My Nomination for Father of the Year

He was not my candidate for president; but, in this season of naked political ambition, how wonderful to see a man who truly has family values. 

Grab a tissue for this one!

Santorum quits

It’s over.

Rick Santorum’s quixotic campaign to be the Republican presidential candidate is over. He announced today he’s “suspending” his campaign.

Santorum had dropped out of events on Monday in order to spend more time with his ailing three-year-old daughter Bella. The girl is afflicted with the rare genetic condition Trisomy 18, which is typically fatal, and was hospitalised earlier this year with pneumonia.

Santorum and Bella

Santorum made the announcement in his home state of Pennsylvania, two weeks before the GOP presidential primary there. But it was believed he faced a tough fight in his home state against Mitt Romney, and a defeat would have proved embarrassing.

The former Pennsylvania senator had been under mounting pressure from the Republicans to step aside following a series of Romney victories in the primaries.

Santorum’s announcement today now leaves the way open for  Romney to stand almost unopposed to take on Obama in November’s election.

+++

Senator Santorum,

Thank you for fighting the good fight. That’s all God ever asks each of us to do.

Now, go home and take care of your family. Bella especially needs you.

~Eowyn

Super Tuesday

From Drudge:

Romney wins Alaska, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio (narrowly by 1%), Virginia, Vermont

Santorum wins Oklahoma, North Dakota, Tennessee

Gingrich wins Georgia

Trouble in Toledo: Wrong ballots distributed...

Total delegate count:

• Romney 404
• Santorum 165
• Gingrich 106
• Paul 66

No. of delegates needed to win GOP nomination: 1,144

It’s looking more and more like we’re heading toward a wide-opened brokered GOP convention. 

~Eowyn

42% of voters Strongly Disapprove of Obama

Are the sheeple waking up?

Remember the news 10 days ago about Obama’s approval rating going up to 50%?

Don’t believe it.

For that matter, don’t believe any polls from the Associated Press because the polling firm it uses, GfK, has a huge conflict-of-interest, being the recipient of federal government contracts.

Last year, National Investigative Media (NIM) uncovered an unusual financial relationship between the AP and the federal government – and evidence that that relationship may have influenced the AP’s reporting on the Obama administration.

In March 2011, GfK announced that it had received clearance for federal government contracts to do marketing and research for US government agencies. On May 11, 2011, based on a poll conducted by GfK, the AP reported that — Surprise!!! — Obama’s re-election was a foregone conclusion.

But NIM found that the GfK employed a severely flawed polling model that gave a significant advantage to Obama in calculating his favorability ratings on a number of issues from national security to the economy. The flawed polling data influenced not just the AP, but other media including ABC News, Time, The Washington Post and Yahoo News which ran the AP’s reportage without scrutiny.

In contrast, polling by Rasmussen Reports is more reliable, not least because Rasmussen surveys likely U.S. voters instead of merely U.S. adults.

Rasmussen Reports‘ daily Presidential tracking poll for today shows that as many as 42% of U.S. voters Strongly Disapprove of the way that Barack Obama is performing as role as president, with only 26% of voters Strongly Approving.

This is how Obama fares in potential match-ups against the four GOP candidates:

• Mitt Romney 45% vs. Obama 43% (Romney has a 9-point advantage among independent or unaffiliated voters).

• Ron Paul 43% vs. Obama 41% (this is the first time that a poll shows Paul being favored over Obama).

• Obama 45% vs. Rick Santorum 43%

• Obama 49% vs. Newt Gingrich 39%

To conclude, when it comes to polling data, caveat emptor. Obama's re-election is not a shoo-in. Things are not as bleak as they seem.

~Eowyn

Mitt wins Maine

Yesterday, Mitt Romney scored a double win:

• He won Maine’s GOP Caucuses preference poll

• He also pulled a surprise win at the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) conference, scoring 38% of the vote

Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich did not compete in Maine, making it essentially a two-man race between Romney and Paul.  Here are the vote counts in the Maine GOP Caucuses:

• Mitt Romney 39%
• Ron Paul 36%
• Rick Santorum 18%
• Newt Gingrich 6%

Total delegate count so far:

• Mitt Romney: 123
• Rick Santorum: 72
• Newt Gingrich: 32
• Ron Paul: 19
• Jon Huntsman: 2 (which no doubt will go to Romney)

~Eowyn

Say a prayer for the Santorum family

Philly.com: The three-year-old daughter of Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has been admitted to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the candidate has cancelled his Sunday morning campaign events to be at her side.

Santorum campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley said Saturday night that the former Pennsylvania senator and his wife, Karen, were with Bella at CHOP. Gidley said Santorum planned to return to campaigning as soon as possible in Florida, where the Republican primary is Tuesday.

Bella Santorum has Trisomy 18 (also known as Edwards Syndrome), a genetic condition caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 18th chromosome. Bella was not expected to survive until her first birthday and concerns over her health have canceled previous Santorum campaign events.

Santorum had been scheduled to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and to attend church in Miami. He was in the Philadelphia area as recently as Friday night to attend a campaign fundraiser in Chester County.

Prayers for little Bella, hope she gets well very soon!

DCG

Dead people vote in South Carolina

Since when did the United States of America become some Third World country rife with voting irregularities, aka fraud?

In election after election, Democrats committed plentiful voter fraud:

• In April 2011, ACORN pled guilty to voter registration fraud in Las Vegas in the 2008 elections.
• The signatures of dozens, if not hundreds, of northern Indiana residents were faked on petitions used to place Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the ballot during the 2008 Indiana primary. The fake petition pages passed through the county voter registration office on days when the Republican head of the office was absent.
  
• In Wisconsin’s spring election on April 5, 2011, Florida SEIU organizer Clarence Haynes, along with two other out-of-state-SEIU organizers, voted using the address of a Residence Inn in Glendale.

In April 2011, a study found that one in seven counties in Illinois had more voters on the electoral rolls than the number of adult residents tallied by the U.S. Census.

More recently, there was alleged voter fraud in Iowa’s GOP caucuses on January 3. At a minimum, there were voting “irregularities” because weeks after Mitt Romney had been declared the winner (by a thin margin of 8 votes), the Iowa GOP announced that, oops, it turns out that Rick Santorum actually won, beating Romney by 34 votes.

Now, South Carolina’s attorney general has notified the U.S. Justice Department of potential voter fraud in the state’s past elections.

Zombie voters of South Carolina

WTOC reports, January 21, 2012, that in a letter to U.S. Attorney Bill Nettles, dated Jan. 19, 2012, SC Attorney General Alan Wilson says an analysis by the Department of Motor Vehicles found 953 ballots cast by voters listed as dead. In 71% of those cases, ballots were cast between 2 to 76 months after the people had died. That means the dead people managed to “vote” up to 6 1/3 years after their death.

The letter doesn’t say in which elections the ballots were cast.

Hmmm. I wonder if the dead also voted in the recent GOP primary in South Carolina?

~Eowyn

GOP candidates’ real positions on family and morality

SaveAmerica.com and SaveCalifornia.com teamed together to compile a report card on how the four remaining GOP presidential candidates (Gingrich, Paul, Romney, Santorum) stand on 10 family and moral issues.

To see the report card in PDF, go here.

Here’s the report card:

YES = Position in support
YES? = Position in likely support
? = Unknown, unclear, or inconsistent position
NO? = Position in likely opposition
NO = Position in opposition

1. Support protecting marriage licenses and marriage rights for only one man and one woman:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: No?
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

2. Oppose marriage substitutes, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: No?
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

3. Oppose homosexual couples adopting children:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: Yes
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

4. Support repealing open homosexuality in military:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: No
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

5. Oppose forcing private business owners to support homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality:

• Gingrich: Yes?
• Paul: Yes?
• Romney: No?
• Santorum: Yes

6. Oppose establishing or expanding pro-“LGBT” “hate crime” laws:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: Yes
• Romney: ?
• Santorum: Yes

7. Oppose supporting or commemorating “Gay Pride” or “LGBT Pride” events:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: Yes?
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

8. Will enforce federal laws against obscenity:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: No
• Romney: Yes?
• Santorum: Yes

9. Support the Boy Scouts’ right to prohibit homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality:

• Gingrich: Yes
• Paul: Yes?
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

10. Oppose teaching schoolchildren to support homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality:

• Gingrich: Yes?
• Paul: Yes
• Romney: No
• Santorum: Yes

As you can see, Rick Santorum is the most culturally conservative, with a perfect score: “Yes” on all 10 issues.

Next is Newt Gingrich, with 8 “Yes” and 2 “Yes?”

Next is Ron Paul, with 3 “Yes”, 3 “Yes?”, 2 “No?”, and 2 “No”.

Last is Mitt Romney, with only 1 “Yes?”, 1 “?”, 1 “No?”, and 7 “No”.

H/t our beloved Tina.

~Eowyn

Joshua Green’s tragic profile photo

Joshua Green is a senior national correspondent at Bloomberg Businessweek and a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe.

On May 26, 2011, while he was still an editor at The Atlantic, Green wrote an article with this title:

Rick Santorum’s Tragic Yearbook Photo

Green wrote with sneering superiority:

“Lots of candidates have embarrassing things in their past that they’d hate to have flare up in the middle of a presidential campaign. I think we can safely conclude that we have found Rick Santorum’s! At the right, cast your eyes upon the tragedy that is Santorum’s high school year book photo–specifically, Carmel High School in Mundelein, Illinois, in 1976. [...] A quick office straw poll here at The Atlantic, conducted amidst uproarious laughter, confirms that this is, in fact, the single worst year book photo that most of us have ever seen. An outright disaster. [...] I have yet to meet the political consultant talented enough to spin this one. My condolences to Santorum. Brave of him to have struggled through this and made something of this life.”

Born in 1958, Santorum was 18 years old in his high school yearbook photo:

I think Rick looked kinda cute, don’t you? Unlike 18-year-olds today, Rick actually looked innocent, instead of hard.

I’d like to see Joshua Green’s high school year book photo. Judging by what he looks like today, I dread to imagine how nebbish Green must have been at 18. Here’s his profile photo on The Atlantic. Bear in mind this is his best (therefore, profile) picture! The pic is fuzzy because I had to enlarge it by 400%:

Joshua Green, 2011

Tssk, tssk.

Tragic. Just tragic….

~Eowyn

Pro-life Santorum voted for govt subsidies to Planned Parenthood

The taxpayer-subsidized abortion mill, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, received $487.4 million in tax dollars over a 12-month period and performed 329,455 abortions.

While he was in the U.S. Senate representing Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, a pro-life Roman Catholic, had voted to fund indirectly (through title X family planning) Planned Parenthood clinics.

Santorum also voted in favor of HR 796, the Abortion Clinic Access Bill; his was a “key vote”. HR 796 sought to amend the federal criminal code to prohibit actions directed at clinics which perform abortion procedures, or at those persons attempting to access these clinics.

He also enthusiastically campaigned for pro-abortion Arlen Specter against the more conservative Pat Toomey.

Rick and Karen Santorum

Here’s some more of Santorum’s troubling voting record:

• Santorum voted for H J Res 47 – Debt Limit Increase Resolution – Key Vote .

• He flip flopped on gun rights, voting against S 1805 – Firearms Manufacturers Protection Bill.

• Santorum also voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — the predecessor to the now infamous NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012) — which:

1. Strips the right of detainees to habeas corpus (the traditional right of detainees to challenge their detention);
2. Gives the US President the power to detain indefinitely anyone—US or foreign nationals, from within the US, and from abroad—it deems to have provided material support to anti-US hostilities, and even use secret and coerced evidence (i.e. through use of torture) to try detainees who will be held in secret US military prisons;
3. Gives US officials immunity from prosecution for torturing detainees that were captured before the end of 2005 by US military and CIA.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail yesterday had a bizarre story on Karen Garver, before she married Rick Santorum, having a years-long cohabitating love affair with an abortion-doctor Thomas E. Allen. Allen not only was 40 years older than Karen, he had delivered her as a baby. Yuck!

Like her husband Rick, Karen Santorum is now pro-life and Catholic. The Santorums have 7 children.

~Eowyn