kind of sickening, i think~

this proves nothing , just a bunch of hugging,u have to study how they feel on issues, macain was way to central for right minded republicans until they realized, he was going to win, he made alot mad working with ted kennedy on issues, and fingold, on the macain fingold law, but if we will stay in iraq, he has my vote,

McCain fighting 'Bush clone' label
By ELISABETH BUMILLER THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.
Last updated Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 5:01 a.m.

WASHINGTON — The Democrats like to say that electing Sen. John McCain would usher in the third term of George W. Bush, and they do not mean it as a compliment. The Republicans counter that calling the senator "McBush" is political spin and that McCain is his own man.

A look at McCain's 25-year record in the House and Senate, his 2008 campaign positions and his major speeches over the last three months indicates that on big-ticket issues -- the economy, support for continuing the Iraq war, health care -- his stance is indeed similar to Bush's brand of conservatism. McCain also has nearly identical ositions as the president on abortion and the types of judges he says he would appoint to the courts.

On the environment, U.S. diplomacy and nuclear proliferation, McCain has strikingly different views from Bush, and while he shares the president's goals in Iraq, he was at times an outspoken critic of the way the war was managed.

The disparities between the two are murkier on other issues.

On immigration, McCain started out with Bush -- at odds with the Republican mainstream -- by favoring a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, then backed off and emphasized the border-security-first approach favored by the majority of his party.

When it comes to dealing with terrorism suspects, McCain has supported imposing tighter rules than favored by the administration on the use of harsh interrogation techniques, but has consistently been with the president on limiting the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees. In one indicator that his view of executive power is moving closer to that of Bush, his campaign has recently signaled that he believes it was constitutional for the president to authorize wiretaps without warrants to monitor Americans' international phone calls and e-mail.

McCain has reversed himself on some issues -- most notably, embracing the Bush tax cuts after deriding them initially as fiscally risky and excessively skewed to the wealthy -- and continues to adjust his positions on others. On Monday, he said he continued to oppose opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, leaving him at odds with the White House and most of his party, but said he favored giving states more flexibility to decide whether to explore for oil off their coasts.

On balance, the McCain campaign has sought to emphasize differences between McCain and an unpopular Bush rather than similarities.

"In the last 10 years, he's been an independent voice for what he thinks is in his country's best interest," said Mark Salter, one of McCain's closest advisers. "Sometimes it's brought him into conflict with members of his party and with the president. The Democrats know that."

Yet while it would be hard to categorize him as a doctrinaire Republican or conservative, McCain appears to have ceded some of his carefully cultivated reputation as a maverick.

In a CBS News poll two weeks ago, 43 percent of registered voters said they believed he would continue Bush's policies, and 21 percent said he would be more conservative in his policies than Bush. Twenty-eight percent said he would be less conservative than Bush.

Presidencies are about more than policies, of course, and McCain would bring a different style, background and world view to the White House should he be elected in November. But when it comes to the issues, here is how he and Bush match up.

THE ECONOMY

Although he once held very different views, McCain's biggest similarity to Bush is on the economy. Not only does the senator support making permanent the large Bush tax cuts he once opposed -- the $1.35 trillion tax reduction of 2001 and the $320 billion tax cut of 2003 -- but he has proposed four major new tax cuts of his own.

Democrats say that those four proposed cuts -- a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, immediate tax breaks for corporate investment, a repeal of the alternative minimum tax and doubling the value of exemptions for dependents to $7,000 from $3,500 -- are more regressive than Bush's tax cuts because they favor the rich more disproportionately than the president's reductions did. McCain's advisers said his plan would help stimulate job creation by reducing taxes on small businesses, especially those that pay taxes at the personal income tax rate, and would be part of a fiscal plan that would also emphasize reining in the growth of government spending far more than Bush did.

HEALTH CARE

On health care, McCain has a market-oriented model similar to the one that Bush proposed to little effect in 2007. Like Bush, McCain would shift the emphasis from insurance provided by employers to insurance bought by individuals, and would offer a tax benefit for families to do so.

McCain's proposal, however, is more progressive in that it offers a refundable credit of $5,000 to families to buy their own insurance, whether or not they pay taxes -- in effect, cash. Although experts have questioned whether the $5,000 tax credit would cover the cost of private insurance, they generally say that Bush's plan, which offered a $15,000 tax deduction for families buying their own insurance, was more valuable to higher-income people.

IRAQ

On the Iraq war, McCain has been one of the president's biggest defenders of its stated rationale: saving the world from Saddam Hussein. Yet he was also an early advocate of increasing troop levels at a time when Bush was resistant, and was withering, from 2004 on, about Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, and what McCain called Rumsfeld's "whack a mole" strategy of moving U.S. troops from one violence-plagued part of Iraq to another.

Like Bush, McCain has steadfastly refused to set dates for withdrawals of troops and envisions a long-term American presence in the country. But last month, in the general election battleground state of Ohio, McCain did a semantic dance and said he expected that most American troops would be home from Iraq by 2013.

ABORTION

On abortion, McCain has long been opposed, and is in fact more explicit than the president in his opposition to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. Although Bush has spoken about changing American "hearts and minds" to build a "culture of life," McCain has said directly, in South Carolina in 2007, that Roe v. Wade "should be overturned."

On judges, McCain has strongly embraced the judicial philosophy of Bush and vowed to appoint conservative judges in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr.

On gay rights, McCain voted against a proposed constitutional amendment backed by Bush banning same-sex marriage, saying that it should be up to the states. Then in 2006, he made it clear how he thought his home state, Arizona, should decide: McCain appeared in a television commercial in support of a state amendment, which ultimately failed, to ban same-sex marriages.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Perhaps McCain's biggest departure from the president is on climate change. McCain has called for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, unlike Bush, who says such limits would be bad for the economy. McCain also supports a "cap-and-trade" system in which power plants and other polluters could meet limits on heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide by either reducing emissions on their own or by buying credits from more efficient producers.

McCain, who has a mixed record on the environment in the Senate -- he has missed votes on toughening fuel economy standards and has opposed tax breaks meant to encourage alternative energy -- has nonetheless tried to highlight what he considers his stark environmental divide with Bush.

"There is a longstanding, significant, deep, strong difference on this issue between myself and the administration," McCain said last month.

FOREIGN POLICY

On diplomacy, McCain has regularly distanced himself from the go-it-alone unilateralism of the Bush administration.

"We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to," McCain said in a major foreign policy address in Los Angeles in late March. "We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new compact."

In the same vein, McCain has significantly broken with Bush on nuclear security policy. Unlike the president, he supports a legally binding accord between the United States and Moscow on limiting nuclear weapons, the elimination of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, a strengthening of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, increased financing for the International Atomic Energy Agency and nuclear talks with China.

On Iran and North Korea, two nations whose nuclear programs will present the next president with tough choices, McCain has allied himself with the Bush administration. He would refuse to engage in unconditional diplomacy with Iran and would continue to maintain contact with North Korea, mainly with multilateral talks. But he has insisted the United States be able to verify effectively any pact in which North Korea promises to abandon its nuclear weapons.


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must be a lot of us retards then lol




McCain a clone of Bush'
12/06/2008 12:39 - (SA)

# McCain, Obama will add to debt
# McCain, Obama spar on economy
# McCain lashes out at Obama
# Reluctant support for McCain
# McCain wants to see man on mars
# Actor's stalker to go on trial
# Cusack stalker arrested
# 'Tell the human side of war'

Los Angeles - Actor John Cusack has jumped into the political arena with a video calling John McCain a clone of President George W Bush who would continue policies the actor says benefit war profiteers.

"I know my opinion doesn't matter more than anyone else's, and I just make films," he told The Associated Press in a phone interview on Wednesday. "But I do feel you have to speak out, and that's what I'm doing."

The 30-second video, which went out to members of the liberal political activist group MoveOn.org on Wednesday, will begin airing on television on Thursday. In it, Cusack offers a "pop quiz" to voters, asking them among other things: "Who supports keeping our troops in harm's way in Iraq but not the bipartisan GI bill of rights to support them when they return home?"

McCain and Bush both do, Cusack says, adding, "Bet you can't tell them apart."

The cost to air the ads is $45 000. They will appear nationally on the Bravo cable channel and in Washington, DC, on CNN, MSNBC and Comedy Central.

War created to profit private businesses

In his latest film, the war satire War Inc, Cusack makes no secret that he believes the Iraq war was created to profit private businesses like Blackwater Worldwide, Bechtel Corp and others that hold war-related contracts worth millions of dollars.

"I'm not going to pretend this thing in Iraq was some kind of free market utopia to spread the gospel of democracy through the Middle East," he told the AP from London, where he's at work on another project.

Cusack says he supports Democrat Barack Obama in the presidential race.

This is the first video Cusack has done for MoveOn.org. In addition to War Inc, Cusack starred in last year's Grace is Gone, in which he plays the husband of a soldier killed in Iraq.

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i did not even take the time to read all that , but what has john cusack have to do with anything, im sure u could pick most any actor, as most are mostly liberal,, obama probably will win , but will never be the man john mcain has been, i really dont understand why macain wants teh grief with a wife as rich as his i would be haveing fun, she is worth atleast 100 million dollar, and maybe more . their kids have a 15 million trust fund, of course they have been married like 30 years i think , and he had to sign a prenup,