school board, which
included a member
who was the local
Democratic Party
committee chair,
attempted to force
Santorum to repay
the district
$100,000 in tuition.
When the scandal
broke, Trombetta,
the founder of the
charter school,
offered to let
Santorum's kids stay
enrolled for free if
Santorum would pay
the technology
costs. In the end,
with Democrats
challenging his
residency in the
state, Santorum
withdrew his kids
from the school. He
never repaid a dime.
The state ended up
settling with the
school district and
repaying $55,000 in
tuition fees. (The
Santorum campaign
did not respond to a
request for
comment.)
Even today,
nearly eight years
after the charter
school scandal,
Santorum's residency
issues continue to
dog him. On the
campaign trail,
distancing himself
from the dreaded
Washington insider
label, he has
highlighted his
Pennsylvania roots.
In August, at a
campaign event in
Iowa, he handed out
samples of
"Pennsylvania
Presidential Peach
Preserves," which he
claimed were made by
his family from
peaches they picked
off their trees back
home. But as the
Roxborough-Manayunk,
Pennsylvania,
Patch pointed
out on Tuesday,
there's not a peach
tree to be found
anywhere near the
Santorum home in
Penn Hills. The web
site speculated that
the peaches must
have come from
elsewhere—Santorum's
$1.26 million manse
in Great Falls,
Virginia, perhaps.
Rick Santorum's endorsement of Arlen
Specter, a strong supporter of
abortion who gave President Barack
Obama the key Senate vote to pass
Obamacare, is becoming a key issue
as the Iowa caucuses near.
Polls show that Santorum is seeing a
last-minute surge in Iowa, but
pro-lifers and pro-Christian groups
are seeing red.
According to press reports, critics
of Santorum have been handing out
fliers and putting them on cars
outside of Santorum events claiming
that the former Pennsylvania senator
is a "Pro-Life Fraud." The
organization publishing the fliers
identifies itself as "Iowans for
Life."
A devout Catholic, Santorum has been
a consistent advocate for pro-life
issues, but he backed pro-abortion
candidates in key political moves
that could have benefited his own
career.
The pro-life flier notes that
Santorum has "a long and storied
history of campaigning for radical
pro-abortion candidates,” mentioning
Santorum's strong endorsement for
former New Jersey Gov. Christine
Todd Whitman and former fellow
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter.
Santorum seems most haunted by his
2004 decision to back the
pro-abortion Specter in a Republican
primary. Specter won narrowly,
defeating his pro-life opponent Pat
Toomey, and Santorum's support of
Specter was cited as a key help to
the liberal Specter.
“Santorum’s recent interventions on
behalf of Arlen Specter are so
bewildering,” Stephen Moore,
president of the Club for Growth,
wrote in 2004 on National Review
Online.
“Toomey’s voting record, especially
on economic-growth issues, is very
similar to Santorum’s and is as
impressive as Specter’s is
dreadful.”
Noting that the Citizens Against
Government Waste ranked Specter as
the “Pork Spender of the Year,”
Moore wrote that, nevertheless,
“Santorum is actively working to
undermine Pat Toomey’s candidacy. He
has discouraged donors from
contributing to Toomey. He has cut
TV ads for Specter that portray the
senior liberal senator as a friend
of the taxpayer.”
Santorum’s support for Specter
proved crucial in the primary, in
which Specter defeated Toomey with
just 50.8 percent of the vote.
Conservative criticism of Specter
appeared justified. Specter backed
Obama's healthcare program — giving
him the swing vote to pass the
legislation in the Senate.
In 2009, Specter faced likely defeat
in the GOP primary, once again
challenged by Toomey. Specter
decided to leave the Republican
Party and ran for re-election as a
Democrat. Obama backed him strongly.
Specter was defeated in the
Democratic primary by Rep. Joe
Sestak, who then lost the general
election to Toomey.
Santorum paid dearly for his support
of Specter, most observers agree.
In 2006, he ran for re-election and
squared off against State Treasurer
Bob Casey. Casey, a Democrat,
received 59 percent of the vote to
Santorum’s 41 percent — the largest
margin of defeat ever for an
incumbent Republican senator in
Pennsylvania.
Some pundits said that Santorum's
strong support for Specter, one of
the Republican Party's most
pro-abortion senators, had cost him
his job.
Conservatives evidently have not
forgotten Santorum’s perceived
betrayal of their cause. Santorum
has been dogged for weeks at
campaign appearances for his support
of Specter.
At a campaign appearance in Sioux
Center, Iowa, in early December,
fliers criticizing his candidacy
were scattered around the site.
The flier read: “Why Rick Santorum
is not fit to serve as President of
the United States.”
It further stated: “It is well
established that Rick Santorum
aggressively campaigned for
now-Democrat U.S. Senator Arlen
Specter, one of the most
pro-abortion Senators in the U.S.
Senate — over a strongly pro-life
primary opponent.”
Santorum told the gathering he
supported Specter because he was the
chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee and promised Santorum that
he would help usher in President
Bush’s Supreme Court nominee,
according to Yahoo News.
However, Specter has flatly denied
that he assured Santorum he would
vote for Bush’s Supreme Court
nominee in exchange for Santorum’s
endorsement, saying “I never made
any promises to Senator Santorum.”
Specter has been a consistent Senate
supporter of abortion rights over
several decades. Santorum himself
has acknowledged that the
endorsement was a mistake. At the
Southern Republican Leadership
Conference in April 2010, Santorum
“apologized" for his support of
Specter.
As Santorum's star has risen in
Iowa, his conservative record has
come under more scrutiny.
This past week, Texas Gov. Rick
Perry began airing an ad attacking
Santorum for being one of the
biggest earmarkers in the Senate,
even supporting the infamous "Bridge
to Nowhere."
Eric Erickson, the head of the
conservative blog Red State, has
described Santorum as a big spender
in the Senate, saying his record
proved him to be a "big government
conservative."
Hard to believe it, but Rick
Santorum strongly endorsed
Mitt Romney for President in
2008.
The former Pennsylvania
Senator is rising in Iowa
polls as one of the
conservative alternatives to
the moderate former
Massachusetts governor, Mitt
Romney.
But now internet blogs are
making a hay out of the fact
that Santorum offered high
praise for Romney as a true
conservative when he battled
in the 2008 GOP presidential
race against other rivals,
including Mike Huckabee and
John McCain.
Soon after Romney lost the
Florida primary in February
2008, Santorum told radio
host Laura Ingraham he was
endorsing Romney.
Santorum told Ingraham that
Romney is “"a guy who has
gone through that pressure
cooker, who has developed a
passion, who understands why
he's a conservative and
understands the issues, how
they weave together."
Santorum added that
conservatives are "about
traditional values and a
traditional way of American
life" and that Mitt Romney
"understands that, it's not
just in his head anymore,
it's in his heart."
This year Santorum, a
presidential candidate and
Romney rival, has said his
2008 endorsement was
motivated more by politics
than conservative beliefs.
"I made, I hate to say it, a
calculated political
decision that Romney was the
stronger horse and had a
better chance to win Super
Tuesday with the resources
he had," Santorum said. "I
like him. The time I spent
with him, he was a
gentleman. He's very
sincere."
Rick Santorum, who is constitutionally
incapable of not whining whenever he opens his mouth, had a whiny
response to being made fun of on Saturday Night Live this
weekend.
SNL did
another GOP debate sketch
and placed Santorum's character in a San Francisco gay bar, where he
was terribly uncomfortable, because Rick Santorum famously hates gay
people. Ha, that's me alright! the real Santorum could have
responded, if he were constitutionally capable of not whining
whenever he opens his mouth. Instead we get this, before he's even
watched the sketch:
"We've been hammered by the left for
my standing up for the traditional family and I will continue to
do so," Santorum told WGIR's "White House Brief" show despite
admitting that he had not seen the skit yet. "The left,
unfortunately, participates in bullying more than the right
does. They say that they're tolerant, and they're anything but
tolerant of people who disagree with them and support
traditional values."
Got it, SNL? No more common
jokes allowed. And under a Rick Santorum presidency, NBC will be
ordered to show a crappy VHS copy of
"Rick Santorum's Summer Dance Party"
every Saturday afternoon at 5:30, the new "late night," as the
country's military-enforced National Bedtime will be at 7.
This led everyone to conclude that his showing was a
demonstration of how strong his campaign is, despite the fact that he's
got little money or organizational strength.
We read his finish as a demonstration of the strength of his
personal brand of peach jelly, which he handed out at Ames. It's sweet,
tacky deliciousness hit the taste buds of the average caucus-goer.
Mmmm-mmmm! Just one swallow and you'll pretty much hate gay people, too!
You might go so far as to opine that the 2008 financial crisis was a
product of gay marriage, and
not a giant over-leveraged casino scheme built by over-confident
greed-fiends!
Santorum left Ames feeling reinvigorated, the only explanation for why
he decided to make the following melodramatic lamentation: "Does anyone
believe that our freedom is as whole as it was at the time of our
founders? It is not."
I don't know, Rick! It's sort of awesome that the United States
doesn't have slavery anymore! But I guess there are all sorts of
points of views on the matter.
Dave Weigel
ruminates on the"persistence" of Rick Santorum, and notes that while
he doesn't have a plausible path to the GOP nomination, he's solidly on
the road to a sort of "political redemption."
"By starting out this campaign as a joke candidate, he can "win" if he
finishes as less than a joke," Weigel says. He points out that Santorum
is also poised to reap the personal financial benefits that follow a
presidential candidacy. (We're pretty sure that even your Carol Moseley-Brauns
get a bump in the speaking fee department.)
An excerpt from
an article by Jason Cherkis on huffingtonpost.com 6/7/2011
WASHINGTON -- Former Pennsylvania
Sen. Rick Santorum, who announced his bid for president Monday, has
spent the past four years serving on the board of Universal Health
Services Inc. (UHS), one of the country's largest and most troubled
hospital chains.
It turns out Santorum may
have had a more personal stake in
railing against
President Barack Obama's signature health care legislation and beating
the drum for less government intrusion in our health care system. Both
federal and state officials have routinely cited UHS for a seemingly
endless number of violations, ranging from Medicaid fraud to patient
neglect and abuse. Investigations have uncovered everything from
riots to
rape to
homicide at UHS
facilities.
During Santorum's tenure on the
UHS board, state documents and court records show, patients at UHS
health care facilities have endured systemic failures that have cost
millions in court settlements. In several instances, the company and
its subsidiaries have been threatened with losing the ability to
take in federally-subsidized patients. At various times, states have
stopped sending children to UHS facilities. And in the last few
years, the King of Prussia, Pa.-based mega-company has been the
subject of two Department of Justice lawsuits accusing the chain of
fraud.
According to
UHS' website, Santorum currently sits on the board's compensation
committee and the nominating/corporate governance committee.
Santorum's committees appear to play no direct role in overseeing
the actual operations of the hospitals. But the board -- like any
corporate board -- is responsible for maintaining oversight and
making sure facilities are safe and do not violate the law.
He was appointed to the board
in April 2007. UHS CEO and chairman of the board, Alan B. Miller,
said in a press release at the time, "Rick Santorum has a long
record of accomplishment and leadership and will provide valuable
advice to the board."
Through his campaign, Santorum
refused to comment about his ties to UHS nor the allegations
concerning the hospital chain. "I would encourage you to contact UHS
about these allegations," replied spokesperson Virginia Davis via
email. "If I have any additional contact from Sen. Santorum I will
let you know."
In response to The
Huffington Post's inquiries, UHS refused to elaborate on Santorum's
role as a board member. "UHS has always made quality and patient
safety its highest priorities at all of our facilities," the company
said in a statement
released to
The Huffington Post. "UHS has been one of the leading providers of
mental healthcare services for over 25 years because of our
commitment to quality and patient-focused programs. All of our
facilities are licensed by their states, nationally accredited
and/or certified and in good-standing. As a company, we strive to
always provide the best possible treatment in a safe environment."
According to the company's SEC
filings, as of Feb. 28, 2011, UHS owned 25 acute care hospitals and
206 behavioral health centers located in 37 states, Washington,
D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The company also owns
or manages seven surgical hospitals and surgery and oncology
centers. The filings state that the company and/or its affiliates
currently face at least seven lawsuits addressing allegations
ranging from patient care to wage disputes among employees.
On Oct. 30, 2009, a
McAllen, Texas, hospital group owned by UHS agreed to pay the U.S.
government $27.5 million to settle allegations of what amounted to
medical payola, or providing kickbacks or "illegal compensation" to
doctors in an effort to pressure them to funnel patients to its
hospitals, according to a DOJ
press release.
The payments were disguised via "shame contracts" including medical
directorships and lease agreements.
Department of Justice
attorneys, along with their counterparts in Virginia, filed suit in
March 2010 against a UHS facility based in Southwest Virginia
charging that operators had committed Medicaid fraud. The facility
billed itself as an inpatient psychiatric facility for youth but did
not provide such services. The DOJ case, along with a whistleblower
lawsuit, also accused the facility of orchestrating a cover-up.
Timothy J. Heaphy, the
United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, stated
in a DOJ
press release:
"We intend to prove that these
defendants billed Medicaid for providing troubled children with
much needed psychiatric medical care when, in fact, they
provided no such service. We will not sit idly by and allow
healthcare providers to take advantage of troubled children in
order to feed their own desire for wealth. The Medicaid system
was designed to help the most vulnerable among us, not to line
the pockets of fraudsters."
In its statement, UHS claimed
that all patients at the Virginia facility were treated
appropriately.
But DOJ's conclusions wouldn't
surprise current and former UHS employees, who said the hospital and
treatment settings have been "depressing" and comparable to prisons
or worse.
Leah Mercer, a former employee
with the Pines, a residential treatment center located in the
Tidewater region of Virginia, described one unit as a "dog pen."
"It's a money making business,"
Mercer said. She worked not only at the Pines but also at an adult
treatment facility in Tennessee. "That's all it is ... Working with
adults and the kids in two different states and two different
facilities, there was no therapy. It was all about money."
Mercer, who used to work as a
prison corrections officer before working with emotionally disturbed
children at the Pines, says she was surprised by how little
experience was needed to work at the facility. "I know they pull a
lot from security people ... You could start out making $10, $11 an
hour and not know jack. You didn't have to know anything. In fact, I
had a 19-year-old stripper and this was her part-time job -- she was
part-time."
HuffPost readers: If
you've ever worked for UHS or have been a resident or patient at a
UHS facility, we want to hear from you. Tell us your stories by
emailing jason.cherkis@huffingtonpost.com. Please include your phone
number if you're willing to do an interview.
Santorum joined the UHS board
in April 2007. Here is just a sampling of incidents that have taken
place at the company's facilities during his tenure:
- In June 2007,
Omega Leach,
17, died after being strangled by staff at UHS' Chad Youth
Enhancement Center, located outside of Nashville, Tenn. Leach's
death was ruled a homicide. Two years earlier, a 14-year-old Long
Island girl died at the same facility.
According to the autopsy
on Leach,
news accounts at the time
stated that the youth had "multiple superficial blunt force
injuries" to his body as well as injuries to his neck muscles. He
also sustained scrapes and bruises to both shoulders as well as a
bruise under his left eye.
Omega Leach's family
subsequently sued UHS.
In 2010, UHS settled with the family for $10.5 million.
- In April 2010, North
Carolina government records reported that the Old Vineyard Youth
Services facility had been the scene of a sexual assault between two
male teenagers. One resident reportedly tried to force his roommate
"to have oral sex and intercourse holding roommate by neck to force
him to have oral sex and dragged him on the floor trying to have
intercourse." The residents, 17 and 15 years old, were found to not
be adequately monitored by staff. The Winston-Salem Journal
had previously reported
that the facility had been sited for a "long list of deficiencies
that included nurses' training and responses to incidents" in
October 2009.
- In September 2010, the
Chicago Tribune
reported that
in the previous two years, two rape allegations were levied at UHS'
Hartgrove Hospital. "Police were called to Hartgrove Hospital on the
city's West End when a juvenile patient alleged he was punched and
forced to perform oral sex on a male patient, then raped when he
tried to resist," the reporters noted. "The alleged victim was
hospitalized with abrasions consistent with rape, a police report
said."
The Tribune went on to detail
another incident involving a 13-year-old male who performed oral sex
on a 15-year-old in a crowded day room "with roughly 14 other youths
and only one hospital employee to monitor them."
- In April 2011, Two
Rivers Psychiatric Hospital in Kansas City
was barred from taking Medicaid
after feds discovered that hospital workers had failed to monitor a
suicidal woman who killed herself at the facility. Authorities also
ruled that workers had erred in their attempts to revive the woman.
The hospital has appealed the decision and challenged the decision
in court.
The Kansas City Star
also reported that the facility has a history of neglect issues:
"Federal records show that Two
Rivers has had a history of patient-care problems dating to
2008, when an Army soldier committed suicide at the hospital by
using bed linens to hang himself in a closet.
That year, inspectors also
found that a hospital employee had poured water over a patient’s
head and that a nurse had put a towel over an elderly patient’s
mouth to stop the patient from screaming.
Inspectors who examined
medical records in 2009 found little evidence that Two Rivers
patients were receiving psychotherapy or medical treatment other
than medications. In September 2010, the hospital refused the
emergency admission of a teenager who had threatened to kill
someone, records show."
- On April 18, 2011,
North Carolina authorities
announced that it would be removing all of its
wards from The Pines residential
treatment center after a youth made an allegation of sex abuse at
the facility. The incident triggered a larger investigation. North
Carolina officials found multiple instances of ill-trained staff,
inadequate staff-to-patient ratios, and "multiple safety risk
incidents," according to an
email from
N.C. authorities to Virginia officials concerning The Pines.
Virginia has since slapped The
Pines with a provisional license and halted sending state wards to
the facility. The D.C. government has also begun to pull its youths
from The Pines.
Susan Lawrence, a parent
and child advocate in Virginia, runs a
Facebook page
dedicated to cataloging abuses within the mental health system with
a particular focus on UHS facilities. In an interview, she called on
Santorum to investigate the company. "He talks about being brave,
about standing up to the establishment," she said. "That's a joke.
He should be asking hard questions of UHS ... If he wants to lead
the country, he should be able to lead a business."
"He's all concerned about
unborn children," Lawrence continued. "He's a lot less concerned
about children that are already here."
Santorum's relationship
with UHS
extends beyond the boardroom.
While he served on the board, the company donated $5,000 to his
political action committee, America's Foundation, in 2010. UHS CEO
Miller, as well as the company's employees, have donated thousands
more in previous campaigns.
This is the first in a
series of stories on UHS facilities during Santorum's tenure on the
hospital chain's board. Part II follows.
WASHINGTON -- T. entered The Pines
Residential Treatment Center, located in Portsmouth, Va., needing help
for his emotional disorders, gender identity issues and violent
outbursts. This month, after a year and a half there, the eighth-grader
left the facility with herpes.
Heather Pinon, T.'s sister,
believes he got the sexually transmitted disease after having sex with
other boys in his restricted unit. There might be at least one other
culprit. Both Pinon and the boy's adoptive mother, Lorraine Honeycutt,
believe that he also carried on a sexual relationship with a Pines
employee. Pinon says she knows of letters that hint at such an affair.
"The information was given to the
therapist," Pinon said. "The therapist destroyed the letters. When we
asked my brother about it, he confirmed that he did write the letters
and that he had a special relationship with that staff member."
The staff member, they said, was
assigned to T. to prevent him from having sex with other kids.
The disease was just another
complication in a life that had many; T. called this latest his "herpes
thing." But it still devastated the boy who wasn't yet old enough for
algebra. "I felt extra scared," he told The Huffington Post in a recent
interview. "I wanted to cry and that's all I did for two days is cry
when they did tell me that."
For The Pines, T.'s diagnosis was
just part of another day. The Pines is the biggest for-profit
residential treatment center in Virginia. During the past three years,
it has also kicked up more abuse and neglect allegations than any other
facility there, state records show, earning an unprecedented level of
scrutiny from investigators with the state's licensing office and Office
of Human Rights. The facility, which covers three campuses that span the
tidewater region -- Brighton, Kempsville and Crawford -- has routinely
faced state orders to correct itself, according to licensing records.
The Pines may be exceptional in
terms of racking up state violations, but it also boasts a singular
distinction: The board of the center's parent company, Universal Health
Services, which bought The Pines in November, included former Sen. Rick
Santorum (R-Pa.).
Santorum, who recently launched a
presidential bid, resigned from the UHS board on June 15, a week after
the publication of a Huffington Post
report on UHS facilities during his tenure.
The former senator had served on the UHS board since 2007, a period
which saw the company twice sued by the Department of Justice.
Santorum's presidential campaign
did not return calls seeking comment.
The health care chain has faced
accusations of Medicaid fraud and employee grievances over pay. At one
facility,
a teen died while being restrained by staff.
The death was ruled a homicide.
* * * * *
The Pines had long teetered on the
brink of a shutdown, but the UHS takeover of the facility appears to
have erased what standards had been put in place. A short time after the
facility fell under UHS control in mid-November, it earned serious
punitive sanctions. Two months into the company's tenure, a sense of
lawlessness pervaded the facility, according to a review of documents
obtained by The Huffington Post through a public records request.
North Carolina, which had sent more
than 100 kids to The Pines, stopped doing so this past spring, when that
state's Division of Medical Assistance, along with other agencies, found
widespread and systemic breakdowns in how the facility treated its
children, according to the documents. In mid-April, the state concluded
that it had to pull all 140 or so of its children -- including T. -- out
of The Pines, according to email records.
Virginia has since barred new
admissions and slapped the facility with a provisional license.
According to the documents, Virginia inspectors found that Pines staff
had been caught watching a pornographic DVD with residents, that one
resident admitted to selling drugs and buying drugs from a Pines
employee and that records concerning the care of one resident had been
"fabricated."
In a statement released to The
Huffington Post, Universal Health Services defended its practices: "The
Pines management team is continually reviewing clinical programming,
procedures and staff training to enhance the provision of safe,
effective, and patient-centered treatment," the company statement reads.
"The Pines is actively addressing any and all concerns relating to the
treatment of our residents."
UHS would neither confirm nor deny
whether T. contracted herpes at The Pines. The company stated that it
had investigated whether an employee had carried on an affair with a
teen and ruled evidence of such a relationship "unsubstantiated." T.,
for his part, denied the tryst in his interview with The Huffington
Post, admitting only to having feelings for a staff member. Pinon, his
sister, says the family was never interviewed nor notified as part of
any UHS inquiry into the matter. "The only evidence of the affair was
destroyed by their staff member," she said, referring to T.'s writings
to the staffer.
Barely a teen, T. had already known
how it felt to fill his stomach with pills and to receive a jolt from a
police officer's Taser. Other things left deeper scars. T. had grown up
in Hamlet, N.C., abandoned from birth by his biological mother. He'd had
to hear stories about her and her new family living in faraway Oregon;
she didn't visit. He never knew his father.
T. was adopted by Honeycutt, his
own mother's former foster mother, who provided a stable and loving
home. But he fell into violent rages, and when they became too much to
handle, the child-welfare system sometimes had to find alternatives.
By the time T. was 8 years old,
group home staff and hospital nurses had become something of an extended
family. In at least one instance, however, they proved anything but
safe. At one group home, Pinon said, her brother claimed he'd been raped
by a staffer.
Not long after, T. wore out his
welcome at every group home and therapeutic foster care placement in the
state. He stabbed one foster parent with a fork. He ended up on
probation after pelting a foster dad's truck with rocks. He could be
equally destructive with his own body, using his thighs and arms as a
canvas for his not-so-secret cuttings.
Officials had to look beyond the
state's borders to Virginia to find T.'s next placement, a next chance
at normal. T. had gone to The Pines fresh from a psych ward. It turned
out to be a huge step backward.
On June 3 of this year, T. was
forced out of The Pines, this time not as a punishment but out of
concern for his own well being. Honeycutt and Pinon were there to pick
him up. There was no teary sendoff. A Pines worker greeted them at the
entrance with a taunt, according to Pinon. "We are so ready to get rid
of him," she recalled the worker saying.
Another employee shepherded T. to
their car. Both Pinon and Honeycutt recalled that she had one final
message for T. before leaving his side. If he gave his family a hard
time, the employee told him, "I'll beat your ass like a man."
A Pines staffer had already done
that, according to T.
T. had two black eyes. One came
from a staff member who T. said punched him after he complained about
the staffer flirting with a coworker.
One bruise was still a deep black,
while the other had started to fade. But both could still be seen
through T.'s foundation and rouge, and his pink-and-purple eye shadow.
While T. was at The Pines,
Honeycutt, 63, tried to follow up on her adopted son's treatment as best
she could. She kept in regular contact with T. and participated in
weekly therapy sessions by phone. When she needed gas money to make the
drive up to see him, she said she resorted to hosting yard sales where
she sold off her clothes and appliances. The real valuables she carted
off to Ned's Pawn Shop.
"My mom sold collectibles,
porcelain dolls," Pinon, 28, recalled. "All of her gold, she pretty much
pawned it or melted it down so she could afford gas or clothes for him.
I took her to the pawnshop one time -- she pulled out family heirlooms.
The people in the pawnshop were telling her not to do it. She sold it
anyway."
When T. complained that he went to
bed cold, Honeycutt bought him a blanket. When he needed clothes, she
mailed him pants and shirts from his favorite store, Hot Topic.
Honeycutt alleged that Pines
officials had promised to assist her with travel expenses but never came
through. "They lied," she said. "They were supposed to meet me part of
the way, and they didn't."
Initially, documents show, The
Pines saw T. as a serious case. The reasons for his admission to the
facility were manifold. Pines officials wrote in an assessment that T.
"represents an actual and potential danger to himself and others as
evidenced by his frequent episodes of self injurious behavior including
cutting himself in the chest, arms, legs, frequent episodes of physical
aggression, threatening to kill his mother including biting his adoptive
father, hitting the walls, running away from home ... [and] bringing
deadly weapons to school."
The facility's management promised
they could improve T.'s behavior and even get him well enough that he
wouldn't need to spend more time in another residential setting. But
under the center's care, Honeycutt and Pinon said, they only saw T.
continue his destructive ways. The facility, they said, failed to
accurately report problems to them.
Honeycutt and Pinon said they were
often left to navigate written reports that were either missing critical
information or contained contradictory assessments. In one example, the
reports failed to mention that Pines staff had left T. unsupervised long
enough for him to pierce his own nose with the broken tooth of a comb.
Nor had they witnessed him stabbing a hole through his tongue.
While the family heard from T.
about how the staff had physically restrained him on multiple occasions,
Pines officials failed to report most of the incidents. In one month,
Pinon recalled, T. had been physically restrained more than 10 times.
She also said her brother reported being chemically restrained. During
one restraint, his family said, a Pines employee broke T.'s glasses. The
facility never replaced them. T. later said to Pinon: "I've had knees in
my back. Knees on my head."
"None of the paperwork documented
the amount of restraints that he had," Pinon said.
Physical restraints were the
staff's go-to method of control, according to T. Even when he was held
down, T. said, staff took cheap shots -- jabbing him, pinching him and
punching him. In one incident, he said, he was slammed against a wall.
"They bend your arm in all
different directions and stuff," he said, adding that the staff called
him "faggot."
"One time, I was in a restraint and
a man punched me in my nose and my nose started bleeding," he said.
The center's low-I.Q. inhabitants
were particularly targeted, he said: "They would always hit in the
special residents."
Although The Pines was required to
provide schooling for T., confidential records show that he often didn't
make it to class. T. said that he was often held back over minor
infractions like talking back to staff. Sometimes, he'd beg to go to
class and was still denied.
According to his last report card,
T. failed five out of seven subjects. His Pines teachers cited his
absences as the main reason for his dismal grades. And yet, in its last
report to the family, Pines officials wrote that T. was "doing well in
school. He has grades from A's to C's."
Honeycutt seized on what she
considers the most painful document of all. It's another Pines
assessment of T., this one dated to this past February. A Pines
clinician wrote: "It is clear the family will not support T." because of
his sexual orientation.
The Pines was charging Honeycutt's
health insurance and Medicaid a combined nearly $20,000 per month for
taking care of T.
* * * * *
Honeycutt's account of her
experiences with The Pines rang true for Kimberly Imanian, who told The
Huffington Post that the facility has also consistently whitewashed
reports of her adoptive 13-year-old daughter's behavior. Her daughter,
she said, has been involved in six violent episodes, but only three were
actually reported. In one incident, the facility did not report that her
daughter had threatened to kill her roommate. The roommate remained in
place for months.
Imanian said her daughter has not
shown improvements since being admitted. "She does not want to be at a
place anymore," Imanian said. "She wants to get well. More often, she
asks, ‘Why am I not getting any better?'"
A UHS vice president, Car Evans,
wrote in an email that The Pines complied with all state reporting
policies. "The Pines reports all requisite incident or restraint matters
to the appropriate agencies or individuals in compliance with all legal
and regulatory requirements of the various states or municipalities with
whom we work with," he wrote.
But misinformation and an
unsettling lack of care appeared to be the norm at a facility even
staffers described as overwhelmingly depressing and disorganized.
Documents show a campus low on management oversight and staffed with
unqualified employees. "When I first got there, I was like, 'Oh my God,
I would never want to live here,'" recalled one current Pines worker,
who requested anonymity to speak openly about the facility's conditions.
Leah Mercer, a former Pines
frontline worker, told The Huffington Post she often did not know the
case histories of the children in her care. Mid-level managers simply
failed to give her each child's diagnosis, she said, and her supervisor
spent most of his time concentrating on his fledgling career as an R&B
singer.
Rather than providing
rehabilitation or care, Mercer said, the facility deepens old wounds and
even creates some new ones among the young residents. She said one boy
with no history of sexual abuse has started acting out sexually. Another
boy had been left alone long enough to dig into his arm with a plastic
spoon. AWOLs were commonplace. She recalled one incident in which an
employee threatened to kill a child; another called a kid a "piece of
shit."
"There are staff that continue to
be there that should not be in this line of work," Mercer said. "There
are staff that I feel are too rough, that don't have an understanding of
child disabilities. They don't understand that each one has
individualized treatment. You can't treat all children the same,
especially ones with disabilities."
Another current employee said she
believed that not all of her colleagues thoroughly reported deserving
incidents. "I don't feel that everybody that works at all three campuses
are there ethically to provide therapeutic care," the employee said.
"Some people are there just to get the paycheck. ... I don't feel some
of the people are educated to deal wit
Mercer said she quit over what she
described as unsafe staff-to-patient ratios, meaning that the kids often
didn't receive basic necessities. She said she knew of a child who
waited eight months to get a pair of glasses, another who endured a
toothache for five months before seeing a dentist and still another kid
who went without underwear.
"I've seen staff buy soap, socks,
underwear, shoes," Mercer said. "I mean, the kids don't have any soap."
In one case, Mercer recalled, she
had to move some residents to a new unit, but found that it had not been
cleaned. There were urine-stained floors, semen stains on a desk and a
pair of mattresses, a bloody mixture left on a bulletin board. She
described a different unit as a "dog pen."
Therapy could be just as haphazard.
A current employee agreed with Mercer's assessment that the
staff-to-patient ratios weren't safe. The other current employee
described the sessions as mere drive-bys, lasting 20 minutes at a time.
"Do you think you are ever going to
get anything accomplished in 20 minutes?" the employee asked.
"It's a moneymaking business,"
Mercer said. "That's all it is."
The current employee said there are
staff issues. "They're lazy. They come in late. The communication is
bad," she said. "There's a lot of money but I don't see it. It's going
to the wrong people."
Those at the top were well paid.
Santorum received roughly half a million dollars in cash and stock
options for his services on the UHS board. In 2007, he received $50,412;
in 2008, he received $77,958; in 2009, he picked up $45,000. In 2010,
Santorum took home a substantial windfall: $168,069. And on Jan. 19,
2011, he received stock options valued at $174,126, Securities and
Exchange Commission records show. The company and its CEO have also
contributed thousands to Santorum's political action committee and his
campaigns over the years.
When Santorum resigned from the UHS
board in early June, company officials had kind words for the former
senator.
"We appreciate Senator
Santorum's service on our Board of Directors and he has been a valuable
asset to our Company," Alan B. Miller, the UHS chairman and CEO, said in
a
press release.
"We certainly understood that should Senator Santorum formally announce
and initiate his campaign for President, it would result in his
departure from the Board given the substantial focus and effort required
to achieve that goal. However, Rick's guidance and stewardship will be
sorely missed."
* * * * *
In February, a Pines staff member
was caught punching a child in the face and torso after being bitten
during a restraint, records show. The incident was not immediately
reported to authorities. The staffer admitted, according to a licensing
investigation, that she had no experience in working with residential
treatment center kids. That same month, licensing found that "staff
currently providing therapy is not licensed or licensed eligible. ...
THIS IS A REPEAT VIOLATION."
The following month, two boys at
the Brighton campus, ages 8 and 9, confessed to engaging in oral and
anal sex, Virginia records show.
At the same campus a short time
later, according to records and interviews with Mercer, who saw a video
recording of the incident, and another staffer, a Pines worker grabbed a
9-year-old boy and dragged him across a table during a therapeutic group
session. Another worker then took the boy into a room and was captured
on video repeatedly bashing his head against a wall.
The staff member was suspended for
a week before being fired. She wrote about how she was spending her time
away from the facility on her Facebook wall:
"Backyard tanning was a success,
including nips ;P Ugh! Dread having not having A\C in a hawt ass house!
Time to take a cold shower."
By then, North Carolina had
concluded it could not continue to send children to The Pines. The state
had launched an investigation after parents came forward with an
allegation that their son had been sexually abused at the facility.
According to a subsequent report by
Virginia authorities, The Pines concluded that on at least one occasion
the abuse had indeed taken place. But the facility had failed to
immediately notify the parents. The Pines had described one incident of
inappropriate touching as "horse playing."
In mid-April, North Carolina paid
the facility an unannounced visit. Patrick Piggott, chief of the state's
Behavioral Health Review Section, reported his findings to Virginia
licensing officials. In an April 28 email obtained by The Huffington
Post, he said the state was making a formal complaint against The Pines
-- that the facility had failed in nearly all aspects of its
responsibilities. Piggott's group found:
The Pines had
inadequate staffing for the entire month of January and two weeks in
February for all campuses.
Employees lacked training on
utilizing non-restrictive interventions.
No evidence of supervision in
any personnel records.
No evidence of sex offender
training.
No evidence of training on how
to write a treatment plan.
No evidence of supervision
plans for unlicensed staff.
Some therapists working in the
facility had masters degrees but were not licensed.
Staff did not watch children
closely -- sexual activity among children had taken place.
Allegations of
abuse or sexual misconduct did not result in clear consequences or
changes in treatment.
Piggott went on to note that basic
records of children often contained missing documents and contradictory
assessments. He also reported that "the child prompting this
investigation was at risk and there is evidence of harm yet the facility
did not appear to take adequate steps to [protect] him.
North Carolina would not wait for
The Pines to correct itself. It had already announced that it would be
pulling its children from the facility.
Meghan McGuire, communications
director for Virginia's Department of Behavioral Health and
Developmental Services, which oversees inspections of facilities like
The Pines, released a statement after North Carolina went public with
its decision: "Over the past several years, we have encountered
significant problems at the Pines' facilities that have required
tremendous monitoring time by DBHDS licensing and human rights staff.
Since concerns continue to arise despite staff's continual efforts, it
may again be time to reevaluate the status of their license."
Ten days after North Carolina
completed its investigation, Virginia authorities inspected The Pines'
Brighton campus.
Not only did Virgina's inspectors
corroborate North Carolina's findings, they uncovered 17 pages worth of
violations. They found scores of untrained staff as well as staff
working without proper documentation or licenses or criminal background
checks. The facility even failed to prove that its van operator had a
valid driver's license.
Supervision of residents was also a
problem. Inspectors found rampant use of cellphones in the units. One
resident, who had been placed on special precautions requiring 15-minute
checks, was not properly watched. "A review of the videotape revealed
that Staff did not perform the 15 minutes room check," the inspector
noted in its report. "The documentation of the 15 minute rounds were
fabricated."
In some cases, Pines workers may
have crossed the line into criminal behavior, as in the case of another
resident who reported being sexually assaulted while also on "close
watch."
The Virginia inspection turned up a
January incident in which staff showed the young residents pictures of
naked women and a February incident in which residents and staff watched
a pornographic DVD together.
That same month, investigators
found out that a resident admitted using and selling drugs within the
past six months. A source stated that the resident "also admitted to
buying drugs from a staff who no longer works at the Pines. Resident
admitted that he did the drugs in November and December."
On the day the inspection was made,
Virginia announced that it would be suspending admissions to The Pines
and issued the facility a provisional license. According to McGuire, the
provisional license means The Pines had failed in caring for its
children.
"A provisional license means that a
provider has demonstrated an inability to maintain compliance with the
regulations, has violations of licensing regulations that pose a threat
to the health and safety of residents served, or has two or more
systemic deficiencies," McGuire wrote via email. "It is a sign to
referral sources and payers that a provider is having serious problems."
* * * * *
Universal Health Services, in its
emailed statement to The Huffington Post, expressed optimism that its
oversight had corrected any problems at The Pines:
"We are pleased to report that as a
result of our efforts, in May of this year, two external independent
surveys by regulatory agencies were conducted at The Pines and found the
program in compliance," the statement reads. "Further, North Carolina
has expressed a willingness to work with our facilities and The Pines is
currently treating children from North Carolina."
UHS' statement appears to have been
overly optimistic. McGuire says Virginia's position on The Pines is
unchanged -- there continues to be a ban on new admissions. She added
that she did not know of any surveys by regulatory agencies and that her
office had two new, open investigations against the facility.
Brad Deen, a spokesman with the
North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, said his agency
"has informed the Pines that without rapid corrective action to correct
the seemingly systemic safety and quality-of-care issues, the Pines will
be terminated as a N.C. Medicaid provider." He added that his agency has
relocated nearly all of its children and is not approving any new
admissions to the facility. Plans are moving forward to have all of the
state's kids removed from The Pines.
Whatever happens with The Pines,
Heather Pinon said she thinks the damage the facility has done to her
brother might be permanent. His depressive bent seems even more
ingrained, she said.
"Now he talks about dying before
he's 20," Pinon said. "He says he knows he's going to be dead by the
time he's 20. He said, 'Nobody loves me. Nobody cares whether I live or
die.' I don't know where that comes from. The person that came out of
The Pines is a very lost, very confused boy."
"I'm not sure it's reversible," she
added. "It's just -- they screwed him up."
After picking T. up from The Pines
in early June, the family members arrived home in Hamlet after 8 p.m.
Pinon and her brother stayed up late talking. The next morning, Pinon
fixed T. a huge breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon and biscuits. They
shopped for clothes. They stopped at a Krispy Kreme. He had only one
blowup. The next day, he started to beg for more time at home.
"It was everything," T. said.
But after 48 hours, North Carolina
authorities had T. transferred to a residential treatment facility in
Orlando, Fla.
"I really liked being home and I
miss it," T. said in a recent phone interview. "I'm actually on suicide
precautions because I've been missing my house. I cut myself the other
day on my arm." T. said he had busted a hole in a wall, ripped out a
screw and used it on himself.
"People were picking on me," he
said by way of explanation. "It's better than The Pines, this place.
They don't pick on me that much."
In the final memo from T.'s last
month at The Pines, officials had concluded that he had "met maximum
benefit at this facility."
[HuffPost
readers: If you've ever worked for UHS or have been a resident or
patient at a UHS facility, we want to hear from you. Tell us your
stories by emailing
jason.cherkis@huffingtonpost.com.
Please include your phone number if you're willing to do an interview.]
Poor little old Rick Santorum just can't seem to get a break. What
has the world come to when an anti-gay zealot like Ricky has to suffer
such harsh attacks as he received from CNN's Don Lemon asking him if he
actually has any gay friends? Or maybe not, but some right wing blogs
that I refuse to link to thought that Don Lemon was terribly unfair to
Santorum for having the nerve to make him answer questions about his
bigotry towards gay people.
Keep in mind here that Don Lemon has
come out as not only being gay, but being a
victim of pedophilia as well, so I doubt that Lemon would be anyone
that would be expected to have a warm spot for Santorum in his heart to
put it mildly. Given that background, I'd say he took it pretty easy on
Santorum for his attacks on the gay community and his willingness to
demonize them for political gain.
Santorum once again proved that he should be considered the part of
the clown show that is the GOP's list of potential candidates running
for president in 2012 with this interview and good for Lemon for
painting him as just another Stephen Colbert satire where he claims he
has black friends as proof he's not a racist.
In the segment above, after citing a new CNN poll which shows that
voters are less concerned about social issues and more concerned about
the economy, CNN's Don Lemon notes that those poll results might be
"very interesting" to a presidential candidate like Rick Santorum, who
he points out "can be very divisive on social issues, like gay rights."
That was putting it mildly and it was good to see someone like Santorum
being put on the defensive for his stance on gay rights for once, even
if it was tepid at best.
I'm no fan of Don Lemon given his typical stenography for all things
right wing on CNN and for a lot of his coverage on that network being
little more than tabloid "journalism", but I was glad to see him put
Santorum on the defensive where he deserves to be during this segment.
Rough transcript below the fold.
LEMON: I was recently on Joy Behar and she said that, she called
you, I think it was a bigot, I’m paraphrasing, bigoted or homophobic
or what have you...
SANTORUM: I have a difference of agreement on a public policy
issue. That doesn’t mean I'm, you know, I hate anybody. I don’t hate
anybody. And I’m called by my faith to love everybody. I do. I mean,
I pray for people whether they’re for me or against me because
that’s what I’m supposed to do.
And just because I disagree with a, you know with what a
definition, a legal definition of a marriage is doesn’t mean I
dislike anybody or hate anybody or am spiteful of anybody or hate
anybody or am spiteful of anybody because I think that’s what best
for society. And we should be able to disagree without calling
people bigots.
LEMON: Yeah.
SANTORUM: I think that’s really sad that you have people on the
other side, because you stand up for something that has been an
institution in this world for 2,000 years, that all of a sudden now,
you’re a hater, you’re a mean person. I’m not. I’ve never been.
LEMON: Do you have any gay friends?
SANTORUM: Yeah. In fact I've had gay people work for me.
LEMON: Yeah. And friends.
SANTORUM: Yes!
LEMON: You know when people say I have black friends.
SANTORUM: I – well, I mean, yes, I have – in fact I was with a
gay friend of mine just two days ago. I mean, so, yeah, I do. And
they respect that I have differences of opinion on that. I talk
about these things in front of them and we have conversations about
it. They differ from me. But they know that I love them because
they're my friends. And they know that I respect and we have respect
for their (inaudible).
LEMON: You know that's the headline -- Rick Santorum has gay
friends.
SANTORUM: It shouldn't be. It was well known that Rick Santorum
had a leading gay Republican working for him for ten years. I don't
know what, I don't know that the, what the shock value is here. I
mean the fact of the matter is when for example, when there was a
man, who was working as the Executive Director of the national
Republican's Senatorial Committee, who was outed by one of the gay
papers, the first person who came to his aid was me.
Because he was doing a great job. So I, I understand the
narritive. It's always easy to sort of hang a narrative; oh, this
guy's for, you know, standing up for traditional marriage, he must
hate gay people.
No. I don't. I just disagree with what the issue of marriage
should be.
Rick Santorum's
last-minute surge in the Iowa caucus brought him
neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney in the first contest of the
2012 race to select a Republican presidential candidate. But
it came too late to attract the harsh scrutiny usually
visited on front-runners.
Only in recent days
have questions emerged about his stand on abortion, his
votes in Congress, and his endorsements of Romney over John
McCain in 2008, and Senator Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in
2004.
If rival candidates
decide to go negative on Santorum - as they have on Newt
Gingrich and Ron Paul -- they have plenty of material with
which to work.
Santorum is beloved
among "values voters" for his stand on abortion, gay
marriage and other social issues. But his record is rich in
polarizing policy positions and questionable associations
that support the charge of "Washington insider."
For example, his
million-dollar-plus 2010 income included payments from a
lobbying firm, an energy company engaged in controversial
"hydrofracking" and a hospital conglomerate that was sued
for allegedly defrauding the federal government.
"The spotlight is
blinding, and if you squint or stumble even slightly, it
gets even more intense," said Dan Schnur, a former
Republican campaign consultant who now heads the Jesse M.
Unruh Institute of Politics at University of Southern
California. "Santorum hasn't faced it yet, but it's about to
hit him in a huge way."
Santorum says he's
ready. "This isn't my first rodeo. I've been in tough
races," Santorum said Monday in Iowa. "I've had the national
media crawling up anywhere they could crawl. ... It's not
going to be fun."
EARMARKS
Texas Governor Rick
Perry fired an opening salvo last weekend, charging that
Santorum, 53, was a big spender in Congress who voted to
raise the debt ceiling and approved such pork-barrel
projects as Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere, a tea pot museum in
North Carolina and an indoor rain forest in Iowa. (http://link.reuters.com/nug85s)
Santorum, a lawyer with
working-class roots, was 32 when he was first elected to
Congress in 1990 from a western Pennsylvania district. He
served two terms in the House of Representatives before
being elected to the Senate. He served two senate terms from
1995-2007, before losing his seat in a landslide.
Santorum declined to
comment for this article, but on other occasions he has
defended his earmarks. "Congress appropriates money,"
Santorum told "Good Morning America" this week. "That is
what Congress is supposed to do."
As a senator, Santorum
went further, playing a key role in an effort by Republicans
in Congress to dictate the hiring practices, and hence the
political loyalties, of Washington's deep-pocketed lobbying
firms and trade associations, which had previously been
bipartisan.
Dubbed "the K Street
Project" for the Washington street that houses most of these
groups, the initiative was launched in 1989 by lobbyist
Grover Norquist, whose sole aim, he said, was to encourage
lobbying firms to "hire people who agree with your
worldview, not hire for access."
But the rubric "K
Street Project" came to encompass the entire climate of cozy
cooperation between Republicans and lobbyists.
When Republicans won
control of the House in 1994, House Majority Leader Tom
Delay and others organized regular meetings with lobbyists
that reviewed K Street job openings with an eye toward
filling them with party loyalists, who would in turn steer
support and donations to the members.
By 2001, Sen. Santorum
was also holding one-hour breakfast meetings with lobbyists
on alternating Tuesday mornings at 8:30 a.m.
In 2004 he denied being
involved with Norquist's effort to staff K Street. But
Santorum convened Senate Republicans to discuss the
appointment of Democrat Dan Glickman as head the Motion
Picture Association, according to Roll Call, a newspaper
covering Capitol Hill.
"Yeah, we had a
meeting, and yeah, we talked about making sure that we have
fair representation on K Street. I admit that I pay
attention to who is hiring, and I think it's important for
leadership to pay attention," he told the paper at the time.
In 2006, as the
influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff
to jail unfolded, Santorum said he was ending the breakfasts
in his conference room. However, his staff confirmed to
Washington newspapers that they resumed almost immediately,
on the same day and at the same time, at a location off the
Capitol grounds.
Abramoff never attended
Santorum's breakfasts. "I was focused on the House," he told
Reuters. Yet the mushrooming scandal about Abramoff's
activities cast a harsh light on all aspects of the lobbyist
huddles on Capitol Hill.
Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal
government watchdog group, named Santorum among three "most
corrupt" Senators in 2005 and 2006, accusing him of "using
his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit
those who have made contributions to his campaign committee
and political action committee." (Link to 2006 report:
http://link.reuters.com/wug85s)
LIFE AFTER CONGRESS
The blowback from the K
Street Project contributed to Sen. Santorum's crushing
18-percentage-point defeat in his 2006 reelection bid. His
image as a conservative firebrand who made polarizing
comments about abortion, gays and single mothers played a
role as well, as did Santorum's full-throated support of the
war in Iraq.
A few weeks after he
left Congress, although his law license had expired,
Santorum landed a job in the Washington office of
Pittsburgh-based law firm Eckert Seamans. Lawyers at the
firm had given Santorum 45 political contributions totaling
$24,400 while he was in Congress, according to data compiled
by the Center for Responsive Politics.
As senator, Santorum
"was a friend of the firm," said Timothy Ryan, Eckert
Seamans' chief executive officer. Santorum helped make
introductions and did other "relationship work," including
providing Eckert Seamans' clients with business and strategy
counseling, Ryan said.
Since then, thanks to
his political contacts, Santorum has cobbled together a
comfortable living as a political pundit, policy advocate
and corporate consultant. His 2010 financial disclosure form
shows that the self-described "grandson of a coal miner"
earned at least $900,000 that year.
* Fox News paid him
$239,153 to appear as an occasional contributor;
* Radio Salem paid him
$83,999 to serve as a guest host on "Bill Bennett's Morning
in America" radio show;
* The Philadelphia
Inquirer paid him $23,000 as a freelance columnist.
* The Ethics and Public
Policy Center, a conservative advocacy group, paid him
$217,385 as a senior fellow.
Santorum also collected
a total of $332,500 in consulting fees from three
corporations:
* $65,000 from the
American Continental Group lobbying firm
* $142,500 from Consol
Energy
* $125,000 from the
Clapham Group, a Virginia-based corporation started by
longtime Santorum staffer Mark Rodgers. On its website,
Clapham says its mission is to "influence culture upstream
of the political arena."
"Rick's been around
Washington for quite some time," American Continental
president David Urban said. "When he looks at the tea leaves
he may see things differently than others. We'd chat about
which way different pieces of legislation might be heading.
He is a very bright guy so I paid for his insight, and he's
a friend, someone whose advice I could trust."
American Continental
represents Microsoft, the American Gaming Association,
Monsanto and the Association of Mortgage Investors among
others.
A spokesperson for
Consol Energy said that they "engaged Senator Santorum to
provide strategic counsel on a variety of public
policy-related issues."
Excerpt
from an Associated Press article on huffingtonpost.com on
5/14/2011
With the click of a
forwarded email, Rick Santorum let Sen. John Ensign know
that the cuckolded husband of Ensign's mistress was going
public.
Santorum, formerly a
Pennsylvania senator and now a presidential candidate
touting family values, is only one of many political and
spiritual figures drawn into the tale of Ensign's sexual
misconduct, political dealings and personal ruin that led to
the senator's resignation May 3 and a scathing Senate ethics
committee report this week.
Many of those named in
the report are only incidentally connected to the case.
Others tried to help hush up Ensign's unpleasantness with
cash, advice or both. The list is a long one. It includes
Ensign's parents; Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Tim Coe,
Ensign's longtime spiritual advisor connected to the
National Prayer Breakfast and the C Street townhouse where
Ensign and other lawmakers lived while in Washington.
Ensign made his
resignation effective on the day before he was to have
testified under oath about his affair with the wife of a top
aide, the aide's subsequent lobbying of Ensign's office and
a $96,000 payment from Ensign's parents to the couple
involved, Doug and Cindy Hampton.
The ethics committee
said Thursday that Ensign broke federal laws, made false
statements to the Federal Election Commission and obstructed
the Senate panel's investigation. The committee sent the
results of its investigation to the Justice Department for
possible prosecution, saying it had assembled enough
evidence to warrant expelling Ensign from the Senate if he
hadn't resigned.
The report's brief
reference to Santorum alleges no wrongdoing on the part of
the Republican presidential aspirant.
The committee wrote
that Doug Hampton, Ensign's former chief of staff and
husband of his mistress, Cynthia, wrote a letter to Fox News
anchor Megyn Kelly on June 11, 2009, in which he disclosed
the affair and sought a meeting. On June 15, Hampton emailed
the letter to Santorum and asked for help. Santorum
forwarded Hampton's email to Ensign at a Gmail address that
evening at about 10:20 p.m.
"Sen. Ensign
immediately called an emergency staff meeting in the late
evening ... that lasted until approximately 3:00 a.m. on
June 16," the ethics committee reported. "During that staff
meeting, Sen. Ensign disclosed the affair, and also
disclosed that he had made a severance payment to the
Hamptons."
In an interview Friday,
Santorum adviser John Brabender said he had not spoken with
Santorum since the committee report came out but had no
reason to dispute it. Brabender said he did not know why
Santorum forwarded Hampton's email to Ensign.
Santorum, then a
contributor to Fox News, did not know Hampton at the time,
but did know Ensign from the Senate, so "I can't imagine
that he wouldn't forward" the email, Brabender said.
Santorum did not
immediately return the AP's requests for comment.
Coburn tried to get
Ensign to call off the affair with Cynthia Hampton, then
later tried to broker a settlement between Ensign and the
couple, according to the report.
Ensign eventually got
Hampton a lobbying job with November Inc., a Nevada-based
consulting company, after misleading the founders of the
company on the reasons Hampton was leaving Ensign's office,
the ethics committee said. Ensign's wife, Darlene, told the
consulting company's co-founder, Mike Slanker, about the
affair, according to the committee's report. Slanker then
confronted Ensign, who offered a "very weak" apology while
eating Wheat Thins, the report said. Slanker ended up hiring
Hampton nonetheless.
Coe, Ensign's spiritual
advisor, tried to get Ensign to call off the affair,
including one incident in which he phoned Ensign from
outside a hotel where the senator and his mistress were
ensconced.
"I know exactly where
you are. I know exactly what you are doing," Coe told
Ensign, according to the report. "Put your pants on and go
home."
At one point, Coe is
reported to have expressed incredulity when Ensign said he
had gotten Hampton a job as a lobbyist with November Inc.
"Well, that's insane,"
Coe says.
In August 2008, three
months after he resigned from Ensign's staff, Doug Hampton
accepted a job as a lobbyist at Allegiant Airlines and began
trying to develop relationships between Allegiant and
federal officials.
The following January
and in violation of a law that forbids former Senate
employees from lobbying current ones for a year, Hampton
pressed Ensign's chief of staff, John Lopez, to set up a
meeting between Allegiant and federal officials, including
newly installed Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood, the
committee said. Lopez, still unaware of the affair, agreed.
Ensign called LaHood on January 29 to request that he meet
with Allegiant officials; LaHood agreed and the meeting took
place on March 11.
The day after the
LaHood meeting, Hampton and the Allegiant officials attended
a welcome breakfast hosted by Ensign and Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid, who also represents Nevada, in one of the
Capitol's most elaborate parlors.
Lopez and Hampton
corresponded numerous times on official business between
February and May 2009 on legislation important to Allegiant.
The issues included the Family and Medical Leave Act, travel
restrictions to Cuba and carbon monoxide regulations, the
report said.
"Sitting here today,
it's painfully clear to me ... that we were being influenced
to make a favorable outcome for Allegiant," Lopez, who was
granted immunity, told the committee.
More Washington figures
became entangled. The report details one incident in which
"Ensign used his office and staff to intimidate and cajole
constituents into hiring Mr. Hampton." When a Las Vegas
developer declined to hire Hampton for government affairs
work on the advice of Ensign supporter Sig Rogich, Ensign
was furious. He told Lopez to phone Rogich "'and jack him up
to high heaven and tell him that he is cut off from the
office and never to contact (Senator Ensign) ever again,'"
the report said.
"When the senator asked
me to do that, I really felt like this is wrong," Lopez told
the committee. "I remember really feeling like that was
abusing the office, you know, cutting someone off from
official action because he didn't hire (Hampton)."
In his farewell speech
on May 3, Ensign reflected on the value of hiring the right
staff and offered his colleagues – none of whom showed up to
hear him – some advice.
Senators should
surround themselves with people who will be honest with
them, Ensign said, "and then make them promise not to hold
back, no matter how you may try to prevent them from telling
you the truth."
He also referenced the
wide range of people drawn into his personal drama.
"I know that many of
you were put in difficult situations because of me, and for
that I sincerely apologize," he said.
"Rick Santorum is one of the
great pulsars of our times: a collapsed gravity well of unblinking
stare. People innocently walking down the street, are drawn
into his orbit, helplessly drawn in by how utterly dense he is.
They cannot escape the completely impenetrable mass of
evil darkness
surrounding his mind and become totally crushed & moronized by him."
By a Friend of
Religious Freedom
Rick Santorum would very much like
to be president. For the past few years, he
has been diligently appearing at the sorts of
conservative events—the Values Voters Summit, the
Conservative Political Action Conference—where
aspiring Republican candidates are expected to show
up. But before he starts printing "Santorum 2012"
bumper stickers, there's one issue the former GOP
senator and his strategists need to address. You
see, Santorum has what you might call a Google
problem. For voters who decide to look him up
online, one of the top three search results is
usually the site
SpreadingSantorum.com, which explains that
Santorum's last name is a sexual neologism for "the
frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is
sometimes the byproduct of anal sex."
Santorum's problem got its
start back in 2003, when the then-senator from
Pennsylvania
compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia,
saying the "definition of marriage" has never
included "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the
case may be." The ensuing controversy prompted
syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to
start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for
slang terms to "memorialize the scandal." The winner
came up with the "frothy mixture" idea, Savage
launched a website, and a meme was born. Even though
mainstream news outlets would never link to it,
Savage's site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in
part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on
the site or linked to it from their blogs.
Eventually it
eclipsed Santorum's own campaign site in search
results; some observers even suggested it may have
contributed to Santorum's crushing 18-point defeat
in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey.
Savage says his site hasn't been
updated for years, yet it remains entrenched in the
Google rankings. Not even Santorum's ascent as a Fox
News contributor or his early campaign swings
through the key primary states of Iowa and New
Hampshire have managed to bury it. With Google
results like this, what's an aspiring presidential
candidate to do?
I
wanted to ask Santorum whether he had a strategy for
scrubbing his Web presence, but he didn't return my
calls. So instead, I asked a few experts. "This is
an unusual problem," says Michael Fertik, CEO of
ReputationDefender, which specializes in helping
individuals maintain a positive Web presence. "It's
devastating. This is one of the more creative and
salient Google issues I've ever seen."
Fertik, who points out that he
is not a supporter of the former senator, notes that
more than anything, Santorum needs to act quickly.
Once the campaign starts to make headlines again, an
increase in search traffic will likely help maintain
Savage's high spot in the rankings: "It's going to
be very hard to move."
To at least make a dent,
Santorum could try a concerted push to generate
links to his domain on
prominent sites and blogs, ginning its Google
ranking; Mark Skidmore, an expert in search-engine
marketing at the online strategy firm Blue State
Digital, says Santorum should also consider buying
paid search results for his name. He says the Obama
campaign successfully used this strategy to help
bury sites that claimed Obama was a Muslim or not an
American citizen. But like Fertik, Skidmore thinks
Santorum faces an uphill battle, in part because
Savage's site has been up for so long—with more than
13,000 inbound links, compared with
only 5,000 for Santorum's own site, America's
Foundation. "He's staring at a very big deficit,"
Skidmore observes.
That deficit might grow even
bigger soon. "I've sort of been in denial about the
fact that Rick Santorum is going to run for
president," Savage says. "But now I'm going to have
to sic my flying monkeys on him"—in other words,
mobilize bloggers to start posting and linking to
his site again.
Savage has not forgiven
Santorum for his seven-year-old comments: "Rick
would have prevented me and my partner from being
able to adopt my son," he points out. But Savage
does have a deal for the politician. "If Rick
Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the
gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it
down. Interest starts accruing now." Santorum may
want to consider Savage's offer. Otherwise, he's
kinda screwed.
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Republican
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Contains excerpts from The Huffington Post written by Luke Johnson on 02/16/2012