Why Tuesday will be a long night

As linked by electoral-vote.com, the BBC has found a secret Republican document planning challenges to 1,886 voters in a predominantly black area of Jacksonville, Florida. Local elections officials, when shown the list, said the list was possibly illegal. And a Republican spokesperson did not deny the party planned to challenge voters at polling stations, as permitted by state law.

While this mindset might strike most people as shameless, I'm afraid it's typical of the ruthlessness of American politics now. Yesterday I was listening to an NPR program in which two newspaper editors talked about the aftermath of their endoresements of Kerry or Bush. In one case, an editor said his newspaper had been falsely attacked by local Republican operatives after his paper endorsed Kerry, but when he called and calmly asked if they didn't feel they were being unfair, was told, "I'm not in this to be fair. I'm in this to re-elect the president." That says it all.