Earlier this week, the House Oversight Committee revealed that just one week receiving an $85 billion bailout, AIG executives went on a retreat to a luxury resort, spending nearly $500,000 on manicures, facials, pedicures, and massages, among other things. After being ridiculed for the vacation, AIG announced today that the parties are over. From an announcement they issued this afternoon:

Earlier today, AIG announced an important policy change – one that we wanted to be sure you knew about. A short time ago, our Chairman and CEO Ed Liddy said that he has ordered the immediate cancellation of all outside meetings, conferences, and recognition events across AIG, except those that are required by law or that are deemed absolutely critical to sustain our ongoing business needs.

Today, AIG canceled a specific party, originally scheduled for next week at the Ritz-Carlton in California’s Half Moon Bay, “after a re- evaluation of the costs under the new circumstances,” according to spokesman Joe Norton.

Recently, the AARP asked both presidential candidates about their positions on issues related to senior citizens. McCain, however, “chose not to check any statements in the survey” on “health care, long-term care, Social Security and retirement security,” the Washington Post reports. The McCain campaign declined to answer whether it commits “to help end gridlock by working across party lines to develop and support common-sense, bipartisan solutions on health care and financial security”:

McCain and Obama did provide written answers on the issues in the survey.

This afternoon on MSNBC, John McCain’s senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin complained that some critics have flip-flopped in their assessments of McCain’s Homeownership Resurgence Plan:

HOLTZ-EAKIN: Senator Obama looked at this idea and thought it was such a good idea that the night of the debate claimed it was his own, but the very next day attacked John McCain about this plan. Why? Well, the reason is quite simple.

Watch it:

Many progressives changed their opinion of McCain’s proposal for one “quite simple” reason: McCain changed his proposal.

On Tuesday night, McCain appeared to be offering a responsible plan that called for lenders to sell the mortgages of struggling homeowners to the government at a discount, rather than their face value — thus forcing lenders to foot the loss.

By Wednesday, McCain had significantly modified his proposal, shifting the cost of the plan from the lenders and onto tax payers. Under his new plan, McCain would pay each lender the full face value of each mortgage, amounting to a $100 billion boondoggle for lenders who made bad loans.

According to Holtz-Eakin, McCain is allowed to change his proposals, but we’re not allowed to criticize him for it.

The New York Times reports today that Sean Hannity has agreed to stay at Fox News until 2012, and “is expected to become an even more prominent part of Fox’s opinion programming.” Fox executives are reportedly pleased with his Sunday-night show “Hannity’s America,” and in a statement, Fox senior vice president for programming Bill Shine said that Hannity would “remain a marquee name at Fox News for several years to come.” Fox declined to comment on the future of Bill O’Reilly or Alan Colmes.

During a recent interview with Marie Claire, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) wife Cindy suggested that her husband has never had PTSD symptoms because “he was trained.” She also added that symptoms such as “cold sweats in the middle of the night” are reserved for the “the 18-year-olds who were drafted”:

Q: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you – or is it a part of history?

McCAIN: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that’s in the past. Certainly it’s a part of who he is, but he doesn’t dwell on it. It’s not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is.

Q: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?

McCAIN: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.

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