Category: Rick Santorum

Santorum Says Immigration ‘Flooding This Country’ With Low-Wage Workers

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Allan Wall calls attention to an exchange in Wednesday’s “undercard” debate in which Rick Santorum discussed the economic impact of immigration on America’s working class:

[W]e have the lowest labor participation rate in 50 years and we also have the slowest growth in wages in the history of our country, any 20-year period. In fact, the last quarter had the lowest wage growth ever recorded.
And so you look at the fact that we’ve brought in 35 million — 35 million legal and illegal immigrants over the last 20 years, more than any period in American history, we have low wages, low participation [rates]. . . .
We have an immigration policy that Senator Graham supported that brings in even more low wage workers into this country. He says he wants to solve problems, that’s great. But you’re not solving problems for American wage earners. You’re not solving problems for workers in America who have seen their wages flat line and have been disaffected enough to leave the workplace.
We need to get better training and better skills, including vocational education and . . . community colleges. But the bottom line is, we have to make sure that we are not flooding this country with competition for low wage workers.

This is important to understand. Arguments over immigration policy are always about numbers. The accusations of “hate” and “racism” flung around by advocates of unlimited immigration (e.g., Lindsey Graham) ignore the basic question of numbers. The United States is a nation of 320 million people and we could, with little difficult, absorb and assimilate 200,000 immigrants annually. But between legal and illegal immigration, we have had at least three times that number every year for the past 20 years. It is this excess immigration — especially what Santorum rightly describes as a flood of illegals from Mexico — that is the source of controversy. For the sake of having a clear policy debate, we may leave aside any questions surrounding the language and customs of immigrants and focus simply on this issue of numbers. Santorum is correct that the downward pressure on working-class wages is a major consequence of our immigration policy (or lack thereof). Economics is always about numbers, and it is important to stress this point.

Unless and until we are willing to talk about immigration in terms of a target number for annual immigration (and, as I say, 200,000 a year would seem entirely reasonable), then we will continue to be distracted by irrelevant objections. The accusation of “racism” is such a distraction. Liberals always racism everywhere in America and, because they know Americans don’t like being called racists, these accusations are used by liberals to intimidate their opponents into silence.




 

Rick Santorum on Tolerance

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He spoke Monday at George Washington University:

“The only sensitivity training we need is to respect every person. . . . Tolerance is the most misused word in the English language. . . . Should a gay or lesbian-owned printshop have to print signs for the Westboro Baptists that say ‘God hates fags’? . . . Should a Jewish printshop have to make signs for the KKK? Should a kosher deli have to serve non-kosher food? It’s a two-way street. Tolerance is a two-way street. If you’re saying that ‘your religious liberties are not as important as my fill in the blank,’ then I’ve got a problem with that.”

During CPAC, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Rick’s supporters. He’s spent the past three years turning his group Patriot Voices into a solid grassroots organization. He has a dedicated base of small donors — thousands of folks he can count on for $25 or $50 contributions when he needs it — and has committed activists on the ground in all the key early primary and caucus states.

Even after his strong showing in 2012, when he finished second to Mitt Romney in the final delegate count, a lot of people still underestimate Santorum, but he works hard and doesn’t quit. He has experience and an awful lot of sincere Christians praying for his campaign. He could win it all, and don’t let the pundits, the media spinners or the early polls deceive you into thinking otherwise.

The Islamic terrorist group ISIS named Santorum as an enemy, citing his warning about the group’s growing menace. Asked about this on Fox News today, Santorum quipped:

“Well the difference is ISIS actually quoted me accurately compared to the New York Times, which is sort of a remarkable comment on the state of the media today.”

ZING!

 

Paranoid Theory: ‘Karl Rove Was Out Raising Money to Keep Santorum Alive’

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James Yanke at Reaganite Republican links to an article at Business Insider in which Grace Wyler gives credence to a paranoid theory offered by evangelical leader David Lane:

Karl stepped on Rick Perry and then Newt Gingrich every chance he got — albeit with deceit and sophistication — and elevated Mitt Romney at strategic, crucial points along their way to the Republican nomination — Rove’s candidate.
As an example of how sophisticated Rove is…Karl Rove was out raising money to keep Santorum alive until they could kill Newt — Santorum basically ran for Governor of Iowa in 2011, visiting all 99 counties; Santorum, out of Iowa, had no organization, no money and no chance in 2012 to be the Republican nominee; he was only a stalking horse for Mitt Romney — Rove kept Santorum alive until he could kill Rick Perry first, and then Newt Gingrich.
It’s instructive to note that Santorum placed 3rd in the South Carolina Presidential Primary the third week of January, and placed 3rd again the next week in Florida — yet Rove [by encouraging GOP donors to donate Santorum] was able to parlay two third place finishes into a $1M shot of money to keep Santorum alive…this is political gamesmanship on a whole other level, plus access to unlimited money.

This is insane in so many ways I don’t even know where to begin. It is obviously false to claim that Karl Rove raised a dime for Rick Santorum’s campaign. Nearly all of Santorum’s post-Iowa fundraising surge was in the form of online contributions from small donors.

So why on earth would David Lane say such a thing? In February, after Santorum won the trifecta — Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri — his underdog campaign caught the attenton of Annette Simmons, wife of Texas billionaire Harold Clark Simmons. Mrs. Simmons is a devout Christian who doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but news reports about Santorum’s strong Christian values appealed to her. So she told her husband that she was thinking about making a donation to Santorum. The Wall Street Journal reported March 23:

Mr. Simmons wondered about the prospects of the former Pennsylvania senator. He called his personal political muse, Republican strategist Karl Rove.
“Is he worth investing into his super PAC?” Mr. Simmons asked. He rose from his leather recliner in the den and stood at a bay window overlooking swans gliding on a lake encircled by 17,000 tulips. “Does he have a chance?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t count him out,” Mr. Rove said. Mr. Simmons’s wife, Annette, who was keen on Mr. Santorum, promptly donated $1 million to his super PAC, cash badly needed for an ad blitz ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.

Keep in mind what the situation was in February: Michelle Bachmann had quit after Iowa, Perry quit two days before the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary, and Gingrich had gotten stomped by Romney in both Florida and Nevada. Then came Feb. 8, when Santorum won all three contests, while Gingrich placed third in Colorado and fourth (behind Ron Paul) in Minnesota (Newt didn’t make the ballot in Missouri).

So if any well-informed person were asked, “Does Santorum have a chance?” the obvious answer would be, “Yes, I wouldn’t count him out.” Yet this is twisted by David Lane — who backed Gingrich from start to finish — into a conspiratorial plot. Furthermore, the idea that Perry and Gingrich lost because Rove “stepped on [them] every chance he got” is blatantly counterfactual:

  • Perry self-destructed in two debates in Florida (Tampa Sept. 12, Orlando Sept. 22), and was never a viable contender thereafter. Whatever prospects there might have been for resurrecting the Texas governor’s campaign ended at the Nov. 9 debate in Michigan, when Perry forgot how to count to three: “Oops.” By all normal logic, Perry should have quit after his fifth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, but instead let himself be persuaded to continue on to South Carolina, only to end up quitting the Thursday before the Saturday primary and endorsing Gingrich.
  • Gingrich was buried in Iowa by a blitz of Romney attack ads, recovered to win South Carolina, then buried against in Florida. As I have extensively documented, Gingrich’s campaign suffered from an unsustainable “burn rate.” Gingrich’s campaign went into the red in late January due to an ill-fated decision to attempt to fight Romney in the expensive Florida TV market and never recovered its financial balance. Newt reportedly spent the days before the Nevada primary desperately “dialing for dollars” (and thereby missed a scheduled appearance with the state’s popular Gov. Brian Sandoval) because of the campaign’s money troubles.

So, on the basis of a single datum — the Harold Simmons call to Karl Rove in February — David Lane has ginned up a conspiracy theory that falsely portrays Rick Santorum as a Rove-controlled stalking horse for the Romney campaign. Paranoia is not an ideology.

UPDATE: It is necessary, in order to understand how absurdly misguided David Lane’s paranoid theory is, to look at the vote totals in the three GOP contests that took place on Feb. 8:

MISSOURI PRIMARY:
RICK SANTORUM …. 55%
MITT ROMNEY ……… 25%
RON PAUL …………….. 12%

COLORADO CAUCUSES:
RICK SANTORUM …. 40%
MITT ROMNEY ……… 35%
NEWT GINGRICH …. 13%
RON PAUL …………….. 12%

MINNESOTA CAUCUSES:
RICK SANTORUM …. 45%
RON PAUL …………….. 27%
MITT ROMNEY ……… 17%
NEWT GINGRICH …. 11%

No intelligent person could look at those results and say that, as of Feb. 9, Newt Gingrich was better positioned than Rick Santorum to defeat Romney, and yet this is what David Lane wants you to believe: That somehow, as a result of Karl Rove’s Machiavellian scheming, Newt got cheated out of the nomination because Annette Simmons gave a million dollars to Santorum’s Super PAC in February.

UPDATE: Linked by Becca J. Lower — thanks!

 


Rick Santorum And The Traditional Justice System

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by Smitty

Jeffery Levin on Twitter points to The Hill, where Rick Santorum seems strangely unconvinced about the wisdom of a national conference on race in the era of Hope’n’Change:

The question. . .was posed to Santorum by talk radio host Laura Ingraham Monday.
“Absolutely not,” Santorum said. “This is either a very disturbed man or circumstances that we’re not aware of that may or may not come out of this case. Let the case play out, and let’s find out what the facts are. As I’ve said—I’ve condemned this. It looks to me as a heinous act. But you know what, let the process work. Let’s find out what’s really going on here. And let’s just focus on the people who are involved.”

In other words, crowd-sourcing our legal system is possibly not the swiftest idea. This whole ‘conversation on race’ piffle is merely a distractor from actual national issues. The propaganda nature of the idea of a ‘conversation on race’ is so blatantly obvious that the World’s Youngest Blogger can hardly halt himself from matching it bile for bile:

Fortunately, the sweater vest helped him hold it together.

As is often the case, Rick seems to have more backbone on the topic than the alternatives.

Update: linked by the Catholic Bandita

Update II: Daily Pundit is having none of Santorum.

Come On, Bill: Newt Has Always Been An ‘Ideas Guy’

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by Smitty

Bill Quick is attacking Newt for being Idea Man Newt, and refusing to drop out of the GOP hunt. But that’s who he is, that’s what he does. In this vintage clip going back to their time in the House together in the early ’90s, Newt is on a road trip with none other than Rick Santorum, explaining his revenue-enhancement ideas (NSFW, F-bomb):How about a little sympathy for a poor guy who got turned into a Newt, in the hopes he’ll eventually get better?

Update: Ace: “Gingrich: I Have Come Here To Chew Bubblegum and Not Drop Out of the Race and I’m All Out of Bubblegum“

Pornographic Politics: Did the Daily Caller ‘Pull a Media Matters’ on Rick Santorum? UPDATE: Romney and Gingrich Both Made January Pledge to Fight Porn

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Today I noticed a thread at Memeorandum aggregating commentary on an article by Daily Caller associate editor Steven Nelson:

‘Vigorous’ Santorum crackdown may catch
Internet porn viewers with pants down

I sort of shrugged that off, and then I saw this Tweet by Jedediah Bila:

Didn’t tweet about this today, but if it’s accurate, I find it absolutely insane.”Santorum Promises Broad War on Porn”: http://onforb.es/zjmZvb

That link is to an article at Forbes. Again, I shrugged this off. But then I was checking my e-mail and saw an item from Judson Phillips at Tea Party Nation:

Ritual Santorum suicide
As Rick Santorum tries to coalesce his position as the Anti-Romney candidate, he manages to attempt political suicide. … Gingrich has his faults, but none this dumb. Romney, for all of his faults such as being a liberal, is not that dumb. Does Santorum really want to simply lose?

Phillips’s item linked an article in The Hill on the same subject, and now I was suspicious, so I checked: Yup.

Nelson’s article was headlined at the Drudge Report. And that’s when I decided to read the Daily Caller article:

Santorum says in a statement posted to his website, “The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.”
If elected, he promises to “vigorously” enforce laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.” . . .

Yes, this is what Santorum says in a statement, one of about two dozen issue-oriented statements on the “Where I Stand” page of his campaign’s Web site. The statement is clear: Santorum wants to enforce laws that the Obama Administration has refused to enforce.

Would you like me to be more specific — because I could, y’know — about some of the clearly illegal obscenity now available online? Perhaps Jedediah Bila or Judson Phillips should contact former Attorney General Ed Meese or former Justice Department official Mark Levin and ask them about this subject. Because I’m reasonably sure that a whole lot of things now available online are, in fact, illegal.

Suffice it to say (I’m trying to be circumspect here) that there are some acts in which “consenting adults” may legally engage, but which are not legally protected as “free speech.”

But maybe the circumspect approach is part of the problem.

How can I put this politely? Ah! Let’s try this: What you want to do with that baseball bat in the privacy of your own home is strictly up to you, but the video is illegal obscenity.

Did that help clarify the issue somewhat?

Remember that Rick Santorum has a law degree and spent 16 years in Congress drafting legislation. He knows the law, and he knows the Constitution, and he knows doggone well that the First Amendment wasn’t intended to protect the kind of filth that’s on the Web nowadays.

So, yes, Santorum promised “vigorous” enforcement to shut down operators who are profiting from commerce in illegal obscenity, and you may agree or disagree with that. But this isn’t an issue that Santorum raised during a stump speech yesterday or that is the subject of his newest campaign ad.

THAT STATEMENT HAS BEEN ON SANTORUM’S WEB SITE FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, PERHAPS FOR MONTHS.

If you didn’t realize that when you read the Daily Caller article — if you mistakenly believed that Santorum had suddenly decided to raise this subject during his campaign — ask yourself why you didn’t realize it.

Do you feel you have been misled?

Exactly why the Daily Caller saw fit to assign its associate editor to write a 700-word “news” article, soliciting opinions from Eugene Volokh and Jonathan Turley, I don’t know. Why this cheap political “gotcha” hit-job deserved headline treatment at the Drudge Report, I don’t know.

But for intelligent people who call themselves “conservative” to fall for such a dishonest media stunt as this is ridiculous.

As James Carville likes to say, “If you find a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t crawl up there by itself,” and this particular turtle seems mighty damned suspicious to me.

UPDATE: Thanks to a sharp-eyed commenter who found this Jan. 9 news release from Morality in Media:

Three of the leading GOP 2012 Presidential candidates have made statements committing to enforce existing federal obscenity laws if they are elected, while the current administration still refuses to enforce federal obscenity laws prohibiting distribution of hardcore pornography, according to Morality in Media.
Morality In Media launched efforts in October 2011 to contact the 2012 presidential candidates, including President Obama, to obtain their respective views on the enforcement of obscenity laws. Thousands of individuals sent emails, made calls and even spoke to the candidates in person urging them to respond to the survey. As a result of these efforts, the following candidates responded:

  • Former Senator Rick Santorum in a written statement:
    “Federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforced. If elected President, I will appoint an Attorney General who will do so.”
  • Former Governor Mitt Romney in a written statement:
    “(I)t is imperative that we cultivate the promotion of fundamental family values. This can be accomplished with increased parental involvement and enhanced supervision of our children. It includes strict enforcement of our nation’s obscenity laws, as well as the promotion of parental software controls that guard our children from Internet pornography.”
  • Former Speaker Newt Gingrich in a face-to-face meeting:
    When MIM’s Executive Director Dawn Hawkins asked former Speaker Gingrich if he will enforce existing laws that make distribution of hard-core adult pornography illegal, he responded: “Yes, I will appoint an Attorney General who will enforce these laws.”

OK, good: That was on JANUARY 9th, which means that the Daily Caller has had more than two months to write the story about how Mitt Romney wants “strict enforcement” of federal obscenity laws.

But they didn’t write that story and send it to Drudge, did they?

You wanna hear some obscenity, Tucker Carlson? Because I’m just about in a mood to cuss a blue streak at your blatant deception.

No, Rick, Teleprompters Should Not Be Against The Law

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by Smitty

The whole ‘there oughta be a law’ notion is predicated upon the idea of the nanny state enforcing everything. All candidates do it, when they talk about swinging by the store and picking up a case of jobs to fix the economy.

Let the court of public opinion do that. Let us understand that if, unlike a military officer or a hospital intern, if the candidate can’t internalize their message, they are unworthy. Let people recognize that, while occasional teleprompter usage happens for any number of reasons, chronic usage is a sign of weakness. Or, in the extreme case of #OccupyResoluteDesk, total vacuousness.

via Breitbart, whose video streaming gadget doesn’t grasp scalability.