99% of Republicans expect their kids to go to college, according to Pew report.

soupsoup:

No matter what political beliefs they hold, nearly all parents—99 percent of Republicans, 96 percent of Democrats, and 93 percent of independents—expect their children to go to college, the survey found. That resounding endorsement makes clear that Santorum is all but alone in his opinion that only snobs encourage all kids to go to college. 

motherjones:

Context: Rick Santorum pledges to repeal 130,000 legally recognized same-sex marriages if elected president.

thedailywhat:

As of this morning, the infamous definition of the word “Santorum” is no longer the top search result on Google.

Spreading Santorum, the website that helped popularize Dan Savage’s alternative meaning, was stripped of its top search result status two nights ago…

SearchEngineLand took a wonky look at what exactly happened, and came back with a pretty troubling response.

It seems Google has been working behind the scenes to implement new SafeSearch features that are left on even when you’ve turned SafeSearch off. One of these features prevents “adult” results from showing up when Google has deemed them irrelevant to the search.

In other words, if you’ve searched “Santorum,” Google “assumes” you’re not looking for frothy fecaled lube, but for the presidential candidate.

Another newly implemented feature aims to return “official sites” as the most relevant search result, and Google again “assumes” that Spreading Santorum is not Rick Santorum’s official site.

[google]

pantslessprogressive:

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.” - Rick Santorum, in Troy, MI Saturday (h/t washingtonpoststyle)

Above, unemployment rates from the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

The Wall Street Journal elaborates:

Some 1.8 million more college graduates have found work since January 2010, when the recovery began producing jobs, but about 128,000 high-school dropouts lost work in the same period, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Less than 40% of the 25 million Americans over age 25 who lack a high-school diploma are employed. And those who are working don’t earn much. High-school dropouts earn about $23,400 on average, compared with $33,500 for those with a college degree.

The only snob here is the one who is too demagogic (pardon the Newtism) to acknowledge the positive effects of a college education.

But Santorum also would face a powerful headwind because of his positions, longstanding and often repeated, on hot-button issues among women. While he has done well among women who turn out for GOP primaries and caucuses, the November electorate will include far larger numbers of independents, Democrats and Republican women who were not active in the nominating contests.

Santorum will have a problem on abortion, not because he is anti-abortion (as all the Republican candidates are) but because he gives the issue a pre-eminence in his array of causes that makes many Americans uncomfortable. The same could be said for his virulent opposition to gay marriage and to women’s current and proposed role in the military.

But his crusade for the restoration of traditional mores goes further.

Santorum’s Problem with Women Could Be His Glass Ceiling 

Rick Santorum's Anti-Abortion Politics Would Have Killed His Own Wife

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, Personhood Pledge-signing, Griswold vs. Connecticut-opposing, Mr. Ban Abortion in All Circumstances With No Exception for the Life of the Mother, believes that the actions of his own wife should be treated as criminal. Why? Because, back in 1996, his wife had a procedure that resulted in the deliberate death of her fetus, even though it was a matter of saving her own life.

Karen Santorum’s difficult pregnancy and resultant life-saving, induced early delivery is no secret; in a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, her husband characterized the 1996 procedure as a harrowing but necessary. Karen, in her 19th week of pregnancy, received a risky surgery to save a pregnancy that doctors thought had little chance of survival. After the surgery, she came down with an infection, and doctors told Rick that unless the source of the infection — the fetus — was removed, his wife would die and his already-born children would be motherless. The doctor also told Santorum that his wife’s fetus would not survive outside of the womb. According to Santorum, Karen went into labor as a result of the antibiotics, and then doctors gave her a drug that further induced labor. She delivered, and unfortunately the doctors were right.

Shortly after Santorum first talked to the press about his wife’s pregnancy and their subsequent loss, rumors began circulating that Karen had actually had an abortion rather than induced delivery. Our Silver Ribbon goes so far as to assert that Karen Santorum did, in fact, have a second-trimester abortion.

But whether or not Karen Santorum had an abortion or medically induced the birth of a non-viable fetus shouldn’t matter in the eyes of someone with views as extreme as Santorum, as he is one of a disturbingly large group of politicians who believe that women should not be allowed to abort under any circumstances. Santorum’s even against abortion if there were no hope of the fetus surviving to full term, or even if the woman carrying the fetus risked death doing so. Karen Santorum would have died if the fetus were not removed, and labor was induced and not halted knowing that the fetus would not survive. How is this not technically “abortion?” In Santorum’s world, it would probably qualify as infanticide.

Santorum's Moral Delusions

Santorum takes it for granted that religious belief, at least of the Christian variety, is a powerful force for moral behavior. That’s not apparent from looking at this country.

He thinks America has been on a downhill slide for many years, thanks to feminism, gay rights, pornography, and other vile intruders. But where is the evidence that the developments cited by Santorum are producing harmful side effects?

In the past couple of decades, most indicators of moral and social health have gotten better, not worse. Crime has plummeted. Teen pregnancy has declined by 39 percent. Abortion rates among adolescents are less than half what they were.

The incidence of divorce is down. As of 2007, 48 percent of high school students had engaged in sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. What “decaying culture” is he talking about?

This piece doesn’t cite these claims, but if there is truth here, these are some interesting points.

Santorum: I Didn’t Say “Black People,” I Said “Blah People”

Santorum defended his tongue-slip on FOX News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” saying: “I looked at that, and I didn’t say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t. And I can tell you, I don’t use — I don’t — first off, I don’t use the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than I use ‘black… I can tell you as someone who did more work for historically black colleges, I used to have — every year, I used to bring all the historically black colleges into Washington, DC to try to help them, because they get very little federal money through the bureaucracy, and so I help to try to introduce them to people in the Department of Education so they could have more resources.”

So that clears that up and we’re all good now.

thenewrepublic:

On the war in Iraq: “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the eye to come back to the United States.”

On President Obama’s pro-choice stance: “I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”

Read more in our “Long List of the Most Terrible Things Rick Santorum Has Ever Said.”

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

Rick Santorum

“Diversity creates conflict. If we celebrate diversity, we create conflict.”

-Rick Santorum

Sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military”? That will be a surprise to the men and women, of every orientation, who love, marry, and become parents while serving. We have an all-volunteer military whose health relies on its strong ties to civilian life — not a praetorian guard of eunuchs. Does Santorum think that “the military” is a collection of battle scenes in an action movie? Surely not; his father worked for the Veterans Administration, and so he must know better. He also ought to know that there is no “special privilege” here, just the possibility of serving without the special obligation of lying, and the same knowledge other soldiers have that the person they love most might be able to be handed a folded flag if they die. Or is the word “gay” so strong for Santorum that it blotted out the word “soldier

Amy Davidson on Rick Santorum. (via thenoobyorker)

From the Hill:

Some members of the GOP debate audience booed a gay soldier who asked via video whether the Republican candidates would re-institute the recently repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of banning openly gay soldiers.

After Stephen Hill, who is serving in the army in Iraq, asked his question, a handful members of the audience booed loudly. None of the Republican candidates responded to the audience’s reaction.