Randy Turner ‏@rturner229

Rick Santorum endorses Ed Martin- search party formed to find people who care: http://rturner229.blogspot.com… … 10:29 PM – 2 Nov 12

We are not worthy.

United States Constitution

Article VI

…but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Rick Santorum (r) at the Values Voters Summit today:

Rick Santorum (r): ….We will never have the media on our side ever in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side. Because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do. So, our colleges and universities, they’re not gonna be on our side. The conservative movement will always be, and that’s why we founded patriot voices, the basic premise of America and American values will always be sustained through two institutions, the church and the family. [applause] And so, and so economic conservatives and libertarian types can say, oh, well, we don’t, we don’t want to talk about the social issues. Without the church and the family there is no conservative movement, there is no basic values in America [applause] in force, and there is no future for our country….        

And to think, I voted for him in the Missouri republican Presidential Preference Primary. Heh. Because we all should have stoopid people telling us what to do.

Evidently, critical thinking isn’t an aspirational goal for Rick Santorum (r).

I recently learned that the issues page at Rick Santorum’s Website tells us that one of his top priorities is “enforcing laws against illegal pornography,” while:

…the word “tax” appears only 4 times on the issue page and “job” only 5 times – the same number as “abortion” and fewer than “pornography,” which appears 8 times

What’s this got to do with the Missouri legislature now convened in Jefferson City? Only this: Today the House is debating HCR41 and in the Senate a bill with a similar goal, SB749, was debated yesterday. Both pieces of legislation are “me-too” bills, efforts to get in on the GOP efforts to make hay out of a group of conservative Catholic Bishops’ staged efforts to thwart an Obama administration rule. The bills, like Santorum’s Website, are, of course, designed to pander to the sexually repressive legislative preferences of most right-wingers.*  

The Bishops object to contraception – despite the fact that most Catholic women have no pangs of conscience about using it – and want it excluded from the preventive care mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Consequently, they claim it violates their institutional conscience to be associated, however indirectly, with such coverage when it is mandated in church-affiliated, secular organizations like colleges, charities and hospitals – institutions, I should add, that take federal taxpayer dollars that are ponied up by non-believers like me. The GOP has, predictably, jumped to endorse the Bishops’ view that their institutional goals trump individual rights of conscience as well as individual public welfare.

The folks in Jefferson city who are running to jump on this already foundering bandwagon are the same folks who don’t seem to be able to address jobs, decaying infrastructure, tax reform or the host of other problems facing Missouri. Although they are confident that they can adjudicate rights of conscience, they can’t even address the issue of their own institutional ethics, so worried are they that they will miss out on lobbyist largess.

Nevertheless, they want us to believe that weakening the ACA’s provisions for preventive health care is of paramount importance because it involves issues of religious freedom. However, as Catholic historian Gary Wills shows, in an excellent debunking of the Bishops’ conscience and religious freedom claims, “what we are seeing is not a defense of undying principle but a stampede toward a temporarily exploitable lunacy.”

So, once more, Missouri’s real needs languish while the righteous legislative deacons of the wannabe state religion cavort in Jefferson City. If you look at HCR41, you will notice consistent themes. That particular legislation references 2010’s wasteful exercise, the anti-ACA Proposition C that has, in turn, been used as an excuse to avoid the hard work of planning for the ACA mandated insurance exchanges, exchanges that would benefit thousands of Missourians.

If nothing else, it provides an excellent  preview of what the GOP might inflict on the nation in the person of Rick Santorum – although there are signs that maybe even the Godfathers of the Grand Old Party are a little too squeamish for that particular outcome. If you’re feeling equally squeamish about the fun-and-games in Jefferson City, call your State Rep. and your Senator and let them know how you feel about their twin follies, HCR41 and SB749.

*Sentence edited slightly for clarity.  

Previously:

Rick Santorum (r) in Lee’s Summit, Missouri (February 3, 2012)

Sen. Will Kraus (r): warming up the crowd about urban schools at the Santorum rally (February 4, 2012)

Rick Santorum in Lee’s Summit, Missouri: the Blutarsky sermon on the summit (February 4, 2012)

The republican beauty contest presidential primary is today. Do your part to make it so:

Public Policy Polling

Big Day Possible for Santorum [pdf]

Q2 The Republican candidates for President on the ballot in Missouri are Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. If the election was today, who would you vote for?

Ron Paul – 19%

Mitt Romney – 32%

Rick Santorum – 45%

Someone else/Not sure – 4%

[emphasis added]

Politics makes strange bedfellows, albeit with very different agendas, from the crosstabs:

2012 GOP Pres Primary

Ideology

Very liberal

Ron Paul – 18%

Mitt Romney – 18%

Rick Santorum – 63%

Someone else/Not sure – 0%

[….]

Tea Party ID

Yes

Ron Paul – 18%

Mitt Romney – 25%

Rick Santorum – 54%

Someone else/Not sure – 2%

[emphasis added]

Heh.

The PPP poll interviewed 958 likely primary voters in Missouri on February 6th. The margin of error was 3.2%.

Remember, to take part in the Missouri Democratic Party delegate selection process (caucus) you must have cast a ballot in today’s election. It doesn’t matter which ballot.

Rick Santorum (r) in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Friday night republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum held a rally in Lee’s Summit, Missouri as a prelude to Tuesday’s beauty contest primary.

Bluto: What? Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

Otter: [to Boon] Germans?

Boon: Forget it, he’s rolling.

Bluto: And it ain’t over now. ‘Cause when the goin’ gets tough…

[thinks hard of something to say]

Bluto: The tough get goin’! Who’s with me? Let’s go!

[Bluto runs out, alone; then returns]

Previously:

Rick Santorum (r) in Lee’s Summit, Missouri (February 3, 2012)

Sen. Will Kraus (r): warming up the crowd about urban schools at the Santorum rally (February 4, 2012)

Rick Santorum (r): ….Barack Obama runs around talking about the right to health care. Where do rights come from? [voices: “God.”] They don’t come from the government. They don’t, but the government cannot [inaudible] you a right. If they can give you a right, what can they do? [voices: “Take it away.”] Take it away from you. And the other thing they can do is they can tell you how you’re gonna exercise that right. They can tell you what you’re gonna get and what you’re not gonna get because they’re giving it to you.

Look at just what happened last week in the Catholic Church. I know many of you were at Mass this past week. [applause] But in most dioceses in the country, about a hundred and forty of ’em, was, a letter was read by bishops, outraged, outraged, that the Federal Government would tell Catholic institutions in America that they have to provide abortifacients, morning after pills, sterilization services, as well as contraception as part of free health care in their health care policies. Every Catholic institution. Even though the Catholic Church specifically teaches against those things. And Catholic institutions were outraged that they would do this. I told the Catholic bishops when they were promoting it and shilling for Obamacare, careful what you wish for. Because when the government gives you something then they can force you to do things because it’s now, they now have you, right. They got what they deserved. They fell, they, they fell in bed with the secular left and then wondered why they’re forcing them to do what the secular left wants them to do….

Teabagger logic. It’s not a right, and if you don’t have it, the government can’t take it away from you. And if you’re not gonna get it, they can’t tell you that you’re not gonna get it.

Rick Santorum (r):….The reason this economy is sputtering is because our economy and our people are not used to being put under a yoke that we have been put under by this administration [cheers, applause]….

The yoke is on you.

….And if you look at the other issues that frame, well, actually, it started the tea party movement, which is the conservative backbone of Republican Party right now. [applause] Right? [cheers] You look to the reasons why the tea party movement was created, it started because of the sell out of the Bush administration, John McCain, and [inaudible] Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, for the Wall Street bailouts. When things got tough and everybody was in a panic, when Goldman Sachs went to them and said, we need your money, they said, yes….

….Ladies and gentlemen, we need somebody who’s much more multidimensional than, than, than Governor Romney and not as multidimensional and every idea in the world as Newt Gingrich. [laughter, applause] I probably should, no moon colonies, I promise. [applause] Right?….

….So I appreciate the tea party and their standing for the Constitution. It is a great guide for a president that has been lost. I can tell you, having served in Washington in the nineteen nineties and in the early part of the, this century, you didn’t hear this thing mentioned very often when it came to government. And I know a lot of people are frustrated that the Republicans, it’s true, Republicans lost their way. And I, too, am not perfect in the sense that sometimes I voted for the thing, I look back and say, why did I do that? Well, sometimes you need some people to remind you. Sometimes things have to get so bad that we realize how far we strayed. We all became too comfortable. And I know there’ve been a lot of folks that are critical of, of Republicans for the work they did. I would just say this to the tea partiers, where were you when we needed you? Where were you when you had to come out to remind us and stand up and fight. And so [inaudible] you’re here now. And this is your moment. Not just tea party, but conservatives all across the [inaudible], this is our moment. This is our opportunity….

* IOKIYAR

….We have to [inaudible] understand what our heritage is. It’s not just the Constitution. But it’s that other document that the left tries to ignore. Push away. They try to expunge it because it is a threat [inaudible]. You see, the left believes, as I said before, that rights come from the government and from the Supreme Court or from some other government [inaudible]. But we all know, because of that other document, which isn’t the how of America, it’s not the owner’s manual, it’s the why of America. When people talk about American exceptionalism, believe it or not, they’re not referring to our Constitution. They’re not referring to our system of government, not referring to our military or our power. They’re referring, I believe, to these words, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their [pause] [voices: “Creator.”] with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [applause]….

….I remind everybody that at the time of the revolution there was another revolution. It was in France. And if you look at the French Constitution, there’ve been about eighteen of ’em since, we’ve had one. Why? Is it because or Constitution was written better? No. No. [inaudible] Or Constitution wasn’t written that much better than the French Constitution. Or any of the interim French Constitutions. The problem was France. From the very beginning of the revolution until now. It’s that France has a different Declaration of Independence. The reason for the French revolution, unlike the American revolution, was not that the king denied us our God given rights. The reason for the French revolution, there were three words, liberty, fraternity, and equality. Liberty and equality, that’s what those, words of our declaration, right? But that third word is not. There are two different words. One was fraternity, brotherhood, the other was, and that’s where the rights came from [inaudible], as opposed to, creator, God. It was a secular revolution. And when you give enormous power to people, guess what happens? They take that power and they build guillotines. Because they have no rights they have to respect other than the rights that the government gives you.

And so when the left, as they’re doing in America today, tries to marginalize faith, tries to marginalize the declaration, tries to marginalize where we get our rights from, it is why I say this election is the
most important election in American history. Because they are undermining the very essence of what American’s [inaudible]….

Freedom fries rule.

….A lot of folks look at me and say, you know, Rick, we really like you. We like you best, but you can’t win. Hear it all the time. If you look at Florida, who had the highest favorability ratings in the State of Florida on election day? [voices: “Rick.”] Me. Who had the highest positive negative in the country, most of the polls? I did. Yet, people say I can’t win. They say, well, you know, you can’t win. Well why can’t I win? You know, you’re one of those social conservatives. [applause] You’re one of those social conservatives. [cheers] You talk about faith and family and we just want to hear about jobs. You see, America isn’t about jobs….

No mas. You can’t win. You’re an idiot. I’m going to crossover in Tuesday’s republican primary beauty contest so I can vote for you. To punish your party for the hour of my life I spent in Lee’s Summit listening to you which I’m never going to get back.

…I was appalled yesterday to hear Governor Romney say that he doesn’t care about the very poor. As long as the safety net is there, if it’s, if it’s broken I’ll fix it. But he cares about the ninety-five percent of America. Doesn’t care about the very poor or the very rich. We already have one president who cares about ninety-nine percent. We don’t need one that cares about ninety-five percent. We need one that cares about a hundred percent of America. [applause][cheers]….

I’m not so sure he thought this one through.

Income, Poverty and Health Insurance in the United States: 2010 – Highlights

The data presented here are from the Current Population Survey (CPS), 2011 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), the source of official poverty estimates. The CPS ASEC is a sample survey of approximately 100,000 household nationwide. These data reflect conditions in calendar year 2010.

 *  The official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent – up from 14.3 percent in 2009. This was the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. Since 2007, the poverty rate has increased by 2.6 percentage points, from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent.

 *  In 2010, 46.2 million people were in poverty, up from 43.6 million in 2009-the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty.

 *  Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites (from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent), for Blacks (from 25.8 percent to 27.4 percent), and for Hispanics (from 25.3 percent to 26.6 percent). For Asians, the 2010 poverty rate (12.1 percent) was not statistically different from the 2009 poverty rate.

 *  The poverty rate in 2010 (15.1 percent) was the highest poverty rate since 1993 but was 7.3 percentage points lower than the poverty rate in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available.

 *  The number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million) is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.

 *  Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for children under age 18 (from 20.7 percent to 22.0 percent) and people aged 18 to 64 (from 12.9 percent to 13.7 percent), but was not statistically different for people aged 65 and older (9.0 percent).

Do the math, Rick, Mitt only cares about eighty-four percent.

* it’s okay if you’re a republican

Rick Rantorum (r) was about a half hour late for the scheduled 7:30 p.m. event. While we waited and

as the crowd was still showing up a young student reporter talked with a representative of the old media on the press riser.

Rick Santorum (r) made a few stops in Missouri today – from Hannibal, to Fulton, to Columbia, to Lee’s Summit – all in a prelude to the beauty contest primary on February 7th. We caught the show in Lee’s Summit tonight. There was a good turnout considering the rainy weather. I estimate six hundred in attendance. One of the Kansas City television stations estimated seven hundred. The candidate’s folks, however:

@TeamSantorum Team Santorum

Over 1000 gather at rally for @RickSantorum at John Knox Village in Lee’s Summit, MO! ow.ly/i/ryju #AcrossAmerica 2 hours ago

@eyokley Eli Yokley

Crowd estimate is there are 600+ here for @RickSantorum at the #SantorumKC event. 3 hours ago

That’s the opinion I gave Eli, I think.

And while we waited the old media hands stood in front of the press riser at one point comparing notes on how Rick Santorum pronounced Missouri at the day’s previous stops.

Yeah, there were a lot of people on a rainy night. It just wasn’t over a thousand. (Yes, that’s Rick Santorum on stage.)

There were quite a few older folks and quite a few families with a number of small children in tow. The demographic was definitely Eastern Jackson County suburban.

To paraphrase George Herbert Walker Bush (r), we’ll mark this voter down as an undecided.

We’ll get some more photos and excerpts up in a later post.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum will be in Cottleville, Missouri tomorrow afternoon for a “major address” which will propel Santorum towards winning a majority of the 0 delegates distributed by Missouri’s February 7th Republican Primary. Santorum will likely lead in Public Policy Polling’s poll for the February 7th primary, which is a hilarious display of Mittose Intolerance from some Republicans.

Santorum will be at St. Charles Community College at 2:30pm to talk about jobs, the economy, the social issues he obsesses about, and why Colleges (like the one he’s speaking at) are used to indoctrinate students. He may also wear a sweater.

This Santorum event is not being held in Cynthia Davis’ district, it’s being held one district to the East (Doug Funderburk’s district). Gotta admire their focus on targeting parts of Missouri that have elected Santorum-esque candidates before. Plus, both Santorum and Cynthia Davis are coming off of big losses in their last electoral pursuit.

If you cross paths with Rick Santorum while he is in Missouri, do not look him in the eyes or feed him after Midnight. It’s for your own good.

Remember former state representative Cynthia Davis? Remember her special blend of naive, petit-bourgeois self-righteousness, triumphalist religiosity and general dimwittedness? Although the term-limited Davis seems to have been too much of a good thing for otherwise crazy-loving Missouri Republicans – she lost her state senate primary race to the more traditionally respectable Scott Rupp – those of us who have been paying attention to the GOP primaries may feel a bit of Davis-tinged deja vu right about now. This feeling is especially acute when we consider primary contender Rick Santorum who shares Davis’ political DNA in spades.

Despite Davis’ failure in Missouri, Santorum’s current popularity in Iowa offers clear evidence that the GOP is far from forswearing his and Davis’ special brand of looney-tunes. While the Missouri GOP realized that Davis lacked the qualities essential to successfully represent the party, and while nobody really thinks Santorum is presidential material, they both equally embody the authoritarian and exclusivist social and religious strains that serve to rev up a sizable segment of the GOP base.  

An excellent example of this GOP cultural model is provided by the particular approach to the problem of resurgent poverty that both Santorum and Davis promote. They seem to think that if you could just force folks (men and women, that is, none of that gay stuff) to get married and stay married, no matter what, poverty would magically go away.  

During her tenure as Chair of the Missouri House Interim Committee on Poverty, Davis’ authored a report (pdf) that is full of gems gleaned from the testimony of exactly two witnesses, both from right-wing religious organizations, one of which, the Ruth Institute, touts marriage between “one man, one woman for life” as its raison d’etre, and from a tour of Sunshine Ministries, an evangelical, faith-based, anti-poverty organization. Not surprisingly, six of the nine conclusions offered in the report seemed to be based on the belief that to cure poverty we only need to promote marriage.

Santorum, for his part, is sure that a simple two-step process will end all poverty for all time:

Number one, graduate from high school. Number two, get married. Before you have children, […] If you do those two things, you will be successful economically. What does that mean to a society if everybody did that? What that would mean is that poverty would be no more. If you want to have a strong economy, there are two basic things we can do.

There’s nothing wrong with encouraging folks to get an education, nor can the importance of a strong family structure be underestimated; it only stands to reason that people working in tandem usually have twice the resources as those who try to go it alone. But conservatives like Santorum and Davis manage to  get it all backwards. A recent report (pdf) from the Economic Policy Institute analyzes  the available data on the relation between marriage and poverty in the African-American and Latino communities and concludes:

Continually high poverty rates among blacks and Latinos are the result of high unemployment and incarceration rates and declining shares of good jobs in the American economy. The decline of marriage in these groups is a collateral consequence of these negative economic conditions. We can address these problems with full-employment in good jobs and comprehensive criminal justice reform. These policies would not only lift large numbers of Latinos and blacks out of poverty, they would also provide significant benefits to all other racial groups. Additionally, these policies would provide more white, Latino, and black men with the economic security they need to get married.

In other words, instead of broken marriages and out-of-wedlock births leading to poverty, poverty leads to broken marriages and out-of-wedlock births which, in turn, reinforces the whole cycle. Forcing people to get married and stay married won’t provide employment when all the jobs have been shipped off to foreign countries. But blaming the evils of poverty exclusively on individual marital choices does let the rest of us off the hook when it comes to addressing the conditions that make stable family relationships difficult to maintain. Plus, it’s always so gratifying to tell other people what they should do – which is, of course, to be more like us.

It’s probably worthwhile to note that Santorum and Davis are selective in their embrace of the miracle powers of marriage. They don’t agree at all with the Huffington Post‘s Amanda Terkel, who notes that by the Santorum/Davis logic, allowing same-sex partners to marry would “increase the number of marriages in the country and theoretically lower the nation’s poverty rate.” Marriage champion Davis is now the executive director of by an anti-gay marriage group – and Santorum’s position on the issue is notorious. They both argue that by increasing the scope of marriage and permitting even more people to share in its benefits, we will undermine the institution for those who are currently permitted to enter it. In their view of the world, there just doesn’t seem to be enough marriage to go around and heterosexuals have dibs on what there is.

Such observations, however, presuppose that the proponents of the miracle marriage cure actually care about logical consistency, which certainly, given their shared tendency to cast their arguments in terms of caricature, doesn’t seem to be the case. However, the rest of us ought to care – one of these clowns is actually being taken seriously – more or less – as a possible candidate for President of the United States, and the more absurd his utterances, the more the the entire political theater will shift into the realm of the ridiculous. We managed to get rid of Davis, what will it take to exile the Santorums of the right from the political sphere?