The perfect depiction of what we’ve heard from Rick Santorum and the rest of the Republican field so far. They preach “small government,” but are on a constant crusade to tell you what to do in your bedroom.
Category: Rick Santorum
The economy is improving and President Obama’s foreign policy is almost flawless. So what are Republicans to do? They have all decided that social issues – more specifically, women’s health – will be their ticket to the White House.
Over the last few weeks, Republicans thought they saw an opening in new ways to attack the President when Mr. Obama’s administration began requiring all employers to provide contraception without a co-pay for their employees. The Catholic Church jumped on this issue saying that the president is forcing the Church to go against its teachings in providing contraception to workers. Republicans smell blood, and began attacking the President, calling his requirement an “attack on Religion.”
The President and the Church came to an understanding and an agreement was reached – Churches would be exempt from the requirement, but contraception will still be provided and paid for by the insurance companies. But don’t tell that to the Republicans as they have decided that this would be the decisive issue in the 2012 presidential election, and they have decided to continue this fight.
And listening to their holier than thou attitudes, you will think that no other Republican president or governor has attempted what President Obama tried a few weeks ago. Yea, you will think that, but you will be wrong as even Mitt Romney, the present leading Republican candidate also signed the very same bill into law in Massachusetts.
Rachel Maddow explains…
That is a quote from Bill Maher as he shared some of his feelings about Rick Santorum and the other Republican presidential candidates on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Maher’s comment is based on some of the most extreme and controversial statements on social issues made by Santorum to date.
Mitt Romney‘s back is up against the wall. His agility to win is being questioned by some of his most ardent supporters and conservatives are still looking for another candidate to carry their banner into the 2012 Presidential election.
They believed Donald Trump was going to be their poster-boy when he toyed with their emotions about running, but soon realized that Trump was just trying to boost viewership of his Apprentice television show. And they hauled their hopes and prayers on the back of Michelle Bachmann, but soon realized that she was too much of a right winged nut-job for their nut-job liking.
Rick Perry was their god and their savior, until he opened his mouth and tried to talk. He was packed up and shipped back to Texas just as fast as he was welcomed and urged into the nomination process. And then there was Herman Cain, who actually managed to carry the conservative mantle for about a month, but after everyone and their mother began accusing him of sexual misconduct, Cain too was shipped back to the pizza joint he crawled out of.
Newt Gingrich will be Newt Gingrich. Conservatives gave him a win in South Carolina then watched as Gingrich self-destruct. Unable to contain the euphoria of his win, Newt crowned himself the man, tooting his own horn, then losing miserably in Florida.
Throughout all this Mitt Romney fumbled, flipped and flopped his way through the debates. He even agreed in one debate that Newt Gingrich was more of a conservative than he was.
Then there was this little nugget when Romney admitted to being an independent.
I was an Independent through Reagan/Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan/Bush.
Throughout the years, Mitt Romney’s been an Independent, accused of being a moderate, he’s been “a businessman and not a politician,” and he’s even been accused of being a liberal because of his views of many social issues. But at no time in his business or political life has anyone ever accused Mr Romney of being a Conservative… until now. With the last three caucus and primary wins by the self-proclaimed Conservative Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney is now, suddenly, “severely conservative.”
“I fought against long odds in a deep blue state, but I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney said, trying to convince the group at this week’s CPAC meeting.
“I did things conservatism is designed for – I started new businesses and turned around broken ones. And I am not ashamed to say that I was very successful at it. I know conservatism because I have lived conservatism.”
This guy really wants to be president, but pandering to a particular group telling them what you think they want to hear is not the pathway to the White House. Mitt Romney is still living in the old days where candidates spoke to certain groups without fear of their words going viral. He must somehow learn to pattern a message for the country, instead of the group he is talking to at that moment.
But sticking to one message that would appeal to the nation would require some level of honesty, and honesty is something flip floppers lack.
How low do you have to go to call yourself a Christian, then use Christianity and its teachings as a fear mechanism for keeping your faithful followers in check by lying to them and invoking their deepest fears – that their faith is being challenged by the all powerful, all mighty president, Mr. Obama?!
Well, if you’re Rick Santorum, you can go pretty low. In the video below, Santorum does just that as he used God and Christianity to tell the audience that President Obama has taken us 1down a road of “overt hostility to faith in America.”
Apparently, according to the Catholic Church, president Obama is waging a war on their religion. The war the Catholics claim, is the requirement approved by the president’s administration that calls on employers to provide an option for contraception in their employees health care policies.
Of course, no one is explaining that this law has been in effect for the last 10 years through the EEOC — Equal Employment Opportunity Commission , or the fact that the Catholic University in Washington DC is already providing this option to their employees. And everyone seems to forget the waiver included in the law for Churches.
But manufactured crisis is what gets the spotlight, and even Congressional Republicans like John Boehner has joined the war, choosing his obvious position and firing on the president.
“In imposing this requirement, the federal government is violating a First Amendment right that has stood for more than two centuries, and it is doing so in a manner that affects millions of Americans and harms some of our nation’s most vital institutions,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said. “If the president does not reverse the Department’s attack on religious freedom, then the Congress, acting on behalf of the American people and the Constitution we are sworn to uphold and defend, must.”
That is expected. Congressional Republicans have been looking for any reason they could find to oppose this president. But it was something said by Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, that caught my attention.
Mr. Santorum, the present leader in the Republican presidential field actually suggested that women priests create a hostile environment.
What they’ve done here is a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on the freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings. . . . This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.
We had already awarded the say anything to get elected trophy to Mitt Romney, but now here comes Santorum. We just placed the order for a second trophy.
And the headlines will be breathless. Rick Santorum hit the trifecta last night winning all three states and setting himself up as the chief conservative challenger to Mitt Romney. Which is like being the first raccoon to cross the Interstate before the semi barrels by going 80 mph, good buddy.
Never mind that no delegates were at stake in any of the states. It’s all symbolic for the conservatives as they attempt to pull Romney so far to the right that he’ll have to lean just to stand up straight.
In the end, it won’t matter. Mitt will be the nominee, but he’ll be damaged and forced to say even more things that he doesn’t believe in order to mollify the conservatives. The Democrats are trying hard to give him an issue over religious groups forced to cover birth control. I would say this was a winning issue, but somehow, Mitch McConnell lecturing the country about religion and the pill is probably the best thing to happen to reproductive rights in a long time.
That sound you just heard? It’s just Tim Pawlenty baying at the moon. Move along citizens.
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Mitt Romney’s negative attacks in Florida have already destroyed Newt Gingrich and according to every poll we’ve seen, Romney is quickly turning off the independent voters with his do anything and say anything to win mentality.
But Romney won’t allow a few turned-off independents to stop his need to be president, as the richest candidate in the race now aims his guns at Santorum – the only Republican candidate who have so far, stayed above the fray.
Mitt Romney’s campaign is turning its attacks on Rick Santorum after a poll showed the former senator leading in Minnesota.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), a top Romney surrogate, will attack Santorum by way of a noon conference call for his history of supporting earmarks, Romney’s campaign announced Monday morning. Minnesota voters go to the polls for their state’s GOP caucuses on Tuesday.
The campaign also emailed “a summary of Santorum’s false attacks on Massachusetts healthcare” that provides a laundry list of nonpartisan fact-checking websites’ analysis on some of Santorum’s statements criticizing Romney’s health insurance overhaul in Massachusetts.
The fact-check list comes ahead of a planned healthcare speech from Santorum.
At a town hall meeting in Florida today, Rick Santorum sat back and listened as a woman in the audience spewed misleading information about the President.
“I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he is not,” the woman in the audience began. “He constantly says that our constitution is passé, and he ignores it as you know and does what he darn well pleases. He is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president.”
If Santorum was an ethical politician, he would have followed John McCain’s example in 2008, when McCain corrected a woman in his audience as she was in the midst of making false claims, as well. Since Santorum failed to correct this untruth in regards to the President, we are forced to question his ethical standings as he allowed this accuser to make blatantly ignorant statements.
“Well look, I’m doing my best to get him out of the government right now,” Santorum said. “And you’re right about how he uniformly ignores the constitution. He did this with these appointments over the recess that was not a recess, and if I was in the United States Senate I would be drawing the line.”
When asked by CNN why he chose not to correct the woman, Santorum said it wasn’t his responsibility to do so.
“I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them, and the President’s a big boy, he can defend himself and his record and I’m going to go out and talk about the issues that the President and I disagree on and try to defeat him because I think that’s the best thing that we can do for the future of our country.”
Rick Santorum has had it up to here with the negative ads against him, so Santorum is making a change. No more Mr. Nice Guy, as Santorum has decided that the only way to fight negativity is with negativity.
Beginning this week, Santorum gets nasty… well, maybe not beginning this week, but… just google it!
Presidential candidate Rick Santorum plans to open the final week of campaigning before voters go to the polls in South Carolina with his strongest assault yet on rivals Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
Aides to Santorum told ABC News on Sunday that the former Pennsylvania senator is fed up with the negative attacks coming from the campaigns of those two opponents and from their allies. He will hold a press conference to make his displeasure known after his first campaign event of the day on Monday.
“It’s time for these negative, false attacks to stop — enough is enough,” Santorum’s communications director Hogan Gidley said in an interview with ABC News. “Mitt Romney and Ron Paul both tried these kinds of tactics in other states and they tried these same type of tactics four years ago. It’s time for Rick to set the record straight and tomorrow he will.”
Where in the world is Carmen San Diego? We don’t know. We also don’t know where Newt Gingrich is. He was supposed to be at an event in South Carolina, but last time we checked, the event went un-Newt-ered!
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was greeted with a standing ovation when he was announced at a barbecue.
Too bad the former House speaker wasn’t around to see it.
He was inexplicably missing, and his absence forced the event’s moderator to ask awkwardly, “Can we check and see where the speaker is?”It was just one in a string of clumsy, head-scratching events staged by the Gingrich campaign since the Republican primary moved to South Carolina, a state that the candidate says he must win if he wants a shot at the nomination.
Mitt Romney has said on the campaign trail that an attack on him is an attack on capitalism. Aside from being a self-serving, disingenuous, mendacious statement (which is enough, don’t you think?), it also shows how shallow and dangerous the Republican party has become.
Romney’s career at Bain Capital is a touchstone for his presidential aspirations, and his success at convincing American voters that it makes him qualified to be president will decide whether he wins in November. As of this moment, I would say that this particular venture is off to a rocky start.
Polling for President Obama’s PAC is showing that anti-Bain rhetoric is a winning issue for him. Rick Santorum is saying that Romney can’t win based on his Bain experience. Rick Perry called out Bain as “vulture capitalism” (and this is officially the last time that anything Rick Perry says will be quoted in the Farmer blog). Newt wants Romney to stop the “pious baloney.” The attacks have continued at such a pace that conservatives are rushing to defend Mitt and capitalism itself.
They must really be worried. After all, the GOP has fought for the last year to defund social services such as Planned Parenthood, enact cuts to education, redesign Medicare so seniors will actually have to pay more, and demonize people who are on unemployment benefits as lazy. Their candidates want to deny law-abiding children of illegal immigrants a shot at the American Dream, obliterate the Federal Reserve, go back into Iraq, make abortion illegal even in cases of rape or incest, oppose full civil rights for gays, keep taxes low on the wealthy so the rest of us have to make do with less, and allow banks and financial institutions to continue to do what got us into this recession in the first place.
But don’t mess with capitalism, mofo.
As usual, they have it all wrong. The questions about Bain Capital and venture capitalism are not about the future of our financial system. The problem is the function of that type of business in the American system. Venture firms do play some positive roles in the economy by either rescuing companies that might otherwise go out of business or by scooping up bargains due to bankruptcies. The makers of Twinkies recently went back into bankruptcy for the second time and I, for one, would like some venture firm to resuscitate it.
The negatives, though, are compelling. These firms have a reputation for chopping up companies into parts and selling them off to make money, and as a result people get laid off and towns suffer. They are seen as paper-pushers whose only concern is for profits and bonuses, not for actually building something. And they’re seen as being cold, calculating, number-crunching entities that don’t care about the effects of their work, only the results. They are ruthless in their Darwinian cruelty, but criticism of their tactics is about capital, not capitalism. Has Bain engaged in this type of behavior? Yes, yes, and yes.
The Republican Party has bet its success on a combination of Cold War-era baiting and big lies, as if their candidates are the only ones who can fix the financial problems created by their ideology. In the end, that strategy will fail because it ignores the fact that more people are not siding with the wealthy (though they don’t always blame them for the inequality). Romney’s defense of capitalism is laudable, but by aligning himself with the 1%, he’s left himself open to the withering attacks not only from his right flank, but from a full frontal assault that’s coming from Obama and the Democrats.
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