Santorum, R Sen

see bak eastman cnp thiel

see CONST CONV

oddly solidly far right?

pension plan, fox. CNN?!

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name just came up recently (in idiot am?) pioneering some noxious thing?

Rick Santorum complains that "very sexy things like abortion and marijuana" were on the ballot in Ohio: "Pure democracies are not the way to run a country" | Media Matters for America

"con con"

12 22 mail

this year, CMD exposed how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and right-wing groups like Convention of State Action are spending close to $25 million annually to push their stealth plan to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in order to lock in minority control and cripple the ability of the federal government to protect our rights, regulate big corporations, and deal with climate change.

Their goal? Forcing Congress to convene a constitutional convention that gives GOP leaders supermajority control over any amendments that get sent out to the states for ratification. And CMD released a report this year, “Convention of State Politicians,” documenting how voters would have zero say in the process.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

CMD obtained audio from an ALEC meeting where former PennsylvaniaSenator Rick Santorum actually said, “We have the opportunity, [through a constitutional convention], to have a supermajority, even though we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7

simulation: COSAction (conventionofstates.com)

vids:

We know you are anxious to see the complete results, and we appreciate your patience. As an independent assembly, the statement about the final results from the Convention must come from the body, and not our organization. We will circulate it on behalf of the Convention.

Here's a quick preview. The Convention passed amendment proposals on the following six ideas:

1. The public debt shall not be increased except upon a recorded vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress.
2. Term limits on Congress
3. Limiting federal overreach by returning the Commerce Clause to its original meaning
4. Limiting the power of federal regulations by giving an easy congressional override
5. Require a super majority for federal taxes and repeal the 16th Amendment [fed income tax?]
6. Give the states (by a 3/5ths vote) the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation or executive order.

The events at Williamsburg will be remembered as a turning point in history. The spirit of liberty and self government has been reignited." Michael Farris - Co-Founder, Convention of States Project.

not complete but most links

biz insider

common cause : ConCon-Opposition-Letter-March-2019.pdf (commoncause.org)

A convention is gaining momentum but still far away

So far, 19 GOP-controlled states, including four in 2022 alone (Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), have passed applications and calls for a constitutional convention under the model pushed by the conservative nonprofit group Convention of States, an offshoot of Citizens for Self Governance.

because of their efforts, "it's the first time any of these applications have had this much movement in quite some time," Viki Harrison, director of Constitutional Convention and Protecting Dissent Programs at Common Cause, told Insider. She called the passage of four new convention calls in states including South Carolina "a brutal loss."

Citizens for Self Governance and Convention of States, led by former Tea Party activist and ex-Parler CEO Mark Meckler, are relatively newer and well-funded players on the scene with connections to wealthy and powerful conservative interests.

Tax filings obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy reveal the groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, have received millions from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust, the Mercer family, and groups linked to powerful conservative lawyer Leonard Leo. A 2020 internal audit of Convention of States obtained by the group revealed that a $1.3 million donation made in Bitcoin made up 16% of the group's budget in 2019. Two donations totaling $2.5 million accounted for 36% of the group's 2020 budget....

so does Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a staunch Trump defender who wrote an entire book, "The Con of the Con-Con," about the dangers of conventions.

"In states where you would have expected this to pass because they have Republican leadership, they're firmly on our side because they're scared about losing guns," Harrison said.

Natelson, who has published numerous writings and academic articles on Article V, charged that people who fear a runaway convention "don't know what they're talking about" and GOP legislatures that have resisted calling a convention out of those worries "have been sold a bill of goods."

"Those academics who go before the legislature and say things like, 'we don't know anything about the process, it could be a runaway convention' without exception, are people who have never published any scholarship on the subject," he said....

at the Convention of the States' 2016 mock convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, delegates, including Eastman, voted out six amendments, including a proposal that would eviscerate the 16th Amendment, which grants Congress the ability to impose an income tax.

The resolution the group is pushing would limit a convention to amendments that "impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress."

But limiting "the power and jurisdiction" of the federal government is an expansive mandate that could encompass virtually anything and enable delegates to pass extreme amendments while technically staying within the bounds of the convention....

Recent blog posts on the Convention of States' website explicitly reference the need for a convention to limit federal overreach on abortion, guns, and immigration.

"The Supreme Court has said that amending the Constitution is a political question in which the federal courts cannot get involved," Super said. "The president has no role at all in the process. And the whole point of the convention route is to sideline Congress. So Congress can't overrule the convention … there's no one to intervene. There's no one to stop a convention from doing whatever they want to do."

States have the flexibility to caveat their calls for a convention, and some have included penalties to keep delegates in line. Indiana and Florida have even made it a felony for convention delegates to defy the legislature's intent, measures they passed alongside their pro-convention resolutions....

Behind closed doors, Meckler, Santorum, and Natelson pitched a convention to GOP lawmakers gathered at a December 2021 ALEC workshop as a way for ordinary citizens to force sweeping changes to every facet of government. 

"We would be aiming at the Deep State and potentially the federal judiciary as well," Meckler told lawmakers in the closed-door session, a recording of which was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. ...

moments later, Meckler said his effort could be judged by its "enemies," railing against a slew of "leftist" advocacy groups who oppose a convention.

"It's every leftist group in America, radical leftist group in America that stands for, I would argue, the destruction of America, the destruction of babies in the womb, the destruction of life itself," he said. "They hate America, they want to destroy America, and they're against Convention of States."

Santorum also assured lawmakers that conservative interests would be strongly represented in a one-vote-per-state convention due to the outsize influence of lower-population states, saying, "we have the opportunity, as a result of that, to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with."....

fired nat am no culture to spk of vs AP palestine?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/rick-santorum/

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CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture"

alexh no lnx twt

During former President Donald Trump's four years in the White House, conservative pundit Charlie Sykes was among his most persistent critics on the right — and during the 2020 election, Sykes enthusiastically supported now-President Joe Biden. Three months into Biden's presidency, Sykes laments the GOP's ongoing Trumpification in an April 28 column for The Bulwark. And the Wisconsin resident cites the vote audit in Maricopa County, Arizona as a glaring example of the "season of crazy" that is plaguing the Republican Party.

Republicans in the Arizona State Senate recently ordered an audit of the vote in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix — hiring the Florida-based firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct the audit and using One America News (a cable television channel that prides itself on being to the right of Fox News) for the livestream. The presidential election results in Arizona have long since been thoroughly vetted and certified by Arizona's conservative Republican governor, Doug Ducey, but the April 2021 audit plays well to the QAnon crowd and far-right conspiracy theorists who buy into Trump's debunked and baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Sykes writes, "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Arizona election audit, which is surely one of the most guano-soaked bits of weirdness in our never-ending season of crazy…. They ordered the 'audit' despite the fact that three previous recounts had shown no problems and no evidence of fraud. Despite that, the GOP senators insisted on a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots cast in the county that represents two-thirds of the vote statewide.... Predictably, the 'audit' has so far been a clusterfuck."

The conservative pundit adds that although the Arizona audit is a ridiculous waste of time, far-right conspiracy theorists are taking it quite seriously.

Sykes explains, "The Arizona story is worth keeping an eye on for at least two reasons: (1) It will likely be used to feed the Big Lie and sundry conspiracy theories, and (2) it is an indication of the metastasizing crazy in the GOP."

Sykes discussed the Arizona audit during an April 26 appearance on MSNBC:

The Arizona audit isn't the only GOP "craziness" that Sykes discusses in his column. The conservative pundit also attacks Republicans for their "bullshit narrative" that Biden is declaring war on meat consumption and slams former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's recent comments on Native Americans.

Santorum, during a speech for Young America's Foundation, made some clueless comments on U.S. history and told attendees, "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here…. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn't much Native American culture in American culture. It was born of the people who came here pursuing religious liberty to practice their faith."

In response, Sykes writes, "Maybe Santorum could come to Milwaukee, named after the Algonquin word 'Millioke,' or Waukesha, from the Potawatomi word for 'fox,' here in Wisconsin, originally 'Meskonsing,' to discuss his understanding of the nullity of Native American culture. If he wants, he could also read up on the origins of corn, and peanuts, and cranberries."

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cNN's Anderson Cooper is forced to cut Rick Santorum off before he gets too racist

Walter Einenkel Daily Kos

 November 05, 2020

Donald Trump supporters, egged on by Trump and the Republican Party's insistence that there has been magical massive voter fraud perpetrated by the Democratic Party for decades, are threatening a lot of violence. Trump himself has been doing the thing he...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/barr-to-be-honored-for-christlike-behavior-with-award-from-right-wing-catholic-group-with-strong-ties-to-trump/

no lnx twt

attorney General Bill Barr will be honored for his “Christlike behavior” at Wednesday’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, according to Roman Catholic Sister, author, and anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean.

"sister Helen Prejean

@helenprejean

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast will present an award to Attorney General Barr for “Christlike behavior” tomorrow morning. A.G. Barr has ordered the executions of six men with at least one more on the calendar. What is “Christlike” about using discretionary power to kill?"

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast says Barr will be presented with its Christifideles Laici Award during today’s 16th annual prayer event.

“In Honor and Gratitude for Fidelity to the Church, Exemplary Selfless and Steadfast Service in the Lord’s Vineyard,” are the words inscribed on the award.

The event is being sponsored by several groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

President Donald Trump is expected to address the group today during its virtual ceremony.

Among the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast’s founders arePat Cipollone, President Trump’s White House Counsel; former Republican Senator Rick Santorum; and Joseph Cella, President Trump’s Ambassador to Fiji, and a former Trump transition team member who co-founded the right wing activist group Catholic Vote.

Another founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is Austin Ruse, the president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM).

Perhaps the most notable founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is the group’s president, conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo.

Leo also serves as co-chairman of the Federalist Society, the far right group responsible for promoting the illegitimate belief that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted by judges according to how the nation’s founders thought.

President Trump, for the first time in history, has effectively farmed out the approval process for federal court judges and even Supreme Court justices he nominates, to the Federalist Society.

The award to Barr is being condemned by notable Catholics, including Sister Prejean, and Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America magazine.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-why-cory-gardner-and-other-gop-senators-are-still-all-in-for-trump-even-if-it-costs-them-the-election/

alex h

recent polls have not been looking good for Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who is trailing his Democratic opponent, former Gov. John Hickenlooper, by 9%, according to Morning Consult as well as Public Policy Polling. Trumpism is not serving Gardner well, begging the question: why is the Colorado Republican doubling down on his support of President Donald Trump even though it appears likely to cost him the election? Never Trump conservative journalist Jonathan V. Last answers that question in an article published in The Bulwark over Labor Day Weekend. And Last’s explanation applies not only to Gardner, but also, to Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and other incumbent GOP senators in swing states who refuse to say a word against the president.

“Gardner is running behind Trump in a state that Trump is going to lose,” Last observes. “And yet, Gardner remains almost wholly beholden to Trump. Why is that?”

Last, citing polling data from Morning Consult, stresses that Gardner’s “political career is over” in Colorado  — where “Democrats loathe him, independents are repelled by him, and Republicans see him as a cuck for not supporting Trump from the start.”

“He almost certainly realizes that there is no path forward for him in Colorado politics,” Last argues. “The state is changing, demographically and politically, and he’s on the wrong side of everything: he’s not where the main body of voters are, and he’s not where the party base are, either. He’s both too Trump and not QAnon enough…. So why is Gardner still all-in for Trump?'

the answer, according to Last: Gardner is putting “party over country.” Gardner, Last emphasizes, is the type of Republican who sees “the Republican Party as a higher priority than the country itself” — and when he loses to Hickenlooper, he “is going to have to make due with raking in the Benjamins in the private-sector sinecures reserved for washed-up politicos.”

Last doesn’t discuss McSally in his Bulwark article on Gardner. But taking the conservative journalist’s arguments a step further, one could say that Gardner is thinking long-term: even if he is “washed up” in Colorado, he could still have a place in Republican politics in general — perhaps as a pundit at Fox News, perhaps writing books, perhaps hosting a radio program. The same applies to McSally. Although poll after poll shows her losing to Democrat Mark Kelly in Arizona’s 2020 U.S. Senate race, she isn’t about to criticize Trump because she knows there could be money-making opportunities for her down the road in the right-wing media.

After being voted out of office in 2006, former PennsylvaniaSen. Rick Santorumwas never elected to public office again yet remained a prominent figure in right-wing politics. CNN, in the Trump era, has often featured Santorum as a pro-Trump pundit. And former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the late Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, made millions of dollars as a pundit even though she never became vice president and never ran for political office again after 2008. Palin is an embarrassment, but in the right-wing media, she is taken seriously.

The “private-sector sinecures reserved for washed-up politicos,” as Last describes them, can be incredibly lucrative. Palin is the butt of jokes outside of the GOP/Fox News/AM talk radio bubble, but that hasn’t stopped her from making millions of dollars.

If recent polls are accurate, Trumpism will cause Gardner and McSally to be voted out of office in November — even if Trump himself manages to pull off a narrow victory in the Electoral College. But the right-wing media often find ways for wingnuts to prosper after they lose elections, from Fox News appearances and AM talk radio shows to book deals. And cable news viewers will probably be seeing a lot of Gardner and McSally in 2021 no matter how badly they lose in November.

https://www.mediamatters.org/cnn/cnns-rick-santorum-claims-trump-rallies-are-not-highly-spreadable-events-studies-and-reports

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CNN's Rick Santorum: “The president cared a lot about the corruption in Ukraine”

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K street

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/rick-santorum-and-the-k-street-project-fact-checker-biography/2012/01/05/gIQAbqwgjP_blog.html

Rick Santorum slammed by conservative Max Boot in CNN clash over ‘loyal lickspittles’ for TrumpTom Boggioni / Raw Story

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919

CNN panel explodes in anger as Rick Santorum defends assault weapons after latest shooting

Tom Boggioni / Raw Story

A CNN panel discussion on yet another mass shooting exploded into anger and yelling after former Sen. Rick Santorum refused to even consider stopping the sale of assault rifles after a massacre in Texas.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/cnn-panel-explodes-in-anger-as-rick-santorum-defends-assault-weapons-after-latest-shooting/

no lnx

CNN panel explodes in anger as Rick Santorum defends assault weapons after latest shooting

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story September 2, 2019

A CNN panel discussion on yet another mass shooting exploded into anger and yelling after former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) refused to even consider stopping the sale of assault rifles after a massacre in Texas.

Sitting in with “State of the Union” guest host Dana Bash, Santorum was given time to make his case.

“Obviously we have had a lot of horrific things happen and people react emotionally to them,” Santorum offered. “I think what we have found when we actually have these debates, and we think about the consequences of the things being talked about and the particulars, the American public and certainly member of Congress in both parties, frankly back down.”

That led DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa to confront the former GOP lawmaker with the carnage in Odessa and Midland, Texas.

“I put my son to bed last night, he’s 11-months old,” she told Santorum. “There is a mother who did not do that because her daughter was shot in the face. When is it enough? I’m from Texas. Not even a month ago, the president said let’s pass background checks. What ended up happening?He backed down and called the NRA, that’s not realistic.”

Santorum then jumped in to say that none of the crimes being discussed by the panel could have been stopped by a background check, which set Hinojosa off.

“So you’re telling me you wouldn’t protect one life because of a background check?” she accused.

“Quit — stop –quit proposing things that limit people’s rightsthat won’t address the problem!” Santorum snapped as Hinojosa shook her head in disbelief. “And the problem, you know very well, is young males and it is a multi-faceted problem and all the left want to talk about is one aspect.”

Watch below:

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true mostly true 21%

fact checks

https://www.politifact.com/personalities/rick-santorum/

https://www.factcheck.org/2015/09/santorums-climate-consensus-claims/

...But Verheggen said the authors found a consensus of between 79 percent and 97 percent. How did he arrive at that range? Two of the possible responses to the first question were “unknown” and “I don’t know,” which the authors called “undetermined” responses. A large number of people selected these options: 9.9 percent said “unknown,” and 8.8 percent said, “I don’t know.” But undetermined responses do not mean the respondents don’t believe humans are the primary driver of climate change. Pinpointing the specific amount of human contribution is a difficult task.

The study authors argue that these answers should not be included in the analysis of the consensus, resulting in Verheggen’s range. The lowest possible value after excluding undetermined responses was 79 percent (see table S3 of supplemental information), among 278 respondents who had published only zero to three papers on climate science. The highest possible value was 97 percent, among 142 respondents who were authors on the IPCC’s scientific report published in 2007. Among all 1,868 respondents, the rate was 84 percent that agreed with the consensus.

So how did Fabius Maximus writers arrive at 57 percent disagreeing with the consensus? The short answer is, by using faulty logic and inaccurate assumptions.

...

no lnx vid

ref 11/18 shamed to do rt thing?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a25304542/meet-the-press-climate-change-chuck-todd-danielle-pletka/

Rarely do you get news of an ongoing catastrophe and, within a couple of days, a perfect example of why we've done nothing about that exact problem. But Chuck Todd and Meet The Press were happy to oblige this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Trump administration attempted to bury a harrowing U.S. government climate-change report by releasing it on Black Friday, a notorious dumping ground for bad news. Normally, though, the bad news is just for the current administration—not the whole world.

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On Sunday, Todd hosted Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute on his teevee show. Her performance—and it was a performance—was a shining example of how the ruling class has successfully hemmed and hawed for decades, with the full support of the feckless Beltway media, slowing any kind of action and safeguarding big-business profits while experts in the field have known full well that human civilization as we know it is in clear and escalating peril

[vid]

...Right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist ... We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that."

As Pletka so happily volunteered, she is not a scientist. So why was she invited on one of the nation's Premier Political Talk Shows to spread disinformation about a scientific issue? That two years since 1980 have been cold does not have any bearing on the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. This member of the conservative intelligentsia—the American Enterprise Institute, for which Pletka works, is a right-wing "think tank"—is actually just making the more polite version of President Good Brain's argument on Wednesday:

Donald J. Trump

?

@realDonaldTrump

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?

114K

4:23 PM - Nov 21, 2018

This is not the first time Trump has disproved global warming on the basis he is cold today. (Elsewhere, he has simply called it a Chinese hoax.) Nobody put this crap to bed better than Stephen Colbert did all those years ago. Weather is not climate. The weather is affected by changing climate patterns, but warming global temperatures over the decades—an indisputable trend, even among denialist hacks like Pletka—does not mean every day of every year will be warmer than the previous. What it does very likely mean is more powerful storms that drop trillions of gallons of water on American cities, and bigger, more ferocious wildfires that turn the American West to ash.

Of course, Pletka probably knows this. She gave Our Beautiful Boy Chuck Todd that tried-and-true conservative line that's rapidly going stale: that surely something is happening with the climate, but who can say whether humans are causing it? Well, after years of exhaustive study, scientists have found it is "extremely likely" (terms the scientific community does not choose lightly) that humans are significantly contributing to warming global temperatures. We also know that the Beautiful, Clean Coal that Pletka suggested the U.S. has switched to does not exist. "Clean coal" is a misleading term for the same coal that continues to be the dirtiest fossil fuel in existence.

Did Todd challenge her with the facts? No. But this is what the evidence says. It's just Pletka isn't concerned with gathering the evidence and coming to a conclusion—also known as the essence of the scientific method. Here is an (albeit anonymous) account from an Atlantic reader who claims to have worked for Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute:

A number of years ago I worked for Danielle Pletka for a summer as a researcher, and her piece today matches the "scholarship" she and AEI were producing in the early part of this decade. I was rarely if ever asked to perform background research on a subject but was more often asked to provide specific evidence to support ready made assertations. At the time AEI was mobilizing in support of military action against Iraq, and it was quite clear to me that the academic process was reversed - positions designed, research dug up to support the positions.

This seems like an opportune moment to mention that Pletka is widely known as a varsity-level cheerleader for the Iraq War. More recently, she demonstrated her intricate knowledge of the conflict by suggesting to the French ambassador on Twitter that France had joined the U.S. in the conflict. OK, so that was completely and laughably wrong (Remember the idiotic Freedom Fries charade?), but at least by 2013 she was...still defending the invasion. Yes, after it embroiled the region in sectarian conflict, and after all the reasons people like Pletka peddled for going in were proven to be baseless. Eventually, this genius foreign-policy move led to the rise of ISIS. This is just another example of how, if you work in the Beltway, there are absolutely zero consequences for being completely wrong about everything.

In fact, if you work at a think tank like AEI, it might just get you a raise—if you stick to the party line. All think tanks are, to some extent, mouthpieces for their donors, but that particularly goes for a right-wing gun-for-hire shop like the Institute. The Guardian uncovered how AEI works to undermine the science on climate change in 2007:

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Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

And what did that ExxonMobil funding look like?

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobiland more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

You may remember that Exxon was also exposed as having discovered, through the work of its own scientists, that climate change was real as early as 1977. Instead of accepting this reality and beginning the work of responding to the burgeoning climate crisis, Exxon chose to fund disinformation on the topic for decades, protecting their profits in the shorter term. They're not alone among oil-and-gas outfits, many of which simultaneously started building their rigs to accommodate sea-level rise that would result from the climate change that, in public, they steadfastly disputed was happening.

One way to fund disinformation is to pay a think tank like AEI to spread it for you. And that's what Pletka was still doing, on Sunday, after just the latest report dropped detailing the catastrophic consequences of our inaction on the climate crisis. The U.S. report focused on the fact that the crisis will melt 10 percent of the American economy and send it crashing into the ocean by 2100. Farmers in the midwest will lose 75 percent of the crop yield on their corn. Rising sea levels will put trillions of dollars in coastal real estate in jeopardy. But last month's report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—compiled by 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists—was even more apocalyptic. It found that human civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.

Amid all that, news programs like Chuck Todd's Meet The Press—offerings that putatively exist to inform the public about the world around them—are still playing host to people who are paid to spread false information about the world. Todd is not alone: CNN hosted Rick Santorum on Sunday. Like NBC News, which employs Pletka as a contributor, they pay Rick directly to spread nonsense.

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...this Week talked about the climate report for two minutes with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and noted that the administration tried to bury it.

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The report did not, from what I can tell, come up on the rest of the hour-long show...[vid]

whitehouse sen

Here'spaid CNN commentator Rick Santorumpraising the Trump administration for trying to bury the climate report, arguing that climate change is made up by scientists trying to make some money pic.twitter.com/lBpLMexgt9...

This festering boil on the body politic highlights another in-vogue conservative argument: that the scientists who've devoted their lives to studying the climate are really just in it for those juicy government grants to continue studying it. It's all about the money! As usual in this era, this is a case of accusing the opposition of something you're already up to.

Santorum is applying the incentive structure that exists for massive multinational oil and gas corporations and those they employ—seeking out certain findings because you have a vested financial interest in a certain outcome—to climate scientists. In reality, the kind of conspiracy that right-wingers like Santorum are alleging here would be perhaps unprecedented in scale. If this is all a big con, thousands of climate scientists spread across dozens of countries would need to all be getting their kickbacks, and have a way to secretly stay on-message. It's absurdly unlikely, and it belies the aforementioned way that the scientific community vets a scientific report's findings.

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Oh, and the money in government grants ain't actually that good. That's why some "scientists" might take, say, $10,000 from AEI to dispute the scientific consensus. It's all bullshit, folks, and it's bad for ya.

...ay that the nation's major television news stations routinely play host to propagandists who are paid, directly or indirectly, to spread disinformation and muddy the waters to protect the interests of massive energy corporations, all at the expense of the future of human civilization.When Pletka said emissions are down since President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords—making the U.S. the only nation in the world that refuses to participate—that was just true enough: they are down in 2018, though the rate of emissions reductions slowed from the previous two years and will likely continue to slow as the Trump administration attempts to roll back our efforts to combat the crisis. The crown jewel in that regard is the Clean Power Plan, our main vehicle for meeting our obligations under the Paris agreement, which Trump has sought to repeal. At the very least, Todd is obligated to challenge this crap if he's going to host a dishonest broker—or host someone who can.

According to John Whitehouse of MediaMatters, none of the Sunday Shows hosted a single scientist while covering the climate in 2016 and 2017.

[RELATED STORIES

It's the Golden Age of Climate Denial

There Are Very Fine Scientists on Both Sides]

The Meet The Press chief will certainly defend his decision to host a climate-change "skeptic" on the basis of "intellectual diversity" and Hearing From Both Sides, as if what his viewers need is to hear both the truth and utter nonsense. Both Sides are not operating in good faith here. One side accepts the scientific consensus. On the other, the Republican Party is the only major political party in the industrialized world that disputes it. Both Sides Journalism, which falsely equates the truth about the world we've determined through the scientific method with self-serving crap dished out by the instruments of oil interests, has made it politically palatable to do nothing, for decades, about an existential threat to humanity. Friday's report further underlined the crisis facing humankind. Two days later, Meet The Press showcased part of how we've allowed things to get to this point.

But since we're on the topic of intellectual diversity, here's a suggestion: If Chuck Todd wants to talk about a scientific topic, how about having a fucking scientist on?

==

Fact-Checking the Attacks

The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.

The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:

• White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "even Obama's undersecretary for science didn't believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released." This appears to be a reference to Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP, who spent 18 months as an undersecretary in the Obama administration's energy department. Koonin has long maintained climate science is not "settled," and has argued the government should have a red-team/blue-team debate—an idea championed unsuccessfully by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
• Sanders also said that the National Climate Assessment "is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends." But in fact the report considered the full range of climate scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, looking at what will happen if carbon emissions decline, if they stabilize, and if they continue to grow unabated. As Hayhoe noted inher Twitter thread, "the observed increase in global carbon emissions over the past 15–20 years has been consistent with higher scenarios."
• The Trump EPA put out a news release it called a "fact check" on Wednesday, citing an article on the conservative website The Daily Caller to try to bolster an assertion by Wheeler that Obama administration's science adviser John Holdren instructed the report's authors in 2015 to look at worst-case scenarios. "Mr. Wheeler's insinuation is absolutely false," Holdren, now at Harvard, responded in a statement. "Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.
• Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, said the administration might intervene in future climate reports. "Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that's used for the next assessment," Wheeler said. But the report underwentseveral rounds of technical and policy reviewby the 13 federal agencies involved. There was a series of regional engagement workshops that reached more than 1,000 people in over 40 cities, with listening sessions, webinars and public comment. Anexpert external peer review of the whole report was performed by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
• Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, took issue with the reportfor including a figure that was widely quoted in the media: that U.S. GDP could take a 10 percent hit by 2100 due to climate change. The estimate was derived from an innovative, cutting-edge modeling of climate impacts on the U.S. economy published in the journal *Science*. Pielke, who often says he agrees with the core science on global warming but disputes how it is applied, argued this headline-grabbing data point should not have been included, since it reflected a scenario of more global warming than is commonly reckoned in modeling. Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and co-author of the Sciencepaper, said the team purposefully took into account the unlikely—though not impossible—scenario at the end of the charted curve because of its potentially large consequences. "We were deliberately trying to include tail risks, not just 'most likely' outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management," Kopp said in an email.

The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute prefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.

Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast.CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.

==

Here’s a brief history of things that paid CNN commentators have said on-air since the inauguration:

Stephen Moore made a completely false claim about coal jobs that an actual economist immediately corrected. (3/29/17)

Jason Miller made sexist remarks about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), calling her “hysterical.” (6/13/17)

After Trump encouraged police brutality, Jeffrey Lord dismissed it as a "New Yorker sense of humor." (7/31/17)

Lord called Trump “the Martin Luther King of health care.” CNN then talked about it for an entire day. (4/13/17)

Lord compared the Congressional Black Caucus to the KKK. (2/16/17)

Ben Ferguson criticized civil rights icon John Lewis for not educating Trump about civil rights. (12/8/17)

Rick Santorum said that Parkland school shooting survivors aren't taking personal responsibility and should learn CPR instead of engaging in activism. (3/25/18)

Kayleigh McEnany attacked Barack Obama for golfing in 2002 when George W. Bush was president. (3/28/17)

Ken Cuccinelli told panelist Symone Sanders to shut up while discussing white supremacists in Charlottesville. (8/14/17)

Paris Dennard posited that Trump was better than Obama at calling out white supremacists. (8/14/17)

Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s sexist remarks to an Irish reporter: "The press should be applauding the fact that he's bringing reporters into the Oval Office, calling them out and including them." (6/28/17)

Rick Santorum attacked reporters for asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for details about North Korea and nuclear weapons. (6/14/18)

Miller dismissed reports that Trump had an affair with adult actor Stormy Daniels and paid her hush money because, according to him, the alleged payoff was nothing to a billionaire. (3/7/18)

Santorum accused Obama of exacerbating racism in America.(6/3/18)

After a suicide bombing killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert, Lord said that it would be fair for Trump to criticize Grande for not providing enough security. (6/5/17)

Lord used a Nazi analogy to attack London Mayor Sadiq Khan. (6/5/17)

Stephen Moore repeatedly lied about the Affordable Care Act, often without CNN fact-checking him. (7/17/17)

After Roy Moore was accused of child molestation, Stephen Moore argued that his opponent was “no saint either” because he supported abortion. (11/20/17)

Jack Kingston pushed a conspiracy theory that shadowy forces were behind the rally against gun violence organized by Parkland survivors. (2/20/18)

While discussing sexual harassment, Stephen Moore said that he would never take a one-on-one meeting with a woman. (10/23/17)

Jack Kingston said that Bill O'Reilly's racist remarks about Waters' hair were just like liberals calling Trump “orange.” (3/29/17)

Bryan Lanza argued that discussing sexual assault allegations against Trump "seems like a waste of time." (12/20/17)

And it’s not only the paid commentators who are a part of CNN's “false equivalency” problem. Just last week, after Lewandowski mocked a 10-year-old with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother at the U.S. border, CNN invited him on to talk more about his remark.

==

wow close? 2nd to trump on coal $

==

https://www.alternet.org/cnn-panel-derails-after-rick-santorum-defends-trumps-barbaric-immigration-policy-and-promptly

==

parkland students shd learn cpr

==

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is another key player in the K Street Project. In the months following the 2000 elections that gave Republicans the White House, Santorum began convening a private meeting each Tuesday morning of Republican lobbyists, attended sometimes by representatives from the White House and other senators. Democrats and journalists were not invited. "The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices," Confessore reported. "Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican-a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors.""

==

6/15

On Monday, presidential candidate Rick Santorum did an interview with a local talk radio host where the topic of Pope Francis came up. Santorum, who is Catholic, said he was a “huge fan” of the Pope, but disagrees with his viewpoint on climate change.

“The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists,” he said. “I think when we get involved with controversial political and scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible. And I've said this to the bishops many times when they get involved in agriculture policy or things like that, that are really outside the scope of what the church's main message is.”

The thing that Santorum does not mention is that Pope Francis actually is a scientist. He has a degree in Chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. When Pope Francis campaigns against climate change as a “sin,” he is doing so not just with the moral authority of the Vatican but with some scientific knowledge as well.

Many believe that when he gives his speech to Congress in September, he will call on it to act on climate change, which it has so far refused to do.

http://www.alternet.org/print/speakeasy/tikkundaily/environmental-justice-and-science-denial

The White House recently released its National Climate Assessment [4] that reported our global climate is, in fact, changing, and this is due primarily to human activity, in particular, the burning of fossil fuels. The Assessment investigated approximately 12,000 professional scientific journal papers on the topic of global climate change, and discovered that in the articles expressing a position on global warming, 97 percent fully authenticated both the reality of global warming and the certainty that humans are the cause.

Additional studies released since the White House report signaled the beginning of the depletion and ultimate total collapse of glaciers in Antarctica, which can continue to raise worldwide sea levels an additional 4 feet. This depletion is now irreversible.

What seems clear to the scientific community seems like science fiction to many key politicians, includingLamar Smith (R-TX),paradoxically the Chair of the U.S. House of Representative's Committee onScience, Space, and Technology, who has been a perennial skeptic of human-produced climate change. He stated on the floor of the House[5]:

"We now know that prominent scientists were so determined to advance the idea of human-made global warming that they worked together to hide contradictory temperature data."

He quoted no sources, and his accusations were later proven [6] false.

Previous Chair of the Committee, Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX) asserted [7] that he does not have concerns about global warming, but, rather, he is "really more fearful of freezing," even though, he mentioned, "I don't have any science to prove that." He went even further by stating that he did not "think we can control what God controls."

Many on the anti-science political and theocratic Right (mis)quote scripture to justify human exploitation of the planet. For example, Republican presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum, questioned [8] Barack Obama's "theology" in an Ohio campaign stop on February 18, 2012 by asserting that Obama believes in "some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology."

The next day, when asked to explain his remarks on the CBS news program "Face the Nation [9]" by moderator Bob Schieffer, Santorum responded that he was referring to "the radical environmentalists," and by implication, placed Obama in this category. Santorum attacked the notion that "man is here to serve the Earth," which he argued "is a phony ideal." Santorum countered that idea, stating "We're not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective. I think a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside-down."

In yet another ill-conceived and executed Christian crusade, Santorum, with his publicly expressed literal biblical perspective, conjures up such passages as Genesis 1:26, which states:

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'"

Also, Genesis 1:28: "God blessed [humans] and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.'"

And, Genesis 9: "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.'"

And Santorum is certainly not alone among his Republican colleagues and electorate. A 2008 study [10] by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, "A Deeper Partisan Divide over Global Warming," found that 58 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats and 50 percent of Independents believed that global warming is mostly caused by human activity, while only 27 percent of Republicans believed this.

Among Democrats, those with higher educational levels - 75 percent with college degrees compared with 52 percent with less education - expressed the view that solid evidence has shown human activity largely as the cause of global warming. Opposed to the Democrats, however, educational levels of Republicans resulted in an inverse relationship in trusting the scientific evidence with only 19 percent of Republican college graduates compared with 31 percent with less education believing in the human connection to climate change.

Pew's updated [11] report in 2013 found that overall 67 percent of U.S. residents believe global warming is happening, but only 25 percent of Tea Party Republicans believe this.....

===

Normally, I wouldn’t bother with what’s happening in the Iowa Republican Party. But this is becoming a trend. Sarah Palin endorsing Joni Ernst. Now Santorum endorsing Sam Clovis. These are the “big guns” for the other side -- the people you send into a Senate race when you think you can win.

==

had Tues mtgs; name just came up repeatedly in some odd context?

5. Rick Santorum says “middle class” is a Marxist term.

Former and perhaps future presidential candidate Rick Santorum is so tired of hearing about the middle class. This is not because of the sad fact that the middle class is shrinking or just becoming part of the poor or one step away from it, it’s because he has decided, the very notion of the middle class is “Marxism talk” because, “Since when in America do we have classes?”

This is Santorum’s notion of creative problem-solving. It is also always good to attach the Marxist/socialist label to Obama, because if there’s one thing Americans hate, it’s socialism.

As Salon reported:

“Who does Barack talk about all the time?” Santorum rhetorically asked a group of Republicans recently in Lyon County, IA. ”The middle class. Since when in America do we have classes? Since when in America are people stuck in areas, or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk. When Republicans get up and talk about the middle class we’re buying into their rhetoric of dividing America. Stop it.". alternet

Republican presidential frontrunnerRick Santorum raised a lot of eyebrows this weekend when he attacked environmentalism as anti-Biblical and said that President Obama has a “phony theology” that sides with “radical environmentalists” over the Bible.While it was remarkable to hear these theories coming from a major presidential candidate, the theories themselves are nothing new. Instead, Santorum was drawing from a dual line of attack on environmentalists and progressive people of faith that has recently come into... MORE >

Beisner: EPA Promoting 'The Lorax' Violates the Separation of Church and State

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Monday 02/13/2012, 11:07am

see beisner, cornwall agenda 21

(CNN) – Rick Santorum unveiled some new details about his three-year-old daughter, Bella, while speaking at the National Rifle Association's annual meeting in St. Louis on Friday.

"(My wife) Karen and I are life members of the NRA, and we wanted to announce today that…now Bella is a life member of the NRA, too," Santorum said. "I hope it is a long life."

Santorum suspended his GOP presidential bid on Tuesday after spending the weekend in the hospital with Bella, who suffers from a serious chromosomal condition that interferes with development. Half of patients born with the condition, Trisomy 18, do not survive past the first week of life, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The former Pennsylvania senator cited family reasons as a major factor for leaving the race Tuesday, but has since pointed to finances and political strategy, as well.

Appealing to his audience Friday, Santorum also touched on other members of his family who share a passion for the Second Amendment.

"When it comes to gun rights advocates I have to say I don't hold a candle to my wife," Santorum said. "I am hunter and I am a gun owner, but she owns way more guns than I do."

3/12

"The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is," he said.

Santorum has used the environment as a talking point in criticisms of both his GOP rivals and President Barack Obama's administration. Back in early February, he targeted Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for allegedly buying into the "bogus" science of man-made climate change. At the same time, Santorum placed himself as a candidate who never believed in the "hoax of global warming."

A few weeks later, Santorum shifted to Obama's energy plans, telling a group of Ohio voters that global warming is not climate science but "political science."

==== Conservatism is a political philosophy that is, at its most fundamental, about resisting change.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that an outrageous and absurd line uttered about global warming in 2003—Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s assertion that it is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”—has not, nearly a decade later, been discredited on the right. Instead, this idea has persisted.

Indeed, the “hoax” charge was recently reiterated by Rick Santorum—who uttered it in Colorado on Monday en route to his three state primary triumph yesterday.

This raises at least two points for me that bear addressing:

First: We need to acknowledge that denying science is very likely politically beneficial to Republicans today. Why? When Santorum denies climate science, he also defines an enemy: Environmentalists, those who are shutting down American industry and ingenuity based on ideologically driven junk science (or so the thinking goes).

We are learning that Republicans and conservatives, more than liberals and Democrats, are sensitive to fear and threat, and more attuned to the difference between themselves and out-groups. If environmentalists are successfully defined as a threatening out-group attacking American values, that is therefore an emotionally resonant political rallying cry.

Second: In using the word “hoax,” Santorum is apparently endorsing the global warming conspiracy theory. What do I mean by that?

This is the idea (at least in some incarnations) that a shady international group of scientists, NGOs, and leftwingers (especially European ones) are out to hamstring economies to advance a red, or at least pink, agenda of global governance. To do this, they need a covert issue to scare everyone into the kinds of changes they demand—hence the bugaboo of global warming.

The conspiracy theory was actually fully articulated in the late Michael Crichton’s controversial novel State of Fear. There, the environmentalists actually turn out to be, like, ninjas who aren’t above violence and generating fake weather disasters to advance their goals.

Does Santorum really think these kinds of things? I don’t know, because his logic is not fully articulated. But, in using the word “hoax,” it is hard to imagine what else he might mean.

A hoax, after all, implies nothing if not a coordinated effort to make people believe something that is knownnot to be true. So there has to be a cabal, a conscious effort at deception. And if the issue is global warming, then the cabal itself has to be global—for so is the scientific community and the international community seeking action on the issue.

What such a hoax would actually entail boggles the mind—it could never be pulled off—but never mind. The point is that Santorum is now lending implicit credence to the idea.

If we had a reasonable national discourse, making the “hoax” charge about global warming would get Santorum labeled a conspiracy theorist.

As Santorum pulls states into his column, then…we can safely say that is notthe sort of discourse we have.

After leaving Santorum's campaign practically for dead in the fourth quarter last year, individual employees and political action committees in the miscellaneous business, health and finance insurance and real estate sectors all returned to Santorum's fold in January, showering the Pennsylvania politician with campaign cash after his strong finish (later declared a victory) in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

Santorum's overall fundraising skyrocketed in January, as the candidate raised $4.5 million in that month alone -- five times more than the $917,000 he raised in the entire fourth quarter of 2011.

After donating $82,500 to Santorum during the third quarter, the miscellaneous business sector (which includes advertising and public relations as well as the entertainment and food and beverage industries, among others) slowed its pace of giving to Santorum in the fourth quarter, sending only about $56,100 his way. But that sector put Santorum back in its sights in January, contributing nearly $297,000 to Santorum's campaign through January 31st. That's an increase of about 190 percent from its third quarter pace and a 428 percent increase from the fourth quarter.

Within that sector, the business services industry was the most energetic. Individuals and PACs affiliated with business service organizations donated about $30,600 to the Santorum campaign in January, an increase of over 600 percent from its fourth quarter giving.

The miscellaneous manufacturing and distributing industry also picked up some slack, contributing about $23,400 to Santorum during January, a 430 percent increase over the fourth quarter.

The health sector also rose again to become a crucial supporter of Santorum's campaign. 

Individuals and PACs in the health sector had moved away from Santorum during the fourth quarter of 2011, giving just $12,600 -- about $20,600 less than they donated in the third quarter. But after Santorum's electoral surge, those interests came back, donating about $61,900 to his campaign in January.

The health professional industry led the charge, giving $24,400, more than double what the entire sector donated to Santorum during the fourth quarter last year. The hospitals and nursing homes industry meanwhile donated about $18,000.

tough to track all the zany:

Rick Santorum presents himself as a devout Catholic, and he certainly holds fast to the church’s line against birth control. But on the issue of climate change, he’s more than happy to stray from the pope’s teachings. Here’s what Santorum had to say at a campaign event on Feb. 6:

[Climate change is] an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life. … I for one never bought the hoax.

Pope Benedict XVI has been consistent and clear [PDF] in saying that global leaders need to confront the challenge of climate change. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, also called for climate action, as have many other leaders within the church hierarchy. Last year, the Vatican issued a report warning about the “serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Most recently, Pope Benedict called for coordinated global action on climate change before the start of the U.N. climate talks in Durban, South Africa, in November 2011:

I hope that all members of the international community can agree on a responsible, credible and supportive response to this worrisome and complex phenomenon, keeping in mind the needs of the poorest populations and of future generations.

2/23

Santorum: Higher Education a Plot to Secularize America

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/santorum-higher-education-plot-secularize-america

In a speech to Tea Party conservatives on Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, Santorum had dismissed Obama's politics as being based in "some phony theology."

"It's not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs," Santorum said. "It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology."

An incredulous Bob Schieffer began his interview with Santorum Sunday by asking, "What in the world were you talking about?"

"I was talking about the radical environmentalists," Santorum said, suggesting that they believe man should protect the earth, rather than "steward its resources." "I think that is a phony ideal. I don't believe that's what we're here to do ... We're not here to serve the earth. That is not the objective, man is the objective."

Earlier in the day on Saturday, Santorum had also said that health insurance plans shouldn't be required to cover prenatal testing, because that testing results in more abortions, as well as contending that government-run public educationwas "anachronistic."

...

ed:

At one appearance here, he said the idea of schools run by the federal government or by state governments was “anachronistic.” Mr. Santorum did not say public schools were a bad idea, and he said that there was a role for government help in education.

But it was the latest in a series of comments by the former Pennsylvania senator — who is tied in polls in the critical Ohio and Michigan primary contests — suggesting that he takes a dim view of public schooling. He and his wife home-schooled their children.

For the first 150 years, most presidents home-schooled their children at the White House, he said. “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.”

“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

Historically, state and local governments have been responsible for public schooling. According to the Department of Education, the federal government contributes almost 11 percent of the cost of elementary and secondary education, financing intended to compel districts to enforce standards to help disadvantaged children and ensure students with disabilities receive equal education. This year, Republican candidates have called for a cutback in this formula, which has had bipartisan support for decades, saying they would give block grants to states and local districts while repealing federal requirements.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, Ben LaBolt, said that while the administration “has fought to strengthen our public schools and expand access to higher education, the Republican candidates are set on gutting education financing, and even, in Senator Santorum’s case, threatening to dismantle them outright.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/us/politics/santorum-criticizes-education-system-and-obama.html?_r=1

wow, it's worse than we thought:

...LCV score 10%

nvironmental issues. How crazy? He makes Newt Gingrich’s moon-colony plans sound plausible and Mitt Romney’s climate flip-floppery look presidential.

On climate change

While Mitt and Newt have both felt compelled to repudiate their former concern for climate change, Santorum can boast that he’s a denier of long standing.

“There is no such thing as global warming,” he told Glenn Beck on Fox News in June 2011.

“It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative,” he told Rush Limbaugh that some month.

He went further at an event in Colorado on Feb. 6:

[Climate change is] an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life. … I for one never bought the hoax. I for one understand just from science that there are one hundred factors that influence the climate. To suggest that one minor factor of which man’s contribution is a minor factor in the minor factor is the determining ingredient in the sauce that affects the entire global warming and cooling is just absurd on its face. And yet we have politicians running to the ramparts — unfortunately politicians who happen to be running for the Republican nomination for president — who bought into man-made global warming and bought into cap-and-trade.

Note that Santorum doesn’t take the common GOP route of arguing that the science is inconclusive, or even just denying that climate change is actually happening. He takes the extreme Inhofe-ian view that the whole issue is fabricated for nefarious purposes. Science journalist Chris Mooney unpacks the implications: “In using the word ‘hoax,’ Santorum is apparently endorsing the global warming conspiracy theory … that a shady international group of scientists, NGOs, and leftwingers (especially European ones) are out to hamstring economies to advance a red, or at least pink, agenda of global governance. To do this, they need a covert issue to scare everyone into the kinds of changes they demand — hence the bugaboo of global warming.”

On the “reign of environmental terror”

But Santorum doesn’t leave it there. He thinks the green plot goes way beyond climate change. He told an Oklahoma audience on Feb. 9:

[T]he left is always looking for a way to control you. They’re always trying to make you feel guilty, so you’ll give them power so they can lord it over you. They do it on the environment all the time. …

We have to have all sorts of government regulations now because of the threats of hydrofracking. It’s the new bogeyman. It’s the new way to try to scare you … And they’re preying on the Northeast, saying, “Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s gonna happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff, what’s gonna happen?” Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen, except they will use this to raise money for the radical environmental groups so they can go out and continue to try to purvey their reign of environmental terror on the United States of America.

Environmentalism is also, apparently, a religion — and not the good kind. Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is just “pandering to radical environmentalists who don’t want energy production, who don’t want us to burn more carbon,” he told Iowans in December. “It has to do with an ideology, a religion of its own that’s being pushed on the American public.”

On dominion over the Earth

When he’s not waxing conspiratorial, Santorum can start sounding completely incoherent, as he did at that Colorado event:

We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit … We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create.

Doesn’t Santorum believe that God created the Earth and everything on it? Is he saying that nature can’t be trusted to nature? If anyone can translate this passage into plain English, please share in comments below.

On energy subsidies

“All subsidies to energy should be eliminated,” Santorum said on Feb. 6, which might sound good to libertarians as well as some clean-energy advocates who’d like to see a level playing field without huge advantages for fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, Santorum is completely clueless about the issue, as became apparent when he went on to say, “There aren’t a whole lot of them, to be very honest with you.” Not a whole lot of energy subsidies? Really? The U.S. government provided about $72 billion in subsidies to fossil-fuel companies in the seven years from 2002 through 2008, plus another $16.8 billion for corn-based ethanol, according to a study by the Environmental Law Institute. Other estimates of federal energy subsidies are higher, at roughly $20 billion a year. And that doesn’t even consider the indirect subsidies.

If Santorum thinks that’s not a lot of money, he must be some kind of big-government liberal.

On coal

Santorum has a deep love for the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. During his 16 years as a member of Congress and then senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum was a big coal booster — and he continued to play that role even after his defeat in a 2006 Senate race.

In 2003, he supported a Bush EPA rule that allowed dirty, old coal-fired power plants, refineries, and industrial facilities to modernize without adding new pollution controls. In January of this year, he bashed the Obama EPA for restricting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, ignoring the fact that the new rules will save thousands of lives and prevent developmental problems, learning disabilities, respiratory diseases, and heart attacks. Santorum accused the EPA of acting on a philosophy of “We hate carbon, we hate fossil fuels, we hate blue-collar Americans who work in those areas.”

On oil and natural gas

“Drill everywhere,” Santorum told Glenn Beck last year, and that pretty much sums up his position on oil and natural-gas development.

He’s particularly enthusiastic about fracking: “You know what the Marcellus Shale is? It’s the largest natural gas found in the history of the country, the second largest natural gas field in the world! It’s under Pennsylvania, and we are drilling, baby, drilling. Everywhere.”

Santorum denies or ignores the health and environmental threats posed by fracking, putting him “squarely to the far right of both the already-conservative Pennsylvania Republican Party and even the drilling industry itself,” writes David Sirota in *Salon*. Sirota explains:

As the Associated Press reports, the state’s Republican legislators just passed a bill “that could force Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry to help pay for a wide range of state and local government programs [and] toughen safety standards” for fracking. … The legitimacy of such concerns are conceded even by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania: As Santorum’s hometown CBS affiliate previously reported, “The president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents natural gas companies, said the group now believes the natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water.”

It just so happens that Santorum was one of the top recipients of campaign donations from the oil and gas industry during his time in the Senate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And after he was booted from the Senate, he got a well-paid consulting gig with Consol Energy, a big coal-mining and fracking company, which he held onto until he launched his presidential bid last year.

On public lands and endangered species

“I’d like to have a lot less federal land. I think that might be a great opportunity for us to reduce the budget deficit is to get rid of and turn over to the private sector a lot of federal lands that don’t need to be in our inventory,” Santorum said at his recent event in Colorado — while stressing that he wouldn’t want to sell off Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon.

He went on to bash the Endangered Species Act, cringing as he talked about how it hurts business and has hindered logging in an area in Pennsylvania: “We have the Endangered Species Act, which has prevented us from timbering all sorts of acreage there. It’s bankrupted the school district and the like because of the government’s inability to allow for us to care for our resources. A forest in my opinion is like a garden and you’ve got to care for it. If you don’t care for it, you leave it to nature and nature will do what it does: boom and bust.”

To sum up …

“He certainly racked up one of the most anti-environmental records in Congress in his time there,” Navin Nayak, senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, told *Mother Jones*. Santorum earned a lifetime score of just 10 percent on LCV’s scorecard of environmentally significant votes. “He was consistently on the side of polluters.”

And if that’s not enough crazy for you, Santorum also wants women to have lots of babies, whether they like it or not.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

http://grist.org/election-2012/crazy-talk-rick-santorum-out-denies-the-climate-deniers-and-spins-eco-conspiracy-theories/

==

8. Santorum warns of ‘reign of environmental terror’ 16

By Jess Zimmerman

 10 Feb 2012 

It's sometimes a little hard to tell what Rick Santorum is saying, but his latest approach to environmental conservation seems to be that liberals are a form of psychological terrorists, using guilt and science to distort the truth and frighten real Americans into sheeplike compliance. You think I'm exaggerating! But ... well, look, I'll just post some quotes, from a campaign event yesterday in Oklahoma City.

“You hear all the time, the left: ‘Oh, the conservatives are the anti-science party.’ No we’re not. We’re the truth party. Because the left is always looking for a way to control you. They’re always trying to make you feel guilty so you’ll give them power so they can lord it over you. They do it on the environment all the time.”

"And they’re preying on the Northeast, saying, ‘Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s going to happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff. Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen, except they will use this to raise money for the radical environmental groups so they can go out and continue to try to purvey their reign of environmental terror on the United States of America. We will stand up for the truth."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72681.html

surges in primary

By EMILY SCHULTHEIS |

2/7/12 12:04 PM EST

POLITICO's Juana Summers reports from Colorado Springs:

Rick Santorum told Colorado Springs supporters Tuesday that Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich would be ineffective challengers to President Barack Obama in the general election because of their views on cap and trade.

"Let's go to cap and trade. Governor Romney proudly announced that they were the first state, Massachusetts, to put a cap on CO2 emissions in the state of Massachusetts," Santorum told more than 100 supporters here.

Santorum also dinged Gingrich for filming a climate change ad with Nancy Pelosi, something Gingrich - as recently as yesterday - has admitted was a mistake. Both Gingrich and Santorum appeared at a Colorado energy conference on Monday.

"Speaker Gingrich has supported cap and trade for more than a dozen years. Now, he wants business incentives to go along with cap and trade, but he supported cap and trade, and sat on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and said that global warming had to be addressed by Congress," Santorum said. "Who is he or who's Governor Romney to be able to go after President Obama? I've never supported even the hoax of global warming."

Romney and Gingrich, Santorum said, "bought into the science of man-made global warming, and they bought into the remedy, both of which are bogus."

===

Rick Santorum's Big Coal Buddies

The "local" company Santorum brags about helping was a coal mining giant that gave him tens of thousands of dollars during and after his time in Congress.

—By Kate Sheppard and Adam Serwer

Rick Santorum has received, and courted, plenty of comparisons with Mike Huckabee since his near-victory in the Iowa Caucuses, but not all of them have been earned. Yes, like Huckabee in 2008, Santorum has been heavily dependent on grassroots campaigning, with direct appeals to evangelical voters, and a veneer of folksy, blue-collar economic populism. But the comparison ought to stop there. What Santorum cannot match is Huckabee’s status as a genuine Washington outsider, someone untainted by the corrupt dealings inside the beltway. Indeed, Santorum’s record shows him to be deeply connected to the ethically unsavory and legally dubious world of DC influence-peddling.

Since losing his Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2006, Santorum has used his connections to land a series of highly-paid jobs. Consol Energy, a natural gas company specializing in “hydrofracking” and the fifth-largest donor to his 2006 campaign, paid him $142,000 for consulting work. He also earned $395,000 sitting on the board of United Health Services (UHS), a for-profit hospital chain whose CEO made contributions to his Senate campaigns and which stood to benefit from a big hike in Medicare payments Santorum proposed in 2003. (Incidentally, the Department of Justice sued UHS for Medicare and Medicaid fraud during Santorum’s four-year tenure on its board.) Santorum also earned paychecks from a religious advocacy group, a lobbying firm, and a think tank. For pushing legislation benefitting UHS and several other companies, one ethics group named Santorum to its “most corrupt Senators” list.

Santorum has made his post-Senate career doing the sort of quasi-lobbying that helped sink Newt Gingrich’s campaign in Iowa. But in fact, while still in office, he was a central actor in an even more sordid venture: The K Street Project. Started in 1989 by GOP strategist Grover Norquist and brought to prominence by former House majority leader Tom DeLay in 1995, the K Street Project was a highly organized effort to funnel Republican Congressional staffers into jobs at lobbying firms, trade organizations, and corporations, while attempting to block Democrats from those same posts. From 2001 until 2006, Santorum was the Project’s point man for the Senate, while House Majority Whip Roy Blunt manned the House side.

In 2006, the K Street Project was effectively forced to shut down amid public outcry; the following year, an ethics reform law made such outfits illegal. But in its heyday, it helped create an unprecedented revolving door between the White House, Congress and K Street, blurring distinctions between Republican policy and corporate welfare. As Elizabeth Drew put it in a 2005 New York Review of Bookspiece, “Democratic lobbyists have been pushed out of their jobs as a result; business associations who hire Democrats for prominent positions have been subject to retribution. They are told that they won’t be able to see the people on Capitol Hill they want to see.” Nicholas Confessore, in a groundbreaking 2003 Washington Monthlyexpose of the Project, detailed the goal bluntly: “First, move the party to K Street. Then move the government there, too.”

At the center of all this was Santorum. According to Confessore, Santorum conducted weekly breakfasts with lobbyists, and occasionally Congressmen and White House staff, during which he attempted to match Republican Hill staffers with K Street job openings. As Confessore put it, “Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican—a Senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated.” The group refused to meet with Democrats, and threatened sanctions against lobbies that did.

Revolving door tactics, until then de facto lobbying policy, were formalized and transformed into a “pay to play” system by the K Street Project. In 2003, after the top post at The Motion Picture Association of America went to a Democrat instead of a Republican, House Republicans reneged on an impending tax break, hitting the movie industry with a $1.5 billion bill. After the Democrat was chosen, Roll Callreported that “Santorum has begun discussing what the consequences are for the movie industry.” (Santorum, though he often denies his involvement in the K Street Project, more or less confirmed his involvement in the MPAA flap.) Later that year, the Washington Post revealed that the House Financial Services Committee pressured a consortium of mutual funds to oust a top lobbyist who was a Democrat in exchange for relaxing a pending investigation. After the smoke cleared, she was replaced by a Republican.

Whether the K Street Project was truly successful is up for debate. Confessore and Drew’s reports portray intimidated and marginalized Democratic lobbyists. According to a 2003 Washington Post story, a Republican National Committee official boasted that 33 of 36 top lobbying jobs had recently gone to Republicans. Former lobbyist Patrick Griffin, now an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University, told me that the project embodied the brazen crudeness of “DeLayism,” but also suggested that most lobbying firms and corporations were not “stupid” enough to purge Democratic staff and risk alienating much of the Hill.

What is clear is how much Santorum’s legacy is entangled with the two most corrupt political figures of the last decade: DeLay, and Jack Abramoff, who was said to have been involved in the Project. (Abramoff reportedly attended Santorum’s very first meeting, though Abramoff denied involvement and Santorum said in 2001 he couldn’t remember if he had.) Abramoff’s recent assertion that he “owned” politicians by dangling the promise of highly-paid lobbying gigs in front of powerful Hill staffers, though hyperbolic, is a fairly apt description of the K Street Project’s goals.

Yet, despite all this, Santorum’s communications director recently told the Washington Post that “Rick Santorum fought to destroy the good old boy network in Washington.” As an electoral strategy, of course, it makes sense for the former Senator to present himself as a Washington outsider and a paragon of personal ethics. But such claims of moral rectitude strain credulity. Santorum made a career polishing DC’s corrupt revolving door—only to walk through it himself at the first opportunity.

Simon van Zuylen-Wood is a Reporter-Researcher atThe New Republic.

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/99323/santorum-corruption-k-street-project

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/07/michele-bachmann-koch-brothers-2012

Richard John Santorum was a Republican member of the U.S. Senate from 1995-2007. He was defeated in the 2006 congressional elections by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

Bio

Background

Santorum was born May 10th, 1958 in Winchester, Virginia; raised in Butler County, Pennsylvania; and lists his residency as Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. His father was an Italian immigrant. Santorum received a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University in 1980 and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. Santorum first became actively involved in politics volunteering for the late Senator John Heinz. [1]

After graduating he became an administrative assistant to pro-choice Republican state Senator J. Doyle Corman (until 1986) and director of the Pennsylvania Senate's local government committee (until 1984, when he became the director of the Pennsylvania Senate's Transportation Committee (1984 – 1986). [2]

In 1986, Santorum received a law degree from the Dickinson School of Law, was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, and began practicing law in Pittsburgh. [3] While working at the law firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, Santorum represented the World Wrestling Federation. In that capacity, he argued that professional wrestling should be exempt from federal steroid regulations because it is not a sport. [4]

In 1990, at age 32, Santorum was elected to the United States House of Representatives, defeating a seven-term Democratic incumbent; he served two terms (1991–1995). A biogrpahical note states that as a member of the Gang of Seven, Santorum worked to expose congressional corruption by outing the guilty parties in the House banking scandal. [5]

In a biographical note, now no longer on his website, Santorum wrote that he "founded FightPac, a political action committee, when he was first elected to the Senate. FightPac supported Republican challengers who faced an uphill battle when running for the United States Congress. From 1995 through 2001, FightPac raised millions of dollars." [6] (Pdf)

It stated that at the time Santorum was "Founder and Chairman of America's Foundation, a federally registered political action committee which assists in raising funds for Republican candidates running for office nationwide. America's Foundation has raised more than $5 million since its inception in 2001, making it one of the most powerful political organizations in the country, according to Roll Call, a well-respected political newspaper in Washington, D.C." Santorum was also Campaign Chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election efforts in Pennsylvania. [7]

Senate Career

In 1994, Santorum was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating the incumbent Democrat, Harris Wofford. Santorum was re-elected in 2000.

Santorum has been active in welfare reform and government accountability. He is a self-described conservative who favors legislation that would restrict or prohibit abortion. Santorum has said he is personally against abortion and has expressed disapproval of homosexual acts, equating them with bestiality, polygamy and incest, issues he believes state legislatures should decide upon rather than courts.

In September 2005, Santorum gave a speech that outlined the future of conservatism at the Heritage Foundation's First International Conservative Conference on Social Justice. [8] In November 2005, he adapted his speech into an op-ed piece for the political website TownHall.com outlining his vision for "Compassionate Conservatism." [9]

In January 2005, Santorum stated his intention to run for Whip after the 2006 elections. [10]

Iraq War

Santorum voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq in Oct. 2002.

For more information see the chart of U.S. Senate votes on the Iraq War.

Positions and Views

• Welfare Reform In 1996 Santorum served as Chairman of the GOP Task Force on Welfare Reform and was the author and key sponsor of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

• Evolution In 2001, Santorum tried unsuccessfully to insert language into the No Child Left Behind bill that would have required that "a full range of views" on human origins be taught in public schools. This so-called "Santorum Amendment" attempted to relativize the teaching of biological evolution in public school classrooms. The amendment would have required schools to discuss controversies surrounding scientific topics, and gave the theory of evolution as an example; many people interpreted this to mean that intelligent design would have to be taught in science classrooms. The Senate passed a weaker, non-binding version of the amendment, which two Ohio Congressmen have invoked to suggest that the state should include "intelligent design" in its science standards. During an interview with National Public Radio in 2005, Santorum clarified his views, saying he is "not comfortable with intelligent design being taught in the science classroom."

• Religion Santorum and John Kerry (D-MA) are the lead sponsors of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act (WRFA), which would require employers to accommodate the religious observances of their employees as long as providing such accommodations would not impose an "undue hardship" upon the employer. Thus, employers would be required to afford employees flexible work shifts so that they could observe religious holy days and to permit employees to wear religiously-required garb at work. Versions of the WRFA have been introduced in 1997, 2000, and 2003, but so far have failed to be enacted.

• Privacy Rights Santorum has frequently stated that he does not believe a "right to privacy" exists under the Constitution, even within marriage. Thus he has been particularly critical of the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which held that the Constitution guarantees the aforementionied right, and based upon it, overturned a law prohibiting the sale and use birth control.

• National Weather Service data On April 14, 2005, Santorum introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 to "clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service (NWS), and for other purposes". This legislation, if enacted, will provide for equal access by the public and private sector to the data collected by the National Weather Service. It prohibits the NWS from competing with private sector entities, such as AccuWeather in Santorum's home state, for the publication of weather data. Opponents of this bill contend that it will prevent the NWS from providing user-friendly presentation of the data it collects, thereby assisting private sector weather services in retaining their own customers.

• Social Security Santorum is also a supporter of partial privatization of Social Security. Following the 2004 presidential election, Santorum has held forums across Pennsylvania on the topic.

• CARE Act The cornerstone of Santorum's current legislative agenda is the Charity, Aid, Recover and Empowerment (CARE) Act. The CARE Act provides incentives for charitable giving, opportunities for low-income families to build their individual assets, and equity between faith-based and secular organizations as they provide charitable social services. "It Is Time To Pass CARE" by Rick Santorum Santorum has worked closely with Senator Joe Lieberman in a bipartisan effort to pass the CARE Act.

• Abortion Santorum sponsored the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 which outlaws a specific late-term abortion procedure. On November 5, 2003, President George W. Bush signed it into law.

Main article: Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003

2006 reelection campaign

Santorum was challenged in the Republican primary by John Featherman, a self-described social liberal and fiscal conservative, who had previously ran against Santorum in the 2000 Senate election as a Libertarian. Santorum defeated Featherman handily.

In the general election, the Democrats nominated Pennsylvania State Treasurer Bob Casey to face Santorum. Casey defeated Santorum by a margin of 59% to 41%. [11]

Post congressional career

Joins Ethics and Public Policy Center

In January 2007, following his reelection defeat, Santorum joined the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank devoted to “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” Specifically, Santorum was hired to establish and direct a program, titled America's Enemies, “focused on identifying, studying, and heightening awareness of the threats posed to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces that are increasingly casting a shadow over our future and violating religious liberty around the world.” [12] [13]

Money in politics

cid=N00001380&cycle=2006

Controversy

Santorum has attracted support and criticism because of his socially conservative and outspoken views, primarily because of his stance on same-sex marriage, homosexuality, and abortion. His views on social and cultural issues are presented in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute of Wilmington, Delaware.

Homosexuality

See also, Wikipedia article on Santorum controversy

A controversy arose following Santorum's statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press published April 20, 2003. In response to a question about how to prevent sexual abuse of children by priests, Santorum described homosexual acts as part of a class of deviant sexual behavior that are "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family." [14] Santorum further stated that he does not agree with the extension of privacy rights dependent on Griswold v. Connecticut.

Santorum said the priests were engaged in "a basic homosexual relationship" with "post-pubescent men," and went on to say that he had "a problem with homosexual acts," that the right to privacy "doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution," that "whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, whether it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family," and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts which "undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family." When the Associated Press reporter asked if homosexuals should not then have sex, Santorum replied, "Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —". [15]

Democratic politicians, gay rights advocates such as Dan Savage, and other liberal commentators condemned the statements, while Republican politicians, religious conservatives, and other conservative commentators supported Santorum and called the condemnations unfair. Some critics argued that Santorum's position might also affect heterosexuals, as Santorum said that he did not believe there is a Constitutional right to engage in private consensual sexual acts.

Santorum did not retract his remarks, stating that they were not intended to equate homosexuality with incest and adultery, but rather as a critique of the specific legal position that the right to privacy prevents the government from regulating consensual acts among adults (such as bigamy, incest, etc.).

On July 20 2004, while debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, Santorum said "defending marriage" was the "ultimate homeland security." [16]

Residency and tuition controversy

In November 2004, a controversy developed over education costs for Santorum's children. Santorum's legal address is in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. But as a Senator, he lives at his home in Leesburg, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. (Leesburg is located about one hour's drive west of Washington, D.C., and about 90 minutes' drive south of the Pennsylvania border). Santorum's five older children received education through the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School with 80 percent of tuition costs paid by the Penn Hills School District. At a meeting in November 2004, the Penn Hills School District announced that it did not believe Santorum met the qualifications for residency status since he and his family spend most of the year in Virginia. They demanded repayment of tuition costs totaling $67,000.

Santorum's supporters said that the controversy is politically-motivated as the school board is controlled by Democrats (Erin Vecchio, the school board member who first publicly raised the issue, is the chair of the local Democratic Party). They also noted that since Santorum votes in Penn Hills and pays property and school taxes there, he is entitled to the same privileges as any other Penn Hills resident and he should not be deprived of these privileges as a result of his service in the U.S. Senate.

In November 2004, the Penn Hills Progress, a local paper, reported that the Santorum and his wife pay about $2,000 per year in property taxes on the home they own. They also found that another couple - possibly renters - were registered voters at the same address.[17]

After the controversy developed, Santorum said he would make other arrangements for his children's education, but insisted that he did not owe the school board any back tuition. On July 8, 2005, a Pennsylvania state hearing officer ruled that the Penn Hills School District had not filed objections to Santorum's residency in a timely manner and dismissed the complaint. Santorum hailed the ruling as a victory against what he termed "baseless and politically motivated charges." Santorum told reporters that "[n]o one's children — and especially not small, school-age children — should be used as pawns in the 'politics of personal destruction.'" [18]

In the 2000 campaign, Santorum's opponent, Ron Klink, ran an attack ad featuring an image of the senator's house in Virginia calling him a "hypocrite." The ad noted that in his 1990 campaign for Congress Santorum had run attack ads criticising the then Democratic Representative Doug Walgren for buying a house and living in McLean, Virginia. A news report noted that "when asked about Santorum's comments in 1990, his spokeswoman said that when Santorum was a congressman, he did not own a home outside Pennsylvania." [19] (Sub req'd.)

Santorum's Family Budget

On March 10, 2006 the American Prospect issued a report on Santorum's finances that reveals that he has received a home loan from a campaign contributor and used money from his political action committee in a variety of questionable ways.[20]

According to the report, Santorum received a second mortgage on his Herndon, Virginia mansion from Philadelphia Trust Company, "a new private bank catering to 'affluent investors and institutions'". The loan to Santorum is questionable because the bank's policy is to only offer loans to clients with investment assets of $250,000 or more, a sum that Santorum does not come close to reporting in his annual personal financial filings. Santorum and his leadership PAC received $24,000 from Philadelphia Trust Company's executives and directors.[21]

The use of funds by Santorum's leadership PAC is also a source of intrigue. The PACs filings show numerous charges at grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and coffee shops (66 trips to Starbucks and over 100 to a local Washington, D.C. coffee shop). The Prospect compared Santorum's PAC expenditures to "to five other senators' leadership PAC expenses shows that those PACs do not list expenditures on items such as convenience stores or coffee shops, with a couple of exceptions for out-of-state travel."[22] Santorum's expenditures at coffee shops, fast food restaurants, and grocery stores accounted for 8.6 percent of his total PAC expenditures, "while comparable numbers for Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, his partner in the GOP Senate leadership, were $29,524 and 1.6 percent."[23]

Principally as a result of this and the previously mentioned tuition scandal, Santorum was named in 2006 by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as one of the twenty most corrupt US legislators. [24]

Comments about the Boston Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal

In 2005, a controversy developed over comments about Boston, Massachusetts Santorum made in a 2002 article about the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Santorum, a Roman Catholic himself, wrote:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. [25]

These comments came to wider attention through an opinion column in the Philadelphia Daily News on June 24, 2005. Columnist John Baer cited Santorum's article and wrote:

I'd remind you this is the same Senate leader who recently likened Democrats fighting to save the filibuster to Nazis, who once equated homosexuality with bestiality and who claimed the Catholic priest pedophile scandal in Boston should be no surprise since Boston is 'a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America.' [26]

Santorum's remarks were criticized, especially in Massachusetts. On July 12, 2005, Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory called on Santorum to explain his statement, and reported that Robert Traynham, Santorum's Director of Communcations, told him: "It's an open secret that you have Harvard University and MIT that tend to tilt to the left in terms of academic biases. I think that's what the senator was speaking to." Julie Teer, a spokeswoman for Governor of Massachusetts, Republican Mitt Romney, said, "What happened with the church sex abuse scandal was a tragedy, but it had nothing to do with geography or the culture of Boston." [27]

Later that day Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) delivered a personal rebuke to Santorum on the Senate floor, saying: "The people of Boston are to blame for the clergy sexual abuse? That is an irresponsible, insensitive and inexcusable thing to say." [28] Santorum has stood by his 2002 article and has not apologized.

On July 21, 2005, Rush Limbaugh interviewed Santorum about Kennedy's speech. Santorum said that he was being targeted by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he said coordinated with the media to publicize Kennedy's speech. He argued that his statement about Boston was taken out of context from an article he had written three years earlier. Santorum agreed with Limbaugh's summary that it was "no surprise that the center of the Catholic Church abuse took place in very liberal, or perhaps the nation's most liberal area, Boston." Santorum reiterated his broader theme of a cultural connection: "[I]t's ... no surprise that the culture affects people's behavior. ... [T]he liberal culture — the idea that ... sexual inhibitions should be put aside and people should be able to do whatever they want to do, has an impact on people and how they behave." When asked why Boston specifically was mentioned, Santorum pointed out in July 2002, the outrage of American Catholics, and his, was focused on the Archdiocese of Boston.

Hurricane Katrina

Santorum remarked to a Pittsburgh TV station WTAE on September 4, 2005 regarding the evacuation warnings given for Hurricane Katrina:

I mean people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings ... There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.[29]

He was criticized for this statement by the campaign of Bob Casey, Jr., his Democratic opponent for the Senate.[30] On September 6, in a follow-up interview with WTAE, Santorum said:

Obviously most of the people here in this case, an overwhelming majority of people just literally couldn't have gotten out on their own," he said. "Many didn't have cars ... And that really was a failure on the part of local officials in not making transportation available to get people out.[31]

On September 8, during an interview with public radio station WITF in Harrisburg, PA, Santorum said:

the weather service gave no warning, or not sufficient warning in my opinion, as to the effects when it came on land in Florida as a Category One hurricane ... Predictions were that it wasn't going to go out to the gulf and affect the western gulf coast, it was going to sort of head up to Florida or go right off the coast of Florida ... I'm not going to suggest when it comes to Katrina that there were any major errors. I don't know. This is something that I think needs to be investigated. [32] [33]

On September 9, Senator Jim DeMint (R.,S.C.) issued a press release stating "After reviewing the actions taken by the National Weather Service, I am convinced that this was one of the most accurate hurricane predictions we have ever seen." [34]

In April 2005 Santorum introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 which proposed to prevent the National Weather Service from competing with private sector weather services. Santorum had claimed that the overlap with commercial weather services "detracts from NWS’s core missions of maintaining a modern and effective meteorological infrastructure, collecting comprehensive observational data, and issuing warnings and forecasts of severe weather that imperil life and property." [35] [36] By the end of the 2005, Santorum's bill had failed to gain a co-sponor and had not managed to gain support from the relevant committee.

In February 2006, Santorum sought to revive his stalled bill, issuing a media release defending his proposal and lashing out at the opposition to his bill. [37]

AccuWeather, one of the private weather companies, is based in Pennsylvania. The founder, CEO and president of AccuWeather, Dr. Joel Myers, contributed $500 to Santorum on March 9, 2005. Joel's brother Barry Myers contributed $250 on the same day, as did Mrs Lee Myers. [38]

K Street Project

Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating since the 2000 election of George W. Bush the Republican majority in Congress has waged a campaign to get lobbying firm, located on Washington's K Street, to only hire Republican lobbyists. [39] This was called the K Street Project and was originally developed by Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and Grover Norquist. Santorum has also been at the center of this project, as the Senate's pointman for the project he held meetings every Tuesday to discuss lobbying openings and work with Republican lobbyists and leaders to plot strategy. Nick Confessore wrote about the meetings in the Washington Monthly,

Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort." [40]

In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal that erupted in Congress in January of 2006 Santorum was made the pointman on reforming lobbying rules by the Senate leadership. [41] He came under fire from critics who viewed the K Street Project and the aggressive badgering of lobbyists by the Republican leadership as leading to the abuses of lobbying during the Jack Abramoff years. Santorum quickly denied that he had ever been part of the K Street Project. [42] Santorum also denied ever knowing Jack Abramoff despite the fact that Abramoff was one of the original lobbyists to attend Santorum's meetings.[43] In January Santorum also claimed to have stopped holding the meetings in an attempt to appease the reform-minded. However, in March of 2006 the Washington Post reported, "After saying in January that he would end his regular meetings with lobbyists, Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), the third-ranking GOP leader in the Senate, has continued to meet with many of the same lobbyists at the same time and on the same day of the week."[44]

Use and Abuse of Hitler Comparisons

On March 3, 2005, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) was taken to task for a remark he made "making an outrageous and reprehensible comparison between Adolf Hitler's Nazis and a Senate GOP plan to block Democrats from filibustering," at which time Senator Santorum "called for Byrd to retract his remarks." [45]

On May 19, 2005, Senator Santorum had this to say regarding President George W. Bush's judicial nominations before Congress and the possibility of Republicans' use of the nuclear option: Note: not an official transcript

"And we shouldn't go mucking around in this institution and changing the way we've done things, particularly when it comes to the balance of powers between the three branches of government. And the independence of one of those branches of the judiciary. We must tread very carefully before we go radically changing the way we do things that has served this country well, and we have radically changed the way we do things here. 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. ..."

Operation Good Neigbor Foundation

An earlier version of Santorum's official biographical note states that he "founded the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation which unites corporations, businesses, and individuals across America to work directly with grassroots organizations whose sole purpose is to address the special needs of the underprivileged, the vulnerable and the indefensible citizens of the Unites States." [46]. In March 2006 the Philadelphia Daily News reported that Preferred Real Estate contributed $25,000 to the foundation in 2002. The contribution, which was the largest received by the foundation, was receiced "as the senator was working to win as much as $8.5 million in federal aid for the donor's project in Delaware County." [47] Sanotrum officials denied that the company had been given any special favours. Preferred Real Estate confimred that Santorum had assisted in winning funding for the redevelopment of an abandoned power plant but denied the contribution was connected in any way. The company's chief executive officer, Michael O'Neill, made donations of more than $1 million that year, a spokesman said. [48]

The according to the report, "officials from Preferred Real Estate and their spouses have donated $22,350 to Santorum's re-election campaign and $6,000 to his political-action committee, America's Foundation." [49]

2006 reelection campaign

Payments to staff

According to campaign records released in July 2006, Santorum’s 2006 re-election campaign and political action committee paid a dozen members of his personal and leadership staff more than $82,000 between the beginning of 2005 and July 2006. This included more than $42,000 to Senate Republican Conference Staff Director Mark Rodgers and more than $24,000 to Conference and personal office spokesman Robert Traynham. [50]

Green Party signatures controversy

During Santorum's Senate reelection campaign against Bob Casey, six of his staffers actively collected voter signatures to help place Green Party candidate Carl Rominelli on the fall ballot. In addition to collecting signatures, Republicans and Santorum supporters invested more than $60,000 into the petition drive. Democratic officials have accused the campaign of collecting multiple signatures by the same person, in addition to fake names. T.J. Rooney, the state Democratic Party chairman, indicated that the party may challenge the eligibility of Rominelli to be on the ballot due to petition irregularities. [51]

On September 6, 2006, Virginia Davis, a Santorum campaign spokesperson, admitted the campaign steered money to help Rominelli candidacy, which would likely peel some votes away from Casey. Davis stated, “We encouraged those who inquired to help with the Green Party effort...We welcome Carl Romanelli's entry into the race because at least he's expressed a real interest in being up front and honest about where he is on the issues.” [52]

On September 22, 2006, a count of the signatures needed to put Romanelli on the ballot was halted by a PA judge. Romanelli was about 9000 signatures short of the 67,000 that he needed to earn his ballot spot. [53]

Committees and Affiliations

Committees in the 109th Congress (2005-2007)

• Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
  • Subcommittee on Research Nutrition and General Legislation - Chair
  • Subcommittee on Production and Price Competitiveness

• Senate Special Committee on Aging
• Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
  • Subcommittee on Financial Institutions
  • Subcommittee on Housing and Transportation
  • Subcommittee on Securities and Investment

• Senate Committee on Finance
  • Subcommittee on Health Care -
  • Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy - Chair
  • Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight

• Senate Committee on Rules and Administration

Coalitions and Caucuses

• Senate Transportation Committee, Director, 1984-1986
• Senate Local Government Committee, Director, 1982-1986
• Congressional Volunteer Firefighters Caucus
• Health Care Task Force
• National Republican Senatorial Committee
• Chair, Renewal Alliance
• Senate Health Care Task Force
• Chair, Senate Republican Conference
• Senate Rural Health Caucus
• Senate Steel Caucus.

Boards and other Affiliations

• Member, Italian Heritage Society
• Member, Italian Sons and Daughters of America
• Board Member, Mount Lebanon Extended Day Program
• Member, Pennsylvania State Bar Association
• Member, Rotary

More Background Data

• Background information on Rick Santorum from Project Vote Smart

• Interest group scorecard ratings for Rick Santorum from Project Vote Smart

• Voting record for Rick Santorum from the Washington Post database

• Information on Rick Santorum from Congress Merge

Wikipedia also has an article on Rick Santorum. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

• Rick Santorum's Senate profile at On the Issues (2000).
• "The Bankrollers: Lobbyists’ Payments to the Lawmakers They Court, 1998 - 2006," Public Citizen, Congress Watch, May 2006. (73-page pdf).

Articles and Resources

Resources

• Interview with Jon Stewart, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, July 25, 2005. (Other Daily Show interviews with members of Congress.)
• Official U.S. Senate website
• Recent Press Releases posted on Santorum's Senate website.
• RickSantorum.com, Santorum's 2006 campaign website.
• "It Takes a Family"
• Technorati Search: Rick Santorum
• Google News Search: Rick Santorum
• Yahoo! News Search: Rick Santorum
• Power Trips: How much does Rick Santorum travel?
• Open Secrets - 2006 congressional races database
• Compare where Rick Santorum stands on the issues - whereIstand.com

Local blogs and discussion sites

• Gort 42
• The All-Spin Zone
• *Snakes on a Senate*, a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee website.

Articles & Commentary

SourceWatch/Congresspedia Resources

• Progressive Policy Council

Books

• Santorum, Rick It Takes a Family : Conservatism and the Common Good (2005) ISBN 1932236295
• Santorum, Rick Rick Santorum (2005) ISBN 0976966808

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rick_Santorum

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