Rick Santorum’s Integrity

[nhboy (Premo)]

Link to original article.

"Many Christian and/or conservative home-schoolers are understandably eager to embrace Santorum (alongside Tebow) as the movement’s leading public face. But even on the rightward fringe, the chorus of praise is not as unanimous as you might think, and Santorum’s fans are distinctly on the defensive. If I had to guess, I would speculate that actual home-schoolers, as opposed to conservatives who find it appealing in the abstract, remain somewhat uncomfortable with Rick Santorum. That’s because his rhetoric — his promise to be a forceful advocate of home-schooling as president, and to continue home-schooling his own kids in the White House — does not square with his own family’s history, which in turn calls the whole Santorum narrative of supreme rectitude and impeccable character into question.

As various media outlets from Mother Jones to the Washington Post have reminded us in recent weeks, Santorum’s record as a home-schooler is ambiguous at the very least, and arguably hypocritical. From 2001 through at least 2004, when Santorum was serving in the Senate and living full-time in Loudoun County, Va., five of his children were enrolled in an online charter school based in Pennsylvania — a public school, albeit an unusual one — with computers, curricula and other educational services provided at taxpayer expense. According to the Penn Hills Progress, a newspaper in Santorum’s suburban Pittsburgh hometown that broke the story at the time, the local school district had spent approximately $100,000 educating the senator’s so-called home-schooled children, although they lived neither in the district nor in the state.

Santorum owned a modest three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot house in Penn Hills (and reportedly still does), on which he paid about $2,000 a year in taxes. But owning a home is not sufficient to prove residency, and public records, neighborhood testimony and common sense all suggest that Santorum’s constantly enlarging family — his kids now range from age 3 to age 20 — never actually lived there. (At the time of the Penn Hills Progress investigation, Santorum’s wife’s niece and her husband were registered to vote at that address.) Appearing to live in Pennsylvania was distinctly advantageous for the Santorums, because state law required school districts to pay 80 percent of the online charter-school tuition for local families who chose it. (No such law pertained in Virginia.) The Penn Hills district challenged Santorum’s local residency, and the ensuing dispute only ended when the senator withdrew his kids from the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Since 2006 the Santorum kids have reportedly been registered as Virginia home-schoolers.

When Penn Hills tried to bill Santorum for $72,000 that the state had withheld from the local education budget to cover the senator’s kids’ online tuition, he refused to pay. In the end, the Pennsylvania department of education was forced to refund most of that money to the local district. In other words, the Santorums presented themselves to the world as home-schoolers for at least three years, while Pennsylvania taxpayers picked up the bill for their kids’ education — and they actually lived in a different state. "

Rick is a Washington Insider ............. not worth voting for



Re Elect Obama !!!

[vraiblonde]

You know what I like about you, nhboy? I can always tell who the Republican front runner is simply by watching who you post attack pieces about. Don't have to look at polls or anything - just see who your obsession du jour is.

Originally Posted by vraiblonde

You know what I like about you, nhboy? I can always tell who the Republican front runner is simply by watching who you post attack pieces about.

well that would be any attack apparatus from the left ....... the have all cycled through the Republican Field ....

starting with Michelle

[Vince]

Originally Posted by EmptyTimCup

Rick is a Washington Insider ............. not worth voting for



Re Elect Obama !!!

You should get a for just joking about that.

Originally Posted by Vince

You should get a for just joking about that.

maybe .....

..... if we accelerate the slide to the bottom