Republican presidential candidate John McCain drew a sharp rebuke Monday from conservatives after he signaled an openness to a higher payroll tax for Social Security, contrary to previous vows not to raise taxes of any kind.

Speaking with reporters on his campaign bus on July 9, he cited a need to shore up Social Security, saying: “I cannot tell you what I would do, except to put everything on the table.”

He went a step farther Sunday with his reponse on a nationally televised talk show to a question about payroll tax increases.

“There is nothing that’s off the table. I have my positions, and I’ll articulate them. But nothing’s off the table,” McCain said. “I don’t want tax increases. But that doesn’t mean that anything is off the table.”

That comment drew a strong response Monday from the Club for Growth, a Washington anti-tax group. McCain’s comments, the group said in a letter to the Arizona senator, are “shocking because you have been adamant in your opposition to raising taxes under any circumstances.”

ABC News

McCain has been holding up pretty well in the polls and them he goes and does something stupid like this.  Of all the things to have a change of heart on, why in the hell would he back off a pledge not to raise taxes?  Taxes don’t need to be raised.  Spending needs to be cut and Social Security doesn’t need to be shored up.  It needs to be phased out of existence.

Wow.  What kind of heathens are in the Oregon State Legislature?

Some terminally ill patients in Oregon who turned to their state for health care were denied treatment and offered doctor-assisted suicide instead, a proposal some experts have called a “chilling” corruption of medical ethics.

Since the spread of his prostate cancer, 53-year-old Randy Stroup of Dexter, Ore., has been in a fight for his life. Uninsured and unable to pay for expensive chemotherapy, he applied to Oregon’s state-run health plan for help.

Lane Individual Practice Association (LIPA), which administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County, responded to Stroup’s request with a letter saying the state would not cover Stroup’s pricey treatment, but would pay for the cost of physician-assisted suicide.

“It dropped my chin to the floor,” Stroup told FOX News. “[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?”

The letter, which has been sent to other terminal patients throughout Oregon, follows guidelines established by the state legislature.

Fox News

This is precisely what we can expect from a universal health care system if God forbid we ever end up with that here in the United States.  When it gets to be too expensive, they’ll just let you die.  It already happens in Britain.

Grandmother dies after NHS cancer treatment is withdrawn because she paid privately for life-extending drug

Sha-na-na-na!  Sha-na-na-na!  Hey Hey-ey.  Good bye!

July 29 (Bloomberg) — Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest serving Republican in the U.S. Senate, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington on charges of hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts he received.

Stevens, 84, was charged with seven counts of making false statements on his Senate financial disclosure forms from 1999 to 2006 about gifts and renovations on his house.

Stevens’s indictment boosts Democratic chances of winning an Alaska Senate seat for the first time in almost three decades, if he remains a candidate. “If Stevens is on the ballot I would expect Democrats to win the seat,” said Nathan Gonzales of the Rothenberg Political Report.

Bloomberg

This is another tumor about to excised from the body of the GOP.  Gonzales is correct, though.  If Stevens remains on the ticket we will definitely lose this seat so it is imperative that the Republican establishment force this man off the ticket if he will not go willingly.

According to NBC which I am currently watching, the field is narrowed down to Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, and Tim Pawlenty.

Sam has predicted Romney. I have predicted Pawlenty. We’ll see which one of us is right, or if he goes with the dark horse pick of Portman.

[UPDATE]: Jim Geraghty is hearing that it is Pawlenty, and HotAir puts that and other clues together to make a compelling argument for this being the case. Stay tuned…

[UPDATE - Tues. Morning]: I am flipping news channels this morning over my morning joe (the drink, not the show) and on MSNBC they are currently talking about this. According to MSNBC the McCain VP “shortlist” includes Jindal, Pawlenty, Portman, Lieberman, Romney, and Ridge. MSNBC is also saying that the buzz is suggesting that Pawlenty may be the one. As for Obama’s pick, apparently VA Gov. Tim Kaine is very high in consideration, among others such as Dodd, Bayh, Clinton, and Biden.

Senate Conservatives Fund endorses US Sen. Candidate Bob Schaffer.

Solid choice.

These laid off supervisors need to file a class action lawsuit against the state.

July 23 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation designed to shore up confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and stem the record surge in mortgage foreclosures, sending the bill to the Senate.House members voted 272-152 in favor of the measure, which lawmakers and administration officials expect will be passed in the Senate and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The bill gives Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson power to inject capital into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and provides for a federal agency to insure refinanced home loans.

Bloomberg

I’m not surprised this passed.  I expected it to.  This is an election year and God forbid the Republicans would show a unified front against reckless spending.  Then again, they were in charge of the most reckless spending in history so what was I thinking.  My anger is directed toward Bush who was set to veto this and has now changed his mind.  Of course, I should have expected this as well.  It’s another facet of his “compassionate conservatism” which has been such a big hit that over 70% of the American people thinks he sucks as a President, Yours Truly included.

This bill goes way farther than just bailing out homeowners.  The real infuriating part is that it bails out a few failed CEOs who will continue to make their millions as well as the suits on Wall Street, courtesy of you and me who are just barely getting by.

The Congressional Budget Office says this plan will cost $25 Billion.  A press release this afternoon from Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC-10) has the figure set at $5 trillion over the long term.

If you haven’t read anything about this in the blogosphere, you surely will until this story is either proven or disproven.

Former Democratic VP candidate, Presidential candidate, and Senator John Edwards cornered with a mistress and a lovechild:

The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 - and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER broke the story of Edwards’ love child scandal last year, when Rielle was still pregnant and Edwards was still considered a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both parties denied the NATIONAL ENQUIRER report and a close friend of Edwards’ came forward and said he was the father of Rielle’s baby. But sources told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER a far different story - they revealed that Edwards was engineering a massive cover up of his shocking infidelity.

Yes, it’s the National Enquirer. But it’s the same tabloid that broke the Rush Limbaugh prescription drug story, and a host of stories in the OJ murder case and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Only time will tell… given how much of a smarmy know-it-all, holier-than-thou personality Edwards is, this wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

“Is McCain inching Towards Pawlenty?”

You can see an earlier thread of Veepstakes speculation here.

Consider this an open thread to continue said speculation.

Go to Parnell’s campaign website here.

Does his campaign symbol seem, uh, familiar to you?  It should.  You can see one a lot like it here.

He’s not in the general election yet… but in a Republican primary race.  I’d advise Lt. Gov. Parnell to change his symbol…

On Friday, McCain had only warm words for his former foe. And Romney, the mega-millionaire former GOP governor of Massachusetts, was pledging to help McCain’s campaign financially – and in any other way.

At a Detroit fundraiser that included a number of former Romney donors, McCain praised Romney, a man he once ridiculed by suggesting that his answer to immigration was “to get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn.”

“In case you’ve been missing it, Mitt has been doing such a great job lately on my behalf,” McCain told the donors. “I said only half in jest – he’s doing a better job for me than he did for himself.”

Charlotte Observer

Romney is going to be the guy.  I am almost certain of it.

Awesome.

Puh-leeze……   This guy gets more full of it with each passing day.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) - Democrat Barack Obama warned Wednesday about the danger of “fighting the last war” as he pledged to focus on emerging nuclear, biological and cyber threats if elected president.

Two goals of his administration would be to secure all loose nuclear material during his first term and to rid the world of nuclear weapons, Obama told an audience before a roundtable discussion at Purdue University.

Breitbart

What he seeks is not possible and it’s a foolish pursuit to think otherwise.  You can’t rid the world of a known technology. The fear that someone else will create it behind your back is what will keep you from getting rid of your own. If Obama or any President were to extinguish our nuclear arsenal they’d be signing our death warrants. Obama knows full well he can’t do this. He’s just telling people that so they’ll vote for him, which means he is lying.

This has been crossposted at Carolina Politics Online

South Carolina Republicans aren’t planning a statewide meeting to get input into their national party platform, but the party still plans to welcome all suggestions submitted online.

The GOP is inviting people to create an account on the Web site, www.GOPPlatform2008.com, where they can then participate in polls and submit platform ideas.

State GOP Chairman Katon Dawson said the Internet outreach will improve the transparency of the platform process, and he hopes that it will give more people a sense that they own it.

The Post and Courier

They still don’t know???  For God’s sake conservatives have only been screaming about it for how many years now.  They want low taxes, low government spending, a truly free market (not this federally backed crap we have now that is failing), individual responsibility and personal freedom and liberty!  Basically, everything that neither the national party nor the South Carolina Republican Party stands for now, but lies to voters claiming they do!  The Republican Party is obviously run by blind and deaf gimps because this message has been out there from the grassroots for a hell of a long time.  It’s nothing new and the party clearly isn’t listening or simply doesn’t care because just yesterday 21 Republicans in the U.S. Senate and over 100 Republicans in the House voted against Bush’s veto of the Medicare bill that would have cut doctor’s payments with our tax dollars by 10%.  Medicare and Social Security are the two biggest entitlements that are going to bankrupt this country.

John Stone has picked up the GOP nomination in District 12 from Georgia. As noted earlier Stone was the most viable candidate. I still doubt he can unseat incumbent John Barrow. Time will tell. State and National GOP support is soft at best.

Also of note Senator Chambliss will have to wait a little while longer before he knows his opponent in the general. Jim Martin and Vernon Jones will face off again in a run-off. Not that it matters.

I can’t believe so many people are actually planning on voting for this guy.  Furthermore, why are he and McCain speaking at a La Raza forum in the first place?  La Raza is a bigoted, hate filled organization.  They may as well be standing in front of the Klan.

I wrote this as part of a series for my friend Karol at AlarmingNews.com. Reprinted here in full:

I was a Fred guy in the primaries. I worked for the Fred Thompson campaign before there was a Fred Thompson campaign. I flew down to Atlanta on my own money to help run a Draft Fred effort at the Georgia GOP Convention last May, and then moved to DC to volunteer for the campaign full time for more than a month before they finally put me on payroll. I spent last fall and winter in South Carolina running the ground game in much of the state.

I believed that Fred was the answer to the vacuum of leadership in the conservative movement. I felt, like many did, that his entry into the Presidential race and surge to the top of the polls were meant to be. He was, and is, a great leader, and a solid conservative.

When Fred lost, I was devastated. Not that I didn’t see it coming, but even when in late December it became apparent that there was almost no way we could win, I still held out a shred of hope that things could somehow turn around. Part of that was probably that I needed to to keep doing 80 hour workweeks.

But even before it was over, I knew that once Fred was out McCain was my man.

If you had told me four years ago that in 2008 I would be enthusiastically supporting McCain for President to the point that I cut a check to his campaign, I would have told you you were crazy. But I have come to believe that he is the answer to the Republican party’s current doldrums.

McCain has been at the forefront, in many ways, of the fight to return the GOP to the core principles it has swayed from. He’s been out in front on curbing earmarks, he’s been a leader on entitlement reform and budget balancing. He voted against the 2003 prescription drug bill. He is the single most responsible person in Washington for garnering the political support to turn things around in Iraq.

And of course, he is an American hero. I challenge any Republican to watch his “Man in the Arena” ad and not be proud to have this man as the standard bearer for our party.

Now, I don’t agree with him on a lot of things. But I know where those differences lie. I’m not voting for him because I think he’ll be a down-the-line conservative. I’m voting for him because I know where he stands and what he believes in, and I’m comfortable with our differences of opinion. There are others who could have been the Republican nominee whom I could not say the same for.

Granted, my decision also has to do with my intense dislike of Barack Obama and his policies, and my belief that Bob Barr is simply not a credible alternative. But the bottom line is that John McCain is a great man, and I believe he has it in him to be a great President.

NEW YORK: In a country that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, Washington has morphed from being the lender of last resort into effectively the only resort for home loans for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives.Before, the government’s more modest mission was to make more loans available at lower rates. Now it is to make sure the loans that matter most to middle class Americans are made at all.The new reality is scorned by libertarians and conservatives, who fear intrusions by the state in the market, and by populists and progressives, who rue a society in which education and housing increasingly rest upon the government’s willingness to finance it.”If you’re a socialist, you should be happy,” said Michael Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a research institute in Washington. “But you should really wonder whether you want people’s ability to pay for housing and college dependent on the motives of people in Washington.”

International Herald Tribune

The proposed bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the latest in the race to see how much industry government can partially nationalize with taxpayer subsidies and keep them afloat.  With a Democratic Congress and a neo-con White House we are becoming less of a free market nation and more of a European Socialist market that is propped up by government funding.  The Federal government has already injected itself in the insurance industry, providing nationalized flood insurance for people naive enough to build their homes in flood plains.  Charlie Crist has been pushing Congress to pass a sort of nationalized hurricane insurance program, much like the NFIP.

And this isn’t even the worst of it.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s plan to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is an “unmitigated disaster” and the largest U.S. mortgage lenders are “basically insolvent,” according to investor Jim Rogers.

Taxpayers will be saddled with debt if Congress approves U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s request for the authority to buy unlimited stakes in and lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Daniel Zimmerman predicted the mortgage finance companies’ shares may fall another 35 percent.

“I don’t know where these guys get the audacity to take our money, taxpayer money, and buy stock in Fannie Mae,” Rogers, 65, said in an interview from Singapore. “So we’re going to bail out everybody else in the world. And it ruins the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and it makes the dollar more vulnerable and it increases inflation.”

Bloomberg

The dollar is already in a perilous position.  The more it declines, the higher oil prices are going to rise, thrashing our economy even harder.

We, the taxpayers, have already bailed out Bear Stearns.  Where does it end?  Rogers is correct in the Bloomberg article (if you read the whole thing).  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should go bankrupt from the careless mistakes they have made and that would be the case if Washington doesn’t step in to save the day.  How will constantly infusing them with more and more of our money going to turn things around?

Free market Capitalism in this country has been slowly going by the way side and just took a huge leap forward in that direction.  A precedent has now been set, a bad one.  Should we nationalize the oil industry next since that is so important to our economic structure?  The cries are already out there to do so.  Even closer are talks of government taking over the health care industry.  Say goodbye to our Capitalist land of freedom, innovation, and opportunity.  It’s all but a memory, pieces of the past that aren’t being picked up.

A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.
 
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.
 
But one global warming expert from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) told Cybercast News Service that such a remark reveals Markey’s ignorance on the subject of global warming.
 
“In Somalia back in 1993, climate change, according to 11 three- and four-star generals, resulted in a drought which led to famine,” said Markey.
 
“That famine translated to international aid we sent in to Somalia, which then led to the U.S. having to send in forces to separate all the groups that were fighting over the aid, which led to Black Hawk Down. There was this scene where we have all of our American troops under fire because they have been put into the middle of this terrible situation,” he added.CNS News

I guess the climate change faithful have become so desperate in their quest to convince others of their beliefs, despite a rising resistance against this junk science, that they just pull stuff out of their asses now and don’t even bother trying to get a scientific opinion.  What other reason could Ed Markey have for blatantly lying to a group of 25 high school students?  Is he so lacking on actual accomplishments in Washington that he must resort to fear mongering to keep getting reelected?

But Myron Ebell, director of Energy and Global Warming Policy at CEI, told Cybercast News Service that Markey’s remarks reveal his ignorance about the science of global warming. 
 
“Yes, that part of the world is subject to drought at times, but it has very little to do with global warming,” said Ebell. “It is subject to drought whether the global average temperature is going up, down, or staying the same. To say you know the conflict was caused by global warming is to show how really ignorant you are of the scientific issues involved.”
 
The students who testified at the event, most of whom had lived in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, described the difficulties they faced after the storm and blamed global warming for the disaster.

Of course they blamed global warming for it!  Our children have been getting brainwashed into becoming believers for several years now.  They are being taught in schools and by left wing politicians and presidential candidates that man made climate change is an indisputable fact and every single disaster that happens on the planet is a result.  Schools around the nation show Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” as if it’s a legitimate scientific documentary. 

As time has gone on the growing absurdity of claims have become comical, like those by Congressman Markey here.  I believe it’s the result of rising skepticism due to reality not coinciding with their claims.  2008, for instance, was one of the coldest winters on record.  This is visible in the believers’ slow shift from “global warming” to “climate change.”