Links and Minifeatures 10 31 Happy Halloween

Carnival of The Capitalists Recommended: PaceSetter Mortgage Blog on the issues with "pre-approval." Ladies and gentlemen, I never trust pre-approvals unless I did them, and they are limited even so.



Carnival of Personal Finance



RINO Sightings Recommended: legal redux (the New Jersey Supreme court's recent decision on same sex marriage)

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Jane Novak, whose work I admire, has a categorical roundup of the sins of the Saleh regime in Global Politician. Check her out on a daily basis over at Armies of Liberation.



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Modern Humans, Neanderthals May Have Interbred, Fossils point to a melding, not replacement, of species



As anyone who's ever been terrorized by the jocks at school could have told them. Seriously, though, it's a fascinating article on what may have happened to our closest genetic relative. Although come to think of it, if our ancestors interbred with them, that would make us the same species by definition, correct?



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A man who may be one of the moderate moslems we need: A radical idea: How Muslims can be European, too. But I stress may. By his actions we should judge him. He may be the Islamic equivalent of a Menshevik.



This appears to be his web page http://www.tariqramadan.com/welcome.php3



his Wikipedia entry



Daniel Pipes had something to say a while ago.



We need to seek evidence on all sides of any question. Given the weight of what I found when I ran him through a search engine, I'd say his works perhaps incline one way (albeit with significant troubling exceptions), his associations another. However, let me ask this: suppose Dr. Martin Luther King had not reached out to defuse the more radically violent of his peers in the Black Civil Rights movement? Now consider that Dr. King did do so, and therefore his associations showed the type of person that Mr. Ramadan is being condemned for by various agencies today. I'm not ready to make a judgment, myself.



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Riehl World View has video of John Kerry's latest character revealing moment.



And here I didn't think anything John Kerry could say would bring my opinion of him any lower. I was wrong, as that digging noise you hear coming from his direction is proof that bottom is not low enough for him.



Maybe the Democrats will pull it off. Maybe they won't. We'll find out November 7th, which is the only poll that matters.



But I can tell you that in at least a couple of races, the thing that has pushed me into the Republican column (at least so far) was information contained in Democratic attack literature ("X voted against bills that would make medicine more affordable!" but those bills were attempts to repeal the laws of economics. Sounds good if you don't think, but if you do, it's a recipe for disaster. My thought in response was, "You say that like it's a bad thing!" and decided to vote for the Repugnantcan over the Dumbocrat.)