Hypocrisy, thy name is ‘Santorum’. Wait. It’s ‘Romney’. No, it’s BOTH!
Both Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney rant and rave about the use of government funds for all sorts of things. However, neither has much of a leg to stand on in this regard.
Rick Santorum took federal funds to home school his kids.
As he presses for the conservative votes he needs to overtake GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum is hammering away at the role state and federal governments play in running schools.Santorum plays up how he and his wife have home-schooled their seven children and says parents should be the ones responsible for educating their kids.Yet back when Santorum was a senator from Pennsylvania, he got a Pittsburgh-area school district to help pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for his children to receive online schooling.
It’s a bit of history that’s unknown to many voters outside Pennsylvania as the Republican nomination race closes in on the 10 Super Tuesday contests next week.
Santorum says he wants to curtail dramatically the power of states and the federal government in public education. […]
In the fall of 2004, Santorum’s use of tax dollars to pay for his kids’ home schooling became controversial because his family was primarily living in Leesburg, Va., west of Washington. Following a local newspaper report, the Penn Hills School District near Pittsburgh tried to recover about $73,000 that it contended the state wrongly sent to an Internet-based charter school. Although the Santorums owned a house in the school district, officials argued, they were living out of state. The Pennsylvania Education Department in 2006 agreed to pay the district $55,000 to settle the dispute.
Romney is no better. A tape from 2002 has surfaced with Romney bragging about how much money he was able to score from the federal government for his own projects. ABC has an exclusive report.
In a long-forgotten tape from the 2002 Massachusetts governor’s race obtained by ABC News, Mitt Romney is seen touting his Washington connections and his ability to get millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal government.“I am big believer in getting money where the money is,” Romney says on the video, “The money is in Washington.”The video, which was surreptitiously shot by Democratic opponents of Romney on Oct. 16, 2002, shows him addressing a group called the New Bedford Industrial Foundation. The Power Point presentation he uses lists ways to improve economic development in Massachusetts, including “boost federal involvement.”
“I want to go after every grant, every project, every department in Washington to assure that we are taking advantage of economic development opportunities,” Romney tells the group.
And while Romney now often criticizes his opponents for being Washington insiders, in this video he touts his Washington connections.
“I have learned from my Olympic experience that if you have people who really understand how Washington works and have personal associations there you can get money to help build economic development opportunities,” Romney says. […]
“We actually received over $410 million from the federal government for the Olympic games. That is a huge increase over anything ever done before and we did that by going after every agency of government,” he says.
He even cites money one his colleagues managed to get for the Olympics from the Department of Education.
“She said, ‘Why don’t I get the Department of Education to buy tickets to the Paralympics so that high school and grade school kids can go to the Paralympics?’ She literally got, I believe the number was over $1 million from the Department of Education, funding to buy tickets for kids,” Romney said. “This way we got kids there and we also got additional revenues that we wouldn’t have had. That kind of creativity I want to bring to everything we do.”
All politicians engage in a little hypocrisy from time to time but the heated rhetoric these days begs us to look deeper. And, when we do, this is the type of thing we find; utter, rank hypocrisy.
It’s like they don’t know about the internet or something.
