Santorum Snorts at the Trough…

January 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The mighty reformer Rick Santorum turns out to have greatly enjoyed the cozy earmarks for donations trade during his time in the Senate.

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

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

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

Filed under Politics Tagged with ,

The Tea Party Frauds

January 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Timothy Egan takes a look at the fire breathing Tea Partiers and finds them as duplicitous/confused as the people they claim to hate…

 

…polls in key primary states show that people who describe themselves as Tea Party members support Mitt Romney,Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Each of the front-runners, in obvious ways, represents what the Tea Party hates. Romney, as is well known, is the founding father of Obamacare — the law requiring people to get health insurance, pioneered by him in Massachusetts. He supported the huge bailout of Wall Street, which passed all that downside capitalistic risk on to the rest of us. Hooray for the socialist from Bain Capital!

After 30 years at the fetid waters of power, Gingrich, of course, is the ultimate Washington insider, and he took $1.6 million from government-sponsored Freddie Mac, which Tea Partiers blame for the housing collapse.

And Santorum, during his 16 years in Congress, never met an earmark he could not support, from a bilingual health care studies program at a college in his home state to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. Critics of big spending say he has requested more than $1 billion in earmarks during his time at the trough.

Filed under Politics Tagged with , , ,