Rick Santorum is ignorant about many things. We can include pre-Columbian history. His April 23 assertion to a right wing youth group that “We came here and created a blank slate, we birthed a nation from nothing” is not true. I doubt he has read “1491” by Charles C. Mann.

Mann describes the extent and history of civilization in “The New World.” By 1621 “Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century.” (p. 35.) Indigenous peoples saw Europeans as “often unbearably…

   Before the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1969, we were treated with interesting spots on the evening news. In 1969 the Cuyahoga River, in beautiful downtown Cleveland, burned. When one approached Gary on I-65, the sky was orange from the effluents of the steel mills.

    Yesterday, in response to my blog about the environment, Mr. Wheeler claimed "you posit an extreme example from your childhood days as that somehow…

   Rick Santorum spoke a couple of weeks ago about President Obama’s attitude toward environmental matters. In dismissing concerns for the environment, Santorum said his god gave people this planet to use.

   How can a person be so short-sighted and such a poor student of history? When Richard Nixon—yes, that Richard Nixon—signed into law environmental protection laws, there were a lot of problems with our environment.

   On the west side of Kokomo was a steel mill. When I was…

   All of us should be alarmed by Rick Santorum’s views. He is ignorant about history. For example, Thomas Jefferson argued for having the Feds in education during his 1806 State of the Union address. The public high school I attended took more of an interest in athletics than it did academics, but the skills I learned there enabled me to compete with others, and complete the degree requirements, at DePauw University.

   Santorum chose to home-school his children. Home-schooling might…