Let me say that again.
Rick Santorum is running for President. The man who said overturning sodomy laws would open the door to incest thinks that four years after the American electorate voted Barack Obama into the White House, it will do the same for him.
In an interview with FOX News, Santorum dodged the 2012 question, but told Greta Van Susteren:
And you know, yes, I went to Iowa because I’m very concerned about what’s going on in America right now. And as you know, I mean, I come on here on FOX and I write and I do radio and I do a lot of things because I’m very concerned about the direction of this country. And I do know this, and I certainly have known it for the last 24 hours, that when you go and give a speech in Iowa, people pay attention to what you’re doing and what you’re saying, and that’s what I hope to accomplish.
This man will never be President
So he’s not willing to state the obvious outright but he will admit to wanting people to “pay attention to what [he's] doing and what [he's] saying,” so he’s not necessarily running, but he’d like us to keep him in mind when the time comes, thank you very much. Continue reading…
So how do we separate money from politics when we need to? I think everyone can agree that, so long as there is money, we cannot (and probably should not) keep money and politics completely separate. Many advocacy groups allow for a kind of collective bargaining that improves the political standing of groups that, as individuals, would have little power. Teachers, for instance, can be limited in their political involvement because they generally are not paid what they’re actually worth in society. In such a case, money, collectively, can be necessary to get the group’s voices heard. [...]
Votes for the two more minor candidates only amounted to 2.58% of the total vote. Now, in the U.S. this result might not seem odd. Thanks to the two-party system, third party candidates never do terribly well in national elections. Even so, in 1992, Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the vote. In the hotly contested 2000 election, Ralph Nader managed to pick up a larger percentage of votes than the two minor candidates in Iran’s election combined. The 2005 federal elecdtions in Germany had two major parties (actually one party and one two-party coalition) contending for the chancellorship, one recieving 35%, the other 34%. The remaining four parties combined garnered 19.9% of the vote. [...]
Beyond Newt’s hyperbole over the relative weight of the “power grab” is his apparent disregard for a) what a dictatorship is, and b) that these new regulations would not exceed in scope those that already control the functions of commercial banks and other industries. I hate to break it to him, but the government already regulates everything down to his toilet seat with good reason, so regulating something as vast as Citi Group is probably in our best interest. [...]
