Facts about Rick Santorum

In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good,” he lectured women who choose to work outside the home, writing that “the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home.”

Convenient rationalization? Given all the money Santorum has made as a Washington insider since leaving office, perhaps he forgets that most American families need two incomes just to put food on the table.

The issue, for Republicans, is not just that Santorum would lose in November. It’s that he could be a drag on House and Senate candidates as well. Imagine, say, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) trying to explain to his constituents why someone who doesn’t fully understand women’s participation in the workforce should be president.
Listen closely and you can hear the anguished cries: “Mitch! Chris! Jeb! Help!”

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rick-santorum-could-take-republicans-down-with-him/2012/02/20/gIQA8Af8PR_story.html

Make no mistake. St. Santorum is another politician, a Washington insider like Newt Gingrich, with a regressive values agenda.

“After graduating, Santorum was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar and practiced law for four years at the Pittsburgh law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, now known as K&L Gates. As an associate, he successfully lobbied on behalf of the World Wrestling Federation to deregulate professional wrestling, arguing that it should be exempt from federal anabolic steroid regulations because it was
entertainment, not a sport.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum#Early_career

Top Ten Catholic Teachings Santorum Rejects while Obsessing about Birth Control

www.juancole.com/2012/02/top-ten-catholic-teachings-santorum-rejects-while-obsessing-about-birth-control.html

Santorum is ahead in national polls on the strength of his meaningless wins in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota and, more to the point, not being Mitt Romney. This election cycle has shown again and again that Republican candidates rise in the polls only to sink again once the public gets to know them. Santorum has undeniable appeal: he is passionate, earnest, genuine and eloquent when it comes to his beliefs. Unfortunately, the more people find out about those beliefs, the more they will see not just how different they are, but how the beliefs themselves encourage the suppression of difference, whatever appeals to freedom he might make.

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ana-marie-cox-blog/2012/feb/20/rick-santorum-conservative-beliefs-paradox

Rick Santorum’s Inquirer columns offer a window into the candidate’s mind

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rick-santorums-inquirer-columns-offer-a-window-into-the-candidates-mind/2012/02/17/gIQAbg26SR_story.html?hpid=z2&wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics

Americans who compare President Obama or President Bush to Nazis are ignorant, despicable and repugnant.

Mental midgets like Rick “Rooster” Santorum who employ such wretched rhetoric are clueless, comparing an American president to der Führer. Common sense must speculate — how much does this Republican actually know about this period in German history. Has he ever heard of Kursk, Operation Uranus , or the execution of July 20 plotters with piano wire? Given the fact that the Nazi regime personified evil, it can only be deduced that the former senator employs “Nazi” willfully because he actually believes his adversary(ies) are evil: cause suffering.

Rick Santorum sees Nazis everywhere: in the Middle East, in doctor’s offices and medical labs, in the Democratic Party, and now in the White House.

The Republican presidential candidate told a group of supporters Sunday night that this year’s election was like the time between 1940 and 1941 when Americans didn’t act against Adolf Hitler because they thought he was “a nice guy” and not “near as bad as what we think.”

“It’s going to be harder for this generation to figure this out. There’s no cataclysmic event,” he explained, but similar urgency. “Is anybody reminding us who we are, what made us great, and what these assaults are all about?”

The obvious implication — later denied by the candidate — was that Santorum is some modern-day Churchill and President Obama is der Fuhrer. It was outrageous and yet, for Santorum, routine.

Dinner service: Adolf Hitler talks to propaganda minister Josef Goebbels over dinner

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rick-santorum-cries-nazi/2012/02/21/gIQAjyw4RR_story.html

York: Why did Santorum lose his seat by 18 points?

by Byron York Chief Political Correspondent

posted February 16, 2012 at 6:58pm

Then-U.S. Sen Rick Santorum (L) (R-Pa.) speaks with Jim Leahy (R), campaigns for re-election at the Mayfair Diner Oct. 1, 2006 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

“Rick Santorum was a sitting senator who, in re-election, lost by 19 points,” Donald Trump, a Mitt Romney supporter, said recently. “Then he goes out and says, ‘Oh, OK, I just lost by the biggest margin in history, now I’m going to run for president.’ Tell me, how does that work?”

Trump exaggerated only slightly; Santorum actually lost by 18 points. But there’s no doubt the most glaring weakness in the case for Santorum’s electability is that 2006 re-election loss. After two terms in the Senate, the voters of Pennsylvania simply threw Santorum out on his ear.]

Why? Santorum explains it mostly by saying ’06 was a terrible year for Republicans. Indeed, the GOP, in the sixth year of George W. Bush’s time in office, did lose control of both the House and Senate. But why did Santorum lose so badly?

The biggest policy reason was Santorum’s outspoken support for the war in Iraq. By November 2006, the war was going badly and threatened to turn into a full-scale catastrophe. President Bush resisted calls to change course. While Santorum’s Democratic opponent, Bob Casey, called for a new policy, Santorum stuck with the president, and with the war. He even made it his primary focus in the last days of the campaign.

The voters clobbered him for it. In Pennsylvania exit polls, 61 percent of voters said they disapproved of the war. Santorum lost among them, 15 percent to Casey’s 85 percent. Among the largest subgroup of war opponents, the 42 percent of voters who said they strongly disapproved of the war, Santorum was routed 93 percent to 7 percent. That by itself was enough to doom any hopes for a third term.
Santorum didn’t lose just because of the war. The economy was also an issue in Pennsylvania in 2006, and Santorum lost 66 percent to 34 percent among voters to whom the economy was a critical issue. Santorum even ran disappointingly on values issues, his usual strength, splitting the vote 50-50 among those who said values were extremely important.

But it wasn’t all issues. Santorum also made personal decisions that came back to haunt him in 2006. For example, even though he owned a modest home in Pennsylvania, he moved his family to a much nicer house in Virginia, leading to charges not only that he had abandoned his home state but also that he had gone native in Washington.

In Virginia, Santorum kept his home-schooled children in a program run by the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. That cost Pennsylvania taxpayers thousands of dollars a year, and some of Santorum’s political opponents demanded that he reimburse the state. “Just pay the money back,” Casey said to Santorum in one debate. “You ripped off the taxpayers. Pay it back.” Santorum declined, and an adjudicator ruled in his favor, but the school issue highlighted the fact that Santorum had left Pennsylvania behind.

Finally, there was Santorum’s personality. In the Senate as well as in his home state, Santorum often struck people as arrogant and headstrong, preachy and judgmental. Even today, he sometimes becomes so involved in an argument that he seems intent more on winning the argument than reaching some sort of useful agreement. Throughout his career Santorum has always maintained that his forthrightness means everyone knows where he stands. Sometimes it means people know they don’t like him.

Looking back on 2006 in private conversations with friends, Santorum is said to understand that he sometimes came on too strong for the voters’ comfort. The question for today is how much he has changed. There’s no doubt he still struggles a bit with the Old Rick: He often seems determined to get the upper hand in disputes that he probably shouldn’t be having in the first place.

The reasons for Santorum’s defeat are too complicated for a 30-second ad or a brief answer at a debate. He can blame a lot of factors, but in the end he was most responsible for his own fate. Now, if Santorum’s presidential campaign continues to soar, he’ll likely have to discuss the ’06 defeat more. The Romney campaign will point to it as proof that Santorum can’t win the White House. Santorum’s job is to tell voters — and prove to them with his actions — that he has learned from his loss, and that he’s a better candidate for it.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-why-did-santorum-lose-his-sen-seat-18-pt/379616

Donors Gave as Santorum Won Earmarks

By MICHAEL LUO and MIKE McINTIRE

Published: January 15, 2012

The announcements flowed out of Rick Santorum’s Senate office: a $3.5 million federal grant to Piasecki Aircraft to help it test a new helicopter propeller technology; another $3.5 million to JLG Industries to bolster its bid to build all-terrain forklifts for the military; $1.4 million to Medico Industries to upgrade equipment for its munitions work.

Each of the news releases represented an earmark or, in some cases, multiple ones — the practice by which members of Congress set aside money in federal spending bills for what critics often denounce as pet projects back home.

Mr. Santorum, who picked up the endorsement of a group of prominent Christian conservative leaders on Saturday, has been trying to persuade conservatives to coalesce behind his candidacy. His rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have seized upon his spending record in an effort to cast doubt on his fiscal conservative bona fides.

But an examination of Mr. Santorum’s earmark record sheds light on another aspect of his political personality, one that is at odds with the reformer image he has tried to convey on the trail: his prowess as a Washington insider.

A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash.

Earmarks, long a hallmark of a pay-to-play culture in Washington, have become largely taboo among lawmakers of both parties. But that element of Mr. Santorum’s record has mostly gone unexplored, in part because transparency rules governing earmarks did not go into effect until after he left office.

In just one piece of legislation, the defense appropriations bill for the 2006 fiscal year, Mr. Santorum helped secure $124 million in federal financing for 54 earmarks, according to a tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. In that year’s election cycle, Mr. Santorum’s Senate campaign committee and his “leadership PAC” took in more than $200,000 in contributions from people associated with the companies that benefited or their lobbyists, an analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times shows.

A senior adviser to the Santorum campaign, John Brabender, said Friday that contributions from earmark recipients would “not have been a factor in any way” in the senator’s decision to support their projects, adding that they were a fraction of the more than 100,000 people who gave money to Mr. Santorum’s 2006 re-election campaign.

“We can’t control when somebody made a contribution,” Mr. Brabender said. “Clearly, there would never have been any type of indication from the Senate office or anybody else that a contribution would be warranted or helpful.”

In all, Taxpayers for Common Sense estimated, Mr. Santorum helped secure more than $1 billion in earmarks during his Senate career, which stretched from 1995 through 2006. But because federal lawmakers did not have to disclose them, as they must do today, it is nearly impossible to produce a complete list.

With the defense bill, the group went through a laborious process of matching up thousands of projects in the legislation with news releases issued by lawmakers, as well as other sources.

It is similarly difficult to rank Mr. Santorum against his Senate peers because of how opaque the process was. But budget observers said it was safe to characterize him as a vigorous practitioner. As a result, the issue has increasingly become a target for Mr. Santorum’s opponents in the Republican race.

An outside group supporting Mitt Romney is spending several million dollars in Florida on television advertisements attacking Mr. Santorum for pushing billions of dollars in “wasteful pork,” including voting for the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” project in Alaska. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Ron Paul, both of Texas, have been boring into Mr. Santorum on earmarks as well.

While Mr. Santorum has defended earmarks as a legitimate use of Congressional power, he has also conceded that the practice got out of hand and should be suspended. Even so, he has argued that the focus on earmarks obscures bigger concerns, namely the need for entitlement reform.

“We’re focused on earmarks, and it’s wrong,” Mr. Santorum said at a recent campaign stop in Hilton Head, S.C. “We’re ignoring the elephant in the room.”

Typical of Mr. Santorum’s earmarks was the $3.5 million grant that he and Pennsylvania’s other senator at the time, Arlen Specter, helped secure for Piasecki Aircraft, based in Essington, Pa.

The Piasecki family, which had been longtime supporters of both men, contributed about $12,000 to Mr. Santorum in the first five years of his Senate career, but the steady stream of contributions trickled to a halt in 1999, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group. Then, in June 2005, Frank Piasecki, the company’s founder, and his son John contributed $3,000 to Mr. Santorum’s re-election campaign.

The next month, John Piasecki sent a letter to Mr. Santorum asking for his help in the appropriations process. Mr. Piasecki included Army correspondence expressing support for the project, which involved an experimental helicopter technology. Less than a week later, Mr. Santorum wrote on the company’s behalf to Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who was chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, according to documents provided to The Times by Piasecki Aircraft.

During the 2006 election cycle, members of the Piasecki family donated more than $16,000 to Mr. Santorum’s campaign.

John Piasecki, now the company’s chief executive officer, said the federal money augmented a military program that the company had already won through a competitive bidding process, adding that Mr. Santorum had backed the project only after making sure it had Army support.

“He was very much by the book,” said Mr. Piasecki, who added that the timing of his family’s contributions to Mr. Santorum had to do with the election cycle, not the federal award. “We supported Rick Santorum on his own merits, and he was a very effective advocate on our behalf as well.”

In the same appropriations bill, Mr. Santorum helped secure another $3.5 million for JLG Industries. The company had been hoping to position itself to compete for a lucrative military contract to build all-terrain forklifts. In 2005 it hired a lobbying firm, the American Continental Group, paying $100,000 in fees over the course of the year.

The firm’s lobbyists were well acquainted with Mr. Santorum, participating in regular breakfast meetings he hosted for lobbyists. The meetings would later become a flashpoint in Mr. Santorum’s unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2006 against Bob Casey, a Democrat, who accused Mr. Santorum of cozying up to special interests. Donors affiliated with American Continental contributed roughly $12,000 to Mr. Santorum’s campaign in 2005.

Mr. Santorum, who went on to consult for American Continental after leaving the Senate, eventually secured the $3.5 million for JLG, a cash infusion that helped the company get its factory in order and train its workers in preparation for its bid on the Pentagon contract, according to former company officials.

The following year, a half-dozen JLG executives contributed $6,000 to Mr. Santorum’s re-election effort. The executives also donated the previous year to Representative Bill Shuster, a Republican who represents the Pennsylvania district where the company’s manufacturing plant is located. Other than that, none of the executives appear to have given to a federal candidate before, records show.

William M. Lasky, who was the chairman and chief executive of JLG at the time, said he was the one who encouraged his team to contribute to Mr. Santorum. “It was just a token on our part to support an official who obviously understood business,” Mr. Lasky said.

In some cases, while representatives from the companies that got a grant did not donate to Mr. Santorum, their lobbyists did. Vision Technologies, a company based in Arkansas with a plant in Pennsylvania, hired IKON Public Affairs in 2004 to help it pursue federal money, paying the lobbyists $100,000 over the next two years.

The company received a $3 million federal grant in the defense appropriations bill to develop a video system to monitor machinery aboard gas turbine ships. Two of the lobbyists on the account, Craig Snyder and Peter Grollman, contributed nearly $9,000 total to Mr. Santorum’s leadership PAC and his campaign committee, mostly in 2005.

And the lobbying firm Blank Rome, Mr. Santorum’s largest single source of contributions during the 2006 election cycle — the firm’s executives gave more than $100,000 to his campaign — had several clients who got help from Mr. Santorum with earmarks and other legislation.

“This is the thing about earmarks,” said Ryan Alexander, the president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s not that every project is horrible. It’s not that it’s inappropriate for lawmakers to garner resources for their constituents.

“The problem is it looks like it is pay-to-play. It looks like: ‘You want to get an earmark? You make a contribution.’ ”

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/us/politics/as-rick-santorum-secured-earmarks-2006-donations-flowed-in.html

http://napoleonlive.info/politics/facts-about-rick-santorum/

Facts about Rick Santorum