Blatant Reality

It’s about time that McCain gave me something to look forward if he wins the presidency.

Sen. John McCain called Wednesday for the construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030 and pledged $2 billion a year in federal funds “to make clean coal a reality,” measures designed to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

 

(…)

 

“Every year, these reactors alone spare the atmosphere from the equivalent of nearly all auto emissions in America. Yet for all these benefits, we have not broken ground on a single nuclear plant in over thirty years,” he said. “And our manufacturing base to even construct these plants is almost gone.”

 

Even so, he said he would set the country on a course to build 45 new ones by 2030, with a longer-term goal of adding another 55 in the future.

 

“We will need to recover all the knowledge and skills that have been lost over three stagnant decades in a highly technical field,” he conceded.

Powerline Blog has more on this here.

Here is McCain’s latest global warming ad.

Sometimes I wonder if Gore endorsed the wrong person.

Hat tip New York Times.

In a recent poll conducted by CNN, Nader received 6%!

Ralph Nader’s campaign is trying to capitalize on his showing in a new national poll to argue that he might be on the stage for presidential debates and to seek more money needed to get on ballots.

 

In the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted June 4-5, Democrat Barack Obama had 47 percent, Republican John McCain had 43 percent, and Nader had 6 percent — “with virtually no mainstream national press coverage,” the consumer activist’s campaign told supporters today. (Without Nader in the race, Obama leads 49 percent to 46 percent.)

 

The 6 percent is an important threshold, Nader’s camp notes, because most debate organizers require at least 5 percent to invite a candidate.

Why is this such great news? Well it means that Nader could possibly be invited to several presidential debates which would boost his popularity even more! More votes for Nader would most likely mean less votes for Obama!

Another added benefit would be that we get a Ron Paul-esque candidate in the debates to spout out crazy ideas while the other two candidates completely ignore him. I might actually watch the debates if he is in them.

On Saturday, I wrote about some of the reasons corn-based ethanol is wrong for the country in both the economic and environmental sense. In this article, I talked about how the ethanol sector gets outrageously large subsidies and that I believe that we shouldn’t be giving them these. Well, it seems that McCain agrees with me on this. (my emphasis)

Sen. McCain argues that many of the steps are little more than subsidies that enrich special interests. He has long called for scrapping the federal ethanol tax credit, saying America’s corn-ethanol industry can and should stand on its own. He has also voted against requiring electric utilities to boost their use of renewable energy sources, preferring to let cities and states set their own targets for renewable energy.

 

At a roundtable with business leaders in Washington state last month, Sen. McCain expressed reluctance to support government incentives such as tax credits for wind and solar energy. He compared his stance on the matter to his position on corn ethanol. “I’m a little wary — I have to give you straight talk — about government subsidies,” he said. “When government jumps in and distorts the market, then there’s unintended consequences as well as intended.”

Those are pretty much my feelings about the whole giving subsidies in general. In the corn-ethanol case, it is arguable that the government subsidies has contributed to the rising price of corn.

Since Clinton is basically defeated (even if she will not admit it), her supporters are now shopping for a new candidate. And where are they going? Well, at least some are finding a home with the GOP.

Wow, what a sad day it is when liberal Clinton supporters are deciding rather to support the Republican candidate than a Democrat.

Now the only thing I haven’t figured out is for what side it’s a sad day. I mean, if unarguably liberal Clinton supporters can relate more with “conservative” McCain than ultra-liberal Obama, what does that say about McCain’s conservatism?

I know we (the GOP) need all the help we can come November but the implications of this probably won’t do anything to reassure conservatives.

Hat Tip Gateway Pundit

There are some days that I just don’t care who wins the Presidency come November. Sure, I’m going to vote McCain but that doesn’t mean I have faith in him to not screw up this country. I only have faith that he won’t screw up this country as much as Obama will (and that isn’t saying much).

So today I began pondering what would be the Republican “dream ticket” comparable to the Obama/(2x)Clinton dream ticket when it hit me. A McCain/Paul ticket would be a winner. Don’t believe me? Just look at the polls. Ron Paul got 15% of the votes in Oregon the other day. In an election that is going to be pretty close, McCain is going to need every vote he can muster to win and Paul might have those votes.

So lets just go along with this idea that there would be a McCain/Paul ticket in November and by some act of God, they actually won the election. If this happened what would our country be like?

Well, in my eyes, Paul’s libertarian views mixed with McCain’s somewhat liberal views would create an almost conservative policy.

For example, on immigration McCain basically wants amnesty and Paul doesn’t, hopefully something could be reached that would lean to a more conservative side.

Another reason I want to see them in office together would be that Paul would be a loose canon. While McCain seems to be constantly wanting to please the other side and not offend them, Paul never did care what people thought. He always spoke his mind and even would call his opponents dead wrong.

Plus they are both old and them together would remind me of the movie “Grumpy Old Men.” I would love to see them both constantly arguing with eachother over policy in public and then there would be times when McCain would have to physically restrain Paul from attacking a reporter when they asked a stupid question. Can’t you see that happening?

You can’t tell me that you don’t laugh when you imagine them both running the country.

Anyways, that thought brought a smile to my face in an election season wrought with constant disappointments. What VP choices (on either side) have brought smiles to your faces?

Recently, John McCain has invited Mike Murphy onto his campaign as an adviser. Supposedly, Murphy told McCain that he needs to “tone down” his attacks on Obama (my emphasis).

Last Sunday, he invited Mike Murphy, his longtime friend and political adviser, who is not involved in this campaign, to his home in Virginia. There, Mr. Murphy reportedly gave him a detailed and at times tough assessment of what Mr. McCain had done wrong.

 

Mr. Murphy urged him to tone down his attacks on Mr. Obama and stop coming across as so angry. He recommended that Mr. McCain concentrate on running as a reform candidate to strip that issue from Mr. Obama, and to make greater efforts to distance himself from Mr. Bush, Republicans familiar with the conversation said.

 

Some of Mr. McCain’s associates said that Mr. McCain might be interested in bringing Mr. Murphy back on board, but that his current circle of advisers was resisting that.

 

As soon as Mr. Obama secures the Democratic nomination, Mr. Schmidt said, Mr. McCain will begin a series of speeches intended to contrast their positions. Mr. McCain’s advisers said they did not think it made sense to do that until Mr. Obama wrapped up his battle against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, given how the two Democrats are dominating the news.

I really hope The New York Times is just having one of those faulty reporting days and this whole article is full of half truths and outright falsehoods. If it’s not, there are so many things wrong with the McCain camp.

First off, McCain doesn’t need to tone down his attacks on Obama because the “attacks” are nonexistent. Have you heard of a single attack? The only “attacks” I have heard about are McCain’s against conservatives for attacking Obama. What McCain needs in his campaign are more attacks against Obama and Hillary.

The next thing that I have an issue with is the idea that McCain wants to be known as a “reform” candidate. I, for one, am not scared of change. However, when McCain wants to be comparable to Obama in the aspect, I tend to have problems. Think about it: How much should “conservative” McCain have in common with the most liberal senator? For example, how much in common should McCain have with Obama on immigration reform? Personally, I think the commonality should be very slim.

Finally, why in the world is McCain waiting for Obama to secure the nomination to begin to contrast their positions? Shouldn’t the differences in their positions be obvious enough? It’s not like McCain is going against Obama in a primary where both of them have the same basic views (or at least I think McCain has different views). The funny thing is, the only real issue that I know for certain that McCain differs from either Clinton or Obama is his stance on abortion. For gun laws though, you would think McCain is a liberal.

Once again I find myself wishing, hoping, and yes, even praying that McCain and his campaign wakes up and discovers that he has a whole lot of conservatives wanting to throw their full support behind him. The only thing he has to do is stop looking like a Democrat by his constantly pandering and courting the other side.

As you may know, I was formally a Mike Huckabee supporter. Once he dropped out, I urged my fellow Huckabee followers to switch over to John McCain, the presumptive nominee by that time, because the alternative was far worse.

Many conservatives, including myself, were not that happy with our candidate, but for the good of the party many of us fell in line. At this time, McCain wasn’t sounding too bad. It seemed, though not many of us believed it, that he might actually turn out to be more conservative than we all thought. However, this brief bit of hope was soon lost.

With McCain now beginning to fall back into his old ways, many conservatives are beginning to lose hope. John Hawkins, who helped convince me to vote McCain, has now lost complete faith in McCain and has confessed that he will not be voting for him in November.

So does this recent information affect who I am going to be voting for in November? The answer is I just don’t know. Does that mean I will be voting for Obama or Hillary or both? Absolutely not. Will I abstain from voting? I couldn’t in clear conscious not vote since it is one of our most important liberties.

Where does this leave me then? Well, I think it leaves me in quite the pickle. If I vote for McCain, I really won’t be able to do that with a clear conscience. Sure he is a heck of a lot better then the Democratic candidates but he definitely isn’t a conservative.

The only thing left for me to do would be to vote for an independent conservative candidate. The only problem with that is I know full and well that I will be basically helping the Democrats win the White House. I, like most conservatives, really don’t like helping them win and would prefer to hinder them at all possible.

So basically anything I do this November is going to be against my conscious. It’s one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of deals. Once again, it seems that my only option would be to pick the lesser of the evils and you know what that will probably be? Vote McCain.

He still has a little over 5 months to prove to conservatives he can still be our candidate. Lets hope he doesn’t squander that time by pandering to the other side.

With everyone attacking McCain about his stand on immigration, I was hoping that I could look at his ratings from interests groups and compare them with Clinton’s and Obama’s. I honestly wanted to find that McCain was ranked better from the “no amnesty” interest groups then his Democratic opponents, but this just wasn’t the case.

Quite honestly, it really shocked me to find out that Hillary and Barack had received better scores (2005-2006) from Americans for Better Immigration (McCain: 18, Clinton: 26, Obama: 28) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (McCain: 15, Clinton: 50, Obama: 43). Just to give you a little perspective, Senator Jim DeMint, who was a strong opponent to last summer’s comprehensive immigration reform, received a rating of 79 from both during the same year (this year he received a 92 from ABI).

Even though McCain received a 100 from the English First group last year, don’t get your hopes. The year before he only received a 25. This is still better than Hillary and Barack’s zeros for both year, but one is to expect McCain to act tough on immigration during the presidential primary. Don’t expect him to keep his 100 percent too much longer since the primary is over.

I am by no means saying that you should vote for either Hillary or Barack in the coming election. All I am saying is that we, as conservatives, are going to have to watch McCain closely when it comes to anything that deals with immigration.

I much rather have to deal with McCain on his few faults than Hillary or Barack with their innumerable faults.

With a weird turn of events, a new poll conducted by the Associated Press has Clinton leading McCain in a head to head poll with Barack in a virtual tie with him.

Clinton, who won the Pennsylvania primary last week, has gained ground this month in a hypothetical head-to-head match up with the GOP nominee-in-waiting; she now leads McCain, 50 percent to 41 percent, while Obama remains virtually tied with McCain, 46 percent to 44 percent.

Well, this is surely a very interesting twist. This news will definitely add some credibility to Clinton’s campaign staying in the race.