Vote Obama and expect an imminent attack on the US.

Charlie Martin conjectures about Nov. 4.

How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would.

Esquire has the complete story on this interesting survey

Meanwhile Arab Muslims, not surprisingly, are keen on Obama as well. Or to put it another way.

‘OBAMA! Inshallah!” - Obama! Allah willing! That slogan, scribbled on walls in Gaza, indicates the hopes that Barack Obama has inspired among Arabs.

And Alexander Cockburn is gloating about an Obama win already making sure to truly twist the knife into the Republicans.

Al Queda is pushing for an Obama win as well. (As is Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Madman InadinnerJacket…etc)

Cold calling for Obama…from Gaza?

*

Time for the obligatory Halloween post. Picture courtesy of Ray Villafane, whose elaborate pumpkin (among other things) carvings are here. Inspired to try your own hand at carving? Go here. (Warning: Sound effects when you advance to the “done” screen.

Or for your reading pleasure: The 23 Best Horror Games. Note: These aren’t playable Flash or Java games; rather, reviews of commercial game releases for the computer or console market.

the blog québécois

Welcome to the October 30, 2008 edition of carnival of the vanities. As with BOMS, the database at Blogcarnival being down delayed this a wee bit.

Raymond presents How To Build A CD Ladder and Get The Highest Interest Rate posted at Money Blue Book.

Aparna presents Beware of dust mites on your pillows posted at Beauty and Personality Grooming.

Khan presents Business Casual posted at Higher Education and Career Blog.

Jim presents Define Class with Financial Planning Time Horizons posted at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

Barry Wright III presents Buttons | 3stylelife posted at 3stylelife.

Jon Swift presents Great Moments in Election-Year Blogging posted at Jon Swift, saying, “The conservative blogosphere deserves to win a collective Pulitzer Prize for its election-year coverage.”

GrrlScientist presents Endangered Cockatoo Species Rediscovered in Indonesia posted at Living the Scientific Life, saying, “The world’s most endangered bird, known as the Masakambing (Abbott’s) yellow-crested cockatoo, Cacatua sulphurea abbotti, is a subspecies of Yellow (Sulfur)-crested cockatoo, which are endemic to several small islands of Indonesia. Worldwide, five cockatoo species are critically endangered — four of which are yellow-crested cockatoos that are found only in Indonesia. Last seen more than twenty years ago when the total population numbered between roughly five and ten individuals, these birds have remained enigmatic due to their rarity and to the immediate threat of extinction.”

GrrlScientist presents London Zoo, Part One posted at Living the Scientific Life, saying, “The first part of my multi-part photoessay about my London Zoo experience. Includes descriptive text, lots of gorgeous images of animal and animal art, and even a video.”

FitBuff presents ‘Does Fruit Make You Fat?’ posted at FitBuff.com’s Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog, saying, “Does fruit make you fat? I decided to put the question to the test for myself with a detailed self-experiment. Here’s what I found…”

GrrlScientist presents The Owl and the Woodpecker: Encounters With North America’s Most Iconic Birds posted at Living the Scientific Life, saying, “Most Americans have not seen all of the 41 species of owls and woodpeckers that share the North American continent with us, but not only has Paul Bannick seen them all, but he has photographed them all, too. And when I say “photographed”, I am not talking about those blurry snapshots that most of us snap, but instead, his images are big, sharp, clear and .. for want of a better phrase, absolutely stunning.”

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of the vanities using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of the vanities, blog carnival.

Welcome to the October 20, 2008 edition of best of me symphony. Its a wee bit late this week due to downtime for the servers at Blogcarnival. So enjoy the Halloween edition of the BOMS.

nickel presents A Peek Inside Our FNBO Direct Online Savings Account posted at fivecentnickel.com.

Indian presents 2009 Horoscope - Astrology posted at DecisionCare, saying, “2009 Horoscope - Astrology predictions and forecasts for new year.”

JennH presents In the Morning Light (Part Two) posted at Mixed Metaphor.net, saying, “A two-part short story about a man who has lived a life of regret. The first installment is found at http://www.mixedmetaphor.net/2008/08/23/morning-light-one/”

Leslie Carbone presents Leslie Carbone: Writing Well–Introduction posted at Leslie Carbone.

Sam presents NEW !! The Bank Crisis, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and How they Affect You posted at Surfer Sam and Friends, saying, “At the foundation of the bank crisis and the stock market crash of 2008 are money, greed and risk.
The New World of Mortgages

Traditionally, when you applied for a mortgage, your bank handled all stages of the transaction. The bank checked your credit, lent you money to buy a house, held the mortgage in its vault, collected your monthly payments and foreclosed on any bad loans. In the 1990s, things changed. A different specialist handled each stage of the mortgage. Mortgage brokers drummed up applicants for mortgages. Mortgage banks lent the money and held the mortgage note. They quickly resold these mortgage notes to investment banks. Mortgage servicing companies collected your monthly payment, and remitted the money to the owner of your mortgage.
Creative Finance with Mortgages

Meanwhile, investment banks put the mortgages into a trust, sorted the mortgages by risk and designed a new financial instrument, called a CMO, collateralized mortgage obligation. Basically CMOs were fancy debt instruments, IOUs with a fixed rate of return, based on bundles of home mortgages. The CMOs were supposed to work just like corporate bonds. Some CMOs, the toxic ones, were based on high risk mortgages, and some CMOs were based on high-quality, lower-interest mortgages. CMOs were rated for quality just like corporate bonds. Everyone in the financial world wanted to own them.

The CMO market collapsed in 1994 because the bundling structure wasn’t financially sound. So Wall Street created another financial instrument called RMBS, residential mortgage-backed securities, bundles of mortgages with more conservative payouts to investors. Some RMBS were created as high-risk, high-return. Some were created as low-risk, low return. They negotiated with rating agencies to get good ratings for these bonds. Because these securities had good ratings, pension funds, mutual funds, life insurance companies, banks and corporations bought them.”

Chief Family Officer presents Cleaning Baby Toys posted at Chief Family Officer.

Jim presents » List of Cards with 0% Balance Transfer Offers for 12 Months on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity posted at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

Kate Andrews presents Misery Loves Company | slyparadox.com Blog posted at slyparadox.com Blog.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of best of me symphony using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: best of me symphony, blog carnival.

Music Reviews: AC/DC, Motorhead, Evergrey, The Lizards, Living Colour, Godhead, and Xystus
A power metal opera, some quality blues rock and a bit of (Living) Colour.

Here are a few more that didn’t quite make the cut.

Bionic: Black Blood

They hail from Montreal and feature a former member of the Doughboys. The band are hard to pin down ranging from punky rock to tunes that border prog. Tracks like “Learn to Love the Government� show the angst that flows through the band. The song is garagey punk angst played as if they really mean it. The title track is menacing with its combination of poppy new rock and a touch of industrial.

This album is one that takes a bit of getting used to and I find it to get better as it goes along. The initial tracks aren’t exactly welcoming to the new listener. There is quality on here but it does take a bit of time to find.

Black Boned Spirit: The Endless Coming of Life

One track that is over an hour of complete and utter pretentious bollocks. There is no tune to this just a bunch of noises repeated over and over again before moving on to another annoying noise. You could use this to torture Al Q with…one listen and they would be singing like a bloody canary. This is just mind-numbingly bad rubbish.

Melanie Phillips examines what Obama has said in the past about laws, governance and the US constitution. Oddly enough its yet another thing that the MSM completely seems incapable on mentioning.

Please…here.

Heritage Calls on Obama to Pull False Ads

The Heritage Foundation today asked Barack Obama to immediately pull two ads that misrepresent the views of Heritage’s Rea Hederman. The campaign has released a 30-second TV ad with false information and repeats it on the campaign website. The following letter was sent by Heritage lawyer Alan P. Dye to the Obama campaign:

Dear Senator Obama:

Two recent campaign advertisements seriously misrepresent the views of my client, The Heritage Foundation. They suggest, quite falsely, that The Heritage Foundation and one of its analysts support your tax plan.

The print ad on your Website as well as your ad entitled “Try This� reference a quote from policy analyst Rea Hederman. In fact, Mr. Hederman never said what is quoted there. Rather, the words you quote are from a New York Sun reporter who interviewed Mr. Hederman and summarized his views erroneously.

That the reporter’s summary is erroneous is evident from the actual quotes from Mr. Hederman presented in the article, which make it quite clear that Mr. Hederman believes your tax plan would be bad not only for the country, but for the middle class. By omitting the direct quotes from Heritage that are contained in the article and attributing to Heritage a conflicting statement not made by its analyst, the advertisement appears to be an intentional attempt to mislead.

Surely there can be no doubt within your campaign as to how Heritage truly views your tax plan. When one of your economic advisors, Jeffrey Liebman, made this same misrepresentation in a September 4, 2008 letter to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Hederman promptly sent a corrective and very public letter. It appeared in the September 16 issue of The Wall Street Journal under the title: “A Bad Plan That Is Less Bad Is Still Not A Very Good Plan.� In it, Mr. Hederman strenuously decried Mr. Liebman’s blatant misrepresentation and set the record straight.

The Heritage Foundation believes that your advertisements’ use of its name is not only not a fair use of its intellectual property, but is an intentional attempt to mislead and misinform voters. As a responsible candidate, you should insist that your campaign cease to run these false advertisements immediately.

Very truly yours,
Alan P. Dye

Update: They still have not pulled the advert according to The Foundry.

You’re kidding right? I mean up until now they have been personification of reasonable and decent behaviour. Ross never tries to see how many times he can say f*** during his TV show nor has Brand ever made the case that Republicans make the case for abortion. Nor has he ever been insulting to the President while in the US.

Come on is anyone surprised by their latest act of idiocy and does anyone expect the Beeb to fire either of them?

Carol Gould examines this over at PJM.

I shall be appearing on today’s one. I am quite regular on there now generally doing two days a week. I tend to do Tuesday and Thursday.

Oh and have a laugh at Al Franken.

Update: I have been asked to do the whip Wednesday as well…how could I say no? Tonight my topic is Russell Brand…the “retarded cowboy fella” in the White House might be having a good laugh at Brand’s expense about now. I shan’t be doing it on Thursday as result.

They claim that Prince ‘arry is playing it as well. Head over here and have a go.

Blogcarnival.com seems to be having database issues so the BOMS is a bit delayed. However why not head over and check out the latest Britblog round-up.

And there is a bumper 105th episode of SNN. They have even found a contributor in deepest darkest Wales.

Michael S. Malone:

The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun - for the first time in my adult life - to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut. I am a fourth generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kansas during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian). My hard-living - and when I knew her, scary - grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I’ve spent thirty years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national by-line before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist”, you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you ten different ways to color variations of the word “said” - muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. - to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

the blog québécois

Via: Libertarian Republican

According to a bunch of academics at Cambridge they merely misunderstood and not the brutish thugs we see of them in popular culture. In fact they cared about their appearances and were very cultured it seems.

‘The New York Times is talking out of its arse, Obama will lose, and all this banging on about winning only makes her know it more, I mean, what about Al Gore, what about the Bradley effect?’

Antonia Quirke reports on Obama supporters who are not exactly convinced by the polls.

Via: Snapped Shot

Daniel Pipes explains that Obama would never get a security clearance. More on the Obama campaigns record of fraud over at PJM and Goldberg goes on about the Racey Content of the campaign.

I have absolutely no idea what this picture is about, and the accompaning text isn’t much help, being that it’s in Farsi, which, believe it on not, I don’t fully understand. But be it noted that that doesn’t stop me from spending hours on Iranian websites, hoping that someone will post an interesting photo, even if I can’t understand it. The things I do for my readers . . .

the blog québécois

And you can use a fraudulent card as well. Patrick Ruffini has been all over this as are other bloggers. I wonder how much of his copious war chest was gained by illegal means. And where is the FEC on this?

The refugees and persecuted you never hear about these days. Pajamas Media has an excellent piece on just this subject written by Ruet Cohen. Well worth the read, distressing though it is.

For further reading take a look at Hitler & Jihad by Andrew G Bostom.

Actually its the boomers who are big fans of Obama; young adults go for McCain in a big way. Not that I truly believe any poll at this point but it is quite an interesting result. I guess young adults are sold on the “pie-in-the-sky” socialism of Obama & co. Probably because they realise they are the ones who are going to get stuck with the bill.

And again the younger voters are for McCain, this time in the military.

Welcome to the October 23, 2008 edition of carnival of the vanities. Batten down the hatches and prepare for some decent entries this week.

swollenpickles presents Daylight savings responsible for drought says Albury man posted at Swollen Pickles.

Ben Dinsmore presents Life on an Oil Rig in the Gulf of Mexico: Part Two “Just Another Day at Work” posted at Trees Full of Money, saying, “I’m not one to brag ;). But when I recently started fooling around with Window’s Movie Maker on my computer, I came up with a pretty darn good video of what life was like working on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Credit Shout presents The Trouble with Credit Cards posted at CreditShout.

Indian presents 2009 Horoscope - Astrology posted at DecisionCare, saying, “Find out how next year will go for you based on your sign. 2009 Horoscope forecast and astrology predictions.”

Lily W presents Love in times of crisis posted at If only my English were better.

Raymond presents New FDIC Insured Limit Covers Bank Deposits Up To $250,000 posted at Money Blue Book.

Raymond presents How To Become A Millionaire and Get Rich In 10 Steps posted at Money Blue Book.

Aparna presents Natural remedies for dark circles around your eyes posted at Beauty and Personality Grooming.

Alvaro Fernandez presents Brainy Haikus for brain training posted at SharpBrains, saying, “Enjoy this collection of fantastic haikus on brain and mind topics, and contribute yours!”

Jim presents Best High Yield Savings Accounts Rates posted at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

GrrlScientist presents ‘Fishapod’ Fossil Provides More Clues for the Evolution of Terrestriality posted at Living the Scientific Life, saying, “A new study on the internal anatomy of the skull of the extraordinary fish, Tiktaalik roseae, which lived 375 million years ago, provides more evidence of how vertebrate life transitioned from water to land. The head showed changes from more primitive fish that helped adapt to the new feeding and breathing conditions presented by a terrestrial environment.”

GrrlScientist presents Research Suggests Bipolar Children Likely to become Bipolar Adults posted at Living the Scientific Life, saying, “Another research paper indicates that many bipolar adults show symptoms of bipolar disorder when they were kids — suggesting that early identification and treatment could slow or prevent the progression of this mood disorder, and save social and familial relationships.”

debergerac78 presents What’s the next President’s position on abortion? posted at The Business Ethics Blog, saying, “Roe vs. Wade is only the tip of a contentious issue abortion–have you thought about your candidate’s stand on it?”

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To John “Air-Quotes” McCain posted at Mad Kane’s Political Madness.

Aparna presents Aspirin for acne-prone skin posted at Beauty and Personality Grooming.

Curry Kenworthy presents Every vote counts: Stop Obama! posted at Curry Kenworthy, saying, “Obama should not be our president, and during these final two weeks conservatives should get the word out that “every vote counts” to stop him. A graphic for blogs is included.”

Leaving The Folks presents Job Search Tips posted at Real World Advice, saying, “Some tips on searching for jobs when you’re getting out on your own.”

Kathryn presents 60 Super Sexy Things to do in San Francisco posted at San Francisco is Sexy.

Jon Swift presents Pro-America vs. Anti-America posted at Jon Swift, saying, “Many Americans are still unclear as to what is pro-America and what is anti-America, so I have made a handy chart that will give you some examples.”

FitBuff presents Pregnant Exercise for women… and men posted at 3rd Chance Fitness Blog, saying, “Exercise is hard enough for most people, but what about pregnant exercise? And it’s not just Mommy, Daddy is affected too!

I was hanging out last weekend and…”

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of the vanities using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of the vanities, blog carnival.

CEI and NTU have started a new organisation called Beyond Bailouts to help Americans express their disgust for the bailout. There is even a petition for those who truly want to get involved.

See what you are getting us all into if you vote Obama. No hysterical nuttiness just the facts laid out in black and white. Most of which I doubt the Obama camp would even deny.

So says some numbnut in “Midwest Voices.” So is there any way to criticise Obama that is not seen as racist by Obama’s thugs?

Here are some more of his thugs attacking Palin’s motorcade.

First Post has a wonderful hatchet job on the budding first lady. It will be interesting to see if any of the British press can muster anything nice to say about anyone involved in the Republican ticket between now and the election. I rather doubt it somehow.

Despite the fact he had a hand in the country’s financial situation, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for 10 years, the public seems to think that he is the best man for the job.

more @ PJM.