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Harper's Weekly for November 4, 2008

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." To subscribe to Harper's Weekly, send an email to join-harpers-weekly@pluto.sparklist.com....