Sunday Morning Politics: Money, Voting, SNL, G. Gordon Liddy

The polls are open on Sundays in North Carolina, so Jaimee and I are going out in a bit to do some canvassing. Here are some links in the meantime:

* Obama raised $150 million in September. Holy crap. That's almost twice (in a single month) what he would have had to spend between the conventions and election day if he'd accepted public financing.

Campaign manager David Plouffe, in an e-mail to supporters Sunday morning, said the campaign had added 632,000 new donors in September, for a total of 3.1 million contributors to the campaign. He said the average donation was $86.

* Daily Kos diarist dean4ever is keeping tabs on North Carolina early-voting numbers. Here's the three-day total through yesterday:

Noth Carolina saw 37,229 more early votes cast Saturday at an abbreviated slate of 103 sites in 34 of its 100 counties. A 17-day early voting period opened in North Carolina Thursday, and the three day total through Saturday evening is 251,709. The first Saturday in 2004 7,471 voted, and the 3-day total in '04 was 63,164.

and the comparison to 2004:

2008
Unaffiliated 16.46%
Republican 22.11%
Libertarian 0.04%
Democratic 61.39%

2004
Unaffiliated 12.62%
Republican 38.72%
Libertarian 0.14%
Democratic 48.52%

* Sarah Palin was on SNL last night.

* And since "associations" is the new buzzword in the race, it's important to take a look at Kos's rundown of one of John McCain's good friends, G. Gordon Liddy.

As Media Matters for America has noted, Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in "if necessary"; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a "gangland figure" to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap "leftist guerillas" at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Why is John McCain palling around with G. Gordon Liddy?