Posted on 02/11/2012 3:10:31 PM PST by writer33
Manassas, VA, February 11, 2012 -- Although he will not appear on the Virginia Presidential primary ballot on March 6, it did not stop Manassas Tea Party members from selecting Rick Santorum as the overwhelming winner in a straw poll conducted at its monthly meeting of members last evening. In the straw poll which also contained the U.S. Senate Virginia seat and Manassas City Council races, Santorum swept the Presidential poll with 67% of the vote but equally interesting was Mitt Romney received no votes. Newt Gingrich was second in the poll with 27% and Ron Paul last with only 9%. “I believe the Santorum victory shows the rising national interest in a true conservative candidate, but it’s a little surprising Romney received no votes,” indicated Manassas Tea Party Chairman Craig Summers.
In the local Manassas City Council race where three seats are up for grabs Republican candidates Ian Lovejoy and Jonathan Way won with 34% and 24% respectively as well as Independent candidate Jerry Carman with 26%. The poll would not have re-elected Councilman Mark Wolfe as he came in with only 16% of the vote.
(Excerpt) Read more at pr.com ...
Everything is known about Gingrich. So you hate his guts. I don’t care what you think or feel.
All I want is for voters to know as much as possible about who they are voting for, and aren’t surprised later when dirt they weren’t aware of begins to stick.
Many people voted for a Democrat in 1976 because they were ticked off at the Republican Party. Carter seemed so upright and Christian, married to the same woman for decades and he even taught Sunday school. Carter turned out to be a nightmare, mostly because voters didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision.
Having all the facts is important. Go ahead and post as much as you want about Gingrich - but it is already known!
And now it is time to vett Santorum and you want to do what - bury everything?
You opened up with a myth...”everyone knows about” Newt’s questionable “record” of holding conservative values. The more people learn it for themselves, the less support he has and the further he slips in polling and voting. Everything that followed was a fabrication as every other anti-Santorum screed you post, especially relying on Linseed GrAMNESTY’s word on any given subject.
Oh, man...you’ve got it really bad. Accusing people on Free Republci is definiitely dangerous.
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Santorum Hits Gingrich, Romney to Kick Off Florida Swing
– January 23, 2012Posted in: Political News
In front of an enthusiastic crowd of 200 people that interrupted him several times with cheers of “Rick, Rick, Rick,” he said: “We are going to campaign all up and down the state of Florida.”
During the rally, Santorum hit both Newt Gingrich, who won the first-in-the-South primary on Saturday, and Mitt Romney, who placed second.
“Trust is a big issue in this election,” he said. “Who do you trust is going to do what they say they are going to do?”
“You look at the record of someone who was the governor of Massachusetts and, well, didn’t necessarily govern all that conservatively,” Santorum said, before introducing a new attack on Gingrich.
“You look at someone who was speaker of the House, and again, these are friends, I know they are good people, but when Newt was speaker of the House, well, within three years the conservatives within the House of Representatives tried to throw him out, and in the fourth year they did. Why? Because he wasn’t governing as a conservative,” Santorum said. “He didn’t live up to all the hype.”
Santorum, standing on a stage in a strip mall parking lot outside of Wings Plus, said he was the “conservative firebrand” other Republicans would come to if they needed help with legislation.
“We were the one standing up and fighting,” Santorum said. “I was the go-to guy.”
“It’s great to be glib, but it’s best to be principled. It’s better to have all of your ducks in a row,” Santorum said. “It’s better to have someone of principal, someone who has been there, someone who’s not afraid when they are getting accused of being intolerant or whatever the case may be stands up and says, ‘I’m not, I’m not and I believe what I did was right.’”
http://www.eastidahonews.com/2012/01/santorum-hits-gingrich-romney-to-kick-off-florida-swing/
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“Trust is a big issue in this election...”
Yep. It sure is.
Rick Santorum’s School Scandal
How the public-school-loathing GOP candidate used Pennsylvania’s taxpayer dollars to school his kids in Virginia.
Santorum has campaigned on the fact that his seven kids have been home-schooled, which has earned him a loyal following of foot soldiers within the evangelical movement. (The same goes for Rep. Michele Bachmann, who on Tuesday dropped out of the presidential race.) Over the past year, Santorum has appeared at a handful of home-schooling conferences. In April, he won the Home School Legal Defense Association’s straw poll. There’s even a “Homeschoolers for Santorum” Facebook page.
But Santorum wasn’t always so opposed to government-run schools—especially one Pennsylvania cyber charter school that offered students free computers, internet service, and online classes. Between 2001 and 2004, that online school allowed the Santorum family to live in Virginia, while sticking Pennsylvania taxpayers with a $100,000 bill.
In 2004, Santorum spawned a minor scandal when news broke that he was no longer residing in the state that sent him to Congress and was living instead outside the Beltway in Leesburg, Virginia. Santorum owned, and still does, a house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, next door to his in-laws. The Santorums bought the three-bedroom house in 1997 for $87,800. But after Santorum got elected to the Senate in 1994, he bought a much larger home in Virginia that would accommodate his ever-growing family. Some relatives moved into the Penn Hills house, but Santorum continued to use it to claim residency in Pennsylvania, where he voted by absentee ballot.
Despite moving his family to Virginia, Santorum didn’t enroll his children in a local public school. Nor did the Santorums simply home-school the kids. Instead, in 2001, they enrolled five of their kids in the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, based out of tiny Beaver County, Pennsylvania. The school was founded by Nick Trombetta, a former wrestling coach who set up an online charter school in a depopulated part of the state and turned it into a financial powerhouse that rakes in millions annually in public education funds. (In 2007, Trombetta, a major Republican donor in the state, was the subject of a state grand jury investigation into his use of millions in public funds to build a performing arts center near the school’s headquarters, among other things. No charges have been brought.)
Considered a public school, the online charter’s students are required to take state-mandated assessments and meet other formal requirements not demanded of traditional home-schoolers. But it offers home-schoolers lots of advantages, notably free computers and internet connections. When Santorum enrolled his kids there, the local school district in Penn Hills was forced to pick up the tab for the cyber school, which cost the district $38,000 a year for the Santorum children.
After four years, the press got wind of this in 2004, and Democrats raised a fuss about the fact that their senator didn’t actually live in Pennsylvania, much less the Penn Hills school district that was footing the bills for his children’s education in Virginia. The local school board, which included a member who was the local Democratic Party committee chair, attempted to force Santorum to repay the district $100,000 in tuition.
When the scandal broke, Trombetta, the founder of the charter school, offered to let Santorum’s kids stay enrolled for free if Santorum would pay the technology costs. In the end, with Democrats challenging his residency in the state, Santorum withdrew his kids from the school. He never repaid a dime. The state ended up settling with the school district and repaying $55,000 in tuition fees. (The Santorum campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
Even today, nearly eight years after the charter school scandal, Santorum’s residency issues continue to dog him. On the campaign trail, distancing himself from the dreaded Washington insider label, he has highlighted his Pennsylvania roots.
In August, at a campaign event in Iowa, he handed out samples of “Pennsylvania Presidential Peach Preserves,” which he claimed were made by his family from peaches they picked off their trees back home. But as the Roxborough-Manayunk, Pennsylvania, Patch pointed out on Tuesday, there’s not a peach tree to be found anywhere near the Santorum home in Penn Hills...
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Here’s another on the same issue, this one from a RC nun.
7/21/2005
A great letter-to-the-editor in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from a CATHOLIC NUN:
“Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife have taught their children a powerful lesson on civic responsibility by refusing to pay any tuition money to the Penn Hills School District for their children who attended the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School ... Released from that payment on a technicality shows that even an upstanding, moral gentleman like Sen. Santorum teaches his children the following lessons:
1) Take advantage of the system whenever you can.
2) The little guy pays while the rich and powerful guy gets away with it.
3) As a Catholic, you have no obligation to pay your share to the common good in spite of Catholic social doctrine. “
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05202/541074.stm
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Nothing beats a good old-fashioned butt-whooping from a nun!
ROFLMAO
You are repeating the Democrat talking points from that election. You should be proud. By the way, you know that some nuns and priests are liberal don’t you? People that write to a paper can even be working for the other side. Is that the smoking gun you have? Pathetic!
The last time I checked, Rick was on the right side of TARP, Health Care and Global Warming. Your guy wasn’t. But your point is his kids schooling?
I would love to have parents who home schooled their kids with a Christ centered education occupy the White House. Liberals heads will explode!
“I don’t hate Newt, far from it.”
That’s cool. I don’t hate Santorum.
In fact, I’ve said on Free Republic that he should go home to Pennsylvania and run for governor of that state. He wins and governs like a Conservative, I would support him in a run for President.
But his record and character, at this point in time, needs some maturing that can only come from experience.
Every national election I research the candidates. In 2008 I kept finding that information about Obama was being scrubbed off the internet very quickly. So, I turned to news outlets and magazines in Africa. Those publication had lots of interviews where Obama, his wife Michelle, and lots of Obama relatives all said the same thing: BHO2 was born in Kenya.
I try hard to keep people informed about candidates. They don’t always like the information and so I get a bit crispy around the edges from flames. Oh, well!
I home schooled my kid and didn’t steal from the school district to do it, either.
Jim Robinson supports Newt Gingrich whole heartedly.
You should be careful who you smear.
I just googled the “Nun” who’s letter to the editor you cite. She belongs to a liberal group of nuns that “operate outside the structure of the Catholic Church” acording to their Facebook page. They have a link to an They dress in everything from miniskirts to medieval mantles. They do everything from classroom teaching to police work. One has a job with Cesar Chavez, another with Ralph Nader. There is a deputy attorney general and an Air Force lieutenant. They live in inner-city slums, in posh suburbs, on farms, even in the desert. They come singly, by the dozen and in battalions. They are the new American nuns who, in the decade since the Second Vatican Council first provided the inspiration, have streamed out of their centuries-old enclosures into the modern world....”
They are most likely all lesbians.
Do you have any more DNC or Romney talking points????
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942531,00.html#ixzz1m8agDBt4article in Time that starts off....”
I don’t tell Jim or anyone else on Free Republic who to support or who not to, nor does he (or anyone else with any bit of credibility) instruct me who to support...I think you could follow the same advice, but I know that’s not allowed in your imaginary world.
Everything I’ve stated here on this thread is going to be thrown at Rick Santorum by Democrats.
Nothing messes up a candidate quicker than the opposition finding questionable issues involving money or hypocrisy. Or worse, a candidate who has made grandoise claims that do not hold up under close scrutiny.
His constituents were really ticked off about his supporting Specter in a past election, and some others mentioned to me the schooling issue involving money.
These issues are out there and must be addressed head on. Striking out at me or at Gingrich is not constructive. If you want to help the candidate of your choice, get the facts out there and stop shooting the messenger!
You keep bringing up Gingrich, yet he isn’t the subject of this thread. I’m not telling you who to support.
Unfortunately, you seem to be afraid to look at Santorum’s past.
Why is that?
You are the one posting the lies. Saying that the Demoncrats are going to do it is a poor excuse.
Shooting the messenger is something I expect from liberals.
So you think this nun is a lesbian? What does that have to do with the fact the Santorums may have ripped off a school district to the tune of $100,000?
And Cesar Chavez has been dead for over 10 years. Good grief!
Everything you chose to ignore will also be discussed regarding Newt. I say bring it on...I’ll gladly take on their smears as a challenge to be battled on the field of their choosing.
I understand about Santorum’s “support” of Snarlin’ Arlen given they were from the same state and the support got us both Justices Roberts and Alito. What did Newt’s support for Dede Scuzzyflava get anyone? Oh yea, zip-zero-nada.
Instead of striking out at me in pointing out Newt’s flaws or attempting to cover them up with generic band-aids, I’m more than happy to get them out there so that he doesn’t stab us in the back again like he did when he stated: “As long as I am Speaker of this House, no gun control legislation is going to move in committee or on the floor of this House and there will be no further erosion of their rights.” then supported and pushed the most anti-gun legislation concieved by the most LIEberal jackasses in congress.
I realize we have no “perfect” candidate and no candiate who I could be in 100% agreement with 100% of their career. I’m not looking for “perfection”...I’m looking for honesty. What is the MOST IMPORTANT issue for this or any election?
LIFE and the ability to DEFEND IT! If you get those two issues correct it is almost guaranteed everything else will fall into place. I hate to break it to you (since you’re one of his primary cheerleaders here), Newt’s record on both is less than promising.
I am saying that voters should be familiar with the past histories of candidates.
Accusing me of being a liar is the last refuge of a person afraid to look at what has been written about their candidate, whether it be true or false.
Go ahead, post a thread about Newt Gingrich’s past record.
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