THEY’RE NOT DONATING MONTHLY!
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Posted on 01/02/2012 11:27:35 PM PST by Qbert
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch on Monday urged Iowans to back firebrand social conservative Rick Santorum, one day before they cast the first votes of the 2012 White House race.
"Can't resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country," Murdoch, 80, said on his official Twitter feed on the eve of the heartland state's nominating caucuses.
Santorum has surged into third place in recent days on the strength of his take-no-prisoners social conservative ideology and seemed poised for a strong finish in the largely symbolic first-in-the-nation ballot.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
But the fact that someone voted for animal waste treatment on large farms, voted to fund military operations in Bosnia, voted for wilderness areas or voted for milk price supports for dairy farmers does not mean he is not a fiscal conservative.
Santorum has supported and continues to support a balanced budget amendment. He supports reducing Federal spending. He supports pro growth activities. He is a fiscal conservative.
You could go through Ronald Reagan's career and find many things he did that could be characterized as liberal. You could do that with anyone.
Santorum does not have a 100% conservative voting record, but it is around 90%.
Tell me who is the perfect candidate.
That’s a very good ad. I could vote for Santorum without holding my nose too much, but I honestly don’t like him. He is not a fiscal conservative and I don’t care what he says. It’s what he does and has done that matters. I’m still hanging in there for Newt.
>> he’s turning into a whiner <<
Turning into? Newt has been known as a whiner ever since that trip back from Israel in 1995 after Rabin’s funeral, when Clinton made him deplane via the rear exit.
Obama is at least 100 times worse than Carter ever was. I never thought it was possible that America would have a president who is that bad.
You are right that Santorum is not Reagan. Santorum doesn't have the charisma and communication skills that Reagan had. He doesn't have the financing or the base of support that Reagan had. He also doesn't have the experience running a large state that Reagan had as Governor of California.
Last year Gingrich was in Congress = 100%
Gingrich lifetime = 90%
Last year Santorum was in Senate = 96%
Santorum lifetime = 87%
I wouldn't make a big deal about these slight differences.
Utmost is just pissed because his preferred opponent, Gingrich is deservedly going down the tubes. Don’t listen to his crap.
Santorum is better than Romney because Romney is way more liberal and many conservatives (including moi) will not vote for Romney but will vote for Santorum in the general.
Santorum is better than Paul for the same reason in the other direction. I would be happy to vote for Paul in the general, but I understand that many Freepers would not.
Santorum is better than Gingrich because he has stayed devoted to his wife and is probably at least as if not more conservative as revealed by voting records and public positions. Both have betrayed conservatives in the party at different points, Gingrich with Scozzafava and Santorum with Toomey. But both will probably govern as effective conservatives in the Bush II if not Reagan tradition.
Santorum is better than Perry becaus... well he’s not really, and I would prefer Perry, but it appears Perry is done. Ditto for Bachman.
Wow!
There is a reason Rick lost his PA Senate seat in a landslide. The following originated on another thread and is from a really pissed-off constitutent:
We tend to forget all of Santorum’s garbage because of his strong social values, likeability, and more importantly, he has had a couple years to buffer himself from his history in Congress and from the old boys group he associated with when he was there.
But WE NEED TO REMEMBER Santorum received more campaign funds from lobbyists in 2006 than any other member on The Hill at that time, even more than John Murtha and Tom Delay ever did, met regularly with K Street lobbyists every Tuesday morning as a Senator, loves earmarks for special interests and still defends them today, and believes it is fine to keep collecting federal tax dollars to give to Congress to determine what lobbyist-driven projects the Congress would like to provide funds for back in the states.
Having home schooled all my children to the time they all entered college, and having had to live a sacrificial life as a family for us to have done so, I am ALSO very put off by the Santorum family taking over $100,000 of state entitlements from Pennsylvania just to home school their children with a public-school-provided virtual school (not actually even permitted since they lived in Virginia and should have lost the almost $7,500 per child / per year entitlement they were being paid by Pennsylvania just to home school their children using a charter-school internet education provided by Pennsylvania for Pennsylvania residents). That is not even mentioning he had to lie about his residence to get it and then was sued by Pennsylvania when they found out (and had to pay some of that back, not all, but some as they settled).
So Rick Santorum pushes old fashioned earmarks and lobbyist connections and he doesn’t mind state entitlements either. That is not fiscal conservatism, and THAT is where the two Ricks take separate paths for sure.
For me, while I really respect Rick Santorum’s social conservatism, and that is very important to me, I think our country needs a fiscal conservative who can get our country back on track before we completely fall apart economically. A big government politician like Rick Santorum just couldn’t do that.
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I think if you want someone who will change the was Washington does business, someone other than Rick Santorum would be preferable.
I’m honest with myself and believe there is NO true conservative in this race. We were robbed again.
Rick’s support of Arlen helped secure a vote for Obamacare. We can spin it all we want, but that’s what happened.
This is the same old tired argument about Ricks earmark spending. Would you rather the Education Dept get the money and distribute it or to have the states elected officials do so? As far as I remember, having congress decide how funds are spent is actually in the Constitution.
How does your candidate stand on spending? I notice you love coming into Santorum threads to bash him on all sorts of issues yet never contrast that with the ideals of your guy. Here we are citing some second hand post on another thread as some sort of truth. To be honest with you, this whole home school issue was straight out of Bob Casey’s smear campaign in ‘06 and went nowhere.
I think you are trying to find fault with Santorum. He is not perfect. He has his faults.
If there was a perfect candidate I would support him. You can take any politician who has been in office for many years and find things he has done that you disagree with.
Santorum has supported and does support a balanced budget amendment. While I was not strongly in favor of it in the late 1990’s when it was introduced I look back now and see how much better our country would be now we if we had a balanced budget amendment.
Santorum believes in reducing government spending. Not as much as I would like but enough to be a big improvement on what is going on now.
If I though Santorum was a big spender who was just pretending to be a conservative I would not support him.
I do not believe that is the case.
That is a very, VERY old smear you are resurrecting. Right out of the liberal playbook.
He'd be a W-style compassionate neocon without the likability factor.
This post by Murdoch, who just joined Twitter, is even more interesting: “I'm getting killed for fooling around here and friends frightened what I may really say!”
We may all be very surprised when we see the real Murdoch via Twitter, unfiltered by his staff. Murdoch has been called the last of the media magnates, and there's a lot of truth to that... he owns the company, he can do what he wants, and now he has the ability to say what he wants to 78,446 followers he's gathered in just three days, and presumably a couple of hundred thousand soon, and then a few million.
Bluntly, this tweet supporting Santorum is not at **ALL** what I expected from Rupert Murdoch.
I tremendously respect Murdoch's work creating FOX News, but I never thought he had much use for Christian conservatives. It looks like I was wrong.
The Australian and British media environments are so secularized that apart from a few places in Wales, the Scottish Highlands and the Islands, there really isn't much left of Christian culture in Britain comparable to the American South or significant parts of the rural American Midwest. Of course there are some large churches in London and other major cities, but there are also large churches in New York City and Los Angeles, and their members know they cannot hope to influence culture so they focus on personal faith. That's obviously not a bad thing but it doesn't create a Christian culture.
(BTW, I'm writing here as a former member of Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village in New York City, which for many years was the only evangelical church in the Village that managed to stay alive in an incredibly hostile environment.)
I can't quite figure out where Murdoch has learned about American politically active religious believers — it certainly doesn't come from his background. Perhaps Murdoch has learned from Israeli politics that religion sometimes means a great deal to voters, and the Republican Party looks much more like the politics of Israel than those of Britain or Australia.
Maybe he's just spent enough time in America reading newspapers to know that we don't think like many conservative Brits or Aussies — God and faith are not mere words to lots of conservative Americans.
I was as upset about Senator Santorum’s 2004 endorsement of Specter over Toomey in the GOP Senate primary as anyone. This is the text of a letter I e-mailed Santorum back then:
“Dear Senator Santorum:
Let me begin by saying that I am not a resident of Pennsylvania, so I am not technically your constituent. But as a member of the Republican leadership in the Senate, you represent Republicans throughout the nation, and as such I feel at the liberty to drop you this friendly note.
I am an active participant in the conservative movement, and regularly mention your name not only as an example of the type of leadership, platform and voting record Republicans need to get elected in competitive states and districts, but also as my preferred candidate for President in 2008. I defended you when you were unfairly attacked for your foresighted criticism of the pro-sodomy arguments in the Lawrence case, and I am certainly proud to have someone like you in the Senate to speak out and act on issues near and dear to me, such as opposition to abortion and judicial activism and support for tax relief and national defense. But I am at a loss for words when someone asks me why you are actively supporting the reelection of Senator Arlen Specter, who disagrees with us in every single one of those important issues.
I know that tradition dictates that incumbent Senators not oppose the reelection of their colleagues from the same party, especially when they represent the same state. And as Republican Conference Chairman, it would be unbecoming for you to actively campaign for the defeat of a Republican colleague. But is it really necessary for you to run commercials supporting Arlen Specter’s candidacy when he is running against Congressman Pat Toomey, a true conservative Republican from a blue-collar Democrat district (just like a certain Congressman Santorum from a decade ago) who can lead the party to a statewide victory?
I am especially disheartened by your claim that Arlen Specter votes with conservatives “on votes that matter.” When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which you had been fighting for years to pass, got to the floor last year, it was nearly derailed by a sham substitute amendment by Dick Durbin that would not have prohibited a single abortion so long as the doctor stated that the mother’s health (including mental health) may be in danger. You know better than I that passage of the substitute amendment would have signaled the defeat of the PBA ban, and would have been a major setback in the pro-life movement. I remember that you spoke eloquently on the Senate floor as to why the sham substitute had to be defeated, and that the only way to end that heinous practice was to vote against Durbin’s substitute amendment. Wouldn’t you call that a “vote that matters”? I sure do. And, in case you’ve forgotten, Arlen Specter voted in favor of Durbin’s sham substitute, and the only reason it failed was because a few Democrat Senators, most of whom were up for reelection in 2004, voted against the amendment. Arlen Specter can only fool ignorant pro-lifers into believing that he supported the PBA ban, since he voted for its final passage, the results of which were a foregone conclusion. (Why, even Tom Daschle voted for the final bill! I hope that, in his Senate race against John Thune, Daschle doesn’t run ads saying that he supported President Bush’s agenda “on votes that matter.”) But most pro-lifers are not that ignorant, and we will not support someone like Arlen Specter for reelection.
I could go on for paragraphs about Specter’s voting record, the dangers posed by someone as unreliable as him serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (had Specter not opposed Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade would have been overturned in Planned Parenthood v. Casey back in 1992, which would have saved millions of lives), the fact that Governor Rendell would name Specter’s replacement in case he can’t serve out his entire six-year term, and how Specter’s proven inability to attract votes from blue-collar Democrats in the Pittsburgh area and in the “T,” not to mention the fact that he cannot rally the conservative base, will make him more vulnerable to a challenge from Congressman Hoeffel (who will not allow Specter to win by his usual margins in the Philly metro area) than would Pat Toomey (who would defeat Hoeffel by winning votes from pro-life, pro-gun, pro-defense Democrats, the group that gave you two House victories and two Senate victories), but I know that you already know all of that. My plea to you is that you think about these things, and reconsider your participation in an active campaign to defeat Pat Toomey in the GOP primary. If, God forbid, Specter defeats Toomey, then it would certainly be acceptable for you to campaign actively for Specter’s reelection. But now is not the time to go wobbly.
I hope that you receive this note in the spirit with which it was intended, and that, after meditation and prayer, you do the right thing.
Sincerely yours in Christ,”
So, irrespective of how Rick Santorum was pressured by President Bush and by PA Republicans to be “congenial” and “support the incumbent” who “would keep the seat safe,” I will not defend Rick Santorum’s cowardly endorsement of RINO Arlen Specter in 2004. But that being said, Newt Gingrich’s full-throated endorsement of DIABLO Dede Scozzafava (compared to whom Specter voted like Jesse Helms) in the 2009 special election, and doubling-down after it became clear that Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman (i) was far, far more conservative than her and (ii) had an exponentially better chance of defeating Democrat Bill Owens, was a million times worse by any objective standard.
And I mention the fact that a Speaker rarely votes (and that, for such reason, Newt cast very few votes while the GOP was in the majority) because that means that Newt’s lifetime ACU rating is almost entirely composed of votes taken when he was in the minority and representing an overwhelmingly conservative district.
As for how people don’t like vote ratings unless they agree with the point they’re trying to make, there’s certainly a lot of truth to that, but I have consistently stated over the years that (i) comparing ACU scores from different years is a fool’s errand, since a 92 on one year may well be no more conservative than an 80 another year (it will all depend on what votes the ACU chose to highlight on each year) and (ii) it is far preferable to look at the aggregate ratings of several different groups in order to weed out outliers. I like to take 6 ratings from Michael Barone’s Almanac of Am,erican Politics-—the liberal ADA, AFS (labor) and LCV (League of Conservation Voters) scores and the conservative ACU, CFG (Club for Growth) and FRC (Family Research Council) scores. Of course, I have to subtract the liberal scores from 100 to get a “conservative equivalent” before I can add them up to the conservative scores; I then divide the total score by 600 to get a conservative percentage. So if a congressman has voter ratings of 5 from the ADA, 8 from the AFS, 10 from the LCV, 90 from the ACU, 88 from the CFG and 100 from the FRC, his “Conservative Score” would be 92.5.
Santorum, as much as I like him, has been touring Iowa in a pickup truck. The guy is among the least financed candidates. That cannot sustain itself for very long.
This is all about splintering the conservatives to pave the way for Romney.
A smear is something that is false or just a half-truth. Explain why you believe it is a smear.
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