This is Rick Santorum's clever new "Obamaville" ad. Look at the subliminal editing of Barack Obama into a shot of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while the voiceover talks about America's enemies. (h/t Digby.)
There's a good reason why we rejected Rick Santorum by 17 points in Pennsylvania. Just like Doug Neidermeyer in "Animal House," he's a sneaky little sh*t. He cooked up an elaborate charade that his family was still living in his old Pennsylvania house for several years, merely so he could get the local school district to cough up $72,000 for his kids' homeschooling extras while they lived in their Leesburg, Virginia manse.
There was also some very interesting monkey business in just how he got the mortgage:
The family returned to Fairfax County in August 2007. They bought a house with five acres in Great Falls with a high-ranking official of a major development and mortgage company.
Santorum formed the Creamcup Trust with James Sack, the secretary and general counsel of NVR, a major single-family developer and mortgage finance company in northern Virginia and 15 states. Creamcup Trust bought a house and five acres of land on Creamcup Lane in Great Falls for $2 milllion in August 2007, according to the deed.
Over the years Santorum and wife Karen have secured a series of mortgages on the 35-year-old, four-bedroom home.
The Creamcup Trust took out a mortgage for $1.5 million from American Home Bank in Lancaster, PA. On the same day, the Santorums took out a mortgage for $200,000 in their own names from the same bank, according to county records. The two mortgages represent 85 percent of the sales price.
The family repaid the $200,000 loan a year later, according to the records.
Now things get a little more complicated. In June 2009, the trust transferred ownership to the Santorums, so the home is now listed in the names of Richard and Karen Santorum.
In February 2010, the Santorums took out a $999,950 mortgage on the home that continued to carry the $1.5 million mortgage. That's nearly $2.5 million in mortgages on a home that sold for $2 million.
A month later, March 2010, the $1.5 million mortgage was repaid.
In July 2010, the Santorums secured a $1 million mortgage from Ing Bank in Minnesota. Now, the house with an assessed value of $1.4 million, carried nearly $2 million in mortgages.
In October 2010, the Santorums repaid the $999,950 mortgage, according to land records.
About the $1 million note: It's a 30-year mortgage with a 4-percent interest rate. The property's assessed value has fallen to $1.2 million.
The two-story brick house, north of the village of Great Falls, was built in 1977. It has four bedrooms, four baths, a swimming pool and sits back from the road in a serene setting.
Rick also put together a charitable organization that, to be charitable (unlike his org), was a bit of a scam. Funded by some rather political donors, the Operation Good Neighbor foundation seemed to exist mostly as a place for Rick to park his fundraising staff after he lost his reelection effort. It spent only a third on grants to faith-based groups (not much, according to the experts who rank charities) and in one of those arrogant moves that seems to dog him, didn't bother to register the charity with the PA Department of State for the first three years.
Then there was the PAC that funded his grocery shopping and Starbucks runs:
The Prospect decided to heed Santorum's advice by taking “an honest look at the family budget” -- his family budget. What we found is that Santorum's exurban lifestyle is financed in ways that aren't available to the average voter back home in Pennsylvania -- namely a political action committee that lists payments for such unorthodox items as dozens of trips to the Starbucks in Leesburg, a number of stops at fast-food joints, and purchases at Target, Wal-Mart, and a Giant supermarket in northern Virginia. Although a Santorum aide defends those charges as legitimate political costs, good-government experts say the expenditures are at best unconventional, and at worst a possible violation of Senate rules, and the purchases appear to be unorthodox when compared with other senators' filings. Santorum's PAC -- a “leadership PAC,” whose purpose is to dispense money to other Republican candidates -- used just 18.1 percent of its money to that end over a recent five-year period, a lower number than other leadership PACs of top senators from both parties.
Yes, but this was during a time when Rick didn't have a job. You didn't expect him to cut back on Starbucks, did you?
So many other reasons why we don't like Rick: The creepy Opus Dei. C Street and the Fellowship. Hypocritical cafeteria Catholic. Walmart.
So now we can add Lee Atwater-like campaign tactics to that list. Santorum's name is not on the ad, of course. We know for a fact that superPACs never, ever coordinate with the campaigns, because that would be illegal!
If I thought Santorum had that capability in him, I'd say he should be ashamed of himself.
