Andrew Sullivan's post "The Desperation of Santorum" directs us to this article in which Sen. Rick Santorum says the following about his opponent Bob Casey, the current Treasurer of Pennsylvania:

"Bob Casey has invested Pennsylvania pension funds in companies with ties to terrorist-sponsoring states and states that engage in genocide... Bob Casey is aiding and abetting terrorism and genocide."

Now, certainly, "aiding and abetting" might be a bit strong, but one wonders what those who happen to live in, say, the Darfur region of Sudan or Iran might think. Would they care that Santorum's language is too strong, or would they care that some U.S. states - perhaps including Pennsylvania - are in effect helping to prop up those regimes?

So, feel free to help Sully look into this matter by trying to determine which countries PA has directly or indirectly invested in, what if anything Bob Casey has done about this, and so on.

As for me, I took a look through a couple Google searches. First, the group mentioned in the article is the Center for Security Policy; they might have a link to a software company that sells products used to determine links to terrorism-sponsoring companies, but as long as that's disclosed and there are no associated shenanigans I don't see an issue.

Then, we've got this:

Nonetheless, the Sudan divestment push is making inroads... Harvard University, which was slow to rid itself of investments in companies doing business in South Africa, has led the way in the academic world with regard to Sudan. Its $23 billion endowment agreed last month to sell its stake in PetroChina, a Chinese oil and gas company with operations in Sudan... Student-led divestment campaigns have begun on campuses including Duke University in North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania...

And, from April 2006:

In Pennsylvania, State Rep. Josh Shapiro is pushing to toughen a 2003 law requiring state authorities to report on state holdings in companies operating in terror-sponsoring countries. Similar bills have been introduced in Alaska and Tennessee; lawmakers in Arizona passed a bill requiring the state’s pension funds to report on all their holdings in American companies active in terrorism-sponsoring countries.

Then, we've got something quite interesting. While Bob Casey became Treasurer in 2005, issues have been known since at latest January 2001:

Last Sunday's edition [1/21/01] of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran a blockbuster expose of the Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System -- "one of the nation's oldest and largest public pension funds" -- for causing, according to the article's opening sentence, "The retirement savings of more than 200,000 Pennsylvanians [to help] enslave Christians in Southern Sudan, build long-range missiles in Iran and smuggle automatic rifles from China to the United States." ...Under the headline "Pennsylvania Pensions Bankrolling Violence," Tribune-Review reporter Thomas Olson reveals the ways in which "global bad actors" have been penetrating the Commonwealth's SERS portfolio thanks to the Retirement System's woefully inadequate political risk assessment and its over-reliance on the flawed judgment of external fund managers -- including, in many cases, representatives of the same Wall Street firms that are responsible for bringing these bad actors' stock and bond offerings to the U.S. market...

So, if this issue has been known about for over five years, and Bob Casey is still investing in such companies, is Santorum's language too strong or not strong enough?

Related: See my video about Bob Casey.

UPDATE: One of the benefits of being a GOP insider is you get access to all the best information. Reporting on the press conference which had not yet happened, the "Captain" says:

Santorum will point to a bill passed by the Pennsylvania House in 2003 (HR 263), a direction from the legislature to PSERS, SERS, and the State Treasury to identify those investments that had any connection to companies or nations doing business in Iran, as well as Libya, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and North Korea. It's clear that the legislature wanted Pennsylvania to redirect their investments away from such companies and projects. However, Casey apparently has done nothing to keep Pennsylvania funds from supporting companies that do business with the same nations that threaten us.