Mookie4ever wrote:I don't know much about Santorum except for what he said about the Shiavo matter and the things that he's said about homosexuality. So I just checked out the wiki entry on him and look at this
wiki on Santorum wrote:Santorum and his wife, Karen Garver Santorum, have six children: Elizabeth Anne (born 1991); Richard John ("Johnny"), Jr. (born 1993); Daniel James (born 1995); Sarah Maria (born 1998); Peter Kenneth (born 1999); and Patrick Francis (born 2001). In 1996, their son Gabriel Michael was born prematurely and lived for only two hours (a sonogram taken before Gabriel was born revealed that his posterior urethral valve was closed and that the prognosis for his survival was therefore poor). Karen Santorum wrote a book about the experience: Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum.[5] In it, she writes that the couple brought the deceased infant home from the hospital and introduced the dead child to their living children as "your brother Gabriel" and slept with the body overnight before returning it to the hospital. The anecdote was also written about by Michael Sokolove in a 2005 'New York Times Magazine story on Santorum.[6] Karen is also the author of a book on etiquette for children.[7]
That is creepy. Why in the world would the hospital let them take the corpse and more importantly who in their right mind would do something like this?
That was just one of many unusual and/or upsetting events in Santorum's political career. He won a lot of support as a "family values" politician, a devout Catholic and a conservative. He lost of much of his credibility throughout his career.
Of particular note, something that upset many PA taxpayers, democrat or republican, is his cyber school controversy:
In November 2004, a controversy developed over education costs for Santorum's children. Santorum's legal address is a three-bedroom house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, which he purchased for $87,800 in 1997. But since 2001, he has lived in Leesburg, Virginia, a town about one hour's drive west of Washington, D.C., and about 90 minutes' drive south of the Pennsylvania border, in a house he purchased for $643,000. The Penn Hills Progress, a local paper, reported that Santorum and his wife paid about $2,000 per year in property taxes on their Pennsylvania home. The paper also found that another couple — possibly renters — were registered voters at the same address.
At the time the issue arose, Santorum's five older children attended the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, with 80 percent of tuition costs paid by the Penn Hills School District.[65] At a meeting in November 2004, the Penn Hills School District announced that it did not believe Santorum met the qualifications for residency status, because he and his family spent most of the year in Virginia. They demanded repayment of tuition costs totaling $67,000. Santorum said he would make other arrangements for his children's education, but insisted that he did not owe the school board any back tuition.
And then his silly announcement about finding WMD's in Iraq:
In June 2006, Santorum declared that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been found in Iraq. The specific weapons he referred to were chemical munitions dating back to the Iran-Iraq War that were buried in the early 1990s. The report stated that while agents had degraded to an unknown degree, they remained dangerous and possibly lethal. Officials of the Department of Defense, CIA intelligence analysts, and the White House have all explicitly stated that these expired casings are not part of the WMD threat that Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched to contain.
If you're a battery, you're either working or you're dead....
by chadlincoln » Fri Apr 27, 2007 12:23 pm 
