POLITICS ON THE STREET: I ran across some Corker supporters on a streetcorner in Knoxville, the kind of thing you don’t usually see in a midterm election. So I stopped and chatted with them.

THE HOTLINE BLOG REPORTS: “We’ve checked in with the national parties, and aside from minor, sporadic tangles and anecdotal evidence of high turnout, there are no major national voting problems.”

IS THERE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO LETHAL SELF-DEFENSE? Eugene Volokh takes a look.

DANIEL GLOVER LOOKS AT who bloggers are donating to.

MY NEPHEW TURNED TWO YESTERDAY, and I sent him this train set. I was a little afraid of inflicting too much assembly-work on my brother, but it didn’t look too bad. He reports: “Hey… got the train set together quick & easy. I was a bit daunted at first, but it was nowhere near as complex or as large as I first thought. William took to it immediately, and, much to my amazement, was saying ‘toot toot, all aboard’ as soon as he started it going. Beats me where he learned that!”

My guess: From television. As Homer Simpson has observed, it teaches us so much . . . .

UPDATE: Wow, lots of InstaPundit readers like those trains. I’ve gotten many, many emails like this one from reader Neal Alcott:

The GeoTrax train sets are great for younger kids. We purchased one for our son when he was 3 (he’s now 5). Since they are relatively easy to assemble, he can take them apart and reconfigure. I help him with the layouts sometimes to keep everything in a “confined” area! Every Christmas and birthday he receives add-on kits, so you may start receiving “requests” for particular kits!

See, I had never heard of this — I just went by the Amazon recommendations. It’s the wisdom of crowds!

THOUGHTS ON RATIONALITY AND VOTING, from Greg Mankiw.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER on those who would play the race card on a Harold Ford defeat:

Yes, Harold Ford would be the first black senator from this state since Reconstruction.

How many black senators have there been total elected in this county? Do you know?

There’s only one now — Barack Obama. He was victorious against another African American, a conservative ideologue carpetbagger who was essentially a pinch hitter for disgraced candidate, Jack Ryan. Obama may be a fine Senator but his electoral achievement was no great feat.

Before Obama?

Two.

There have been five black U.S. Senators in this country. Two were appointed. So, if Tennessee is racist for not having electing a black senator so is every fudging state in the Union save Massachusetts and Illinois.

The national media will ignore this, of course.

Of course. But if Ford loses, I think it will be because he overplayed his hand. I was talking to a trainer at my gym the other day who’s very Christian — Church of the Nazarene, and constrained in her dating life by the need to find a boyfriend who loves Jesus as much as she does. But she was totally turned off by the church commercial.

And yesterday I heard a negative radio ad about Bob Corker, saying that he wasn’t a true conservative and concluding that “He’s not one of us.” Wow, I thought — has the Tennessee Conservative Union come out against Corker? But then came Harold Ford’s voice, telling me that he had approved that message. Now Ford can run plausibly as a fairly conservative Democrat, but he’s not really credible enough as a conservative to run that kind of ad. My reaction was along the lines of “good grief, what a stretch,” and I suspect most other listeners thought the same.

Meanwhile, if Michael Steele loses, will it be proof that Marylanders are racist? Of course not — he’s a Republican!

UPDATE: More trying too hard: The camo cap just doesn’t fit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Democratic blogger Sean Braisted comments:

As for Ford and Corker…unless all the likely voter models created by pollsters are wrong, Ford is going to lose. Some Liberals will say it was “racism” that did him in, but I think Ford was his own best friend and worst enemy. He tried the ultra-religious angle, which might have worked, had it not been for the fact that he is a 36 year old Single man who you know gets a lot of action. Sorry, preaching the gospel about Marriage and Family works a lot better if you have both of those. For a single man who like “Football and Girls” to go out and put the 10 Commandments on his cards, film ads in church, and use God’s name in every other sentence; it just comes off as disingenuous.

Overplayed, as I said.

“ARE YOU A JEW?” A report from an anti-war rally in Canada.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH CONDEMNS violence against women in the Palestinian territories.

Shrinkwrapped is pleased: “Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of accountability for the Palestinians; if so, it may yet prove once again that only with responsibility is growth possible.”

SADDAM IS CALLING FOR IRAQIS TO RECONCILE: Austin Bay approves of the sentiment, but has doubts about Saddam’s credibility: “Start with the corpses. He’s now on trial for the deaths of 185,000 Kurdish men, women, and children slain in the 1987-88 Anfal operation. (The AP report says 180,000. An Iraqi report I read a couple of weeks ago said 185,000. Ballpark figures for mass murder are bitter math.) Tony Blair’s opinion on capital punishment, the Pope’s opinion, the opinion of the NY Times editiorial board — none of these mean squat. The opinion of the Iraqi people matters and I strongly suspect they favor hanging him high.”

OH JOY: Rick Hasen looks at the prospects for election litigation this year.

DAN RATHER defends his TANG story as “absolutely true,” notwithstanding the forged documents. Boy, they’re really pulling out all the stops for election day.

IT’S ANOTHER STATE-OF-THE-BLOGOSPHERE REPORT from Dave Sifry, and judging by this chart, InstaPundit should be somewhere between CBS News and NPR in terms of importance. I can live with that. I’m not sure I agree with it, but I can live with it. . . .

Hey, maybe this guy is onto something!

THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: “Voting machines began wreaking havoc the minute the polls opened Tuesday, delaying voters in dozens of Indiana and Ohio precincts and leaving some in Florida with little choice but turn to paper ballots instead.”

Should’ve just started with the paper ballots and saved themselves the trouble.

MARK BLUMENTHAL WRITES on what you should know about exit polls.

My prediction: If they’re bad for the GOP they’ll leak early. If they’re good for the GOP, they won’t.

MERYL YOURISH WRITES THAT ANDREW SULLIVAN HAS nearly persuaded her to vote for George Allen. Which is no small feat considering that she’s a candidate herself. She’s even attracting attack ads!

AN ELECTION NEWS ROUNDUP over at Pajamas Media.

MORE ON VOTE FRAUD: My TCS Daily column is up.

MICHAEL KINSLEY looks at the Democratic Platform:

For national security in general, the Democrats’ plan is so according-to-type that you cringe with embarrassment: It’s mostly about new cash benefits for veterans. Regarding Iraq specifically, the Democrats’ plan has two parts. First, they want Iraqis to “assum[e] primary responsibility for securing and governing their country.” Then they want “responsible redeployment” (great euphemism) of American forces.

Older readers may recognize this formula. It’s Vietnamization—the Nixon-Kissinger plan for extracting us from a previous mistake. But Vietnamization was not a plan for victory. It was a plan for what was called “peace with honor” and is now known as “defeat.”

Read the whole thing, and don’t miss Capt. Ed’s comments. “In fact, as Kinsley notes, the Democrats have no plans for anything other than their normal asset redistributions to special-interest groups and selected victim classes.”

A PREDICTION that shortly after the election fuss is over, we’ll be hearing about the War on Christmas again.

PAJAMAS MEDIA will be providing lots of election coverage tomorrow, including video (follow the link for a sample). Description:

We’ll have video crews at the Lieberman and Schwarzenegger headquarters in Connecticut and Los Angeles. Look for frequent updates that you won’t find, in style or substance, anywhere else.

Pajamas Washington, DC editor Richard Miniter will be our inside man in Foggy Bottom.

We’ll have constant updates on critical races from our editors around the globe and across the country starting before the polls open and wrapping up long after they close.

I’m supposed to be on PJM, and on CNN, via webcam.

REMEMBER WHEN OPRAH WAS PRO-WAR? Some people do.

NOW THAT’S JUST SAD: “From the country that brought us the Boy Scouts.” A war on scout knives?

But there’s danger of blowback. “Justice department officials have been told of a possible influx of illegal firearms into the country a result of the high-profile campaign to get knives off the streets.”

If you’re unwilling to crack down on criminals, cracking down on weapons will never reduce crime.

MARK STEYN: “It’s worth contrasting the fawning media admiration for Kerry’s truncated tour of duty with their total lack of interest in Bob Dole’s years of service two presidential campaigns earlier.”

UPDATE: The Absolute Moral Authority Card — don’t leave home without it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More moral authority blind spots.

“The most sophisticated right-wing reactionary to run on a Democratic ticket since Grover Cleveland.” Hey, Grover wasn’t a bad President.