McCain: Buddhist Monks Should Have Won Peace Prize, Not Al Gore

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain said the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, announced today, should have gone to someone else other than former Vice President Al Gore. "I would have liked to see that prize go to the Buddhist monks who are suffering and dying in Burma," McCain said after a speech this morning in Davenport. Gore and the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the award for their efforts to spread awareness of global warming and lay the foundations for counteracting it. Gore's environmental film, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award earlier this year.McCain, an Arizona senator, said he hoped Gore would now support nuclear power and a cap and trade proposal made by McCain and Sen. Joseph Lieberman to mandate that all sections of the U.S. economy reduce greenhouse gasses through a market-based system of trading emissions. McCain spoke to about 120 people at Genesis Health Care System's Adler Health Education Center. He was about 20 minutes late to the talk, in part, because his driver got confused an drove to Davenport's Adler Theater. McCain talked with the crowd about his plan for reforming health care through providing tax credits for people to purchase their own health insurance, allowing health insurance policies to be sold on a national basis, requiring more transparency from providers and drug companies and imposing limits on medical malpractice. "There is little doubt in my mind health care is the overriding domestic challenge and issue," McCain said.