Stick around.  St. John will contradict these statements soon.  Then he’ll deny his contradictions.  Then St. Joe will interpret it for us, explaining what he REALLY meant to say; and, oh yea, Obama is an elitist.

I think, because of the maverick thing and the PUMA people, there’s a lot of effort to “out” McCain as a Republican.

Of course he is a Republican. And ultimately, any candidate running for President is going to conform his positions to the mainstream party platform, unless his differences with the mainstream party are serious points of personal principle.

Each president has a clear agenda and a clear set of objectives on behalf of which he will deploy his staff, call in political favors, and personally invest himself (risking embarrassment if the measure fails).

McCain is not vilifying gay people. He’s not vilifying people who support abortion rights.  I doubt you will ever hear the word “pro-choice” out of the mouth of George W. Bush or Mike Huckabee or Pat Robertson.  McCain’s position on abortion and gay rights is that he is nominally on the side of his party’s majority, and as president, he intends to do absolutely nothing about either of these issues.

McCain espouses his party’s position on abortion, but realistically, he is much less likely than a president like Bush to expend a lot of effort trying to force Congress to confirm a Supreme Court Justice who is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Similarly, while McCain is not supportive of gay rights, he is not going to be making a Constitutional marriage amendment a central first-term objective.  McCain’s position on gay rights seems to be that he is adamantly indifferent to the issue, and he’s not going to do anything about them one way or the other.

I don’t think that people who support abortion rights or gay rights, and who also support McCain are misunderstanding his positions on these issues.  Rather, we are satisfied with a Republican whose opposition on these issues will be inactive, and whose interests will be focused elsewhere.  I am not sure the distinction will matter to you, since, as an activist, you seem to have as much contempt for people indifferent to your hot-button issues as you do for those who fairly actively oppose them. 

Personally, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a gay person who is likely to see a substantial tax increase under Obama to prefer an extension of the Bush tax cuts over an administration sympathetic to gay marriage.

SO Mitch - your one note hotbutton issue is your wallet.  Your moral bankruptcy aside, of course.

I don’t purport to speak for LGBTs or women.  But I think that if you gave people on both sides of these issues a choice between progress on that issue and a continued political stalemate on the hot-buttons plus a small tax cut, the majority would favor the tax cut.

There are a lot of places in this country where gay marriage is illegal, but gays enjoy most of the practical benefits of marriage.  The marriage issue seems to be a symbol for equality rather than a substantive right that will materially improve people’s lives. 

The real irony of the progress in gay rights is that gays essentially won mainstream acceptance the same way Mormons did; by being well-educated, productive, and therefore, desirable to the business establishment.  This resulted in key gay-rights victories, like domestic partner benefits from private employers, which actually did improve people’s lives. 

Similarly, overturning Roe would throw the issue back to the states, which would only moderately reduce access to abortions.  A federal ban would never get through Congress and most states wouldn’t ban it either, and those that would have already found loopholes to limit access to abortions within their borders. 

I will absolutely favor my wallet over a meaningless symbolic victory every day of the week.  Given a choice between a partial-birth ban and a bill supporting condom distribution in public elementary schools, I’ll support whichever one you wrap in a tax cut, which is another way of saying, given a choice between two things I don’t care about, I’ll favor whichever one comes wrapped in something I do care about.

John McCain saying he will nominate judges like Roberts and Alito says effectively nothing, because Roberts and Alito are not very much alike.

John Roberts is a world-class advocate, a brilliant guy, and a superlative lawyer, and I don’t think anybody owns him.  He testified at his confirmation that Roe v. Wade was entitled to be deferred to as settled law, which is a judicial way of saying he doesn’t care much and he doesn’t plan to do anything about it.

Roberts’s confirmation was also supported by about half of Senate Democrats.  He is pretty widely accepted as superbly-qualified and well liked, and satisfactory to most people.  At the time of the Roberts confirmation, Bush was pushing for his Social Security privitization package, which was his key, second term legislative agenda item.  Senate Democrats were willing to fight an ideological nominee, and Bush wasn’t in a position to fight both of those battles at the same time.

Alito, by contrast, is ideologically very conservative.  At that time, Bush was very interested in placing a hardcore conservative on the bench, and was prepared to fight the Democrats over confirmation.  Alito barely got out of the Judiciary Committee and his confirmation vote was closely divided. 

It is very hard to imagine John McCain weakening support for his own legislative agenda by expending substantial political capital trying to ram an ideological conservative Supreme Court nominee through a Democrat-controlled Senate, because, unlike Bush, McCain is not an ideological conservative himself. 

There is also a tremendous risk that such a nomination will be blocked, and a high-profile political failure like that really damages the prestige and power of a President.  There is no chance any first term Republican would be dumb enough to try to back someone like Alito in a Democrat-controlled Senate confirmation.

Roberts, who was an olive branch from Bush to the Democrats and is far from a lock to further any of the social conservatives’ agenda items, is about the best the right can hope for from McCain.  And it’s more likely that a McCain nominee will end up being a John Paul Stevens or an Anthony Kennedy.

I’ll ignore most of that ridiculous comment, but this sentence intrigued me.  Do you honestly think McCain could be a two-term president?…

If he’s healthy at 76 and his first term is successful, I don’t see why not. 

But the larger point is that even if the Republicans had nominated an ideologue, which McCain is not, any Republican President would be shooting himself in the foot to back a right-wing nominee to the Supreme Court, unless the primary policy objective of his presidency was to stack the Court to overturn Roe.

Mitch, I’m happy for you that you’re rich enough that everything’s about taxes to you. Me, I have to worry about the overall shape of the economy, which all the war spending has been really bad for.

Human rights, unlike decisions about infrastructure, are virtually free. It doesn’t cost the government money to allow safe and legal abortions; in fact, it saves money, because women don’t have to go to the emergency room after a DIY goes wrong. The financial impact of allowing gay marriage is hard to estimate, but not like to cause trouble—if there are a few more tax deductions available to them, there will, otoh, be less court time wasted on relatives contesting the wills of those who wanted to take care of their partners after death.

Log Cabin Republicans are like pigs joining a “More Bacon!” movement.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, let him choose a pro-choice running mate! That will keep the fundies at home come election day, and he can’t win without them.

I have no patience for queers who would exchange their civil rights for a tax cut.

Well, they’re there. So get used to it.

They’re only into Republican politics for the leather and shiny jackboots

McCain espouses his party’s position on abortion, but realistically, he is much less likely than a president like Bush to expend a lot of effort trying to force Congress to confirm a Supreme Court Justice who is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade.

It’s always interesting to meet a telepath.  John McCain says he will do just that, but of course, you know he’s not telling the truth, which is why you will vote for him for president, right?

(And when you claim Roberts is more moderate than Alito, you simply demonstrate that you know nothing whatever about recent Supreme Court decisions—to the very limited extent that the two show any difference in their votes, Roberts is farther to the right.)

I find it funny that McCain is pro-life and he presumably thinks that abortion is murder, but he would be okay with a VP that is pro-choice. However, he would not be okay with a VP that wants to treat gays like people.

“Roberts’s confirmation was also supported by about half of Senate Democrats.  He is pretty widely accepted as superbly-qualified and well liked, and satisfactory to most people.”

What country are you living in?  Satisfactory to most people, except us women-folk, but we don’t count, I guess.