Parris and I voted on Tuesday. Big turnout here in Santa Fe for early voting. Good.

If any of you reading this live in a state that offers early voting, I urge you strongly to go and vote NOW. The crowds on election day are likely to be large, which could mean long lines, confusion, waiting. Take advantage of early voting. It will help ease the crush, and make things easier for all concerned… especially you.

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The McCain campaign has been spending a lot of time lately hammering Obama for alleged ties to ACORN, which they’re portraying as some kind of extreme radical group engaged in massive voter fraud.

It’s all bullshit, of course.

Take a look at this if you want the truth about ACORN — who they are, what they do, what this “voter fraud” consists of.

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McCain talks about an assault on the very fabric of democracy, but there’s far more of that coming from the right, with its efforts to disenfranchise minorities, the young, first time voters, and the elderly than from anything that ACORN has done. It worked in 2000 (Florida) and in 2004 (Ohio). We have to make certain it does not happen this time.

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Some of you may have seen the mind-boggling and horrifying HARDBALL interview with the Minnesota congresswoman who wants her fellow members of Congress investigated for anti-Americanism.

Her comments provoked such a storm of national outrage that her opponent immediately received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions, from all over the country.

And I’m pleased to see that Colin Powell shared the outrage.

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Another week in the NFL. The Giants won an ugly one over the Niners, and the Jets lost an uglier one to the Raiders. I have to admit, both games frustrated the hell out of me.

The Giants defense showed up again, after having taken off the Cleveland game. Six sacks, lots of pressure on the quarterback, three turnovers, even a safety. That was the good news. The offense left much to be desired, however. The G-Men are now 5-1, but the creampuff portion of their schedule is over. Next week they face another 5-1 team in the Pittsburgh Steelers, and we’ll get the first true indication of how good they are.

As for the Jets… sigh…

The whole team played like crap in Oakland, but I have to blame the coaching for this loss. After Brett Favre passes them down the field with a minute left to set up the field goal that sent the game into overtime, the Jets win the coin toss… and Mangini and Little Schott turn more conservative than Rush Limbaugh. Run on first down, run on second down, throw on third and long. Not once, but on all of our overtime possessions. The Raider defense was gassed and demoralized by the end of regulation; if the Jets had come out in overtime and continued with the same wide-open passing attack that had tied the game, I’m convinced they would have claimed the victory.

Sad to say, the Jets are not playing like a playoff contender at this point.

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“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

That’s what Joseph Welch asked Joe McCarthy at the Army/McCarthy hearings, and that’s what I asked of John McCain in my last post about the election.

McCarthy had no sense of decency, as it happens, and it appears that McCain has lost his.

The last debate is over and the election has turned onto the home stretch, and McCain’s campaign only grows more toxic. McCain and Palin both continue to harp on the thoroughly explained and thoroughly discredited William Ayers non-issue, despite his alleged desire to run a positive, issue-oriented campaign. This is especially hypocritical for McCain given his own ties to G. Gordon Liddy. In the debate, McCain tried feebly to say that Obama has gone negative as well, citing Obama commercials attacking the McCain health care plan. As if criticizing your opponent’s proposals on a major issue was somehow morally and ethically equivalent to saying your opponent “pals around with terrorists.” Is McCain that stupid, or is this the hypocrisy of desperation?

And now we learn about the robocalls the McCain campaign is making. Talk about disgusting. Can these guys go any lower?

I do think there’s a certain hideous irony in McCain’s insistence that he’s not George Bush, and the way he keeps promising change to rectify all the mistakes of “the last eight years.” Those years, of course, being the Bush administration. Notice, he never says “the last sixteen years.” In other words, he’s pretty well conceding that Bill Clinton was a much better president than W. In the debate, he accused Obama of trying to run against George Bush… ignoring the fact that he seems to be running against George Bush as well.

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Ouch.

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Wild Cards fans, take note.

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist is running another of their famous giveaways, this time for an Advanced Reading Copy of BUSTED FLUSH, the second volume in the new Wild Cards triad from Tor.

For further details on the contest, check out Pat’s at

http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2008/10/win-advance-reading-copy-of-grrm-and.html

Good luck and good reading.

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One of the reasons I started this Not-a-Blog was to have a place to talk about politics, and for more than a year now I have been intending to post some of my thoughts and opinions on the presidential campaign. It’s been a busy year, however, and political posts demand more time and energy than I have had to spare, so as it happened I never got around to posting about the primaries, the conventions, or the debates. Aside from the “Books for Barack” plug in my last post, I have hardly commented on the election at all.

In view of what’s happening right now, however, I find a need to say a word or three, even if it means taking a few hours off from DANCE WITH DRAGONS, the Vance anthology, SUICIDE KINGS, the WARRIORS anthology, and all the other projects that I am juggling.

I am referring, of course, to the McCain campaign’s decision to go swiftboating. Instead of talking about the economy or the war or the other issues that confront the country, all of a sudden all they want to talk about is Obama serving on the board of a charity with a guy who was in the Weather Underground back in the 1960s.

If it wasn’t so tragic, this would be funny. In her debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin tried to score points by arguing that Biden was talking about “the past” when he criticized the policies and mistakes of the Bush administration. She wasn’t interested in talking about “the past,” Palin said. Since the debate, however, Palin has talked about little else… and not last week or last year or four years ago, either, oh no, her interest is all in something that happened forty years ago, when Barack Obama was eight.

And now McCain has started in as well.

That saddens me. I’m an Obama supporter, make no mistake, and I’ll be voting for him in a few weeks. Even so, a year ago I had a lot of respect for John McCain. I looked on him in the same way as I once looked on men like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley — as a man of integrity and intelligence with whom I disagreed. (For the record, I looked on W as a man who combined the integrity of Richard Nixon with the intelligence of Dan Quayle). One of the things that I found most attractive about McCain was his insistence that he wanted to run a clean campaign on the issues.

That’s gone now, it appears, and with it any respect I might have still retained for McCain. Faced with the spectre of defeat, he has turned to swiftboating, to the old tried-and-true tactic of guilt by association that was such a mainstay of HUAC and Tailgunner Joe back in the days of the Red Scare, one of the darkest epochs of American history.

Will it work? I hope not. Still, it worked in 2004, when a well-financed campaign of lies and character assassination destroyed John Kerry, a true American hero. I hope we have all learned better since then, but there’s part of me that wonders.

Make no mistake. McCain and Palin are now appealing to the darkest elements in the American populace, as the shouts of “Treason” and “Kill him!” at their recent rallies make clear.

When a candidate, any candidate, engages in a campaign of character assassination, it says more about the character of the attacker than the target. What this says to me is that John McCain has abandoned his own ideals and principles, that he would do anything to win.

If I ever happened to be at one of those “town halls” that McCain likes so much, and if by some miracle I was actually allowed to ask a question, I know what that would be. I would ask him the same question that Joseph Welch asked Senator McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy Hearings, a question that still echoes down the halls of history:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

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Music: Happy Days Are Here Again
… but when you can Do Good and add some nifty autographed books to your collection at the same time, well, that’s even better.

So here’s your chance to end the war, defend the constitution, and help take back this country from the corrupt plutocrats who have given us this latest financial crisis. And get some great swag at the same time.

I’m talking about Books for Barack.

Just go to http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/ayelet and make a donation of $250 (or more) to the Obama Victory Fund, and you’ll receive a canvas tote bag imprinted with the BOOKS FOR OBAMA logo and stuffed with ten (10, count ’em, 10) autographed books.

The contents of each tote bag will be randomly selected from the books donated by a huge list of participating writers, so there’s no knowing what titles you may get. There will be hardcovers, first editions, mass market paperbacks, maybe some art books, graphic novels, and who knows what else… but all of them will be signed by the authors, and all the money will go to help elect Barack Obama as our next president.

Hundreds of writers have already signed up and sent books. Stephen King, Judy Blume, Michael Chabon, Nora Ephron, Alan Furst, Garrison Keillor, Lemony Snicket, Amy Tan, Steve Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Dennis Lehane, Ann Tyler, and many, many, many more have donated to the cause, and more writers are being heard from every day.

For full details on the program and how it works, and a (partial) list of particpating writers, check out the Books 4 Barack website at http://books4barack.com/

And yes, I said “partial,” and that’s because more writers are sending more books every day.

And that definitely includes me. I have a big box of twenty-odd books here that will be on its way tomorrow. Some old stuff, some new stuff, some hardcovers, some paperbacks, some common, some rare and collectible. Maybe you’ll get one of them. Or maybe you’ll be the lucky one who gets a signed Stephen King first in your mystery bag.

And whatever books you get, your donation will help restore dignity, decency, and intelligence to the White House, and get this country back on the right course.

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