If a Republican tells you this race is about character, bring up this point.

In 2007, John McCain made $405,409. That's his own income, separate from Cindy McCain's millions. She filed separately.

Of that $405,409, $23,157 came from Social Security benefits. Here's a link to USA Today that discusses his 2007 income.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-04-18-mccain-taxes_n.htm

A man who earned $31,771 a MONTH thought that wasn't enough and accepted another $1,933 a month in Social Security funds.

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Just posted this over on the Honda CR-V forum over at edmunds.com. Thought I'd post it here too.

Last week, there was a Shelby Cobra, red with white rally stripes, in the parking lot at the supermarket. My 3-and-a-half-year-old was mesmerized. He spotted it the moment we pulled into the lot and said "Daddy, I want the red car." I could only second the emotion.

I'm turning 40 in a few weeks, have another kid due a few weeks after that, and I'm trading in my Elantra GT (which I bought because it looked like a Saab 9³) on a CR-V LX with AWD today.

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Sarah Palin has recently been going on about a tenuous connection between Barack Obama and William Ayers, a former sixties radical, suggesting that Obama's character should be judged by the company he keeps. She's also throwing Tony Rezko and Reverend Wright into the mix.

But what about the company Sarah Palin keeps? Her husband joined a secessionist party. He so hates America that he wanted to make Alaska its own country and stop being an American.

Obama served on a charity board with his America-hater. Sarah Palin sleeps with hers.

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So here's one that has signs of being legit and some of the red flags of a scam. Love to get comments on it.

I got the following mail this morning...

From:
Subject: I saw your resume... please complete application. BNR-National

Response to your resume posting.

We have received your name and email from your resume posting service while reviewing your information. We may have some job opportunities that will interest you.

Please go to: BNR-National, Job page.

If your are interested in our open positions you can apply on-line.

To view jobs, click this link. Available Jobs.

This email was sent per your authorization of the terms and agreements you accepted on Hot Jobs and/or Monster and/or CareerBuilder. Your current preferences on your resume account need to be
changed if you Do Not want to receive recruiter and/or employer email messages. -- See instructions below.

Hot Job's - Resume & Email Privacy Options (as seen on hotjobs.com)

Since the Site is a career site, HotJobs gives you the option of putting your resume in the Hot Jobs database. There are three ways of doing this:

1. With our HotBlock feature, you can store your resume in the database, but not allow it to be searchable by any employers or staffing firms. Not allowing your resume to be searchable means that you can use it to apply for a job online, but it will not be searchable through the resume database.

2. You can store your resume in the database, but not allow it to be searchable by certain employers or staffing firms who are members of HotJobs at the time you set your HotBlock preferences. Not allowing your resume to be searchable means that you can use it to apply for a job online, but those employers or staffing firms that you have blocked will not have access to search it through the resume database.

3. If you allow your resume to be searchable, then those individuals or entities that pay for access to the resume database and all prospective customers who are receiving a demonstration of our product will have access to your resume.
These individuals or entities have the ability to distribute your resume to their own hiring systems via e-mail.

Privacy Options - Job seekers can block some or all of HotJobs' member companies from viewing a resume and sending you email messages through the "HotBlock" feature.

Career Builder's - Resume & Email Privacy Options (as seen on CareerBuilder.com)

Managing your privacy is as simple as selecting which pieces of your contact information are displayed. This is done at the bottom of the Review & Submit section of the resume form (shown below).

1. Be Visible. This option gives you the most visibility to the broadest employer audience possible. Select "Make my resume visible..." from the Privacy Settings, and allow employers to see your name, phone, and email.

2. Be Choosy. This option allows you to only display selected pieces of contact information, or none at all. (If you use this option be sure to remove your contact information from the body of the resume.) Select "Make my resume visible..." from the Privacy Settings, and select which contact information you want seen by employers.

3. Be Anonymous. This option allows you to post your resume on CareerBuilder.com without having it searched by employers. The benefit is that you can quickly and easily apply for jobs without retyping your information. Select "Hide my resume..." from the Privacy Settings.

BNR-National.com recruiting services are paid by entirely by the employer. Job Seekers using BNR-National.com recruiting services pay no fee.

Sincerely, BNR-National.com

If you prefer to not receive messages from BNR-National.com, you may unsubscribe by using the link below.

or by mail:

BNR-National.com - Unsubscribe
514 Daniels Street, #342
Raleigh, NC 27605

Now it was sent with Subsrribermail.com and the links within the mail go through a redirect at Subscribermail.com, which is a legitimate e-mail marketing company. So it seems like this may be a legitimate opportunity. But then I dug deeper and all sorts of cracks appeared.

Their site sports a "copyright 2000-2008" statement, but upon checking its registration record BNR-national.com was registered at the end of July of this year. Not only that, but they used a proxy service to hide the name and contact information for the real owner of the domain. So they're claiming to have been around 8 years, but their domain is 10 weeks old, and they're hiding the identity of the owner of the domain.

If you look on their jobs pages, they list some generic descriptions for jobs. It's not even a database, but just a plain HTML listing. If you click on a link for any job, you're sent to their application page which is a form to add your e-mail to their mailing list at AWeber, another legitimate e-mail marketing service which is actually owned by a friend of mine (and boy is he gonna be steamed when I show him this - the reputation of his company is VERY important to him).

So they're using two legitimate service providers, but more cracks show up.

All of the job links on their jobs pages go to their application page without passing a single bit of information about the job you clicked on. I looked at the source code, the link for every job title is a plain vanilla link to "Application.html". They're doing nothing to pass the name or any sort of ID for the job to the application form. And then, on the application page, they don't ask the name of the job, just your "field".

When you fill out the application, you're not filling out an application for the job you clicked on. You're filling out a generic "application" that's intended to gather your contact information.

But that's not the end of it. AWeber (an innocent dupe in this scam, I assure you) collects the form information and then refers you back to the page BNR-national specifies. From there, they say they'd like to recommend a free interviewing skills CD and send you over to a shopping cart for "Interview Concepts".

The cost for your "free" CD is a $6.95 shipping and handling cost. Furthermore, they have a fun little gotcha. They're going to send you more than the "free" CD. They're going to send you all three of their CD's. Then you have a 14-day free trial period... from the date they ship and postmark the package. If you do not call them and arrange to return the extra CDs before the the end of the 14-day trial (with the 14 days starting on the day they sent them, not the day you got them), you will be billed an additional $59.95. And how much do you want to bet that they're shipping via Media Mail or Parcel Post so it takes a week or more for the package to arrive?

All these different red flags tell me that there is nothing savory about this. It looks like a scam designed to build a "suckers" list and sell some overpriced CD-ROMs through a hinky "free trial" offer.

Sorry if any of you got your hopes up when BNR-National contacted you. Best of luck in your job hunting.