Santorum's Creative Financing

Santorum, who came close to being voted Most Annoying Senator, is the subject of a The American Prospect cover investigative piece and this post by the author at Attytood: How Santorum paid for his Va. house...and his Starbucks coffee

Santorum and his wife received a $500,000, five-year mortgage for their Leesburg, Va., home from a small Philadelphia private bank run by a major campaign donor — even though its stated policy is to make loans only to its “affluent” investors, which the senator is not.

Good-government experts said the mortgage from Philadelphia Trust Co. raises serious questions about Santorum’s conduct at a time when he is the Senate GOP’s point man on ethics reform. They explained it would be a violation of the Senate’s current ethics rules if Santorum received something a regular citizen could not get.