Exits

Two exits made the news. The first was that Rick Santorum ended is candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, effectively conceding the prize to Mitt Romney, who only has Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul left to ignore. With polls showing him losing in the presidential primary in his home state of Pennsylvania, Santorum decided to get out now and preserve his prospects for a future run in 2016 or 2020 rather than risk a repeat of the repudiation Pennsylvania voters gave him when he lost his Senate seat to Robert Casey, Jr. in 2006 by an eighteen-point margin. With Romney now the de facto Republican nominee, President Obama can now focus on how to, as Democrats always do, lose to most losable candidate the Republicans can possibly put up. No, I'm not confident in an Obama victory, largely because the economy hasn't fully rebounded, the European debt crisis could still affect us, and Romney likely has an array of slogans and sound bites to distract voters from the issues.

In fact, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin is convinced that Obama's endorsement of an unpassable bill to tax millionaires and billionaires at the same rate their own employees pay - the so-called "Buffett rule," after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who's appalled that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary - is politically motivated. (Really, Doug?) Holtz-Eakin is also certain that the Buffett rule wouldn't even make a dent in helping to balance the budget. He even thinks Obama's support of it will even hurt Obama in the election - because despite Obama's characterization of the Buffett rule as an act of fairness, Holtz-Eakin says independent voters are interested in jobs . . . and are not interested in fairness.

There's your take-away: Douglas Holtz-Eakin (who has opposed each and every one of Obama's economic initiatives) thinks independent voters are self-interested heartless bastards.

Meanwhile, George Zimmerman, the likely killer of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, has made an exit of his own even as his legal team made an exit from defending him. After Zimmerman contacted the special prosecutor in the case - something he ought not to have done - he pretty much disappeared, causing his lawyers to resign from the case in part because of their inability to communicate with him. Never arrested, he's now likely anywhere but Florida, laying low out of fear.

Zimmerman's ability to avoid arrest by claiming self-defense under Florida's "stand your ground law" - one of thirty such state laws in the nation and the kind of bill pushed nationwide in state legislatures by the reactionary American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - may be the reason why so many major corporations are deserting ALEC. They got in bed with that right-wing group to promote their business-friendly agenda, and they're dissociating themselves from ALEC now that it's become apparent that ALEC's support of "stand your ground" gun laws like the one in Florida presents a public relations problem.

Marching To Pretoria

The country moved a little bit closer to apartheid-era South African-style fascism with Rick Santorum's twin primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi, forcing Mitt Romney - who still leads in the delegate count for the GOP presidential nomination - to become more reactionary in his sociopolitical views. The former supporter of Planned Parenthood now thinks we should stop supporting it. To respond to the inevitable insistence that a President Romney would moderate his views and go back to where he was as governor of Massachusetts once he's in the White House, it should be remembered that the senior George Bush held on to his adopted ultraconservative social views once he was elected President in 1988 . . . because he still had to please the right in 1992.

Liberals and moderate Democrats may be eagerly awaiting the prospect of President Obama facing either Romney or Santorum will full confidence in his ability to clean either of their clocks, but they should check Obama's own timepiece first. It turns out that Obama's approval rating is down to 41 percent in one poll taken this month, and he's only four points ahead of Santorum - yes, Santorum - in a hypothetical matchup, just outside the margin of error. Obama is getting blame for the high gas prices - which Republicans are helping to cause by talking about war with Iran, spooking commodity speculators - that even recent good news about the job market can't seem to neutralize. In an ideal world - France - people would be driving smaller cars and have plausible mass transit options, so maybe gasoline prices wouldn't be such a big deal. Or, at least people would be smart enough to understand that high gas prices are not Obama's fault.

Because of all that - and because of the fact that Republicans hold 29 state governorships, hold the most state legislature majorities since 1928, and are working to make sure fewer Democratic Party-friendly demographic groups vote in November - the sun may be setting on American progressivism (what there is of it) for years, maybe even decades. The GOP has the mechanism and the money to see to that.

And even though female voters in the Democratic party may be energized by the Republican war or women, the battle over contraception has energized Republican women like TV actress Patricia Heaton. By now you may know about her nasty, snide Twitter comments about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke's testimony on birth control coverage. Referring to Fluke as "G-Town Gal" and addressing her in the second person, Heaton wrote comments on her Twitter page like: "Hey G-Town Gal: If your parents have to pay for your birth control, maybe they should get a say in who [sic] you sleep with! Instant birth control!"

How many of you who remember Heaton's performance as the caustic Debra on "Everybody Loves Raymond" got the feeling that she wasn't acting?

Though Heaton apologized for her tone, she's been known to offer nasty right-wing comments for years. She once declared Obama to be "completely wrong" for the Presidency and said she wanted a Republican presidential debate that would include Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved asking "tough and intelligent" questions. The pro-life Heaton also insisted that women who may seek an abortion should give birth instead, regardless, commenting: "A woman experiencing an unplanned pregnancy also deserves to experience unplanned joy."

And yet, in spite of all this, no one has called for a boycott of her current ABC sitcom "The Middle." I myself watched it last week after having heard of Heaton's comments about Ms. Fluke, even though that particular episode was a rerun. But then everyone knows that there's a difference between Limbaugh and Patricia Heaton.

Heaton is just an entertainer.

The Elephants In the Room

What, the Republican presidential nomination contest still isn't over?

When it became apparent that Mitt Romney was going to have a good night on Super Tuesday, I pretty much expected the aura of inevitability to finally shine on him. But Rick Santorum came within a whisker of wining the Ohio primary, and he was also able to claim wins in North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee - highlighting Romney's problems in the South and the Plains states and revealing a remarkable acceptance these rednecks and yokels have for Italian-American Catholics like Santorum. Romney, going into upcoming contests in Mississippi and Alabama as well as Kansas, admitted he's going into "foreign territory." Conservative voters just aren't warming up to him - there'll be another Ice Age before they do.

That said, President Obama isn't out of the woods yet. He'll have to face negative ads from numerous right-wing super-PACs in the fall, plus a virulent Tea Party ready to turn out for the Republican presidential nominee even if it's a cow. Righties will gladly overlook the flaws of the eventual nominee (Romney) to get Obama out of office. The fact that Obama's poll numbers have improved is irrelevant, especially considering how marginal these improved ratings really are.

Meanwhile, the Republican power grab plot is in full force. A redistricting of U.S. House seats in Ohio, done by Republicans in Columbus with the blessing of Speaker John Boehner (who represents a suburban Cincinnati district) after Ohio lost one seat, forced liberal Democratic incumbent representatives Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur in a primary contest for the same seat, even though the distances between their respective home bases of Cleveland and Toledo are 120 miles apart. (Their new district snakes along the shore of Lake Erie.)  Kaptur won, ending Kucinich's political career - to the delight of Republicans who were sick and tired of his progressive policy initiatives and to the dismay of Republicans who will no longer have him to kick around anymore. But more Republicans are delighted than dismayed. Kucinich's forced retirement is the latest in a series of GOP efforts to establish a permanent majority in the House of Representatives by eliminating Democratic districts in states currently under Republican control that lost House seats as a result of the 2010 census even as Republican states in the Sun Belt are gaining seats.

Many of these states losing House seats have more Democrats than Republicans, so Democratic votes in Democratic states will be neutralized. In New Jersey, the Eleventh U.S. House District, where I live, was redrawn to include a good part of the liberal Essex County town of Montclair (which was divided between two Democratic districts), but the Eleventh District remains heavily centered in Republican Morris County. Starting in January, the Democratic voters in Montclair who now find themselves in Republican Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen's district can now look forward to a decade of having their positions and concerns underrepresented - or not represented at all.  

The era of Democratic dominance James Carville predicted back in 2008 ended before it even began, and the demise of the Democratic party can't be far behind. Even if Obama wins re-election, the Democrats can't possibly overcome in 2016 the built-in advantages Republicans are creating for themselves in terms of reapportionment and super-PAC money.

The Campaign Continues . . .

Oh, is the Republican presidential nomination campaign still on?

This protracted race is probably the best argument for replacing the constitutional system in America with a parliamentary system that guarantees shorter election campaigns - or at least overturning Citizens United. All eyes are on tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, especially Ohio, where Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are in a dead heat. Santorum was a huge favorite in Ohio until he said John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on separation of church and state made him want to throw up and suggested that a President who wanted people to go to college was a snob.

Yeah, about that latter issue . . .. Santorum apparently misunderstood President Obama's comments on education. Obama believes that anyone who may not be an appropriate fit for college ought to go to a trade school, which, ironically, was the same point Santorum was trying to make in his wrongly worded remarks. And that would be a reasonable argument, which Santorum could have made if he had spent time in his own undergraduate studies learning how to debate.

But - and here's another important point no one seems to be making - wouldn't it be a good idea if some trade school students went to college as well, if they have the intellectual capability for it, so they could enjoy high art and literature in addition to learning how to work in a specific vocation? And it would also be beneficial to require some intellectual rigor in the engineers who build our dams and bridges so they could have minds flexible enough to consider possible effects of their work and imagine the implications of it. If engineers are smart enough to ponder the long-term effect of infrastructural systems and how they could fail, for example, they can design infrastructure with such ramifications in mind. Then we could build bridges that don't collapse.

As someone who merely observes the debate over education in America and is not an expert on it, I don't know how we can get the best bang for a buck and produce, as former Vice President Dan Quayle advocated, "the best educated American people in the world." All I know is that the current system ain't working. Look at Dan Quayle.

The Miseducation of Rick Santorum

Liberals have likely been double-checking their passports and looking into foreign real estate trends with Richard John Santorum becoming an even more viable candidate for the Presidency . . . especially since he appeared in a Tennessee church and attacked President Obama for saying that every child should go to college. "I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely," he also told Glenn Beck, expressing fear that liberal college professors are trying to pollute young minds. "The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country."

The Pennsylvania State University alumnus somehow sees higher education, traditionally the realm of critical thinking and intellectual development, as a form of brainwashing just because students tend to develop more tolerant attitudes towards different sorts of people and may be open to more contemporary ideas. So how did Rick manage to escape indoctrination - not just in Penn State's undergraduate department but at the university's Dickinson Law School? And how much liberal indoctrination could there possibly be in the University of Pittsburgh's business administration master's program, from which Ricko received an M.B.A. in 1981?

This latest hypocritical belittling of intellectual development from the Republican party as an un-American activity is pathetic, but even more troubling is that the real crisis of American higher education is not that students are being told what to think but that they're graduating without learning how to think . . . just like Rick Santorum. America boasts of having the most colleges and universities in the world - at last count a total of 5,758 higher education institutions, an average of more than 115 per state - but, as I have noted before, few of these institutions have produced many great thinkers. For more on this subject, please see my earlier post, "Higher Miseducation."

As for Santorum, I imagine that he's shown no curiosity in art and letters despite his own education. I seriously doubt that he's even displayed any curiosity in the intricate machinations of the body politic despite his own B.A. degree in political science. It would benefit a politician running for President to learn of the rise of Islam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to understand the Middle East or the balances of power in post-Napoleonic Europe to understand how the Old Country went from imperial competition in the nineteenth century to a legally sanctioned socioeconomic community today. But Santorum seems to be comfortable with his own righteousness and absolutism without seeking out the nuances of how the world he'd have to deal with as President got to be the way it is. All he knows is that Iran may have the bomb, and we may - no, as far as he sees it, will - have to start another war in the Middle East.

If Santorum does get the Republican presidential nomination, I hope he releases his college transcripts. I want to see how he fared in his remedial courses.

Santorum Rising

Is Rick Santorum for real? I think he is.

Ricko the Sicko has statistically insignificant leads over Mitt Romney in national polls for the Republican presidential nomination, but the fact that they're leads just the same has given Mitt Romney cause for concern. Romney is coming off as more of a phony as he tries to tighten what had once been thought to be a secure grip on the nomination, all the while coming across as an out-of-touch spoiled rich kid who doesn't seem angry about the perceived decline of the American middle class. Rick Santorum seems more authentic as an angry working-class-rooted conservative warrior going against the powerful economic elites, despite the unpleasant truth that the policies he espouses - which would make such economic interests more powerful and elitist - aren't that different from the ones Romney supports. But he has an obvious appeal to blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" who are inclined to vote Republican in presidential elections on cultural issues.

It is for that reason alone that Santorum should be no less underestimated than Newt Gingrich has been. (We can't rule out Newt yet either.) President Obama is presiding over an economy that seems to be on the mend, but we could reach a particular threshold, at which the economy has improved to the point where it's good enough to let people focus more on social issues (the kind of social issues that were resolved decades, if not centuries, ago in other Western countries) but not good enough to be neutralized as an issue in and of itself. A condition like that could make a Republican presidential candidate like Santorum very attractive.

Do not imagine for one moment that a rabidly conservative and intellectually bankrupt politician like Santorum could never make it to the White House. I've said it before and I'll say it again (an annoying habit on this blog, I know, but what the heck, history has been repeating itself a lot lately): Back in the 1990s, everyone knew that the idea of "President George Walker Bush" was ridiculous.

Clarification and Follow-Up: February 8, 2012

I have been told that a long blog entry is no good, because it's too cumbersome to read online.  There's another problem: When you write a long blog entry and you have to get it out as soon as possible owing to the timeliness of the subject, it can be completely free of spelling errors but still have something wrong with it. So I need to issue a clarification of my long annual winners and losers lists for 2011" In declaring Woody Allen a winner of the year because of his latest movie, his "love letter to the American literature and music of the 1920s," I omitted the title of the movie.  It was, of course, Midnight in Paris.  I have since corrected the original post.

Meanwhile, I'm guessing that one of my posts has offended fans of an overrated fiftysomething Italian-American scam artist with a large following.  I am, of course, talking about Rick Santorum.  Earlier today I made reference to the fact that he and his wife slept in a hospital bed with their dead baby son between them by saying his Lakota Indian name would be "Sleeps With Dead Babies."  Admittedly, this makes him sounds sick.  Because, he is.  Some people might think that I should apologize to Santorum for offending his sensibilities.  Well, here again is some of the shtick about Rick.  He opposes all forms of health care reform.  He hired a campaign  staffer who says that God decreed that a woman shouldn't be President of the United States.  He says global warming is a hoax.  He likened homosexual relationships to bestiality.  He dismissed black people as parasitical welfare dependents.

So here's my point: I'll stop offending Rick Santorum's sensibilities when he stops offending mine.

Much Ado About Nothing

Rick Santorum - also known by his Lakota name, "Sleeps With Dead Babies" - is the man of the hour in the Republican presidential nomination contest, having swept the caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and won a primary in Missouri, a state considered a microcosm of America at large. He's shaken up the Republican race by winning 28 convention delegates for a total of 45 so far, putting him ahead of Newt Gingrich and damaging Mitt Romney's aura of inevitability as the Republican nominee. Gingrich has to find a way to keep his campaign going in the month leading up to Super Tuesday on March 6, when many Southern states with voters friendly to his proposals are holding primaries and caucuses, while Romney has to avoid freaking out.

But wait a minute! Isn't the focus on this Santorum sweep just a lot of hype from a mainstream media eager to keep the GOP race alive? I think so. As someone who wants to see those Grand Old Partisans go down this autumn, I hope this does keep the race alive. But how can it be anything other than hype when the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado are in fact the first step in a complicated process to award delegates to the Republican convention, and the delegates Santorum won last night are not bound by the caucus results? And shouldn't it matter that Missouri didn't matter? Missouri's primary was nonbinding; the state Republican party chooses its convention delegates through a series of caucuses and state conventions starting next month. Why have a primary that doesn't count? And why should Santorum brag about winning it? This would be like Jon Cryer bragging about winning a best TV actor poll on Facebook - or, for that matter, a People's Choice award.

Holding nonbinding primaries is a useless gesture, it wastes taxpayers' money, and it gives Chris Matthews way too much to talk about. Besides, we already have political contests in this country that don't count. They're called general elections. :-p

Ricko The Sicko

I'm sorry I never got to comment on Newt Gingrich while he was the right-wing white ring's flavor of the month, but fortunately (for the sake of having someone to bash), Richard John Santorum has stepped in to fill the void and is widely expected to by the main conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential nomination contest.

Before you start thinking that a nice, upstanding family man like Santorum can't possibly be as horrid as Rick Perry or as dumb as Michele Bachmann, here are some things you ought to know about the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania hoping to become the nation's 45th President, some of which I may have mentioned in earlier posts:

 Rick Santorum told a crowd at a Christian college, in response to a student's suggestion that maybe God doesn't appreciate the fact that Americans die because they have no health insurance, that he rejected such a suggestion. "People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their health care. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to," he said. "And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit." In fact, a 2009 Harvard Medical School study found that 45,000 deaths in the U.S. are attributed to lack of health insurance every year.

He complained about regulations forcing states like Iowa to sign more people up for Medicaid, which he saw as an expansion of the welfare state. He also added that the last thing he wanted to do was give black people welfare when he wanted to incentivize them to work, as if everyone on welfare were black.

He not only advocates the re-instatement of "Don't ask, don't tell" in the military, he supports a constitutional amendment that would invalidate same-sex marriages. Santorum supports an anti-abortion policy that would throw abortionists in jail for murder. He also likened homosexuality to "man-on-dog" sex.

I didn't want to bring this up again - even though this is primarily why I call him Ricko the Sicko - but he and his wife slept with a dead baby between them. After their son Gabriel was born prematurely and lived only two hours, the Santorums - the Santora? - slept in a hospital bed, separated by the corpse of their infant son. They brought his lifeless body home to present them to their children. Two of their children, Elizabeth and Johnny, held the baby "with so much love and tenderness," Mrs. Santorum later wrote, addressing her deceased son in the second person. "Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'"

Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, believes in magic underwear, eternal marriage, and, speaking of angels, an angel named Moroni who will announce the return of Christ just before the world ends. Frankly, I don't see him to be nearly as daffy as Santorum.

Single Digits

So let me get this straight . . ..  Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight.  I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes.  But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand.  I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night.  He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months.  As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes.  In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.  

Not six thousand.  Six.  One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum.  And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.  

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race.  The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0. 

Love and Bondage

The possibility of a fascist state in America that I alluded to in an earlier post became slightly more realistic yesterday when it turned out that a pact to protect the sanctity of marriage that was put out by the Family Leader, a right-wing advocacy group, that had been signed by two Republican presidential candidates featured a rosy view of black family life under slavery. The document, signed by Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, expressed the belief that a black child born in slavery in 1860, before the Civil War, had a more stable family life, with two parents, than a black child born during Barack Obama's Presidency.

If this statement had expressed outrage or pity over this assessment, the Family Leader might have gotten away with it. But the wording suggested that the Family Leader endorsed slavery. Though they retracted the wording, they've still managed to call attention to the underlying racism of social conservative groups fighting for . . . no change. They want to return to the 1950s ideal of white nuclear middle-class families before gays came out of the closet, women went to work, and actresses like Cybill Shepherd mouthed off about marriage being a misogynistic institution . . . and when blacks were seen but not heard.

I understand why Bachmann signed the vow. She thought John Quincy Adams and other Founding Fathers ended slavery long before 1860. I don't know why Rick Santorum, who's evidently dumber than he looks (he reminds me of the 1980s video game character Evil Otto) would sign this pact, because I don't think he has anything against black people. It's the gays he hates.

Anyway, like Michele Bachmann's statement about the Founding Fathers and the belief that "Father Knows Best" reflected real life, the Family Leader's statement just isn't true. Plantation owners had no regard for slave family units; slave marriages were not recognized as legitimate, and many families were broken up at the auction block. Absent fathers may be a problem in black America today, but both parents were likelier to be absent in a slave child's life because the master sold them to another cotton grower.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has reared her ugly head on the cover of Newsweek, telling the magazine that she can win a general presidential election and toying with the possibility of a presidential campaign. And even while family leader is trying to distance itself from charges of racism, Palin is dismissing President Obama as a "sugar daddy" for doling out money in the form of government spending and that he has "run out of sugar." Unfortunately, Palin, more evil than Evil Otto, hasn't yet run out of sweet talk designed to keep people paying attention to her - some of that same talk being sourly racist.

It should be obvious that the United States is becoming more like apartheid-era South Africa, where we will see more laws based on fundamentalist Christianity, white people will be the minority but will still control everything, people of color have no voting rights, women have no health amenities, and the capitalist system merrily rolls along enriching only a few people. Pretty soon other countries will boycott us.

Except China, which will continue to make our kitchen utensils and underwear.

Goodbye Joe, Hello Rick

Faux Democrat Joseph Lieberman, the senior senator from the state of Connecticut, has announced that he will not seek a fifth term. The "Independent Democrat," as he is registered in the Senate, cited his inability to fit comfortably with either party because of his unorthodox political views.

More likely, it's because he's afraid of losing. The Democrats don't want him, the Republicans don't trust him, and his credibility disappeared with his 2004 presidential run. More recently, Lieberman has continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was working on a program of "weapons of mass destruction" when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, even though George Walker Bush has long since admitted that no such program existed. It's also to Lieberman we owe the credit for killing a public medical insurance option and even the idea of a Medicare buy-in for people 55 to 65, preserving the right of private health insurers (many of whom are in Connecticut) to avoid competition designed to bring down costs.

Lieberman is already irrelevant, having ceded his moral authority over these issues and having campaigned for John McCain in 2008 after having been Albert Gore's vice presidential running mate eight years earlier. All eyes are now focused on the new U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Democrat Richard Blumenthal. Having survived a tough campaign, we now wait to see how Senator Blumenthal will parlay his experience in taking on corporate interests as his state's attorney general for twenty years into helping and serving the people who sent him to Washington. As for Lieberman's seat, the horrible Linda McMahon is already rumored to be ready to run for it. But I doubt there's enough WWE-bred savvy to fix the result on this contest.

Linda McMahon is not the only contemptible Republican vying for a comeback. The spectacularly insufferable Rick Santorum, a former two-term senator from Pennsylvania, is either mulling over a run for his old Senate seat (he was voted out of office in 2006 in favor of Democrat Robert Casey, Jr.) or for, God forbid, the Presidency. The staunchly anti-abortion Santorum - who values the right to life so much that he and his wife brought their prematurely born son home after he had died for two hours and slept with the remains for a night - accused President Obama of being a discredit to his race for supporting abortion rights. Santorum said Obama, who as a black man and as a constitutional professor knows that black slaves were considered three-fifths of a person when the Constitution was written, has no right to deny the right of the unborn to be considered a person.

Santorum, an Italian-American, is a discredit to his own people. Since Italian-Americans have always been put down in politics, television and Woody Allen movies as being undereducated goombahs, I would argue that Santorum doesn't have the right to be stupid.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Santorum opposes abortions even in cases of endangerment to the life of the mother and he opposes single-payer health care, suggesting that any baby girl with the right to life has little right to anything else once she grows up.