Rick Santorum on Technology Republican Jr Senator (PA); 2012 presidential frontrunner

DoD plays defense on technology; we need to go after them

SANTORUM: If we were doing a better job within the government, we wouldn't need the private sector to do the things that we're asking them to do. What I've found [is that] layers and layers of bureaucracy is #1, if a lot of people have authority, nobody has authority. And #2, that if you don't do anything, you don't get fired. It's only when you do something and something goes wrong, you get fired. So they do nothing. And that's what is happening in our Defense Department right now. We have a capability that they're trying to develop to play defense. We have a lot of technologists that are very skilled. And they're trying to figure out how to play defense. But we don't have folks who are thinking about offense. We don't have war-fighters. Technologists are not war-fighters. Technologists are thinking, "How do I secure, how do I protect?" We need to have, "How do we go after them?"

Harden electric grid against electromagnetic pulse attack

SANTORUM: Well, the most devastating attack that could occur is an electromagnetic pulse attack, and that would be triggered by a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere. The best way to stop that from happening is to make sure that those who are talking about using it, Iran, doesn't get a nuclear weapon so they can't explode that device. And the president has put Iran on a path to a nuclear weapon. And we have done nothing to do anything to harden our grid. There is actually a bill in Congress that would put money forward to try to put redundancy and harden our electric grid so it could actually survive an EMP. An EMP is a devastating explosion that sends a pulse that knocks out everything that is wired. Cars stop. Planes fall out of the sky. This is a devastating attack. And this president has done nothing to take the most probable country to launch an attack & stop them.

Bulk metadata collection doesn't violate privacy

Get federal government out of the infrastructure business

SANTORUM: We need to get the federal government out of this infrastructure business, other than vital economic highways. It has been said that if we cut the gas tax to 3 to 5 cents and send the rest back to the states, and just take care of the federal infrastructure that's vital for our economy. We don't need the federal government and the road business that it is today.

CEO of EchoLight Studios, making faith & family movies

Moon base is fiscal insanity

• Voice Over: Reckless spending has led to a $15 trillion national debt.
• That's $50,000 of debt for every person in America, and it's crushing our economic recovery.
• And what's does Newt Gingrich suggest? Spending half a trillion dollars on a moon colony.
• Gingrich's idea is fiscal insanity.
• And another reason true conservatives are uniting behind Rick Santorum.
• Unlike Gingrich, Santorum opposed all the bailouts. And Rick Santorum successfully reformed welfare, and has fought tirelessly for a balanced budget amendment.

Moon colony is fiscal insanity during debt crisis

Script To "Out Of This World:
• Reckless spending has led to a $15 trillion national debt.
• And what's does Newt Gingrich suggest? Spending half a trillion dollars on a moon colony.
• Newt Gingrich: " By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon. When we have 13,000 living on the moon, they can petition to become a state."
• Gingrich's idea is fiscal insanity.
• Unlike Gingrich, Santorum opposed all the bailouts. And Rick Santorum successfully reformed welfare, and has fought tirelessly for a balanced budget amendment.

NASA programs sound good, but we need to cut programs

SANTORUM: I believe America's a frontier nation and obviously the frontier that we're talking about is the next one, which is space. And that we need to inspire. Space defense is another area which is very, very important. But let's just be honest, we run a $1.2 trillion deficit right now. We're borrowing 40 cents of every dollar. And to go out there and promise new programs and big ideas, that's a great thing to maybe get votes, but it's not a responsible thing when you have to go out and say that we have to start cutting programs, not talking about how to grow them. We're going to cut programs under my administration. Spending will go down for four years until we get a balanced budget. And you can't do that by grand schemes. The space program sounds good, but we've got to be responsible in the way we allocate our resources.

Make R&D tax credit permanent

BACHMANN: Today the US has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. We've got to bring that tax rate down substantially so that we're among the lowest in the industrialized world.

Q: [To Santorum]: Your state of Pennsylvania, a big industrial state, has struggled in recent years.

A: We still make things there. And what I learned from growing up in a steel town is that's how the wealth from those who create the jobs gets down. We've been outsourcing those jobs. So what we need to do is a lot of what was said here. I would add another thing: We need to cut the capital gains tax in half, but for manufacturers we need to give a five-year window where we cut it to zero. We want to encourage people to set up jobs here in America. Take that R&D credit, make it permanent, take that innovation and then invest that money here to create that broad middle of America and have that wealth really trickle down.

Prosecute WikiLeaks on terrorism charges

Palin concluded: "We are at war. American soldiers are in Afghanistan fighting to protect our freedoms. They are serious about keeping America safe. It would be great if they could count on their government being equally serious about that vital task."

The Obama administration has said that it "deeply regrets" the leaking of the embarrassing cables that have disclosed exactly what American diplomats think of foreign leaders and promised to take "aggressive steps" against those who "stole" them.

Scale of potential destruction from EMP demands action

So is the government taking the threat seriously? Well, the government has taken steps to "harden" senior leadership communications in Washington against an EMP attack. But the Department of Homeland Security doesn't include it on its list of potential threats. The probability and fallout of such an attack are debatable, but the scale of potential destruction demands action now.

$90M to study effects of media violence on kids

There have been thousands of studies investigating the impact of media violence on kids, but little in the area of sexually explicit me

Fund reverse-commuting for distressed suburbs

Good culture tells the truth, even if not G-Rated

I am not going to tell you that good culture is made up only of paintings of pastoral scenes or finely crafted, life-like portraits, G-rated movies, & books without any sex or violence.

GOOD CULTURE tells us about life as it really is--it tells the truth. To uses the title of a great Clint Eastwood film, it tells us about "the good, the bad, and the ugly." It illuminates the truth about the human predicament and our human destiny. And that is not always very pretty. "Braveheart" is a healthy addition to our culture. But for every "Braveheart," Hollywood seems intent on turning out a dozen films featuring an antihero, a tortured soul fighting his own demons and doing hardly anyone any good at all.

Make "airplane" edited movie versions with advisory labels

There are a number of technical tools available to parents. The industry, however, has responded to these new technological aids with lawsuits and other threats. Rather than trying to take away tools from parents who want to let their kids watch movies (would they rather we just say "No" completely?), the industry should be working with parents to make available to us the "airplane" edited version of their films. A recent poll found that almost three out of four respondents would purchase or rent an airplane-edited version of certain films that they would otherwise choose not to watch at all. Making these films available would be in the economic interest of the industry.

Voted YES on restoring $550M in funding for Amtrak for 2007.

Proponents of the bill say to vote YEA because:
• [In my state], Philadelphia's 30th Street station is the second busiest train station nationally, with over 3.7 million boarding a year. And 3,000 people are employed by Amtrak in Pennsylvania. Amtrak and the health of Amtrak is important.
• Last year the Senate transportation bill had $1.45 billion for Amtrak, which is obviously more than the $900 million in the current budget proposal. I am offering an amendment to increase that funding from the $900 million which is in the bill right now to the $1.45 billion level and adding $550 million.
• I support funding through the section 920 account [without a tax increase]. We have seen that without raising the cap or without raising taxes, the Senate has been able to come up with a robust number for Amtrak which I will support within the context of a responsible budget.
• We have spent less money on Amtrak in the last 35 years than we will on highways in this year alone. And highways don't pay for themselves, even with the gas tax. Neither does mass transit, either in this country or anywhere else in the world. But we subsidize them because they improve the quality of our lives.
• We have never provided the kind of commitment to Amtrak that we have for other modes of transportation, and this amendment will be an important step to getting Amtrak off the starvation budgets that it has subsisted on for far too long.

Opponents of the bill say to vote NAY because:
• The problem with that is there is no money in the section 920 account. If we want to talk about "funny money" financing, that is it--taking money from an account that has no money. This whole budget takes money we don't have. The result is we keep running up the debt.

Voted NO on disallowing FCC approval of larger media conglomerates.

Voted YES on Internet sales tax moratorium.

Voted YES on telecomm deregulation.