PeteHoekstra.com, the unofficial website of Pete Hoekstra, passionately endorses Debbie Stabenow for U.S. Senate.

For more information on Debbie and her campaign, please click here.

With Michigan’s Republican Presidential Primary election on Tuesday, we’ve been receiving a number of inquiries on whether or not PeteHoekstra.com will endorse a candidate.

The answer is YES!

We are very pleased to give a full-throated endorsement to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

Like Pete Hoekstra, Santorum is a knee-jerk partisan who lacks the intellectual chops or curiosity to hold serious elected office. He’s a table-pounding critic of science, education, and does not believe in the separation of church and state. In fact, he uses his religious faith as a veil for his deeply bigoted feelings toward homosexuals.

Admittedly our endorsement of Santorum is mischievous. We don’t really want him to become President, rather we’d like to see him win the Republican nomination and get annihilated in the general election. The epic massacre that would unfold for the GOP with Santorum at the top of the ticket would likely lead to some wholesale changes within the party as the sane, reasonable, moderates will have had enough of the wingnut fringe which is driven by bigotry, intolerance, sanctimony, fear, hawkish rhetoric and military adventurism.

A vote for Rick Santorum on Tuesday is a very patriotic thing to do: we need two strong political parties, and Santorum’s rise is evidence of how sick the GOP is. The only solution is burning down the house and starting all over again.

PeteHoekstra.com urges strong support of Rick Santorum!

(Editor’s Note: Here’s the latest guest post from our long-time reader and PeteHoekstra.com contributor, “Steve.”)

It’s just an hour-long drive from Pete Hoekstra’s hometown of Holland to Kalamazoo. But as the rural  highway slides southeast through the state’s dope growing capital, Allegan County, the further Hoekstra gets from his element. No, not K Street.

Kalamazoo isn’t in his old 2nd Congressional district. These two West Michigan cities, Holland and Kalamazoo, are more second cousins than brothers. The scion of of one of Holland’s fortune’s, Erik Prince, is loathed across the globe as a war criminal. His Kazoo equivalent, billionaire Jon Stryker, is a whipping boy (not literally, though that may be his thing) for some on the right because of the money he throws into pro-gay politics via the Arcus Foundation. That, and ape preservation.

Holland’s greatest contribution to the sporting life? Articulate and chaste Michigan State quarterback Kirk Cousins. From Kalamazoo, Hall of Fame shortstop and a Manhattan bachelor with his own “herpes tree,” Derek Jeter. Cousins, like Hoekstra and Prince, graduated from Holland Christian High School. Just down the road, Holland High is a national power in swimming. K-Central? Two-time state hoops champ in the state’s largest division. ”Ghetto ball,” the upper level of the decaying Holland Civic Center gym might call it.

Hoekstra’s local college alma mater, Hope, doesn’t let gay movie directors speak on campus. It’s eponymous neighbor in Kalamazoo, K College, is an effete liberal arts campus of the type that may allow only gay movie directors First Amendment rights. Next door to Hope’s campus, Holland’s yuppified downtown (recently dry on Sundays) has a brewpub where the service meanders at a pace where only a school girl could cop a buzz. Kalamazoo is home of the renowned Bell’s Brewery.

Holland Public Schools is apparently just discovering that pesky “achievement gap” between white students and their minority counterparts. Kazoo? Screw it. You graduated high school? Your college is paid for (via an anonymous donor, believed to be the Stryker family). No idea who any of the commencement speakers were for Holland’s five high schools in 2010. At Kalamazoo Central, just Barack Obama. Thursday, Kalamazoo was blessed with another black politician and great alleviator of white racism, this of the more honest right-wing type, Herman Cain. The apparently not too disgraced former GOP presidential candidate, and fleeting primary favorite, Cain showed up with Hoekstra on a quick campaign tour of Michigan. Two for one? Too much to pass up. Patriots for Pete. Catchy. I’m all in, and found myself in the Radisson in downtown Kalamazoo.

Apparently Hoekstra didn’t bring along Cain just because he’s a “good talker,” (though it would be tough not to be more charismatic than Pete), and he was met with an in-tuned and agreeable audience whose age skewed towards Ron Paul’s, if away from that of Paul’s supporters’. Hoekstra said he supported the Pizza Man’s 9-9-9 tax plan. The one where, if you turn it upside down, Michelle Bachmann’s head does a 180 and Rick Santorum stars seeing pentagrams on Penn State’s football helmets. Linking himself to Cain also helps Hoekstra with Tea Party bona fides, as it’s somewhat laughable for the nine-term former Congressman turned lobbyist to color himself a Washington outsider.

Ignoring the idea of Republican primary opposition, Hoekstra went right after incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow. He stayed on message. Cain? He took a similar stance, attacking Obama and linking him to Stabenow. They’re the “stupid people” running America. He said he respected Hoekstra’s positions on energy independence, national defense and “tax replacement.” But then, no, not the … Super Bowl ad, wich Hoekstra said he had “moved beyond.”

While Hoekstra apparently admires Cain’s maverick political spirit, Cain said he loved that Hoekstra’s controversial and racially tinged Super Bowl ad (now disappeared from Hoekstra’s site, and the “Chinese” actress — or “little girl” as Cain called her — apologized for her appearance), that it was a sign of chutzpah in defiance of the politically-correct agenda, and was not racist. He said actually, it was factual.

The real victim of racism was not Asians-en masse via the Super Bowl ad, Cain said, but Cain himself. He said that, as a black conservative, he was castigated as a sell-out and “Uncle Tom” during those heady campain days. But unlike the Asian community (which, remember, shouldn’t have been insulted in the first place), he didn’t have any defenders from the bleeding hearts, civil rights crowd, or the perpetually offended chattering class.

While he may be done with Michigan, Cain will remain on the road. His next endorsement? Ohio, for Joe the Plumber.

Thankfully, the hotel had a bar.

Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel reports that Lisa Chan, the actress who appeared in Pete Hoekstra’s racially-charged ad, has apologized, calling her participation “a mistake.”

The commercial was widely criticized for its cultural insensitivity and furthering negative stereotypes of Asian-Americans. It ran on Super Bowl Sunday but was pull down a couple of days later.

In the ad, a woman, played by Chan, was shown bicycling through a landscape of rice paddies. As she approached the camera, the actress sarcastically thanked “Michigan Senator Debbie Spend-it-Now” for spending so much money, it was helping the Chinese economy at the expense of the U.S.

“Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good,” she said in broken and stereotypically accented English.

“I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities,” Chan wrote on her Facebook page. “As a recent college grad who has spent time working to improve communities and empower those without a voice, this role is not in any way representative of who I am. It was absolutely a mistake on my part and one that, over time, I hope can be forgiven. I feel horrible about my participation and I am determined to resolve my actions.”

The silence — and lack of apology — out of the Hoekstra camp is deafening, which is par for the course when Pete makes a mistake. He doesn’t say “I’m sorry” as a true leader would. He doubles down and points fingers. “We knew we were taking an aggressive approach on this,” Hoekstra is quoted as saying in response to the criticism. “But this is a time where the people in Michigan and across the country are fed up with the spending, and we wanted to capture that frustration that they had with Washington, D.C. This ad … hits Debbie smack dab between the eyes on the issue where she is vulnerable with the voters of Michigan, and that is spending.”

I don’t know why I should expect any growth or personal development out of Hoekstra, who served in Congress for 18 years. But when you screw up this badly and offensively, one would think he’d have a conscience about it.

I guess not.

Read more at HuffingtonPost.com and Angry Asian Man blog.

A new report from Public Policy Polling (PPP) of Raleigh, NC, shows Democratic U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow has taken her biggest lead yet in the four polls conducted by PPP on the Michigan U.S. Senate race dating back to December of 2010. She now leads former U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra by 14 points, 51-37, and has an even wider 17-point advantage over Clark Durant at 50-33. In three previous polls, Stabenow led Hoekstra by an average of just 7 points and on the most recent one, in July, her lead was 9%.

What’s interesting, according to PPP, is that Stabenow’s approval numbers have barely moved over the last six months. But Hoekstra’s numbers have plunged. In July his favorability/unfavorability rating was narrowly positive at 31/30. Now he’s dropped a net 11 points to a -10 spread at 28/38. There have only been minor shifts in his numbers with Democrats and Republicans, but with independents his numbers have flipped from +10 (33/23) to -10 (29/39).

Hoekstra’s wounds appear to be self-inflicted. His controversial, racially-charged Super Bowl commercial has clearly hurt him. PPP’s survey said 54% of Michigan voters were familiar with it, and within that group, 45% said it made them less likely to vote for him compared to only 16% who considered it a positive and 37% who said it didn’t make a difference to them either way. Independents were heavily turned off by the ad; Hoekstra’s gone from leading with them by 6% in July to trailing by 4%.

PPP says Hoekstra remains the overwhelming favorite in the Republican primary. He’s at 42% to 9% for Clark Durant, 6% for Scotty Boman, 4% for Gary Glenn, 2% for Randy Hekman, 1% each for Peter Konetchy and Rick Wilson, and 0% for Chuck Marino.

Read more @ PublicPolicyPolling.com and see full results here.

Do you still think the feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Pete?