http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/The-Santorum-that-America-doesnt-know.html

Wednesday, January 4, 2012
The Rick Santorum that America doesn't know


You’ve probably heard all the good ones about GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by now. The one about his “Google problem.” The one about the “man-on-dog sex” (prompting the greatest journalistic response ever, when the reporter told Santorum that he was “sort of freaking me out.”) The one about how the Catholic Church’s priest sex abuse scandal was caused by Boston liberalism, or the one about how President Obama should be anti-abortion because he’s black and abortion is like slavery. And so on and so forth.

That’s the Rick Santorum that America has come to know over the last 15 years or so – an unapologetic and almost goofy culture warrior whose obsessions – like thinking that gay sex is a gateway drug to bestiality – make him a hero to social conservatives and often a laughing stock to most everyone else. Santorum’s rise in the 2012 presidential race has people talking about whether his views on social issues – talk of annulling gay marriages, seemingly questioning the right to even birth control --- make him too extreme to be president – and that’s an important topic to discuss.

But I also think Santorum’s weird sexual bluster can obscure who he really is, and what truly matters about his suddenly surging campaign. As a Philadelphia-based political reporter, I arrived in town just seven months after Santorum became my state’s junior senator. I followed his 12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I think people obsessing on the “man-on-dog” stuff are missing the bigger picture. For one thing, the self-styled “family values” expert has a surprisingly ambiguous record with his own personal ethics. Also, Santorum’s legislative record shows that his real workaday agenda was not so much waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1 Percent, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party. You could say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that would be giving him too much credit.

Here’s a Pennsylvanian’s brief guide to the Rick Santorum you don’t know:

1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity – which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.

2. Likewise, a so-called “leadership PAC” created by Santorum that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America’s Foundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates, less -- and typically far less -- than any other “leadership PACs.” What America’s Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum’s then hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures at Wal-Mart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC’s expenses – paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen and lobbyists – were “unconventional,” at best and arguably not legal. Santorum also funded his large Leesburg “McMansion” with a $500,000 mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.

3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with the everyday work of raising political cash. In 2005, Santorum made headlines – not all positive – for visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy.What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baer later exposed was that the real reason he was in the Tampa, Fla., area was to collect money at a $250,000 fundraiser organized by executives of Outback Steakhouses, a company that shared Santorum’s passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses and other rank-and-file workers. Santorum’s efforts were also aided by his unusual mode of travel: Wal-Mart’s corporate jet. And he canceled a public meeting on Social Security reform "out of respect for the Schiavo family" even as the closed fundraisers went on.

4. Santorum didn’t seem to be against government waste when it came to his family. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginia and rarely if ever seemed to use the small house that he claimed as his legal residence, in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. So Pennsylvania voters were shocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 for the home cyberschooling of five of Santorum’s kids, hundreds of miles away in a different state. The cash=strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of its money back from Santorum.

5. Washington's lobbyist culture -- Santorum was soaking in it. The ex-Pennsylvania senator spent much of his final years in government trying to downplay and defend his involvement in the so-called "K Street Project," an effort created by GOP uber-lobbyist and tax-cutting fanatic Grover Norquist and future felon and House majority whip Tom DeLay. By all accounts, Santorum was the Senate's "point man" on the K Street Project and he met with Norquist -- at least occasionally and perhaps frequently -- to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence other Republicans.

6. Santorum had no problem with big government if it was supporting his campaign contributors in Big Pharma.It's little wonder that Santorum ultimately supported Medicare Part D, a prescription drug plan for the elderly that has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit and was drafted in such a way to best help pharmaceutical companies maximize profits from all the unbridled spending. When Santorum was defeated for a third term in 2006, an internal memo at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline said his departure from Washington "creates a big hole that we need to fill.

7. The defender of family values was also slavish in his devotion to a large American corporate behemoth, Wal-Mart: In the wake of the report about Santorum's travel in the Wal-Mart corporate jet, I counted the many ways that Santorum had done the bidding of the world's largest retailer in the Senate, including battling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and seeking to make changes in overtime rules that woulld benefit the company and hurt its blue-collar workforce, tort reform to limit lawsuits against what is said to be the world's most-sued company, and changes in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate tax that would benefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.

8. Santorum has frequently insisted that his political values are guided by his religious values, and that John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech describing a separtion between the two had done "much harm" in America. But despite inviting such scrutiny, there's been little discussion of Santorum's ties to ultra-conservative movements within the Roman Catholic Church Santorum's comments about JFK were made in Rome in 2002 when he spoke at a 100th birthday event for Jose Maria Escrivade Balaguer, founder of the secretive group within the church known as Opus Dei. Although Santorum says he is not a member of Opus Dei -- which has been criticized by some for alleged cult-like qualities and ties to ultra-conservative regimes around the world -- he did receive written permission to attend the ultra-conservative St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Va., where Mass is still conducted in Latin and a long-time priest and many parishioners are members of Opus Dei, mingling with political conservatives like Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and former FBI director Louis Freeh.

9. Santorum isn't above big government-funded boondoggles -- when they're linked to his allies and campaign contributors. Consider the type of project that the Tea Party loves to hate, a $750 million energy plant in Schuylkill County, Pa., that was to convert coal to liquids but needed massive subsidies. Santorum boasted of his rule in securing an $100 million federal loan for the project -- which had hired Pennsylvania's top Republican Party power broker of the 2000s, Bob Asher, as a lobbyist and paid him at least $900,000. Despite Santorum's efforts, the plant has not been built.

10. Santorum apparently believes in "an entitlement culture" when it comes for former politicians. After Tuesday night's virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, the Pennsylvanian spoke eloquently about his immigrant grandfather working for decades in the Pennsylvania coal fields and his massive hands; the grandson probably won't have that problem. Losing an election in 2006 allowed Santorum to become a poster child for how ex-pols quickly and easily cash in in America, as a lawyer-rainmaker and joining a "think tank" (that for a time was called America's Enemies) and as an analyst for the Fox News Channel and as a board member for Universal Health Services, an ethically challenged company where executives had supported his Senate campaigns. The New York Times' Gail Collins noted that Santorum had earned $970,000 in 2010 despite seeming sort of unemployed.

The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of self-interest, loose ethical standards, and careerism in a career that's been largely devoted not so much to the social causes about which he makes headlines as looking out for the interests of big corporations and the wealthiest 1 Percent of Americans. It's a shame that more voters don't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually deserves.


Posted by Will Bunch @ 11:08 PM

With Former Sen. Rick Santorum's rise in the Iowa polls and renewed interest in his candidacy, The Huffington Post looks back at a story it published this past June on the presidential candidate's connection to a troubled hospital chain.

WASHINGTON -- T. entered The Pines Residential Treatment Center, located in Portsmouth, Va., needing help for his emotional disorders, gender identity issues and violent outbursts. This month, after a year and a half there, the eighth-grader left the facility with herpes.

Heather Pinon, T.'s sister, believes he got the sexually transmitted disease after having sex with other boys in his restricted unit. There might be at least one other culprit. Both Pinon and the boy's adoptive mother, Lorraine Honeycutt, believe that he also carried on a sexual relationship with a Pines employee. Pinon says she knows of letters that hint at such an affair.

"The information was given to the therapist," Pinon said. "The therapist destroyed the letters. When we asked my brother about it, he confirmed that he did write the letters and that he had a special relationship with that staff member."

The staff member, they said, was assigned to T. to prevent him from having sex with other kids.

The disease was just another complication in a life that had many; T. called this latest his "herpes thing." But it still devastated the boy who wasn't yet old enough for algebra. "I felt extra scared," he told The Huffington Post in a recent interview. "I wanted to cry and that's all I did for two days is cry when they did tell me that."

For The Pines, T.'s diagnosis was just part of another day. The Pines is the biggest for-profit residential treatment center in Virginia. During the past three years, it has also kicked up more abuse and neglect allegations than any other facility there, state records show, earning an unprecedented level of scrutiny from investigators with the state's licensing office and Office of Human Rights. The facility, which covers three campuses that span the tidewater region -- Brighton, Kempsville and Crawford -- has routinely faced state orders to correct itself, according to licensing records.

The Pines may be exceptional in terms of racking up state violations, but it also boasts a singular distinction: The board of the center's parent company, Universal Health Services, which bought The Pines in November, included former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

Santorum, who recently launched a presidential bid, resigned from the UHS board on June 15, a week after the publication of a Huffington Post report on UHS facilities during his tenure. The former senator had served on the UHS board since 2007, a period which saw the company twice sued by the Department of Justice.

Santorum's presidential campaign did not return calls seeking comment.

The health care chain has faced accusations of Medicaid fraud and employee grievances over pay. At one facility, a teen died while being restrained by staff. The death was ruled a homicide.

* * * * *
The Pines had long teetered on the brink of a shutdown, but the UHS takeover of the facility appears to have erased what standards had been put in place. A short time after the facility fell under UHS control in mid-November, it earned serious punitive sanctions. Two months into the company's tenure, a sense of lawlessness pervaded the facility, according to a review of documents obtained by The Huffington Post through a public records request.

North Carolina, which had sent more than 100 kids to The Pines, stopped doing so this past spring, when that state's Division of Medical Assistance, along with other agencies, found widespread and systemic breakdowns in how the facility treated its children, according to the documents. In mid-April, the state concluded that it had to pull all 140 or so of its children -- including T. -- out of The Pines, according to email records.

Virginia has since barred new admissions and slapped the facility with a provisional license. According to the documents, Virginia inspectors found that Pines staff had been caught watching a pornographic DVD with residents, that one resident admitted to selling drugs and buying drugs from a Pines employee and that records concerning the care of one resident had been "fabricated."

In a statement released to The Huffington Post, Universal Health Services defended its practices: "The Pines management team is continually reviewing clinical programming, procedures and staff training to enhance the provision of safe, effective, and patient-centered treatment," the company statement reads. "The Pines is actively addressing any and all concerns relating to the treatment of our residents."

UHS would neither confirm nor deny whether T. contracted herpes at The Pines. The company stated that it had investigated whether an employee had carried on an affair with a teen and ruled evidence of such a relationship "unsubstantiated." T., for his part, denied the tryst in his interview with The Huffington Post, admitting only to having feelings for a staff member. Pinon, his sister, says the family was never interviewed nor notified as part of any UHS inquiry into the matter. "The only evidence of the affair was destroyed by their staff member," she said, referring to T.'s writings to the staffer.

[HuffPost readers: If you've ever worked for UHS or have been a resident or patient at a UHS facility, we want to hear from you. Tell us your stories by emailing jason.cherkis@huffingtonpost.com. Please include your phone number if you're willing to do an interview.]

He asked for it, just like every other candidate when they took the lead. Bet the people who voted for him are either trying to justify it or asking themselves WTF????

Did you hear that most of his stops in NH he has been boo'ed off the podium? The crowds are asking him about gay rights and his stance on privacy issues on sexual relations....and they aren't liking his answers!

In a couple, the crowd was yelling at him so bad he left the place saying "I tried" and calling the crowd names in front of the press.

His little light is gonna get buried under a bushel in NH

Will be an interesting debate tomorrow!

Indeed!

The MSM is saying "Santorum greeted by large crowds in NH!" and spinning it.... while elsewhere on the www, the iPhone vids are showing the crowds, but with a whole nother picture painted

This little piggy worked for News Corp...He's a Rupert boy! No wonder Faux Noise and the others won't dirty him!

He's worse than the Grinch in the Senate, and straight into lobbying for the power brokers who paid him....bribed him....as a Senator.

An influence peddler (after Delay fiasco even, most corrupt member of Congress 2007), and an extreme religious zealot.... sounds like a good combination and definition for "Domestic Terrorist" to me!


http://news.yahoo.com/santorums-income-soared-since-left-senate-084720661.html

Santorum's income has soared since he left Senate
By ANDREW MIGA | AP – 2 hrs 33 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Losing his Senate seat might have been the best thing that ever happened to Rick Santorum's bank account.

In 2006, the Republican presidential hopeful earned about $200,000 from his Senate salary and book royalties. From January 2010 to August 2011, he earned at least $1.3 million as he cashed in on his 16 years in Congress by working as a corporate consultant, political pundit and board member.

The financial disclosure report Santorum filed last August shows how his income has changed. Many voters are taking their first hard look at the former congressman and two-term senator from Pennsylvania following his near-win in the Iowa caucuses.

Santorum's resume contrasts with campaign rhetoric that casts him as an outsider who would shake up Washington. It also appears at odds with the image that Santorum stresses as a candidate with hardscrabble roots in blue-collar Pennsylvania and as the grandson of an Italian immigrant coal miner.

Much of the money Santorum earned in recent years was for his work as a board member for a large health care company and consulting for a Pennsylvania energy company and a Washington lobbying firm.

Santorum earned a $165,200 Senate salary and $32,245 in book royalties, according to his 2006 disclosure report.

At one time the No. 3 GOP leader in the Senate, Santorum was of comparatively modest means during his two terms. He has followed the same revolving-door path that many former members of Congress pursue when they move to the public sector, trading on his knowledge and political connections as a congressional insider with groups that advocate for corporations and other interests. He was not a registered lobbyist but served as a corporate consultant.

"It's a well-worn path of former members of Congress using their former position in Congress to cash in," said Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "It's ironic that he portrays himself in his campaign as a Washington outsider. He's a quintessential insider. He's an incredibly rich, highly paid consultant."

A Santorum campaign spokesman did not return messages Friday seeking comment.

Santorum's service on the board of a hospital conglomerate provided much of his income in recent years.

Santorum reported receiving $395,414 in director fees and stock options from Universal Health Services Inc., a hospital management company. He left the board last year as he launched his presidential bid. Santorum listed between $100,001 and $250,000 in Universal Health stock.

Santorum's consulting work earned him six-figure fees in recent years, his disclosure form showed.

Consol Energy, based in Pennsylvania, paid Santorum $142,500 for his consulting services.

Santorum reported that the American Continental Group, a Washington lobbying group, paid him $65,000 in consulting fees. The firm's lengthy client list includes Microsoft Corp., Comcast Corp. and the American Gaming Association.

"The senator did general consulting and provided his advice and opinion on which way the Senate may go, based on his record in the Senate and his history in leadership," said David Urban, president of American Continental Group. "He's very smart tactically."

Santorum left the firm last June when he formally began running for president.

Santorum also reported earning $125,000 for consulting work for The Clapham Group, a Virginia-based consulting firm that works with faith-based groups, among others. Clients include the American Bible Society and The Poverty Forum, according to its website.

Santorum's earnings included payments from a conservative think tank and media outlets.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington paid Santorum $217,385 as a senior fellow.

News Corp. in New York paid Santorum $239,153 for his appearances on Fox News Channel. Salem Radio paid Santorum $83,999 for his work as a radio talk show host. Santorum was guest host for "Bill Bennett's Morning in America" radio show. The Philadelphia Inquirer paid Santorum $23,000 for columns he wrote for the paper.

Santorum's income after he left the Senate helped him increase his investments and savings for his family. The disclosures don't show specific amounts invested, but instead offer a range of values of investments.

The most recent form shows a series of new investment accounts, including college savings funds for five of his seven children with investments valued between $25,000 and $375,000; individual retirement accounts with investments ranging between $173,000 and $720,000; and a brokerage account with investments valued in the range of $10,000 to $150,000.

When he left the Senate, he reported retirement accounts with investments valued between $21,000 and $140,000.

His disclosure also shows more than $52,000 in cash in checking accounts.

‘Over-flow crowds’: Local officials allege that Santorum campaign rejects larger space in order ‘to make sure the venue was packed’

By Chris Moody The Ticket – 16 hrs ago (AP)

DUBLIN, N.H. -- "Look at the crowds!" Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum exclaimed after a packed townhall meeting here Friday afternoon. "They were out the doors, you can't get folks in!"

Indeed, Santorum spoke to an overflow crowd again in New Hampshire, and the campaign had to turn people away to stand in a separate room where they watched the candidate speak on a projector. Those in the overflow room who had questions were out of luck.

But it didn't have to be that way.

The campaign rejected an offer from the Durbin School, which hosted the event, to move his speech to a larger venue that could have accommodated everyone present, school and law enforcement officials said. The school's gym is next door, but the campaign organizer didn't agree to the plan.

"They wanted to make sure the venue was packed," Andy Hungerford, the school's head of buildings and grounds, told Yahoo News. He said the campaign told him specifically that the reason was to give the feeling that the crowds were overflowing. He suggested use of the gym after receiving a report that venue organizers in a nearby town were having overcrowding problems.

Tom Vanderbilt, chief of the Dublin Fire Department, confirmed the story.

"We got a gym that fits 500 people and they said no," Vanderbilt told Yahoo News. "We had a better venue, and they didn't want it."


When asked about the arrangement with the school, Santorum's spokesman denied that the campaign would have rejected an offer for a space that could fit everyone.

"I don't believe the campaign would have turned it down," Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told Yahoo News. "I can almost guarantee that it wasn't a strategic decision so we could say it was an overflow room." Gidley said he could not elaborate because he was not involved with the planning of the event.

Of course, if the Santorum campaign did deliberately elect to use the smaller venue, it wouldn't have been doing anything out of the ordinary. Managing the optics of an event to maximize the appearance of mass enthusiasm is a classic campaign tactic, and virtually every candidate is guilty of doing it. Nor is this to suggest that Santorum isn't drawing large crowds--Hungerford estimated there were about 300 people here to see the candidate, and Santorum packed a 650-person auditorium Thursday night. Nevertheless, the case of the abandoned school gym does offer an instructive peek into how these things often work out on the trail.

They are all going to go after Paul tonight..

He is a solid second in NH polling and needs to be ready for the onslaught coming..

Wonder if we can get some youtube vids of what really is happening instead of being fed slop from Liberal MSM?

Santorum lost by the largest margin EVER for an incumbent Federal Senator here in Pennsylvania. It was often said during the race that Santorum 'was his own worst enemy' by being a hypocrite and sticking his foot in his extremist mouth with regularity. He tried to ride GWB's coattails with extremely bad timing on the issue of privitizing Social Security.

One of the most telling scenes in that campaign was when the Casey campaign bought ads showing footage of a Santorum rally attended mostly by the Santorum Faithful, in which they chanted "Hee Hee, Hee-- Ho ho ho~ Social Security's got to go!" This firmly affixed his political hand to The Third Rail that burned out his campaign.

I think it's pretty funny that he's NOW claiming that he wants to be the hero that saves SS.

I suspect this year's candidacy is just a practice run for 2016.

-Kerry O.

This man gives me nightmares. He reeks bureaucratic fascism I can't even look at the guy. That's good to know also the system keeps changing its mind when every candidate besides RP come with some nasty murdering intentions. I wonder what GOP are saying about Romney. A lot of his former employees ain't singin his praises. God, why are people SO ignorant? Its almost as if they want this kind of treatment. Once they rape, they rinse and repeat until you grow a backbone or obliterate.