Santorum

You gotta read this. Sirota starts with a brief description of Senator Conrad Burns' (R-OR) conduct, then quickly jumps over with this:

But as I tell everyone who seems shocked at Burns' behavior, he's just one of a number of senators who has based his career on manipulating the system of legalized bribery that has overtaken our democracy. Having grown up in the Philadelphia area being represented by Rick Santorum, I should know.

Now we're talking. So tell us Mr Sirota, what has lil Ricky been up to? After touching on the K-Street project, he gets to the good stuff:

[Santorum] is a legislator who aggressively pushes Big Money's agenda on the Senate floor.

Oh yea? How so?

For instance, he was dispatched by GOP leaders in Washington to kill a minimum-wage increase in 2005. After voting repeatedly throughout his career against raising the minimum from its now 50-year low, Santorum offered an amendment to a minimum-wage bill that seemed likely to pass. The legislation purported to raise the minimum, and gave GOP senators a way to seem like they supported the increase.

But experts quickly noted that behind Santorum's charade purporting to support a wage hike, his bill's fine print would have eliminated all existing minimum-wage protections for almost 7 million workers, opening the door to massive pay cuts, and the effective legalization of sweatshops.

The bill also would have nullified various state minimum-wage laws, eliminated overtime pay protections for millions of workers and exempted businesses from fines for violating workplace safety, health and pension laws.

Though Santorum's proposal didn't pass, it stripped enough votes from the real bill to send it to defeat. As a thank you, Santorum got a nice wet kiss from Corporate America: Wal-Mart, one of the country's largest low-wage employers, lent him its corporate jet a few weeks later for a victory lap at a slew of fat-cat fund-raisers in Florida, where his campaign pocketed $250,000.

How wonderful! Isn't this the same Rick Santorum who a few days ago was described this way?

Poverty is a big deal to him, Santorum explained, because "if you want me to be honest, I'm a Catholic." He added: "How many times did the nuns beat into your brains: the poor, the poor, the poor, the poor?"

It's so good to know that he cares so much for "the poor" that he can use them to get a free jet ride to Jeb Bush's Florida so that he can pick up a cool quarter mil.

But wait. Sirota's not finished.

In 2003, for instance, he led the fight to pass a multibillion-dollar tax cut for investors. According to the New York Times, "Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent" of the cuts. Those making more than $10 million got $500,000 each in cuts, while those making $50,000 or less got about $10.

Santorum championed this tax cut just months before he opposed increasing child-care funding for working mothers by saying, "Making people struggle a little bit is not necessarily the worst thing."

The poor, the poor, the poor, the poor.