Here's the first paragraph from the always-wonderful and surprise-filled Harper's Weekly email newsletter.
Democrats were outvoting Republicans in all nine states
that track the party affiliations of early voters,
indicating a likely election victory for Barack
Obama. "It's gonna get nasty," Obama told a crowd in
Missouri. Republicans claimed that Democrats were coercing
dementia patients to cast absentee ballots, and fliers
posted in black neighborhoods of Philadelphia falsely
warned that voters with unpaid parking tickets would be
arrested at the polls. It was reported that Obama's
half-aunt Zeitun Onyango lives in a Boston housing project
and is an illegal immigrant–a detail likely leaked by the
Bush Administration against the procedures of the
Department of Homeland Security. Evidence emerged that
during the Senate Ethics Committee investigation of the
Keating Five scandal in 1990, John McCain allegedly
committed perjury and illegally leaked details to the
press that made himself seem innocent and his colleagues
seem guilty–actions that had they been exposed at the
time, could have resulted in McCain's expulsion from the
Senate. Novelist John Updike endorsed Obama. "I am so much
for Obama," said the author of "Terrorist," "it would be
hard for me to cook up a character who was for McCain."
Dick Cheney endorsed McCain, and two white-supremacist
skinheads were arrested in Tennessee for plotting to kill
88 people, behead 14 African Americans, and assassinate
Barack Obama while wearing white tuxedos and top
hats. Author Erica Jong told an Italian interviewer, "If
Obama loses, it will spark the second American Civil
War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's
not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers
from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American
citizens in the streets." Madelyn Dunham, Obama's
86-year-old grandmother, died of cancer, and a man leaped
to his death from the Spaghetti Bowl, in El Paso, Texas,
leaving behind a note that read, "Obama take care of my
family."
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