Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

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?

Lots of stuff happened this weekend, and I didn't blog about any of it. Here's some catch-up.

* Marriage equality has reached Connecticut. Three down, forty-seven to go.

* John McCain is finally trying to calm his crowds down and getting booed for his efforts.

* How big is "big"? However big "big" is, Obama's still-unannounced fundraising total is it.

* Since polling began, only one candidate has ever closed a gap as the one now facing John McCain: Ronald Reagan. And since we already know Obama is the liberal Ronald Reagan, that leaves McCain pretty much high and dry. The RNC is even thinking of bailing on him to try and protect congressional seats.

* Though not everyone agrees McCain is toast. "My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.” And the media backs up his unhealthy delusions by reporting ten-point Obama leads as "toss-ups" and 2% McCain leads as "Lean McCain."

* Palin cleared in Troopergate probe—by herself. The real probe says she acted unlawfully, and so does the New York Times.

* And is this the end of American capitalism?

Contrary to reports that his fund-raising had slowed, Obama raised $66 million in August. First on the agenda, based on the racheting up of rhetoric I've mentioned in other posts, should be ads hitting McCain hard on his constant lies.

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, George Saunders explains why he's more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin.

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

Sarah Palin was also the mayor of a very small town. To tell the truth, this is where my qualifications begin to outstrip even hers. I have never been the mayor of anything. I can’t even spell right. I had help with the above, but now— Murray, note to Murray: do not correct what follows. Lets shoe the people how I rilly spel Mooray and punshuate so thay can c how reglar I am, and ther 4 fit to leed the nashun, do to: not sum mistir fansy pans.

A few people have asked me about today's New York Times article about Obama's money problems. (Just another part of the general Obamaniac freakout this week.) My reply was that we've seen an article like this almost every month, just before Obama sets a new fund-raising record. Now the Washington Post is reporting that Obama's August fund-raising set a new record. No word yet on the actual number raised...