GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s unexpected finish in Iowa has thrust his record into the spotlight. Naturally, his anti-choice, homophobic, and patently outrageous positions only help shore up his right-wing credentials. As he said in Sioux City, “A track record is a pretty good indication of what you’re going to do in the future.”

However, some of his votes in the past will certainly put a dent in his conservative credentials. As Bloomberg News points out, Santorum spent a lot of his 16-year congressional career fighting alongside labor advocates to protect striking workers, increase the minimum wage, and ensure that the law requiring employers to pay the prevailing wage stayed on the books:

In 1993, Santorum was one of 17 House Republicans who sided with most Democrats in backing a Clinton administration bill to protect striking employees from being permanently replaced by their employers.

Santorum’s Senate service shows a clear track record of supporting the Davis-Bacon Act, the federal law that requires government contractors to pay workers the local prevailing wage (USMMMNCH) and a perennial target for elimination by the business community and anti-union Tea Party activists.

In 1996, Santorum voted in effect for an amendment by former Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy that said the 1931 law shouldn’t be repealed.

In 1999, the Senate accepted a Santorum amendment that said it should consider “reform” of Davis-Bacon rather than repeal. Later that year, Santorum was one of 15 Senate Republicans who sided with Democrats in rejecting an amendment that would have limited the application of Davis-Bacon in federal disaster areas.

Of course, Santorum’s fight for the middle class and low-income Americans may merely reflect that he first ran in “a democratic-leaning, working class congressional district” in Pennsylvania. But in seeking national office, Santorum is throwing those same people under the bus. Now, he compares programs that help America’s workers — the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, or food stamps — to fascism, even going so far as to say, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better” with taxpayer funds. He also advocated for the elimination of all public sector unions.

Santorum’s convenient rejection of his previous efforts may not be enough to maintain the right-wing veneer he is aggressively pursuing. After all, if he is to be believed, his track record is a good indication of what he’ll do in the future.

Last year, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed into law a drastic expansion of the state’s emergency manager law, which imposes what critics have dubbed “financial martial law” on local governments the state deems to be mismanaging finances. The emergency managers, who are appointed without input from local communities, have the power to effectively depose elected officials, break collective bargaining agreements, and unilaterally dictate decisions about city operations, finances, infrastructure, and public safety.

Today, the Flint Journal points out that the managers receive six-figure salaries, set by the state and paid for by the local communities, which are all cash-strapped (or else they wouldn’t be subject to emergency managers in the first place). In Flint, in fact, the manager earns more than the mayor earns:

By law, the pay of Michigan’s five emergency managers — ranging from $132,000 to $250,000 — is set by the state, but the money actually is paid by the local communities they’re in charge of. [...]

Mayor Dayne Walling’s was Flint’s highest-paid elected official, receiving $91,800 before [Flint emergency manager Michael] Brown eliminated his pay and benefits and those of city council members.

Brown on Tuesday partially restored Walling’s pay to $55,000 and council members each will receive $7,000 a year.

The Journal points out that law has dictated that local communities pay the salaries of emergency managers since 1990, but Snyder’s expansion of the law means that many more communities have become subject to it than ever before. Activists are working to repeal the law via referendum of through a court ruling.

Mitt Romney, last night’s Iowa caucus winner, has been on the campaign trail claiming that the private equity firm he ran, known as Bain Capital, was responsible for creating loads of jobs. Romney responded to criticism about his time at Bain by saying, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

When a group of Romney backers ran an ad making the same claim, they were unable to back up the number with data. And as it turns out, the Romney camp can’t either, as it admitted that the statistic is nothing but cherry-picked job growth from a few companies that did well after they were bought by Bain:

[Romney spokesman Eric] Fehrnstrom says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs).

This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain. (Indeed, Romney made his comments in response to a former employee of American Pad & Paper Co. who says he lost his job after Bain Capital took it private.)

Bain Capital has been responsible for thousands of layoffs at companies it bankrupted, such as American Pad & Paper, Dade International, and LIVE Entertainment, which Romney’s stat completely leaves out. He’s also taking credit for jobs created long after he left the firm to launch his political career. To sum it up, the stat Romney uses is incredibly dishonest, like much of his jobs rhetoric.

One of Romney’s Bain business partners has said that he “never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.” “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors,” he added. And Bain has certainly done that, maximizing earnings “by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits.” Due to a lucrative retirement deal, Romney is still making millions from Bain, as he goes across the country calling himself “middle class” and joking about being “unemployed.” [HT: Greg Sargent]

President Obama is planning to announce today that, in addition to his recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he will also use his recess appointment powers to place Department of Labor Attorney Sharon Block, labor lawyer Richard Griffin, and NLRB counsel Terence Flynn to the National Labor Relations Board.

Like the CFPB, Republicans have spent the past year blocking nominations to the NLRB in an effort to keep the agency from functioning. Those efforts would have paid off soon, since after Craig Becker’s term on the board expired this week, the NLRB would have been reduced to two members, which is the number it had for more than two years from 2008 to 2010. This effectively shuts down the board, since the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that two members does not constitute a legal quorum, and thus, a two-member board can’t make binding rulings.

All 47 Senate Republicans have warned Obama of a “constitutional conflict” should he choose to use his recess appointment powers — authority he is well within his right to use, as ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser noted yesterday — but it was Chief Justice John Roberts, a noted conservative, who suggested the president should make recess appointments to keep the NLRB functioning, as ThinkProgress reported in 2010.

Obama’s appointment of Block, Flynn, and Griffin is important, too, because it boosts the board’s membership to five, protecting its quorum even if member Brian Hayes follows through on his threats to quit. Preserving its right to quorum ensures that its rulings will not be thrown out on legal challenges, as more than 600 cases were by the Roberts Court in 2010.

Starting in late January, the Obama administration will force airlines to be more transparent about the full cost of tickets they often disguise in ads touting cheap fares. Low-price airlines Southwest, Spirit, and Allegiant are going to court to stop the rules, arguing that they violate corporate free speech rights.

But consumer advocates say the changes are a positive development for travelers who have been swindled by airlines for too long:

Advertisements that make airfares seem enticingly low will soon lose that asterisk pointing to a dense paragraph of additional taxes and fees that make a cheap ticket much more costly.

Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a paragraph of fine print disclaimers about charges that can add 20 percent or more to a ticket’s price.

But with airlines now promoting fares on Web ads, Facebook and Twitter, and adopting a menu of fees for services that used to be part of the ticket price, the government decided it was time for a change so travelers have a clearer sense of the total price they must pay.

Kate Hanni of FlyersRights.org describes an all-too-common scenario: “People would get up against the point where they were about to make a purchase, and suddenly the cost of their ticket went up because of these taxes and charges.”

“Requiring all mandatory charges to be included in a single advertised price will help consumers compare airfares and make it easier for them to determine the full cost of their trip,” said Bill Mosley, a Transportation department spokesman. The advertising rule is one of a dozen passenger protections the department adopted last spring.

But airlines like Spirit that have built their profits on advertising $9 fares, then charging much more, are determined to resist the new rules. They are also objecting to changes that “allow passengers to cancel a ticket purchase without penalty within 24 hours of booking; include information about baggage fees on e-ticket confirmations; and notify passengers more promptly about flight cancellations and delays.”

The government’s move was prompted by a dramatic increase in deceptive advertising. This year, the Transportation Department issued 21 penalties totaling $1 million in fines for fare advertising violations, compared to 14 penalties and $379,000 in fines in 2001. Spirit, for instance, advertised a $9 fare on Twitter, then forced customers to click links to two more Web pages to find out the full price.

Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucuses last night, squeaking past the late surging Rick Santorum by just eight votes. And when it comes to tax and budget policy, the two candidates are separated by about as much as their final vote tallies.

Romney’s economic plan includes a $6.6 trillion tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations. As a result of this gargantuan giveaway, the plan “would yield approximately $6.5 trillion in deficits from 2013 through 2021.” And as the Tax Policy Center found, Santorum’s plan doesn’t fare much better:

The Tax Policy Center has not yet formally modeled the former Pennsylvania senator’s tax platform. However, because it cuts rates significantly but does not eliminate tax preferences—and even expands a few—it would very likely add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit. Looked at from that prism, it is not so different from the ideas raised by most of his GOP rivals.

Like other Republican tax planks, Santorum’s would benefit corporations and high-income individuals. No surprise there. But unlike his rivals, he’d also cut taxes for many families with children.

Santorum is no bleeding heart, however. Even as he’d cut their taxes, he’d shred direct government spending for programs aimed at assisting these same households.

When it comes to economic policy, the GOP field is largely in lockstep, supporting new, huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations and opposing efforts to ensure that millionaires can’t pay lower taxes than middle-class families. That kind of end result fits right in with the economic beliefs that Santorum holds, as he’s said that he is “for income inequality” and believes that the country’s economic woes are the result of “huge moral failings.”