Carpetbagging

My friends Sara and Martha are among many Bay Area activists travelling to swing states to register voters and get them to the polls. This Rolling Stone article has a guy going to Orlando -- the most Republican-plastic place he could think of -- as a tongue-in-cheek undercover worker at the local Bush H.Q.; he imagined a crack field operation, a combination of "The West Wing" and the Death Star, but found a nearly empty office where he quickly became one of the major operatives. And the FBI, among other organizations, was investigating reports of fraud in voter registration drives, like the one in Nevada, where a firm hired by Republicans to register voters is alleged to have torn up the registration forms of anyone who registered Democratic.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle picked up on something I'd noticed while watching the 3rd presidential debate: both candidates passed up chances to seize on culture war issues which were expected to play a large part in the election. Of course, just because Bush isn't slagging gays doesn't mean his fifth-level-of-deniability operatives aren't slipping anti-gay fliers under windshield wipers.