I attended the first Georgia Americans For Prosperity town-hall meeting last Tuesday. Congressman Lynn Westmoreland and Herman Cain were the guests of honor. AFP looks to be a good group promoting fiscal responsibility and tax relief in Georgia and nationwide. I look forward to their progress.

At the AFP event, Westmoreland was asked about the Foley Fiasco. It was pretty clear by his explanation that the folks in Washington and in the Media either have no idea the difference between email and IM or they are deliberately trying to confuse the “overtly friendly” emails Hastert’s office was told about with the explicit and disgusting IMs that forced Foley to resign.

Saturday was the Gwinnett GOP’s monthly breakfast. Congressman John Linder was added as a surprise guest to the program. Seems like orders went out to the caucus to motivate the troops, and Linder did as good of a job as can be done defending the GOP’s last six years in office. He too brought up Foleygate and by his comments, it didn’t seem to catch on. They still aren’t getting out the message that Hastert’s office knew about strange emails and not explicit IMs. Also trying to bring up the Stubbs scandal 23 years ago isn’t going to convince anyone that the GOP should be left in office.

Kathy Cox was the other speaker and she had some interesting statistics on Georgia’s SAT scores. Sure we are towards the bottom in ranking and aggregate score. But when you break out the numbers, Georgia has some of the best scores for African Americans among the states where over 50% of the students took the SAT. I need to go find the statistics before I can do the numbers justice.

Finally, tonight was the Georgia Public Policy Foundation’s 15th anniversary. Senator John McCain was the featured speaker. McCain’s speech was canned and he delivered it like a high school kid in his first public speaking class. It was very disappointing. However there were certain parts of the speech were you could tell he was more fired up. The best example of that was when he started talking about Property Rights, Kelo, and the growth of Government. He also made a fairly frank assessment of the GOP’s track record on decreasing the size of government and came close to admitting what I’ve been saying about the National GOP for awhile: They believe that government is good when they are the one who get to run the government.

McCain’s assessment of the North Korea situation seems pretty rational. Two party talks won’t work and will just increase Kim’s stature in the world. We need to pick up the phone and tell China that it is time for them to become a responsible super-power and work with us on resolving the NK situation. If NK isn’t brought under control, Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan will all begin their own nuclear programs in self defense. An asia-pacific nuclear arms race will benefit no one, and will hurt the Chinese the most.

Finally he was asked “What are the first three bills President McCain will send to the Congress?”. His response: Earmark reform, Social Security Reform, Medicare Reform.

I’m starting to warm to the idea of McCain as president. I’m still furious at him for McCain-Feingold. I do think he is more in the right place on torture than the Administration, although I admit I never followed that issue closely. We’ll have to see.