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!

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.

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.

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?

When Schultz asked Hoekstra campaign spokesman Paul Ciaramitaro about dropping the old, he said in an e-mail: “After hundreds of thousands of visitors to the micro-site saw our first campaign ad and the effects of Stabenow’s reckless spending, we wanted to direct traffic to Pete’s site where voters can see our second ad, which lays out Pete’s vision of fiscal discipline and economic growth.”

What a crock.

Pete was shellacked by the negative backlash on his racially-charged ad, and correctly pulled it down. (Although he never admitted the slightest bit of remorse.)

One of Hoekstra’s Republican challengers, Clark Durant, was also disgusted by rival’s ad. He launched his own television commercial criticizing Hoekstra’s ad as “demeaning,” “hypocrisy,” “misleading” and “goofy.”

You can watch Durant’s new ad here:

Read more @ DetroitNews.com.

Thankfully, this time around, there is no racially-charged imagery or Chinese-American actresses speaking fake splintered English. Here’s the original commercial:

One quick note: Hoekstra originally posted the offensive ad on YouTube and as soon as the negative ratings started flooding in, he disabled comments and ratings. However, there are at least three other versions of the ad posted on YouTube, here, here and here. Roughly 85% of the comments — 1700 to 300 at the time of writing — were “Dislike”.

But as you know, Pete referred to the feedback as “overwhelmingly positive.”

Here’s the fundraising letter:

In a matter of roughly 72 hours, Pants-on-Fire Pete Hoekstra went from calling his “Debbie Spend-it-Now” Super Bowl ad “overwhelmingly positive” to replacing the racially-charged commercial with a new, non-culturally insensitive ad and pulling down the debbiespenditnow.com site entirely. Visitors who go to www.debbiespenditnow.com are automatically redirected to petespenditnot.com.

Note there’s been no press release, no public comment, no apology, no communication whatsoever about pulling the offensive advertisement.

That’s what politicians do. They sweep things under the rug hoping they’ll blow over.

Leaders lead.

Leaders are courageous.

Leaders don’t play to our worst instincts.

They resist temptation to take the low road, even if it’s the politically expedient move.

And when leaders make a mistake, they admit it, and say “I’m sorry.”

Pete Hoesktra, you are not a leader.

And we at PeteHoekstra.com are committed to making sure everyone understands this.

Michigan can, and must, do better.

With Rick Santorum’s caucus and primary victories in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, we’re reminded of one of Pete Hoekstra’s “greatest hits,” back when he was chair of the House intelligence committee. It was in June, 2006 that the senator from Pennsylvania Santorum and congressman from Michigan Hoekstra were proud to announce that yes, finally, “weapons of mass destruction” were found in Iraq! The Bush administration wasn’t made up of lying war-mongers after all. Ah, sweet vindication.

Well, they found something alright. But it wasn’t a cache of weapons poised to destroy the United States. According to the Washington Post:

“The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

“The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

“Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.”

Five hundred impotent old shells. 4,484 United States military dead. Over a half-million Iraqi dead. Pete Hoekstra, back safe in Washington, forked lying tongue, bloodied hands.