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Eight Egyptian bloggers have traveled to the United States to cover the elections there as part of a project by the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo.

BEIRUT, September 11, 2008 (MENASSAT)- The bloggers who have temporarily set up shop in the U.S. include award-winning Wael Abbas of Egyptian Awareness, Sandmonkey, and EgyDiva among others.

Here is a quick digest of their first posts.

EgyDiva is stunned by the extent of voter profiling in the U.S., admitting that "the precision, classification and observation is beyond her capacity of understanding."

"Security moms, soccer moms, white moms, moms with sons at war, moms with bastard sons, moms with sons going to college, now Wal-Mart moms, moms. Just pick a mom.

"I wonder if this kind of effort went into to profiling Egyptian moms what are the pseudo labels we would come up with…?" she asks.

Zeinab, another member of the Egyptian blogging team, is amazed by what she calls the "media mind-twisting" that American voters are being exposed to.

"The media are bombarding the American viewer with "expert opinions" so fast and so hard that no one has the time or brain capacity to come up with their own.

"Watchdog groups are trying to keep tabs on the candidates and the people who work for them. The media is hyper-profiling the candidates as the candidates are hyper-profiling themselves. A lot of the times the real issues are being forgotten in favor of focusing on the personal lives of the candidates and their petty infighting. Spin doctors are making big bucks," Zeinab writes.

Meanwhile, Sandmonkey has written an extensive piece on Washington DC’s most talked-about woman at the moment, John McCain"s running mate Sarah Palin.

Sandmonkey, whose blog carries the tagline "Be forewarned: The writer of this blog is an extremely cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled sandmonkey. If this is your cup of tea, please enjoy your stay here. If not, please sod off," also discovered a new reason for loving America: the Sarah Palin Action Figure.

MENASSAT will keep you posted about the exploits of these Egyptian bloggers in the weeks to come, including Sandmonkey"s upcoming interview with Alec Baldwin.