More Republicans are starting to turn away from John McCain.

He endorsed John McCain in the presidential primary, but now former Republican Gov. William Milliken is expressing doubts about his party’s nominee.

“He is not the McCain I endorsed,” said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. “He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

“I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”

Milliken, a lifelong Republican, is among some past leaders from the party’s moderate wing voicing reservations and, in some cases, opposition to McCain’s candidacy.

More conservatives are speaking out about Sarah Palin. David Brooks thinks she’s not qualified, and he doesn’t pull any punches.

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

The conservative movement used to pride itself on ideas. With Sarah Palin, those days are over.

Ron Paul has announced a major news conference at the National Press Club on Wednesday to ask his supporters and other voters to reject the major party candidates and to choose instead among the third party candidates.

Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning, Houston-area congressman who waged a feisty Republican primary campaign for president, is expected on Wednesday to urge supporters to reject the two major-party candidates and vote for any of the four minor-party contenders on the November ballot.

“The two parties and their candidates have no real disagreements on foreign policy, monetary policy, privacy issues, or the welfare state,” Paul is expected to say at a news conference in Washington, according to an advance copy of his remarks obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

“They both are willing to abuse the Rule of Law and ignore constitutional restraint on executive powers. Neither major party champions free markets and private property ownership.”

Although he serves in Congress as a Republican, Paul has had strong disagreements with his party’s presidential nominee, John McCain, over the wisdom of the war in Iraq and the use of American military force around the world. Although Democratic contender Barack Obama, like Paul, has opposed the war, he also espouses expanding government programs that Paul has criticized.

In his speech, Paul is planning to say that voters can send a message to the major parties by voting for the non-establishment candidates: Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Green Party contender Cynthia McKinney, independent Ralph Nader or Constitution Party standard-bearer Chuck Baldwin.

Barr is attending the news conference and his candidacy could be the biggest beneficiary here, as the Libertarian Party is a logical choice for Paul’s supporters.