Rick Santorum's Dangerous Agenda

From Alternet.org by Adele M. Stan February 22, 2012 

Agenda for the Dark Ages: GOP Frontrunner Rick Santorum's 5 Most Extremist Themes

If Santorum gets to bear the standard for the GOP, the party moves even further to the right. Here's a taste of what's on that plate.

It says quite a lot about the state of the Republican Party that the right-wing extremist Rick Santorum -- a politician so despised by his own Pennsylvania constituents that he lost his U.S. Senate seat by an 18-point margin -- is now the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. And not by a little, I might add -- by 10 points, according to that latest national tracking poll by Gallup.

As increasing numbers of people identify themselves as independent voters -- independent of the major political parties, that is -- the essence of the Republican Party has distilled into a toxic brew of resentment, prejudice, anti-intellectualism and misogyny. In truth, the party has been headed this way for a long time, but the election of Barack Obama -- a moderately liberal African American man with an African-Islamic name -- offered the perfect catalyst for the alchemists of the right to convert their everyday potion of pique into something far more fortified.

Enter Rick Santorum, a presidential candidate regarded as little more than a joke a mere month ago. Santorum presents himself as everything Obama is not, and represents the opposite of everything those anti-Obama right-wing tropes, the lies both whispered and shouted, purport the president to be. There are liberals who relish the possibility of a Santorum nomination; at the Daily Kos, founder Markos Moulitsas is urging liberals to vote for Santorum in open primaries, on the reasonably sound theory that Santorum is too crazy to win the presidency. Perhaps. 

"The longer this GOP primary drags on, the better the numbers for Team Blue," Markos writes. Fair enough, but is it good for America? If Santorum gets to bear the standard for the GOP, the party moves even further to the right from where it is now. Difficult to imagine, I know. But sooner or later the Republican Party wins big, when voters tire of the Democrats, or the Democrats screw up in a major way. And then, we'll all be ruled by the Santorum agenda, or something like it. Here's a taste of what's on that plate, based on Santorum's own extremist claims.

1. The end of the secular state. Santorum is a big proponent of the religious-right assertion, which he recently reiterated at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that the rights of American citizens come not from the U.S. Constitution or the laws of man, but from God. (To prove their point, they cite the Declaration of Independence, and the line that "men" are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.") Not just any God, mind you, but the authoritarian, patriarchal God of right-wing Christian theology. And Santorum has reserved for himself the role of theologian-in-chief, the arbiter of true religion, the messenger privy to the things God really wants -- and the things Satan really wants, which, according to a 2008 speech he delivered at Ave Maria University in Florida, is the demise of the United States.

Via Mediaite:

"This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war at all. This is a spiritual war,” Santorum said, describing how American institutions and our nation’s way of life are falling to evil forces. “And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?"

At a February 18 campaign stop in Ohio, Santorum made the case that Obama is not a true Christian, that his overal agenda is based on "a phony theology." From Politico:

Slamming the president's agenda on a range of points, Santorum said the agenda is "not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology."

On CBS News' "Face the Nation" the next day, Santorum said he was talking specifically about the president's environmental policy and, no, he didn't mean to suggest that Obama is a Muslim or anything like that. (Actually, he was suggesting that the president is an earth-worshipping pagan whose earth-worship is a path to growing the size of government.) Transcript from ThinkProgress:

When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate — this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government.

Some, including me, heard in Santorum's original comments a dog-whistle to right-wingers intent on viewing Obama as a crypto-Muslim. But Political Animal's Ed Kilgore reminds us of Santorum's assertion in a 2008 speech that mainline Protestants (basically, Protestants from the major sects who are not part of the religious right) are not Christian, either. Whichever it is, Rick Santorum clearly reserves to himself the right to determine who is and isn't a Christian, a particularly outrageous claim by a presidential hopeful who asserts that rights are bestowed on humans by his idea of the Christian God. In the practical sense, then, a President Santorum would render himself as God.

2. The end of science. While it may be de rigueur for Republican candidates to deny the science of climate change, Santorum takes it a step further, claiming not just that humans make no contribution to changes in the climate, but implicitly arguing that in order to be a great nation, America needs its citizens to waste energy, especially through such greenhouse-gas producing products as gasoline-guzzling cars and incandescent lightbulbs. For starters, that will give a rationale for raping the U.S. environment through fracking -- of which he's a big fan, especially near population centers -- offshore drilling, and plundering the Alaskan wilderness.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Santorum made the point that, among the nations of the world, those that use the most energy have the highest standards of living. (It doesn't take a genius to accept that people who live in centrally heated and air-conditioned homes, and who have refrigerators and ovens that run on fuel other than dung probably have a higher standard of living than those who don't.) So, by Santorum's reasoning, that means we should step up the energy gluttony if we want an even higher standard of living. (If you can come up with some scientific reasoning for that conclusion, you deserve a very special prize.)

At Talk to Action, Rachel Tabachnick attributes Santorum's anti-green messianism to a strain of religious-right theology known as "Biblical economics," which, Tabachnick says, is " a world in which unregulated free markets are holy and the opposition is literally demonic."

But it doesn't end there. At the intersection of Santorum's anti-science stance and his misogyny stands his opposition to prenatal testing.

3. A return to patriarchy. The leaders of Rick Santorum's religion -- the Roman Catholic Church -- oppose abortion and birth control, and so does he. Combined with his opposition to science, the fact-free mind of the GOP frontrunner has transformed his personal religious beliefs to a contention that prenatal screenings of pregnant women and their fetuses are a bad thing, so he wants to end any requirement on health-insurance companies that they be covered. Via First Read:

"One of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America," Santorum, a conservative Roman Catholic, told a Christian Alliance luncheon in Columbus. "Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society. That too is part of ObamaCare — another hidden message as to what president Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country." 

"That ugly meme is completely made up," writes health expert Harold Pollack at the Reality-Based Community. "By any reasonable measure, the proliferation of genetic diagnostic technologies coincides with great progress in public acceptance and support for people with disabilities."

And those technologies actually save fetuses with anomalies, allowing pregnant women to have healthy babies because their pregnancies were monitored. One case in point is the daughter of writer Sarah Fister Gale, whose rH blood disease was discovered while she was still in the womb, by the use of amniocentesis, which Santorum claims, "does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortions." He added, "That is a fact."

Actually, it's not. Here's Gale, writing at Salon:

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong.

(Meanwhile, at the Nation, Ben Adler details Santorum's opposition to programs on which disabled people depend.) Yet Santorum talks constantly on the stump about his seventh child, Bella, who was born with a brutal chromosomic disorder.

The truth is, Santorum will use any rationale that suits him to deny women any kind of reproductive healthcare that informs their decision-making process, whether the decision is about getting pregnant or whether to bring a fetus to term. When arguing the merits of his so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban, a law enacted in 2003 to ban a particular abortion procedure, Santorum claimed that the procedure was used to abort fetuses that were not deformed or disabled in any way. But on "Face the Nation," as Slate's Will Saletan points out, Santorum claimed just the opposite, saying the procedure had been primarily used to abort fetuses that, if brought to term, would become disabled children. 

Then there's birth control, which Santorum told a right-wing Iowa blogger at Caffeinated Thoughts, is "not okay" because it takes the procreation out of sex. In fairness to Santorum, he does say that, as a matter of public policy, he would not try to outlaw contraception: he just wants to make it harder for you to get (especially if you work for a business that is owned by a church-affiliated institution).

Like the other Republican presidential candidates, Santorum says the Obama administration's mandate that health insurance provided by employers must cover prescription contraception (and with no co-pay) is a violation of the religious freedom of employers whose consciences, like Santorum's, are offended by the very notion of birth control. But what makes Santorum unique is a novel interpretation of what health insurance is meant to do, which is not, according to the candidate, to pay for things that only "cost a few dollars." Which brings me back to the notion that Santorum will use whatever rationale he finds necessary to deprive women of the full range of reproductive healthcare. He has not voiced similar concerns, for instance, over having insurance plans pay for low-cost generic antibiotics, or Tylenol-with-codeine pills.

4. The fostering of ignorance. Although his wife home-schools their own children, Rick Santorum isn't completely against public education. He just wants to starve it. At an Ohio campaign stop, Santorum hailed the fact that most of the early U.S. presidents "home-schooled" their children (he neglected the mention of any tutors), adding, according to the New York Times: 

"Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children."

Which is great for parents who don't want their kids to learn actual science or facts. (The mind boggles to consider what the Santorum children are learning in science class at the kitchen table.) The Times goes on to note that federal government, which Santorum would cut out of the education process, contributes 11 percent of most schools' budgets, and is targeted for the enforcements of standards which would, of course, include the teaching of science. Meanwhile, the United States lags behind most of the industrialized world in turning out scientists and engineers.

5. The demonization of everybody but white, heterosexual, right-wing Christian males. In Rick Santorum's mind, everybody who is not like him is some form of demon: Obama is like Hitler, gay people are like beastialists, women who have sex for pleasure are licentious, working mothers take the easy way out, single mothers are welfare queens, undocumented immigrants are thieves, black people are lazy and Muslims are bloodthirsty infidels.

At a February 19 campaign stop in Georgia, Santorum compared the 2012 presidential election to World War II, when the U.S. initially stood by as Britain was showered with Nazi bombs. Via The Raw Story: 

"Why? Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, 'You know it will get better. Yeah, I mean, he’s a nice guy. It won’t be near as bad as what we think. You know, this will be OK. You know, maybe he’s not the best guy.' After a while, you found out some things about this guy over in Europe and maybe he’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? 'Why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems, just get our families off to work and our kids off to school and we’ll be okay.'"

Santorum later denied he was comparing Obama to Hitler, but it's hard to come away with any other conclusion. Santorum also denied he was talking about black people when he was quoted as saying, at an Iowa campaign stop in January, "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." (He laughably claimed three days later that he said "blah" people, not "black" people.)

Of working women, Santorum wrote in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that they find it easier and "more socially affirming" to keep up their careers than to "stay home and take care of their children." In other words, women who work outside the home are not taking care of their children.

Single mothers often refuse to marry their partners, Santorum told Fox News in December, so they can collect welfare. 

And of women who use birth control in order to have sex for (horrors) pleasure, Santorum told Caffeinated Thoughts: "[Contraception is] not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."  And while Santorum disavowed the comments of his sugar daddy, billionaire Foster Freiss, who suggest that women just clamp their knees together as a means of birth control, there have been no reports that he's stopped taking the old sexist's money.

Immigrants fare no better under Santorum's gaze. Undocumented workers aren't just people who came to the U.S. because they wanted to feed their families, Santorum said in a January debate: they're thieves, and should be sent home, even if it means separating parents from their children. Via ThinkProgress:

"I understand Congressman Gingrich saying, ‘Well, you know, people have been here and they’ve been good citizens and paying taxes.’ Yeah, under somebody else’s Social Security number because you stole it."

Then there are the Muslims, about whom Santorum has a phantasmagorical imagination. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire last month, the former Pennsylvania senator suggested that the U.S. should bomb Iran -- not simply because of the allegation that the Muslim nation is building a nuclear bomb, but because the bomb-building is all part of a Shi'ite plan to bring about the apocalypse to pave the way for the return of a messianic figure known as the Mahdi. Lost on Santorum was the irony that in several corners of the religious right, support for an aggressive Israel is based on just such a scenario, designed to pave the way for the second coming of Jesus.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention Santorum's jihad against LGBT people. Suffice it to say, "man on dog."

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington correspondent. Follow her on Twitter:www.twitter.com/addiestan
(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

Could Rick Santorum Really Be The Anti-Christ?

Could this paranoid psychopath be the Anti-Christ? Is he trying to stir the American Fringe Fanatics into a frenzy of fear and frothing hatred? More than likely. 

Rick Santorum Defends Satan Comments

Rick Santorum is making no effort to distance himself from his 2008 remarks about Satan attacking America.

Last week Right Wing Watch dug up a speech Santorum made while McCain and Obama were campaigning. Listen below, and here are some sound bites:

"Satan has his sights on the United States of America!"

"Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

"This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”

Santorum defended his comments a rally in Phoenix Tuesday evening, saying that it's "absurd" they resurfaced on the Drudge Report earlier that day.

“Its a joke, its absurd," he said, according to Politico. "You know, if a person I‘m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil. I think if somehow or another because you’re a person of faith you believe in good and evil is a disqualifier for president, we’re going to have a very small pool of candidates who can run for president."

When pressed about whether he believes the country is under attack by Satan, he said:

"You guys are asking questions that are not relevant to what's being discussed in America today. What we're talking about in America is trying to get America working, that's what my speeches are about, that's what we're going to talk about in this campaign. If they want to to dig up old speeches when I'm talking to a religious group, they can go right ahead and do so but I'm going to stay on message, I'm going to talk about what Americans want to talk about, which is creating jobs, getting our country safer and secure and yeah, taking on the forces around this world who want to do harm to America. You bet I will take 'em on."

During the same appearance, Santorum mocked Obama as a "rock star" that people "believed could solve their problems" back in 2008.

The former Pennsylvania senator made waves last week when he said Obama subscribes to "some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible." Later he insisted he was attacking the president's worldview, not his faith, and believes he is Christian.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is a Romney surrogate, criticized Santorum's defense of the Satan comments on "Good Morning America" Wednesday.

"Listen, I think anything you say as a presidential candidate is relevant," Christie said. "It is by definition relevant. You’re asking to be president of the United States. I don’t think [Santorum's] right about that. I think it is relevant what he says. I think people want to make an evaluation, a complete evaluation of anyone who asks to sit in the Oval Office."

Sarah Palin defended Santorum's comments on FOX News, blaming the "lame-stream media" for getting "all wee-weed up."

"They will attack any conservatives who boldly proclaims their faith and talks about there is good in the world and there's evil in the world and that's what Rick Santorum was talking about," she said. "And this was a speech that he gave back in 2008, where he named evil as Satan. And for these lame-stream media characters to get all wee-weed up about that, first you have to ask yourself, 'Have they ever attended a Sunday school class even? Have they never heard of this terminology before?' And that's why they got so, you know, just whacked out about the speech."

(

The American Middle Class Is Becoming Poor, and Mitt Romney Doesn’t Realize It

Those who vote for GOP candidates, and  are NOT in the one percent, don't realize that they might actually be one breath away from losing it all; yet, out of ignorance and shortsightedness, they cast their votes for the most regressive people in America who actually want to take it all away from them, if they can. Their only aim is to enrich the richest among them, and, of course, their benefactors--the corporate predators and job destroyers.

"The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing." — Macbeth

Monday 6 February 2012

by: Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed

January’s increase in hiring is good news, but it masks a bigger and more disturbing story – the continuing downward mobility of the American middle class.

Most of the new jobs being created are in the lower-wage sectors of the economy – hospital orderlies and nursing aides, secretaries and temporary workers, retail and restaurant. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain working only because they’ve agreed to cuts in wages and benefits. Others are settling for jobs that pay less than the jobs they’ve lost. Entry-level manufacturing jobs are paying half what entry-level manufacturing jobs paid six years ago.

Other people are falling out of the middle class because they’ve lost their jobs, and many have also lost their homes. Almost one in three families with a mortgage is now underwater, holding their breath against imminent foreclosure.

The percent of Americans in poverty is its highest in two decades, and more of us are impoverished than at any time in the last fifty years. A recent analysis of federal data by the New York Times showed the number of children receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million in the last school year, up from 18 million in 2006-2007. Nearly a dozen states experienced increases of 25 percent or more. Under federal rules, children from famlies with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty line, $29,055 for a family of four, are eligible.

Experts say the bad economy is the main factor driving the increase. According to an analysis of census data by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, 37 percent of young families with children were in poverty in 2010. It’s likely that rate has worsened.

Mitt Romney says he’s not concerned about the very poor because they have safety nets to protect them. He says he’s concerned about the middle class. Romney doesn’t seem to realize how much of the middle class is becoming poor.

But Romney doesn’t like safety nets to begin with. He’s been accusing President Obama of inviting a culture of dependency. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society,” he says over and over, arguing that our economic problems stem from a sharp rise in dependency. Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

He and other Republicans point to government data showing that direct payments to individuals have shot up by almost $600 billion since 2009,  a 32 percent increase. And 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit such as food stamps or unemployment insurance, up from 44 percent in 2008.

But Romney and other Republicans have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in benefits is Americans got clobbered in 2008 and many are still sinking. They and their families need whatever help they can get.

The real scandal, as I’ve said before, is America’s safety nets are too small and shot through with holes. Only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits, for example, because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were let go. The unemployment system doesn’t recognize how many Americans work part time on several jobs, and move from job to job.

And even those who are lucky enough to be collecting employment benefits are about to lose them. A record and growing percent of the unemployed have been jobless for six months or more, and Republicans in Congress are unwilling to extend their benefits.

Romney’s budget proposals would shred safety nets even more. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, his plan would throw 10 million low-income people off the benefit rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination. “These cuts would primarily affect very low-income families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” the Center concludes.

At the same time, Romney’s tax plan would boost the incomes of America’s most wealthy citizens, who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of that nation’s total income. Romney wants to permanently extend George W. Bush’s tax cuts, reduce corporate income tax rates, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax cuts would increase the incomes of people earning more than a million dollars a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

By reducing government revenues, Romney’s tax cuts would squeeze programs for the poor even further. Extending the Bush tax cuts will add $1.2 trillion to the nation’s budget deficit in just two years. That’s the same as the amount that’s supposed to be saved by automatic spending cuts scheduled to start next year – which, by the way, will hit the poor especially hard.

Oh, I almost forgot. Romney and other Republicans also want to repeal of Obama’s health care law, thereby leaving 30 million Americans without health insurance.

The downward mobility of America’s middle class is the big news, but the GOP apparently hasn’t heard about it. Maybe it’s too hard to hear about from that far away – and Mitt Romney is certainly far away. His unearned income last year was more than $20 million. That’s about as much as the combined earnings of a thousand American families at or just above the poverty line.

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

Rick Santorum is a liar, fraud, and incompetent golden boy

Rick Santorum continues to be taken care of like a stray dog that has no home. The stray dog is fed by the kind hearts of people, given a comfortable bed out behind the shed, but is not invited into anyone's home because of its bad behavior and habits.

Rick should be renamed Sarah Santorum. He is more like Sarah Palin than any other freak in the GOP.

What we have in America are GOP fanatics taking over the government pushing away and out those with sane minds and opinions. This has happened in Pakistan and other Middle Eastern countries. The fanatics take over and destroy the country.

The GOP Jihadis are alive and well and are truly embodied in candidates like Santorum and Paul. Perry is just stupid. And, Romney is incompetent. Newt is just a simple sociopath. Romney's only skill is that of a "destructionist"--one who likes to destroy things, such as when he was a predatory private equity destroyer. He would buy up companies, gut them, sell off their assets, ruin their contribution to jobs and product creation, and then, sell off their equity. This would be his same goal as president. He hard-on is to balance the federal budget, which would create the worst recession we would ever experience.

Rick Santorum appears to be a pervert, predator and psychopath. (Google the word Santorum.)

Santorum stated in Iowa that he believes that health insurance companies should be able to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. That would include Santorum's youngest child who is mentally retarded, and a chromosomal condition that has disabled her with a heart and lung condition.

Santorum also paraded his youngest child, when she was ill, during the Iowa Straw Poll, just as Palin had done repeatedly. Such an action is perverted. And, why was Mrs. Santorum parading with Rickie in Iowa, while her sick child stayed home? She, too, must be a pervert.

This from Huffington Post: 


Rick Santorum--Linked Universal Health Services Facility: Fraud, Assault And Alleged 'Exorcism'

WASHINGTON -- Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has become a top-tier candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in recent weeks by appealing to evangelical voters as a man steeped in family values and his Christian faith. From 2007 to 2011, however, Santorum served on the board of directors of Universal Health Services Inc., a large hospital chain which racked up dozens of allegations of abuse during that time -- including everything fromrape to suicide attempts allowed by neglect tomurder.

Over the years, states have barred children from attending UHS facilities over safety concerns and the feds have put UHS on their radar. Department of Justice lawyers have filed two lawsuits accusing the chain of fraudulent activities. One lawsuit settled for $27.5 million. Another suit still pending in federal court in Virginia centers on a facility called Keystone Marion Youth Center.

The facility, located in Marion, Va., is a residential treatment center for troubled boys with mental-health issues. The majority of patients come from states' child-welfare and juvenile-justice systems. The center promises stability, schooling, and clinically-approved therapies. It was also approved to accept Medicaid patients.

It did not have approval to perform an "exorcism."

But that is what appeared to be happening in an empty room at Marion in May 2007, according to a facility teacher who passed by the room, which was occupied by at least one nurse, a supervisor, a janitor and a boy with autism. Several in the room appeared to be hovering over the boy and praying, according to the teacher, who recounted the incident shortly after to Barbara Jones, the center's director of education at the time.

The severity of the boy's autism left him hardly able to speak and unable to walk on his own, Jones says.

"'They were trying to exorcise him. That's why he had the autism, he had a demon in him,'" Jones recounted what the teacher told her to The Huffington Post. "The cleaning lady was trying to cast out the demons."

The Marion Center repeatedly fell into trouble with authorities before and during the time Santorum served on the board. He resigned this past June to focus on his campaign. UHS facilities across the country -- from the former senator's home state of Pennsylvania to Illinois to Tennessee to Texas and Kansas -- have come under fire as well. Authorities have thrown around words like "systemic failure" to describe the UHS treatment centers and have sued them for millions in court settlements.

Santorum served on the UHS board's compensation committee and the nominating/corporate governance committee, which appear to play no direct role in overseeing hospital operations. But the board -- like any corporate board -- is responsible for maintaining oversight and making sure facilities are safe and do not violate the law. Bloomberg has reported that Santorum has made close to $400,000 off his relationship with UHS.

Santorum's campaign declined to comment, referring inquiries to UHS. But in an interview with Yahoo News this week, Santorum said that as a member of the board, he cooperated with the DOJ's Medicaid fraud investigation.

"Any investigation, you obviously engage and fully cooperate with it, and that's what we did. You try to get to the bottom of it. There's always accusations that take place and that's part of the responsibility of directors to make sure that we investigate that and get to the bottom of it," Santorum said. "I don't have any stock options. I did, but I exercised them and they're gone."

UHS issued a statement to The Huffington Post concerning the Marion Youth Center.

"There are hundreds of adolescents who have received high quality, successful care and treatment at Marion Youth Center," the company wrote in an email, "and have had their lives dramatically improved as a result of the efforts of the dedicated individuals that work at Marion."

The hospital chain responded directly to the exorcism charge, calling the allegations "absolutely false, libelous and knowingly untruthful."

A state report counters this claim and appears to back up Jones' recollections of the incident as relayed to her at the time, and its subsequent fallout. According to the report, state investigators noted that the Marion Youth Center initiated an internal investigation into the matter as well. An administrator with the facility reported to state investigators that staff had been caught "praying over" a boy. "Provider determined the youth did not give consent for the event to occur," the state investigation found. "One regulation violation was determined."

The most shocking thing about the incident, however, was that it didn't shock. As Jones says, "It didn't surprise me."

* * * * *

Jones, 44, began working at the Marion Youth Center in July 2006 to take over the treatment center's school. The center was small, holding only 48 beds, and it only took boys between the ages of 11 and 17 and sometimes older. She was in charge of setting the curriculum, supervising seven teachers and implementing a behavior modification program. "It was appealing to me to run a school," Jones says.

But when she arrived, Jones says there was no school to run. She found teachers would convert a group room into a makeshift classroom. There were no chairs. There were no books. She found boys either playing video games or sleeping on the floor.

"There was a couple broken down chairs," Jones remembers. "The walls were dirty. The floor was dirty. It was chaos. That was the best word. The teachers obviously didn't like it but that's what they were told to do."

Jones says she had to beg the center's management to make classrooms. She insisted that children were not meeting the contracted education requirements known as Individualized Education Programs. "They were saying they didn't have enough staff to be in the classroom," Jones explains. "It was about money and coverage. I had to pull out their educational plans ... to pull out the child's IEP -- a legal document."

The boys of Marion didn't just miss out on school. They were missing basics like proper clothing, Jones found. Many kids didn't have socks or shoes. A 17-year-old kid sent from West Virginia walked around in shower slippers and pants an inch or two too short.

"He didn't remember anyone buying him clothes," Jones says. "He hadn't been out of the building for a year."

The kids, she said, only had thin blankets on their beds. The facility had them sell Christmas cards to raise money for new blankets. "The kids designed them, and then I went out and sold them," Jones says.

As for treatment, the head psychiatrist rarely made appearances. Therapy was sometimes conducted in hallways. "It was called 'drive-by therapy,'" Jones says. "They would walk with the kid to the cafeteria and the kid would get their food. It would be written up that [the] therapist had seen the kid."

If a boy mouthed off or provided the slightest provocation, Jones says, sometimes the staff response was "brutal force." Virginia records obtained through a public records request show the state investigated assaults, AWOL's and inappropriate encounters between staff and patients at Marion during the time Santorum served on the UHS board, from 2007 to 2011.

In January 2009, Leslie Anderson, the then-director of Virginia's Office of Licensing for Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation, and Substance Abuse Services, emailed her superiors a scathing review of Marion.

"They just got cited for systemic abuse for letting several youth beat and pick on one resident repeatedly and not intervening," Anderson wrote. "They do not have a clinical director and their psychiatrists are very part time. They are barely functioning as a [residential treatment center]."

Incident investigation records bear out Anderson's assessment:

*On August 1, 2007, Virginia records show, "a youth alleged to a staff person that another staff 'slammed' his face onto the floor when restraining him" in late July. The Department of Social Services determined the staffer had been abusive.

*In March 2008, a staffer held down a resident while another kicked the resident in the knee. Records show one employee resigned the day of the assault. When interviewed, the staffer that held the boy explained: "I didn't realize that he kicked him that hard."

*In August 2008, a staff member admitted being the getaway driver for two boys who had gone AWOL. "One resident was transported to his home," the state investigation noted in a report written a month later. "Where the other resident was transported is not yet known." The report went on to state that the staffer had been cited for boundary issues with the patients. Two weeks before the escape, one of the boys said he had a "love letter" from the staffer.

*In May 2009, a mother reported that while her son was home for a few days during the previous month, he had numerous phone calls with a center therapist. During one call, records show, which was on speaker phone, she alleged that she heard the therapist promise her son a blow job if he didn't run away. During the conversation, the therapist suggested that she had already performed oral sex on the boy. The boy refused to cooperate with investigators.

*In August 2009, a nurse was found to have sexually abused a boy on two occasions. A staff member reported witnessing one incident. Another staffer reported that the nurse had explained that she had to take the boy's blood pressure. They were left alone for one hour. After that incident, the boy asked an employee "if he smelled like a girl."

Other incidents, Virginia records show, included a part-time staffer "diverting" ADHD meds, and criminal background checks not conducted for new employees.

Investigators also found that therapy goals were vague to the point of meaninglessness. Plans for patient care were not reviewed, and medications were managed without being documented. In one 2010 incident, a program director threatened jail if boys didn't "straighten up.'"

Jones alleges that managers only cared about keeping those beds filled. In July 2010, she filed afederal civil suit against UHS over the goings on at Marion, saying she was forced out for raising the Medicaid fraud issue with management.

During meetings, managers repeatedly emphasized slowing down the process for a soon-to-be exiting child. There were kids that could have gone home but didn't. "The kids that were warded to the state, those were easy prey for them," Jones says. State social workers were overworked and never seemed to make the trip out to the center. The kids were simply out of sight, out of mind.

"I used to call them 'The Lost Boys' because no one was really advocating for them," Jones explains. When staff couldn't justify keeping them, the boy would suddenly have an outburst over the weekend. It would be characterized as "anxiety about being released." The boy would earn an extended stay.

Jones's allegations echo those in the DOJ's 2007 lawsuit against the Marion Center. The charges in that case include drive-by therapy sessions in the center's hallway, doctoring records, billing for undocumented services, billing for 50-minute group therapy sessions that lasted half that time, and provoking residents into outbursts to justify a delay in their release.

In the 2010 amended complaint, DOJ lawyers argue that the center "was operated as a juvenile detention facility, not as a residential treatment facility, in violation of state and federal law."

The three plaintiffs in the DOJ complaint all worked as therapists employed by the Marion Center. All three raised the issue of the Medicaid fraud. All were fired in 2006. But both the DOJ's case and Jones' lawsuit contend that a pattern of fraud and whistleblower retaliation extended beyond that time, into the period when Santorum served on the UHS board.

In the statement sent to HuffPost in July, UHS initially denied the allegations brought by Jones and the DOJ. "We are defending these cases vigorously to demonstrate that Marion Youth Center did not engage in any fraudulent practices as alleged," the statement reads. The cases are ongoing, however, and the company declined to comment further.

But court records show that the company is close to finalizing a settlement with the government.

The Marion Center is closing. Its lease has run out and could not be renewed, UHS told HuffPost in an email. The last day for employees is Friday, UHS said. But hundreds of other UHS facilitiesremain open.

"For too many years, UHS has been given a free pass," says Susan Lawrence, a parent and advocate in Virginia whose adopted child had resided in a UHS facility. "And they're not being held accountable by the government agencies."

Lawrence is especially angry with board members like Santorum. "I'm also tired of board members pleading ignorance and getting a free pass when their corporations break laws," she says. "The board should have known. It was their responsibility to know."

"If Santorum cannot be responsible for knowledgeable leadership of a corporation as a board member," she says, "he could never lead the greatest country in the world."

This is the third in a series of stories on UHS facilities during Santorum's tenure on the hospital chain's board. The other stories can be found here and here.

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"It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."