So apparently all the speculation this week started by Robert Novak that McCain would counter-program Obama’s Europe trip with a VP announcement was just that, speculation. Obviously McCain could at any moment come out with something but considering it is 11:00am on a Friday and nothing has been said, I have to believe it isn’t going to happen.

Last week McCain top economic adviser Phil Gramm made some comments that did not sit too well with observers. He basically said that the recession is a state-of-mind and the American people had become “a nation of whiners”. They were comments that McCain eventually disavowed and Obama jumped on.

This morning when asked McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina made it pretty clear Phil Gramm would not have a position in the Senator’s White House. Now news from the campaign that Gramm has been releaved of his duties and is no longer a part of the team.

I just watched a half an hour of campaign surrogates Carly Fiorina and Senator Claire McCaskill debating their candidates plans on Meet the Press. After a half an hour the final conclusions I came to were these:

1) Neither candidate is willing to come out on a firm position on almost anything.
2) Neither candidate has an economic plan that adds up to solving our problems.
3) This election looks and sounds almost exactly like every other one for the past few cycles.

Call me a curmudgeon but for over a year I have been skeptical about this tidal wave of “change” and “reform” that has been touted by both of these candidates but especially Obama. Through the sheer for of their wills is how we are told they will change the system. Yet here we are in what is obviously the general election campaign, forget waiting until the conventions, and I see two candidates and their surrogates who look, sound and feel just like any other.

John McCain echoes the weekly Presidential Radio addresses with his first address today (click link to hear it) detailing his positions on energy.

Good morning. I’m John McCain, and this week I’ve been on the road in Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I’ve been holding town hall meetings to talk over the subject on most everyone’s minds these days — our slowing economy.

More than 400,000 Americans have lost their jobs since December, and the rate of new job creation has fallen sharply. Americans are worried about the security of their current job, and they’re worried that they, their kids and their neighbors may not find good jobs and new opportunities in the future. It’s a big problem when gasoline, food, and other necessities of life carry the price tag of luxury goods, and that’s what it feels like to millions of Americans.

I have a plan to grow this economy, and it starts with getting a handle on the cost of gasoline and regaining America’s energy security. I believe we should immediately suspend the federal gas tax for the remainder of the summer driving season. We also have billions of dollars of oil in the United States, and vast reserves of natural gas as well. So we must commit to producing more of both, to send a message to the market and trigger lower prices for oil and gas.

We will develop more clean energy, and especially zero-emission nuclear energy. We will build at least 45 nuclear plants that will create over 700,000 good jobs to construct and operate them. At the same time, we will develop clean coal technology — which alone will create tens of thousands of jobs in some of America’s most hard-pressed areas.

Under my energy plan — the Lexington Project — we will also accelerate the development of wind and solar power and other renewable technologies. And we will help automakers design and sell cars that don’t depend on gasoline. Production of hybrid, flex-fuel, and electric cars will bring America closer to energy independence. And it will bring jobs to auto plants, parts manufacturers, and the communities that support them.

My opponent has an answer to the Lexington Project, and it’s “no”: No to more drilling, no to more nuclear power, no to more use of coal. For a guy whose “official seal” carried the motto, “Yes, we can,” Senator Obama’s agenda sure has a whole lot of “No, we can’t.”

We need to think as well about small businesses and the jobs they create. Small businesses are the job engine of America, and I will make it easier for them to grow and hire more workers.
My opponent would make it harder by imposing a healthcare mandate that will add a crushing $12,000 to the cost of employing anyone with a family. My plan attacks the real problems of health care — cost, availability and portability.

In an economic downturn, the worst of all ideas is to raise taxes. And Senator Obama will do just that. If you are one of the 23 million small business owners who files as an individual rate payer, watch out — because as your business grows, my opponent proposes to raise your taxes. If you have an investment for your child’s education or own a mutual fund or a stock in a retirement plan, watch out — because Senator Obama intends to nearly double the taxes on capital gains. He will raise estate taxes to 45 percent. I propose to cut them to 15 percent. For those of you with children, I will double the child deduction from $3,500 to $7,000 for every dependent, in every family in America.

To promote job creation, we must also get government’s fiscal house in order. Government has grown by 60 percent in the last eight years, because this Congress and this Administration have failed to meet their responsibilities. When I’m president, I will order a stem to stern review of government, and I will veto every single bill with wasteful spending.

For his part, Senator Obama proposes to create sprawling new federal programs that will increase government spending even more. As for earmark spending, I have never asked for a single earmark in my entire career. In his Senate career, Senator Obama has requested some $930 million for earmark projects. That comes to more than a million dollars in pork for every working day since he became a United States Senator.

In America, the most important measure of the economy is the opportunity — the chance for every man and woman to find a better life, and to make one better still for their children. That is all a part of the promise of our country. And if I am elected president, I will see that promise kept.
We’re passing through a very tough time, my fellow Americans. But we’ve been through worse, and beaten longer odds. And very soon, we’re going to get this economy running again at full strength.

I noticed that there was something oddly familiar about General Wesley Clark’s attack line against Sen. McCain’s military service, it sounded like a joke I had heard from Al Franken, I just couldn’t remember where I had heard it. Luckily we have Google and I could find the quote from a 2000 campaign related interview in Playboy magazine.

OV: Do you like McCain?

AF: I just read his autobiography and I like that a lot. I think he’s admirable in many, many ways. He has certainly been courageous on tobacco and campaign finance reform. I read the book and it has a lot about his time in captivity in North Vietnam being tortured and stuff. I don’t understand why all this war hero stuff. I mean anybody can get captured. Isn’t the idea to capture the other guy? As far as I’m concerned, he sat out the war.

Now obviously, Franken unlike Clark was joking. With that said this isn’t the first interesting Franken thought to come out of a Playboy related article for the comedian who is currently running for the Minnesota Democratic Senate ticket.

First the first time since 1791, the Supreme Court has made a ruling conclusively interpreting the rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment of the Constitution. District of Columbia v. Heller, challenged a 32-year-old-ban on handgun ownership in the nations capital city and put a new twist to the debate on whether the amendment should be interpreted solely as the right to create “well regulated militias” or whether it allowed for individual gun ownership without restriction.

The 5-4 decision fell along ideological lines with Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

Dick Anthony Heller is an armed security guard who sued the District after rejecting his application to keep a handgun at his home for protection. The U.S. Court of Appeals had ruled in Hellar’s favor stating that an individual’s right to own arms was obstructed by a total ban on handguns.

In addition to striking down D.C.’s handgun ban the ruling also lifted the restriction that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled. Scalia did say in his opinion that the ruling should not “cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”

Similar gun laws will now be challenged across the country and it is unlikely that this will be the final say between those debating the interpretation of the Second Amendment and the extent to which gun control can be carried out by cities, states and the federal government.

“Today’s decision is a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom in the United States. For this first time in the history of our Republic, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was and is an individual right as intended by our Founding Fathers. I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use firearms for self-defense.

“Unlike Senator Obama, who refused to join me in signing a bipartisan amicus brief, I was pleased to express my support and call for the ruling issued today. Today’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans. Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right — sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

“This ruling does not mark the end of our struggle against those who seek to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens. We must always remain vigilant in defense of our freedoms. But today, the Supreme Court ended forever the specious argument that the Second Amendment did not confer an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Meanwhile in light of the decision the Obama campaign is attempting to reverse course on a statement given to the Chicago Tribune last year which suggested he supported the ban. The campaign now says those comments were “inartful”.

But the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he “believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.”

From ABC News:

The Chicago Tribune clip from Nov. 20, 2007, is an inaccurate representation of Obama’s views, according to Burton, because the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has refrained from developing a position on whether the D.C. gun law runs afoul of the Second Amendment.

When Obama has been asked on multiple occasions to weigh in on the D.C. gun case he has regularly maintained that the Second Amendment provides an individual right while at the same time saying that right is not absolute and that the Constitution does not prevent local governments from enacting what Obama calls “common sense laws.”

Although he has been willing to describe his general views on this topic, Obama has sidestepped the question of whether the ban in the nation’s capital runs afoul of the Second Amendment.

Today the Obama campaign has released the following statement on the Court’s decision:

I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view, and while it ruled that the D.C. gun ban went too far, Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe. Today’s ruling, the first clear statement on this issue in 127 years, will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.

As President, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Today’s decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe.

Today John McCain is proposing a $300 Million dollar government award to whomever can create a new car battery capable of delivering power at 30% of today’s costs and have “the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.” The prize equates roughly the cost of $1 per person in the U.S. and something McCain calls “a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency.”

A similar approach was taken to commercial space travel under the X-Prize Foundation, which under the Ansari X PRIZE, awarded Burt Rutan $10 Million in 2004 for building a private suborbital spacecraft. The challenge resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in research and development by private teams who competed. Similar prizes for medicine, lunar exploration and yes automotive are currently being pursued.

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For weeks now the McCain campaign has been hitting Michelle Obama over her comments that she did not feed pride for her country until her husbands campaign for president. Just yesterday Cindy McCain, wife of the Senator, personally took a shot at Ms. Obama over the comment. Now Dan Abrams of MSNBC has this piece showing McCain telling FOX News he did not “love America” until he was a POW. Further MSNBC has found that during the 2000 campaign this statement was a running theme of the McCain camp.

Not good for McCain or the Republican Party.

The Hill reports 14 Congressional Republicans say they will not endorse Senator John McCain for President citing various reasons including the Senator’s stance on energy issues and the Iraq War.

While economic conservatives would find much in John McCain’s current message calling for lowering corporate taxes they may be surprised to find out he would also regulate CEO pay. In prepared remarks reported on by McCain is to say:

“Americans are right to be offended when the extravagant salaries and severance deals of CEOs … bear no relation to the success of the company or the wishes of shareholders,”

“If I am elected president, I intend to see that wrongdoing of this kind is called to account by federal prosecutors. And under my reforms, all aspects of a CEO’s pay, including any severance arrangements, must be approved by shareholders,”

My take? McCain is making an interesting pitch that reaches out to economic conservatives on taxes and reforming the tax code while also reaching out to middle Americans who are increasingly incensed by corruption in business and Washington. It is an interesting appeal that will either end up pleasing many or offending all.