Santorum says JFK speech makes him sick
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday he doesn't believe in the separation of church and state.
The former Pennsylvania senator, in an interview on ABC News' "This Week," said John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech to Baptist ministers in Houston makes him want to throw up.
"The first substantive line in the speech says, 'I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,''' Santorum said. "The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country."
Santorum said the First Amendment is about the free exercise of religion and that means "bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square."
"To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up," he said.
Santorum said his vote for No Child Left Behind legislation championed by former President George W. Bush was against his principles "When you're part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake, he said.
Santorum said his record shows he's been fighting to get the federal government out of the education system. "I looked at No Child Left Behind after it was enacted and saw what happened and saw the expansion of the federal government and the role of education," he said.
He said he stands by his comment Saturday at Michigan campaign event where he called President Obama "a snob" for saying everyone in the United States should obtain higher education.
Romney says Obama blew it in Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Sunday the recent surge in violence in Afghanistan was evidence U.S. President Obama had bungled the war.
Romney said anti-American violence over the accidental burning of Korans by U.S. troops showed that the president had announced plans to withdraw American forces before the security situation had been stabilized.
"It is an extraordinary admission of failure for us to establish the relationships that you'd have to have for a successful transition to the Afghan military and Afghan security leadership," Romney said on "Fox News Sunday." "I hope that we're going to see some improvement very soon, bit it's obviously very dangerous there and the transition effort is not going as well as we'd like to see it go."
Romney said Obama had emboldened Afghan militants by both publicly announcing the withdrawal timetable and also publicly apologizing for the Koran incident.
Romney, a front-runner for the GOP nomination, said Obama's attempt to placate the Afghan people would have consequences on Election Day in the United States.
"We've made an enormous contribution to help the people their achieved freedom and for us to be apologizing at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance," Romney predicted.
Ambassador: U.S committed to Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- The United States remains committed to its partnership with Afghanistan and is not planning to pull out, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker said.
In an interview Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Crocker said violent anti-Western protests in Afghanistan over the accidental burning of Korans at Bagram Air Base are expected to taper off soon.
"I've seen this kind of thing before when I was ambassador to Pakistan," he said. "Religious sensitivities run very, very deep in this part of the world and several times while I was there we saw countrywide violence. At a certain point it tapers off and I think we're all hopeful that the appeal for calm that [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai made today and he did so with the backing of the entire political leadership of the country will create a condition in which this diminishes."
Karzai has said publicly and privately he recognizes the Koran burnings were an inadvertent mistake, Crocker said.
While NATO and the United States have pulled their personnel out of the Afghan ministries in Kabul, the ambassador said the United States is not planning to leave Afghanistan.
"We remain committed to a partnership with the Afghan government and people as we seek to achieve our shared goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaida and strengthening the Afghan state and we're doing that so that Afghanistan can never again be the refuge for terrorists who would strike the American homeland."
Crocker said the stakes in Afghanistan remain high. "If we decide we're tired of it, al-Qaida and the Taliban certainly aren't," he said.
Syrians vote in national referendum
DAMASCUS, Syria, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Syrians Sunday voted in a national referendum on a draft constitution the government says would allow a multiparty political system.
The Syrian government said voters are flocking to polling centers across the country, the government-run SANA news agency reported.
Critics, however, say the draft constitution is a farce and are calling for the removal of President Bashar Assad as violence in Syria continued unabated, CNN reported.
Russia and China support the referendum process and accused participants in the Friends of Syria conference in Tunisia of fostering war, The New York Times said.
Assad and his wife, Asma, were greeted with cheering crowds of public employees when they arrived Sunday afternoon at a polling station in the state-run broadcast center in Damascus, the newspaper said.
Violence, however, kept voters from polls in areas such as Homs and Hama in central Syria.
At least 100 people were killed Saturday, opposition activists said. The anti-government Local Coordination Committees said 34 people were killed Sunday, mostly in Homs and Hama. The government also moved against protesters in several Damascus suburbs.
