I must admit that after Hillary failed to clinch the nomination this year I am intrigued by the thought of McCain picking a woman as his VP. With the pick promised to be just days away new names of possible VP nominees are bound to surface. One name that has recently come up is TX Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Hopefully there’s not much merit to this speculation. Though Hutchison has voted in favor of many abortion restrictions over the years, she is opposed to outlawing abortion and thinks that Roe v. Wade was “appropriate and secures an important constitutional right” according to her vote on the Harkin Amendment to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban – which she did also vote for. Along with that, she eagerly favors expanded federal funding for ESC research, signing the same letter to President Bush that McCain did in 2004, voting for the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Acts and, calling on the State of Texas to broaden their stem cell research policy. Though she did vote to ban human cloning in 1998, one pro-life source, Joe Pojman of the Texas Alliance for Life, told Life News in 2004 that Hutchison now opposes a comprehensive ban on human cloning and wants to allow the cloning and killing of human embryos for scientific research.

As far as VP chicks go, McCain can do much better than Hutchison:

*Word is that McCain will notify his VP pick today (8/28) and most reports are still saying it’s either Romney or Pawlenty. I’m not a Romney fan – he bores me to tears and his pro-life switch always seemed a little too convenient for me. I’ve been trying to find some information on Pawlenty. Apparently early in his career he told one paper, “I think we could move beyond the fundamental [abortion] question and start talking about other aspects of family planning,” [Eagan This Week, Nov. 8 1992], and said to another that the abortion issue “isn’t a big deal” to him [St. Paul Pioneer Press, Oct. 7, 1992]. As an elected official he has signed the Unborn Child Pain Prevention Act, vetoed a measure to use State funds to conduct ESC research and appointed a pro-life advocate as head of the MN Supreme Ct.

Oh, and McCain insiders are saying that Lieberman is still a possibility. Read: Avoiding a Lieberman Disaster, from Robert Novak